De-Extinction

Meet the Scientists Bringing Extinct Species Back From the Dead Wall Street Journal – October 9, 2018 “The last known passenger pigeon—a bird named Martha—died in captivity at a Cincinnati zoo in 1914. Her demise sparked the passing of modern conservation laws to protect other endangered species in the U.S.” Now, more than 100 years later, the Passenger Pigeon is again advancing conservation. Although the de-extinction of the Passenger Pigeon will likely take decades, de-extinction research is already generating foundational science that could transform bird conservation. Furthermore, Passenger Pigeon de-extinction offers a new opportunity to achieve long-term conservation goals for...

Ben Novak – Revive & Restore's Lead Researcher for The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback – is pursuing his Ph.D. at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. There, he will be working with scientists from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to develop a model system for testing genome editing in pigeons. Novak was awarded the Faculty Graduate Research International Scholarship and the Co-funded Monash Graduate Scholarship to fund his research. This exciting phase of collaboration between Revive & Restore and CSIRO began in May 2017. Novak aims to produce a strain of rock pigeons capable of making genome engineering in pigeons...

Ben Novak and Paul Marini The biggest challenges facing The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback will be obtaining germ cell cultures, engineering cells and birds, and then breeding and raising passenger pigeons that will survive and flourish in the wild. The underlying element of these challenges is handling live birds. As our project now is completing genome sequences and beginning to assess the mutations we will engineer into living band-tailed pigeons, we face our biggest obstacle – establishing a research flock of pigeons for the purpose of recreating the passenger pigeons. Mid- 2014 our project gained a new advisor and project…