The idea to scientifically bring back extinct species through cloning and genetic engineering, while once a merely science-fiction notion, is gaining headway and financial support from some of the world's wealthiest individuals.

After visiting The Science Museum of Minnesota at the age of 16 and seeing a passenger pigeon for the first time in his life, Ben Novak dedicated the rest of life to restoring and resurrecting some of earth's extinct species, New York Times Magazine reported.

Working with Revive & Restore, an organization devoted to the genetic rescue for endangered and extinct animals, the 27-year-old Novak has been working on a paper about passenger pigeon's affect on ecology and chestnut trees while also consulting on other academic papers regarding the hot-button issue of de-extinction.

Novak, who has no advanced scientific degrees, and his team of scientists are currently waiting for the passenger pigeon's genome sequencing to be completed; a task that scientist Beth Shapiro has been working on since 2001. The DNA sequencing is in the data-analysis phase.

While the process of actually hatching the extinct species is long, Novak told the magazine he hopes to see the birth of the first passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914, by 2020, but more realistically 2025.

Stewart Brand and his wife Ryan Phelan co-founded Revive & Restore, which connects scientific research projects in molecular biology and conservation with similar like-minded institutions, financial backers and scientists. The couple employed Novak as the organization's research and science consultant, one of its few full-time employees.

Novak fields emails from scientists who would like to work on de-extinction projects and then connects them with the right institution.

More than a decade ago, using similar technology Novak and Shapiro will use to resurrect a passenger pigeon, scientist Alberto Fernández-Arias, who is now a Revive & Restore adviser, revived a bucardo, a mountain goat subspecies that went extinct in 2000. However, the animal did not survive as it had trouble breathing because of lung defect.

The process of reviving a species uses somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same technique used to clone Dolly the sheep, and requires the species' DNA, which should be preserved in liquid nitrogen. However, DNA decays quickly after the organism dies, which makes acquiring the passenger pigeon's DNA very difficult because the last of its species died before cryopreservation ever existed.

But, using the genome of a closely related species such as the band-tailed pigeon that Shapiro is using, scientists can replicate the passenger pigeon's DNA as close as possible. Because the process is similar to translating ancient text to modern languages, there could be errors.

After that process is completed, researchers will need to culture band-tailed pigeon germ cells, a technique where living tissue is made to grow in a petri dish, but is difficult because cells usually prefer to exist inside a body.

If successful, scientists can then "cut-and-paste" the band-tailed pigeon DNA with the synthesized passenger pigeon DNA using the new machine named MAGE (Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering) and nicknamed the "evolution machine" because it can mutate the cells genetics in minutes, which usually takes millions of years to accomplish.

The process will continue as the scientists inject the passenger pigeon coated DNA into a band-tailed pigeon embryo. A band-tailed pigeon will hatch and if it's a male, it will have passenger pigeon sperm and if it's a female it will have passenger pigeon eggs. The band-tailed birds will breed and ideally produce the long-awaited return of the passenger pigeon.

According to the article, Novak's dream of reviving a million passenger pigeons and releasing them into the wild will be three to five years of cultivating genetic diversity and then years of adaptation into the wild.

Furthermore, the process of de-extinction has been met with criticism from numerous scientists who fear the species could just go extinct again because of environmental changes that affected the species in the first place. Also concerns of funding has been an issue as other conservationists believe an excess of funding will go toward de-extinction instead of other conservationist methods that have already proven to work.

Numerous scientists are already planning on bringing back species such as the Woolly Mammoth, black-footed ferret, Caribbean monk seal and northern white rhinoceros.