Jose Andres

Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability

Jose Andres is a Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability who studies ecological and conservation genomics/environmental DNA.  

Andres says:  

“Biobanking tissue, gametes, and living cells from imperiled species can be genuinely useful, but it is an insurance policy, not conservation itself. DNA in a freezer does not preserve a species in any full ecological sense. It does not preserve viable wild populations, learned behaviors, microbiomes, habitat, or the relationships species have with other organisms. 

“My concern is the public message that extinction can be technologically reversed. Colossal’s ‘dire wolves’ are a useful cautionary tale: editing a small number of gray-wolf genes to produce animals – wolves – with a few selected dire-wolf-like traits does not resurrect the extinct species, Aenocyon dirus. At best, these are engineered proxies. Genomics should support the recovery of living endangered species, not make us more comfortable losing them.”