Even if scientists could make woolly mammoths de-extinct, should they?

Bringing extinct animals back to life was once considered something that would only happen in movies likeJurassic Park, but with new technology, some say it could happen within the next 20 years.

Recently, social media became flooded with stories about geneticist George Church who said hemay be able to create awoolly mammoth embryo in two years.However, in an email to CBC News,Church said the stories were "exaggerated" and based on comments about "a project that was not on the agenda and not yet in a peer-reviewed paper."

Church declined to discuss his research further, but the reports have reinvigorated discussions about the de-extinction of species.

• Woolly mammoth could walk the Earth again thanks to genome research

"The inevitability is it will be feasible,but don't knowtime frames,"McMasterUniversity professorHendrikPoinartold CBC News.

From discovery to debate

Poinar has been surrounded byde-extinction since the 1980s, when his father published research about insects embedded in amber that helped inspireJurassic Park.

Poinar's own research at McMaster led to the genome sequencingof extinctanimals. In 2006, McMaster became the first university in Canada to have a sequencer that made the discovery of the genomic sequence of the woolly mammoth possible, he said.

The research and discussion around de-extinction has only grown from there.

He said it could happen within 10 years, but it's more likely to happen 20 to 50 years from now.

As de-extinction becomesmore likely to happen, the debate is less whether it can happen to whether it should.

One of the main arguments surrounding de-extinction is called a moral hazard, which is if recreating species will lead to further destruction.

Potential benefits

Poinar said the point of de-extinction isn't to bring species back and put them in a zoo, it's meant to have ecological benefits.

He would like to see the technology used on species that went extinct more recently than the woolly mammoth. For example, Australian researchers are looking into reviving the brooding frog, which has only been extinct for 30 years.

If research funds that go towards a woolly mammoth project can also help with projects like the brooding frog, the research benefits might be greater, Poinar said.

"People take one particular aspect of a large movement and latch on without considering the ramifications of the technology being perhaps devised on an iconic animal that might help generate funding for reptilian research," Poinar said.

Need for conservation

Paul R. Ehrlich, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University in California, has a much less diplomatic view of de-extinction.

"De-extinction is something that scientists would describe as spherically senseless. That is, it's idiotic from any point of view you look at it," he told CBC News.

He acknowledges it is possible to create something that resembles an extinct species, but even if the de-extinction were successful, the habitats for an extinct species likely no longer exist.

Ehrlich said the moral hazard is one of the biggest issues, especially when less funding and attention is paid to conservation.

"The real issue is the rate at which we are destroying life forms of thethe planet," he said.

Wider impacts

The International Union for Conservation of Nature published a report in May 2016 containing some guiding principles for creating "proxies" of extinct animals.

The report notesthat any de-extinction wouldn't be an exact replica, but a "functional equivalent" of an extinct species. It alsoconsiders the ecological impacts and the ethics, including the moral hazard of de-extinction and the natural process of evolution.

"A proxy species, once placed in the wild, might have major undesirable and unforeseen impact at its destination on other species or on ecosystem functions," it says.

The IUCN report doesn't address whether de-extinction should be done, but notes that it could be considered as a conservation tool after further research.