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From: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Newsgroups: net.sci
Subject: Re: Costs of extinction
Message-ID: <1170@cybvax0.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Oct-86 11:52:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: cybvax0.1170
Posted: Thu Oct  2 11:52:12 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Oct-86 10:04:41 EDT
References: <26500079@inmet> <26500106@inmet> <1166@cybvax0.UUCP> <44@oliveb.UUCP>
Reply-To: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Organization: Cybermation, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Lines: 59

In article <44@oliveb.UUCP> prs@oliven.UUCP (Philip Stephens) writes:
> >Eventually, perhaps, we might be able to learn enough about organisms that
> >we can recreate them from their sequences and cultures of related organisms.
> >Maybe we could even start preserving organisms in liquid nitrogen, so that
> >their chromosomes stay intact, in hope that future technology will allow
> >recovery of that information.  Perhaps then we could better afford to allow
> >extinctions.
> 
> Good idea, if workable.  Can you (or anyone else on this group) confirm the
> practicality of this preservation technique for later use, in terms of
> present technoloy?  And for the sake of planning, how much material (ie, 
> grams? milligrams?) is needed in each sample?  

Quite a bit of research (and some applied technology) is based on frozen
genetic material.

Zoos are cooperating to build mammalian sperm banks for endangered species.
Unfortunately, ova are a much more difficult proposition.

I know one grad student at Harvard whose thesis research is using genetic
character information (NOT distance information) to perform cladistic
analysis on crickets.  He freezes the entire crickets in liquid nitrogen.

I've yet to see a proposal for large-scale preservation of biological
diversity by freezing: probably because it just isn't as good as
preserving natural habitats.  In order to preserve something, you have to
find it: how are you going to find the uncounted millions of undiscovered
species lurking in biological niches that we haven't even looked at yet?
Sure we can collect tree seeds: but what about the complex community that
is associated with the tree?  A community that includes bacteria, algae,
microrhyzal fungi, insects, mites, mosses, lichens, nematodes, etc.?
We don't know enough about even well-known temperate-zone trees to be
sure of getting everything about whichever is the best known species.
But if you preserve a section of woodland with those trees in it, the
entire community is still there to be studied.

If you'd like to understand the magnitude of the task, consider the amount
of work currently going on for the preservation of germ plasm of the major
world crops.  There's no reason to consider our major crop species to be more
genetically diverse than other non-economic species, yet current programs
are maintaining thousands of strains per species at multiple sites to prevent
loss due to accident.  Total number of strains for the top ten crop species
is probably over 100,000.

> I do *not* mean this question as an implicite criticism; I really want to
> know how practical this aspect of the idea is, how large the storage 
> facility would have to be, how expensive.  If it costs on the order of the
> Apollo program, but not on the order of Star Wars, I could see doing it.

In summary, preservation with current technology is best done by preserving
natural habitats: something that can be done at a much lower cost than
Star Wars.  Until we are confident that we have extracted all the biological
information we can from an ecosystem, it does not make sense to allow that
ecosystem to become eradicated.  If destruction is inevitable, triage in
the form of preserves is the best solution.  In extremis, collection of 
frozen specimens is possible, but too much information is lost.
-- 

Mike Huybensz		...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh