Blast from the past may blow us away

Russian scientists have set a world record by raising a plant from genetic material extracted from a 30,000-year-old frozen fossil recovered from Siberia.
While I marvel at the prowess of the advanced technology, I can’t help but wonder if it is wise to recreate a living being of another time. When you read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and watch the movie years later, the possibility of bringing back an extinct species, you realise is nothing more than the imagination of a fiction writer.
No, I am not paranoid about corporate conspiracies of hatching deadly species in their secret labs nor an evangelic apocalypse-monger who cries hoarse with a don’t-try-to-play-God propaganda.
The plant, Silene stenophylla, is not an extinct species and is still found in Siberia. However, according to a BBC report on the development, when the scientist compared today’s plants against the samples that have been ‘resurrected’, they found several differences in the shape of petals and the sex of flowers and they could not explain the anomaly.
Though human intervention has been a major reason for extinction of several species, there are several natural phenomena, which bring about this process — and in turn trigger the process of evolution.
Bringing back to life something that has been dead for 30 millennia or for that matter from any point in the past brings with it the dangers of introducing into our environment an entity that we aren’t ready for or in control of.
For example, a 1,000-year-old fossil might have embedded an equally old parasite, which had natural predators or counter-mechanisms in hosts those days. When the host organism is recreated, the parasite is also resurrected and a possible contamination of today’s defenceless ecosystem could trigger an ecological catastrophe.
Nature has distributed its variety across different terrains and has raised and annihilated species according to climatic and environmental requirements. Whenever humans, the apex predators and the intelligent creatures, have attempted their hand at this, the results have had undesirable fallouts.
Almost every country suffers from infestation of some form of the other. Life forms that were artificially introduced to alien lands accidentally or deliberately have become pests that have grown to uncontrollable proportions and wiped out several local species.
One of the worst affected regions in the world is the continent of Australia, where several animals like rabbit, cat, fox and cane toad are wrecking havoc on local environment. Several species have become extinct due to these animals and more face the same fate in future if the present scenario continues. Australia is just one example. Almost every country has its share of pest problems from introduction of non-local species.
With all the advancement in science and technology, we can’t still solve problems regarding creatures of our times. So the proposition of a face-off with species from the past becomes even more complex. We may be faced with a war, which we may win only with unacceptable losses to ourselves and the supporting ecology.
The phrase ‘blast from the past’ has a ring to it, but that may be the last good thing we remember before eventually joining the mighty dinosaurs in the pantheon of the extinct greats.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 22, 2012)