The $20 million bioengineering gambit to Save the Northern White Rhino

We have the science and technology to bring animals back from extinction. But should we use it?

- ANDREW ZALESKI

AT AGE 45, SUDAN WAS THE FINAL progenitor of Earth’s most endangered animal species: the northern white rhinoceros. As the last male northern white in the world, he was both a global icon for conservation and a two-and-a-half-ton target – because the horn of even the most precious rhino is not safe from poachers. He lived out his final years under 24/7 armed protection at the conservancy, along with two of his female relatives.

Half a world away, Barbara Durrant felt it. She had never met Sudan, but she knew Nola. Most people in San Diego knew Nola, though not the way Durrant did. Nola was a northern white rhinoceros, one of only four that remained by the middle of the last decade, along with Sudan and his kin. She lived at the Nikita Kahn Rhino Rescue Center, located at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, about 50 km north of the city, and not far from where Durrant reports to work every day at the zoo’s Wildlife Biodiversity Bank. Nola had also been euthanised, after age and infection caught up with her, in 2015. She was 41.

‘She was just the most amazing animal,’ says Durrant, recalling Nola’s wide mouth, her skin the colour of clay stone, and her distinctive horn, which curved towards the ground. ‘It’s not only losing that animal that you know personally and you love; it’s another step in losing the whole species.’