Meet the bioscientist hoping to make extinction go extinct.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. More than 99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct.

And we humans certainly have something to do with that.

There is, though, an entire scientific discipline devoted to bringing species back.

If you're picturing those cloning scenes from Jurassic Park right now, I get it.

But de-extinction, as it's known, is not quite that.

Beth Shapiro is the chief science officer

at colossal biosciences, a bioengineering startup

working on de-extinction.

And no, there will be no dinosaurs brought back for now. Here's how she describes her work.

Instead of cloning, what we're actually doing are taking living cells of animals that are still alive and using the tools of genome engineering

to tweak bits and pieces of those genomes to make them more similar to those extinct species.

So the definition of de-extinction that colossal like to use

is not to resurrect something that is 100%

identical to a species that used to be here,

but instead to resurrect those core phenotypes that made those species unique.

In the case of the Dodo, for example, we start with the genome of a Nicobar pigeon, which

is the closest living relative of a dodo.

What we want to do then is identify the parts of the genome where the dodo and the Nicobar pigeon are different from each other

and then engineer that Nicobar pigeon genome to have those core dodo

genotypes which will then translate into a pigeon that looks and acts more like a dodo

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