Genetic Rescue

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya. Sudan died March 19, 2018. Photo credit: MEAACT/Stuart Price. (This article was originally published in Fortune, March 20, 2018.) By: Nishan Degnarain and Ryan Phelan We are facing a global crisis in biodiversity loss. Tens of thousands of animal species are becoming extinct every year and about half of the world’s biodiversity has disappeared since the 1970s. These troubling trends show no signs of slowing down. Indeed, population growth, widespread habitat destruction, invasive species, wildlife diseases, and climate change are worsening the situation. To safeguard our planet’s...

Assuredly yes, it is time for synthetic biology to be incorporated into the twenty-first century toolkit for biodiversity conservation. Prompted by pressing biodiversity concerns, an influential group of scientists and conservationists organized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature met in December 2015 in Bellagio, Italy to examine how emerging synthetic biology tools might successfully be applied to currently intractable problems. Concluding that greater collaboration between synthetic biologists and conservationists is urgently needed, participants – including Revive & Restore's Executive Director Ryan Phelan – put out a call for the community educate itself on how new genomic technologies could remedy a variety of...