The Extinct Moa—a 12-ft. Flightless Bird—May Follow In the Dire Wolf’s Footsteps

TIME

It has taken no end of imagination for Sir Peter Jackson, the Academy Award winning—and, not incidentally, knighted—director of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, to produce his entire body of cinematic work. It’s a quality Jackson has had since he was a small child, when he would conjure up visions of the future. “When I was a kid [I dreamed of] personal jet packs and flying cars and things,” Jackson said in a recent conversation with TIME. “One of those other things I always dreamed of was to be able to bring back extinct species.”

Transcript

00:00To de-extinct the MOA we are collecting DNA from all nine species of MOA. We'll be comparing the

00:06genome sequences to genomes of living birds to identify what it is that made MOA unique

00:12and using the tools of genome editing to make those changes in the DNA sequence of the living

00:18close relatives. The process of de-extinction is that we extract DNA from ancient bones and we

00:25sequence that DNA and assemble ancient genomes. We use the tools of computational biology to compare

00:31those ancient genomes to genomes from living animals and to identify what made the extinct

00:36species physically and behaviorally distinct from living species. We then use the tools of genome

00:42engineering to gradually edit the genomes of living species to contain that ancient DNA so that we can

00:50bring back those extinct phenotypes. I haven't associated any movies I've made with the MOA.

00:57I mean it's a separate, it's like the movies are my day job and the MOA is my fun thing I do,

01:03you know, in the hope that within a few years we'll get to see a MOA back again. I mean that to me

01:10is giving me more enjoyment and satisfaction than any films ever have.

01:16So all they've shown is that they can snip in a few genes to an existing species.

01:24So the claim that they have created the dire wolf is just simply rubbish. You know, they've put a few,

01:32you know, dire wolf genes to create a big white dog. I mean this is straight out of,

01:40you know, Frankenstein. It's an extraordinary hubris that says, you know, that we are all powerful.

01:51Well, you know, we're not. And the idea is that we can go and destroy nature because one day we can

02:00we can pick up the pieces. Well, you know, we can't. Humpty Dumpty and all the king's men

02:06cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

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