Swedish Journalist Torill Kornfeldt travelled the world to meet the scientists working to bring extinct animals back from the dead, and she narrates their laboratory adventures here.
Some of the projects Kornfeldt writes about are incredibly compelling, given that we are living through a mass-extinction event that threatens the stability of the world’s ecosystems ... It’s this tension—even more than the specifics surrounding the revival of any one species—that carries Kornfeldt’s stories along: she constantly pursues the question of what all of this means for humanity’s relationship to nature ... Reading the science of de-extinction can inspire a lot of hope—not necessarily about the species themselves, but for demonstrating how relatively fast an area of science can develop.
Advances in gene-editing technology promise to make 'de‑extinction' a potentially viable enterprise, but what exactly is the point? To answer this question, the Swedish science journalist Torill Kornfeldt has travelled to meet the researchers involved for this excellent book, written with a deceptively light touch (in Fiona Graham’s translation), that raises a number of deep questions and paradoxes about our relationship with nature ... There are no right or wrong answers in this area, but as Kornfeldt implies, the rhetoric of such debates still revolves around a few presumptive virtues that are rarely interrogated deeply.
Ethical questions...loom over the work ... Free of most scientific jargon, Kornfeldt’s book is an eye-opening introduction to an important new field of study that’s well fit for public library audiences.
