Revive and Restore is a California-based nonprofit that uses genetic engineering to help solve conservation problems, such as saving endangered species and increasing the biodiversity of ecosystems. To facilitate their solutions, Revive and Restore utilizes genetic engineering, which is the process of making changes to an organism’s DNA, or the set of instructions for how an organism develops and functions. One of their broad solutions is genetic rescue, which involves imbuing populations of endangered species with a wider variety of traits to make them more adaptable to a changing environment. Their other solution is de-extinction, which takes a more radical approach by attempting to recreate extinct species that performed important roles in their ecosystems. While scientists working with Revive and Restore have helped advance genome editing technology on a theoretical and technical level, their research has also prompted practical and ethical concerns over the extent of permissible human interference with nature, even when attempting to conserve it.

David Edwin Wildt developed and applied assisted reproductive technologies to conserve rare and endangered wildlife species in the US during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He advocated genome resource banks to help preserve biodiversity, and he advocated for practical ethics to guide wildlife reproductive biologists when they use technology and environmental planning. Wildt often focused on the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), but he researched greater than fifty vertebrate species. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, he directed the Smithsonian's Conservation Biology Institute Center for Species Survival in Front Royal, Virginia. He researched reproductive biology and population genetics, used assisted reproduction technologies (ART) for wildlife species, and showed researchers how to utilize noninvasive techniques to monitor the hormones in organisms and their reproductive behaviors.

Black-footed ferrets have become one of the most popular conservation success stories because of the miraculous rediscovery of the species after being declared extinct and the growing population today. The stability of the species is still highly variable as the ferrets are threatened by disease, habitat fragmentation, human infringement, and the extermination of their main prey item the prairie dog. The complexity of the issue arises from negative public perceptions of prairie dogs leading to less citizen support for protection which in turn undermines progress in black-footed ferret conservation. General issues with the bureaucracy of conservation helps to delay a formal protection of species at risk which would be especially important for species that are actively being removed or exterminated by humans like the prairie dog. Careful analysis of the black-footed ferret and the prairie dog through the lenses of their natural histories, conservation histories, and modern conservation methods suggest that the public’s opinion and support is the greatest tool for the protection of species at risk because of the complexity of conservation and the rallying bureaucratic motion.