Technologies of preserving and reviving organisms are already redefining the meaning of life, death, and extinction itself

by Sadiah Qureshi  BIO

The egg of the now-extinct passenger pigeon. Courtesy Muséum de Toulouse/Wikipedia

is a writer and historian of science, race, and empire. Currently a Chair of Modern British History at the University of Manchester, she is the author of Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (2025), and has written for The London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and New Statesman magazine.

Edited byRichard Fisher

In 2003, a unique baby goat lived and died. In doing so, she might be regarded as the first species to have endured the indignity of going extinct twice.

The Pyrenean ibex, also known as the bucardo, was once native to the mountainous regions of Spain. By the mid-20th century, hunting had severely depleted populations. By 1999, only one survived, named Celia. When she died a year later, the bucardo was declared extinct.

While she was alive, tissue samples from Celia’s ear were collected, and frozen in liquid nitrogen. Encouraged by previously successful techniques for cloning animals, a team of Spanish, French and Belgian scientists hoped to bring back the bucardo. They cultured the harvested cells to isolate bucardo DNA, and transferred cloned genomes to domestic goat eggs with the nuclei removed. A total of 208 embryos were transferred to surrogate mothers: either Spanish ibex (a still-living, related species) or hybrids of Spanish ibex and domestic goats. Seven pregnancies resulted, but only one goat carried to full term. That goat gave birth to a bucardo kid by caesarean section.

The tiny Pyrenean ibex was genetically identical to the last living bucardo, making her a direct clone. But while the kid appeared healthy until birth, she never took a breath. The desperate team tried to help her breathe, but she was declared dead within a few minutes. An autopsy on her miniature body identified a defective lung.

The story of the cloned bucardo kid can be told in many ways. Was this a rare double-extinction? Perhaps. More cautiously, we might suggest that the experiment was never a successful de-extinction at all, because the kid was never able to perform the same ecological function as the lost species. But there is also a more provocative telling: that neither happened, because the bucardo never went extinct in the first place.

In recent years, some advocates of de-extinction technologies have argued that if an animal’s tissues and cultured cells persist in a state of cryopreservation, it is not extinct, but ‘evolutionarily torpid’. In other words, the death of the last living animal is not an ending, merely a pause.

This reframing isn’t merely semantic – it reshapes the meaning of conservation. If frozen cells forestall extinction, when do we declare a species lost? And if genetic material assuages our guilt that a ‘way of being’ survives, why invest in protecting living animals? The question cuts deeper: what distinguishes being alive from existing as dormant genetic material?

Beyond recent heated debates about whether de-extinction is possible or wise lies a more fundamental shift: these technologies are already redefining the meaning of life, death, and extinction itself.

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Declaring a species extinct is not just a technical decision, but a notoriously difficult process, especially with wild lives. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declares a species officially extinct ‘when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died’.

Martha, the last known passenger pigeon. Courtesy the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Occasionally, the death of celebrity ‘endlings’ means we know when species were lost. Perhaps the most famous is Martha, the last known passenger pigeon. She died on 1 September 1914 at Cincinnati Zoo. She was quickly skinned, stuffed, and displayed mounted on a thin branch. She now resides in the stores of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Some living endlings are so precious that they are watched over round the clock by armed security guards, such as the last pair of northern white rhinos, Najin and her daughter Fatu, in Kenya. Their deaths will make global headlines and mark the extinction of their kind with rare precision. Mostly though, extinction is far more likely to occur without us noticing, or take us decades to confirm the loss.

Yet in recent years, some have suggested that no species is truly lost, so long as genetic material remains. Through de-extinction, they say, we can even revive creatures that no one alive has encountered: dinosaurs, dire wolves or dodos. Whenever de-extinction hits the headlines – as it has done often in recent years – the stories tend to focus on the past, whether reviving lost species or recreating ecosystems. Appealing to loss is a powerful marketing tool for companies trying to raise capital and convince us that de-extinction is a viable means of conservation. But de-extinction is also a process of deliberately building radically different futures, rather than mere revival. The future-oriented nature of de-extinction is rarely discussed, despite its potential to reshape fundamental aspects of how we relate to life and death in the natural world.

Antonia, a clone of the critically endangered and twice-thought-extinct North American native black-footed ferret, gave birth to kits in 2024. Courtesy Revive and Restore/Smithsonian

One de-extinction organisation that has made no secret of seeking to steer nature’s future, and our relationship to the world beyond us, is Revive and Restore, co-founded in 2012 by Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan. The organisation was originally an offshoot of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco,........

© Aeon