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Now, extinction is a different kind of death.

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It's bigger.

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We didn't really realize that until 1914,

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when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha,

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died at the Cincinnati zoo.

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This had been the most abundant bird in the world

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that'd been in North America for six million years.

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Suddenly it wasn't here at all.

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Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long

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used to darken the sun.

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Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm,

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a feathered tempest.

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And indeed it was a keystone species

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that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest,

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from the Mississippi to the Atlantic,

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from Canada down to the Gulf.

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But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades.

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What happened?

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Well, commercial hunting happened.

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These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton,

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and it was easy to do because when those big flocks

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came down to the ground, they were so dense

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that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up

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and slaughter them by the tens of thousands.

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It was the cheapest source of protein in America.

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By the end of the century, there was nothing left

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but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers.

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There's an upside to the story.

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This made people realize that the same thing

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was about to happen to the American bison,

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and so these birds saved the buffalos.

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But a lot of other animals weren't saved.

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The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere.

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It was hunted to death for its feathers.

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There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen.

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It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway.

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A local newspaper spelled out, "There is no survivor,

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there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again."

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There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things,

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and it happened to lots of birds that people loved.

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It happened to lots of mammals.

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Another keystone species is a famous animal

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called the European aurochs.

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There was sort of a movie made about it recently.

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And the aurochs was like the bison.

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This was an animal that basically kept the forest

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mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent,

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from Spain to Korea.

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The documentation of this animal goes back

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to the Lascaux cave paintings.

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The extinctions still go on.

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There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo.

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It went extinct in 2000.

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There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf

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called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia,

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called the Tasmanian tiger.

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It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos.

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A little bit of film was shot.

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Sorrow, anger, mourning.

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Don't mourn. Organize.

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What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens,

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fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old

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could be used to bring species back,

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what would you do? Where would you start?

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Well, you'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there.

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I started with my wife, Ryan Phelan,

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who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct,

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and through her, one of her colleagues, George Church,

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one of the leading genetic engineers

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who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons

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and a lot of confidence

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that methodologies he was working on

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might actually do the deed.

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So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting

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at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together

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specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists,

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and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced

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by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro.

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All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian

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was a little bit of toe pad tissue,

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because down in there is what is called ancient DNA.

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It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented,

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but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome.

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Then the question is, can you reassemble,

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with that genome, the whole bird?

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George Church thinks you can.

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So in his book, "Regenesis," which I recommend,

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he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species,

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and he has a machine called

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the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine.

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It's kind of like an evolution machine.

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You try combinations of genes that you write

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at the cell level and then in organs on a chip,

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and the ones that win, that you can then put

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into a living organism. It'll work.

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The precision of this, one of George's famous unreadable slides,

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nevertheless points out that there's a level of precision here

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right down to the individual base pair.

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The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome.

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So what you're getting is the capability now

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of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene.

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It's called an allele.

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Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway.

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So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome

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of an extinct species

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with the genome of its closest living relative.

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Now along the way, George points out that

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his technology, the technology of synthetic biology,

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is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law.

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It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.

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Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon

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is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here.

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Genetically, the band-tailed pigeon already is

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mostly living passenger pigeon.

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There's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon.

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If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits,

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you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you.

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Now, there's work to do.

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You have to figure out exactly what genes matter.

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So there's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon,

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genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon,

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and so on with the red eye, peach-colored breast, flocking, and so on.

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Add them all up and the result won't be perfect.

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But it should be be perfect enough,

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because nature doesn't do perfect either.

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So this meeting in Boston led to three things.

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First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit

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called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally

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and try to have it go in a responsible way,

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and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon.

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Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak,

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who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14

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and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA,

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himself sequenced the passenger pigeon,

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using money from his family and friends.

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We hired him full-time.

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Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian,

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he's looking down at Martha,

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the last passenger pigeon alive.

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So if he's successful, she won't be the last.

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The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization

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that there are scientists all over the world

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working on various forms of de-extinction,

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but they'd never met each other.

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And National Geographic got interested

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because National Geographic has the theory that

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the last century, discovery was basically finding things,

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and in this century, discovery is basically making things.

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De-extinction falls in that category.

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So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists,

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they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists,

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basically meeting to see if they had work to do together.

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Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical.

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There's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species,

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they're recreating extinct ecosystems

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in northern Siberia, in the Netherlands, and in Hawaii.

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Henri, from the Netherlands,

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with a Dutch last name I won't try to pronounce,

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is working on the aurochs.

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The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle,

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and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed.

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So what they're doing is working with seven breeds

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of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there

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to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding,

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the aurochs.

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Now, re-wilding is moving faster in Korea

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than it is in America,

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and so the plan is, with these re-wilded areas all over Europe,

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they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job,

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its old ecological role,

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of clearing the somewhat barren, closed-canopy forest

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so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it.

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Another amazing story

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came from Alberto Fernández-Arias.

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Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain.

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The last bucardo was a female named Celia

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who was still alive, but then they captured her,

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they got a little bit of tissue from her ear,

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they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen,

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released her back into the wild,

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but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree.

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They took the DNA from that ear,

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they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat,

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the pregnancy came to term,

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and a live baby bucardo was born.

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It was the first de-extinction in history.

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(Applause)

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It was short-lived.

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Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems.

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This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes,

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but Alberto was confident that

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cloning has moved along well since then,

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and this will move ahead, and eventually

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there will be a population of bucardos

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back in the mountains in northern Spain.

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Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder.

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At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo

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has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species

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over the last 35 years.

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Now, when it's frozen that deep,

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minus 196 degrees Celsius,

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the cells are intact and the DNA is intact.

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They're basically viable cells,

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so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology

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took some of that tissue from an endangered animal

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called the Javan banteng, put it in a cow,

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the cow went to term, and what was born

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was a live, healthy baby Javan banteng,

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who thrived and is still alive.

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The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza

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is the ability now to take any kind of cell

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with induced pluripotent stem cells

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and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs.

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So now we go to Mike McGrew

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who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland,

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and Mike's doing miracles with birds.

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So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast,

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turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells.

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Since it's so pluripotent, it can become germ plasm.

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He then has a way to put the germ plasm

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into the embryo of a chicken egg

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so that that chicken will have, basically,

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the gonads of a falcon.

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You get a male and a female each of those,

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and out of them comes falcons.

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(Laughter)

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Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens.

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Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting.

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He showed how all of this can be put together.

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The sequence of events: he'll put together the genomes

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of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon,

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he'll take the techniques of George Church

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and get passenger pigeon DNA,

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the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew,

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get that DNA into chicken gonads,

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and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs, squabs,

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and now you're getting a population of passenger pigeons.

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It does raise the question of,

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they're not going to have passenger pigeon parents

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to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon.

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So what do you do about that?

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Well birds are pretty hard-wired, as it happens,

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so most of that is already in their DNA,

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but to supplement it, part of Ben's idea

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is to use homing pigeons

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to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock

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and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds

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and feeding grounds.

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There were some conservationists,

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really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple,

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who is one of the founders of conservation biology,

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and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List.

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They're excited about all this,

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but they're also concerned that it might be competitive

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with the extremely important efforts to protect

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endangered species that are still alive,

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that haven't gone extinct yet.

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You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there.

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You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down

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so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year.

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But at the same time, conservation biologists are realizing

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that bad news bums people out.

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And so the Red List is really important, keep track of

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what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on.

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But they're about to create what they call a Green List,

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and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you,

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species that were endangered, like the bald eagle,

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but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work,

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and protected areas around the world

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that are very, very well managed.

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So basically, they're learning how to build on good news.

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And they see reviving extinct species

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as the kind of good news you might be able to build on.

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Here's a couple related examples.

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Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species.

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The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987.

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Everybody thought is was finished.

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Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo,

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there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild.

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That technology will be used on de-extincted animals.

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Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa.

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In 1981, Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct.

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There were just 254 left.

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Now there are 880. They're increasing in population

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by three percent a year.

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The secret is, they have an eco-tourism program,

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which is absolutely brilliant.

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So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan

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with an iPhone.

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That's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors.

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Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help,

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is the northern white rhinoceros.

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There's no breeding pairs left.

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But this is the kind of thing that

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a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo.

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A bit of cloning, you can get them back.

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So where do we go from here?

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These have been private meetings so far.

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I think it's time for the subject to go public.

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What do people think about it?

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You know, do you want extinct species back?

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Do you want extinct species back?

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(Applause)

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Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down.

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It is a Tinker Bell moment,

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because what are people excited about with this?

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What are they concerned about?

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We're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon.

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So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group

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that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz.

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They're going to work on the genomes

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of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon.

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As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church,

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who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that.

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We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew

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to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens

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that can produce passenger pigeon squabs

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that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents,

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and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way,

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maybe for the next six million years.

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You can do the same thing, as the costs come down,

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for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk,

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for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker,

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for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal,

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for the woolly mammoth.

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Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole

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in nature in the last 10,000 years.

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We have the ability now,

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and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.

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Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands,

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by expanding and protecting

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the populations of endangered species.

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But some species

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that we killed off totally

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we could consider bringing back

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to a world that misses them.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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Chris Anderson: Thank you.

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I've got a question.

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So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand.

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I suspect there are some people out there sitting,

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kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about,

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well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute,

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there's something wrong with mankind

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interfering in nature in this way.

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There's going to be unintended consequences.

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You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box

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of who-knows-what. Do they have a point?

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Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is

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we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct,

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and many of them were keystone species,

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and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in

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by letting them go.

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Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is,

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so when these things come back,

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they might replace some birds that are there

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that people really know and love.

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I think that's, you know, part of how it'll work.

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This is a long, slow process --

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One of the things I like about it, it's multi-generation.

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We will get woolly mammoths back.

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CA: Well it feels like both the conversation

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and the potential here are pretty thrilling.

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Thank you so much for presenting. SB: Thank you.

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CA: Thank you. (Applause)