“the golden toad was the only Bufo to display such a striking orange color. What if the proteins that made the orange color had some undiscovered medical purpose, or psychoactive properties? We’ll never know until somebody licks one, and for that we’ll have to bring it back.”
― Beth Shapiro,How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction

“team from Kindai University in Japan are taking a different approach and have been trying to work out how to repair damaged cells; they are essentially sticking broken chromosomes back together to try to bring a dead cell back to life. In 2019, this team tried using mouse enzymes to reconstitute cells recovered from the remains of Yuka, a 28,000-year-old mammoth mummy that was recovered from melting sediments in Russia’s Sakha Republic in 2010. Yuka is widely considered to be the most intact mammoth yet discovered. Even so, her cells are far too degraded to be brought back to life.”
― Beth Shapiro,How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction

“For several weeks, I sat in the dark damp cold of the library’s basement, resisting the surprisingly potent lure to get warm by drinking hot tea or setting books on fire,”
― Beth Shapiro,Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature