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After the bird's death, tissues were taken from the bird and grown out--not easy to do with bird cells--but scientists did manage to obtain fresh cells that had grown and divided and that contain the entire genetic code for the bird. Cryopreserved in the Frozen Zoo, these cells might someday be thawed and reconstituted. We may yet be able to imitate--and even replicate--the world we drove away far more than Audubon ever imagined. It is hard to conceive of the bird flapping out of extinction, but it is certainly a step beyond holding Martha the passenger pigeon by the feet upside-down in a tank of water. Likewise, breeding in zoos is going to be, and already has proven, the salvation of a number of species already gone from the wild.
Questions about extinction and conservation stir complex human questions that are difficult to answer but important to frame. What do we owe the natural world and why? Is it pure self-interest--the need to maintain biodiversity in order to maintain healthy balance in the world we draw food and medicine from? Or is there a deeper, transcendent sense of obligation, even in a post- Darwinian world? Are we still biblical stewards of the earth? And what would we sacrifice to save a bird, or an animal lower on the evolutionary ladder?
