WEBVTT 00:00:00.950 --> 00:00:06.012 Now, extinction is a different kind of death. 00:00:06.012 --> 00:00:08.635 It's bigger. 00:00:08.635 --> 00:00:11.715 We didn't really realize that until 1914, 00:00:11.715 --> 00:00:14.930 when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, 00:00:14.930 --> 00:00:17.948 died at the Cincinnati zoo. 00:00:17.948 --> 00:00:21.489 This had been the most abundant bird in the world 00:00:21.489 --> 00:00:25.096 that'd been in North America for six million years. 00:00:25.096 --> 00:00:28.401 Suddenly it wasn't here at all. 00:00:28.401 --> 00:00:32.478 Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long 00:00:32.478 --> 00:00:35.125 used to darken the sun. 00:00:35.125 --> 00:00:38.195 Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, 00:00:38.195 --> 00:00:41.000 a feathered tempest. 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:43.444 And indeed it was a keystone species 00:00:43.444 --> 00:00:47.460 that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest, 00:00:47.460 --> 00:00:49.744 from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, 00:00:49.744 --> 00:00:53.059 from Canada down to the Gulf. 00:00:53.059 --> 00:00:56.372 But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades. 00:00:56.372 --> 00:00:57.572 What happened? NOTE Paragraph 00:00:57.572 --> 00:00:59.725 Well, commercial hunting happened. 00:00:59.725 --> 00:01:03.684 These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton, 00:01:03.684 --> 00:01:06.004 and it was easy to do because when those big flocks 00:01:06.004 --> 00:01:08.276 came down to the ground, they were so dense 00:01:08.276 --> 00:01:10.644 that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up 00:01:10.644 --> 00:01:13.650 and slaughter them by the tens of thousands. 00:01:13.650 --> 00:01:16.668 It was the cheapest source of protein in America. 00:01:16.668 --> 00:01:18.643 By the end of the century, there was nothing left 00:01:18.643 --> 00:01:23.483 but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:23.483 --> 00:01:25.358 There's an upside to the story. 00:01:25.358 --> 00:01:27.272 This made people realize that the same thing 00:01:27.272 --> 00:01:29.764 was about to happen to the American bison, 00:01:29.764 --> 00:01:33.169 and so these birds saved the buffalos. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:33.169 --> 00:01:34.843 But a lot of other animals weren't saved. 00:01:34.843 --> 00:01:39.634 The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere. 00:01:39.634 --> 00:01:41.980 It was hunted to death for its feathers. 00:01:41.980 --> 00:01:45.082 There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen. 00:01:45.082 --> 00:01:48.091 It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway. 00:01:48.091 --> 00:01:51.465 A local newspaper spelled out, "There is no survivor, 00:01:51.465 --> 00:01:56.282 there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again." 00:01:56.282 --> 00:01:58.953 There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things, 00:01:58.953 --> 00:02:01.378 and it happened to lots of birds that people loved. 00:02:01.378 --> 00:02:03.586 It happened to lots of mammals. 00:02:03.586 --> 00:02:06.209 Another keystone species is a famous animal 00:02:06.209 --> 00:02:08.274 called the European aurochs. 00:02:08.274 --> 00:02:10.729 There was sort of a movie made about it recently. 00:02:10.729 --> 00:02:13.337 And the aurochs was like the bison. 00:02:13.337 --> 00:02:16.517 This was an animal that basically kept the forest 00:02:16.517 --> 00:02:21.569 mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, 00:02:21.569 --> 00:02:23.913 from Spain to Korea. 00:02:23.913 --> 00:02:26.041 The documentation of this animal goes back 00:02:26.041 --> 00:02:29.266 to the Lascaux cave paintings. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:29.266 --> 00:02:31.458 The extinctions still go on. 00:02:31.458 --> 00:02:34.487 There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo. 00:02:34.487 --> 00:02:36.833 It went extinct in 2000. 00:02:36.833 --> 00:02:39.590 There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf 00:02:39.590 --> 00:02:43.321 called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia, 00:02:43.321 --> 00:02:45.391 called the Tasmanian tiger. 00:02:45.391 --> 00:02:49.709 It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos. 00:02:49.709 --> 00:02:52.745 A little bit of film was shot. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:03.593 --> 00:03:08.850 Sorrow, anger, mourning. 00:03:08.850 --> 00:03:12.006 Don't mourn. Organize. 00:03:12.006 --> 00:03:15.625 What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, 00:03:15.625 --> 00:03:18.622 fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old 00:03:18.622 --> 00:03:21.060 could be used to bring species back, 00:03:21.060 --> 00:03:22.684 what would you do? Where would you start? NOTE Paragraph 00:03:22.684 --> 00:03:25.598 Well, you'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there. 00:03:25.598 --> 00:03:27.690 I started with my wife, Ryan Phelan, 00:03:27.690 --> 00:03:30.824 who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct, 00:03:30.824 --> 00:03:34.873 and through her, one of her colleagues, George Church, 00:03:34.873 --> 00:03:37.568 one of the leading genetic engineers 00:03:37.568 --> 00:03:40.577 who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons 00:03:40.577 --> 00:03:42.188 and a lot of confidence 00:03:42.188 --> 00:03:44.500 that methodologies he was working on 00:03:44.500 --> 00:03:46.589 might actually do the deed. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:46.589 --> 00:03:49.844 So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting 00:03:49.844 --> 00:03:52.108 at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together 00:03:52.108 --> 00:03:56.719 specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, 00:03:56.719 --> 00:04:00.832 and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced 00:04:00.832 --> 00:04:04.123 by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro. 00:04:04.123 --> 00:04:07.002 All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian 00:04:07.002 --> 00:04:09.657 was a little bit of toe pad tissue, 00:04:09.657 --> 00:04:13.040 because down in there is what is called ancient DNA. 00:04:13.040 --> 00:04:16.012 It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented, 00:04:16.012 --> 00:04:20.904 but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:20.904 --> 00:04:23.225 Then the question is, can you reassemble, 00:04:23.225 --> 00:04:25.720 with that genome, the whole bird? 00:04:25.720 --> 00:04:28.224 George Church thinks you can. 00:04:28.224 --> 00:04:31.289 So in his book, "Regenesis," which I recommend, 00:04:31.289 --> 00:04:34.752 he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species, 00:04:34.752 --> 00:04:36.288 and he has a machine called 00:04:36.288 --> 00:04:39.736 the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine. 00:04:39.736 --> 00:04:41.470 It's kind of like an evolution machine. 00:04:41.470 --> 00:04:44.176 You try combinations of genes that you write 00:04:44.176 --> 00:04:47.416 at the cell level and then in organs on a chip, 00:04:47.416 --> 00:04:49.325 and the ones that win, that you can then put 00:04:49.325 --> 00:04:52.022 into a living organism. It'll work. 00:04:52.022 --> 00:04:55.216 The precision of this, one of George's famous unreadable slides, 00:04:55.216 --> 00:04:59.815 nevertheless points out that there's a level of precision here 00:04:59.815 --> 00:05:02.381 right down to the individual base pair. 00:05:02.381 --> 00:05:06.520 The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:06.520 --> 00:05:09.525 So what you're getting is the capability now 00:05:09.525 --> 00:05:13.050 of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene. 00:05:13.050 --> 00:05:14.953 It's called an allele. 00:05:14.953 --> 00:05:17.803 Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway. 00:05:17.803 --> 00:05:20.994 So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome 00:05:20.994 --> 00:05:22.874 of an extinct species 00:05:22.874 --> 00:05:26.404 with the genome of its closest living relative. 00:05:26.404 --> 00:05:29.119 Now along the way, George points out that 00:05:29.119 --> 00:05:32.930 his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, 00:05:32.930 --> 00:05:36.736 is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. 00:05:36.736 --> 00:05:41.024 It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:41.024 --> 00:05:43.728 Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon 00:05:43.728 --> 00:05:47.022 is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here. 00:05:47.022 --> 00:05:51.110 Genetically, the band-tailed pigeon already is 00:05:51.110 --> 00:05:53.478 mostly living passenger pigeon. 00:05:53.478 --> 00:05:55.913 There's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon. 00:05:55.913 --> 00:05:58.657 If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits, 00:05:58.657 --> 00:06:02.872 you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:02.872 --> 00:06:04.780 Now, there's work to do. 00:06:04.780 --> 00:06:07.494 You have to figure out exactly what genes matter. 00:06:07.494 --> 00:06:10.136 So there's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon, 00:06:10.136 --> 00:06:12.836 genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon, 00:06:12.836 --> 00:06:16.394 and so on with the red eye, peach-colored breast, flocking, and so on. 00:06:16.394 --> 00:06:19.265 Add them all up and the result won't be perfect. 00:06:19.265 --> 00:06:21.243 But it should be be perfect enough, 00:06:21.243 --> 00:06:23.889 because nature doesn't do perfect either. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:23.889 --> 00:06:28.065 So this meeting in Boston led to three things. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:28.065 --> 00:06:31.611 First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit 00:06:31.611 --> 00:06:35.264 called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally 00:06:35.264 --> 00:06:38.415 and try to have it go in a responsible way, 00:06:38.415 --> 00:06:41.703 and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:41.703 --> 00:06:45.768 Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, 00:06:45.768 --> 00:06:49.024 who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 00:06:49.024 --> 00:06:52.087 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, 00:06:52.087 --> 00:06:55.398 himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, 00:06:55.398 --> 00:06:58.013 using money from his family and friends. 00:06:58.013 --> 00:07:00.160 We hired him full-time. 00:07:00.160 --> 00:07:03.824 Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, 00:07:03.824 --> 00:07:06.055 he's looking down at Martha, 00:07:06.055 --> 00:07:08.840 the last passenger pigeon alive. 00:07:08.840 --> 00:07:11.575 So if he's successful, she won't be the last. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:11.575 --> 00:07:14.457 The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization 00:07:14.457 --> 00:07:16.290 that there are scientists all over the world 00:07:16.290 --> 00:07:18.264 working on various forms of de-extinction, 00:07:18.264 --> 00:07:20.079 but they'd never met each other. 00:07:20.079 --> 00:07:22.063 And National Geographic got interested 00:07:22.063 --> 00:07:24.546 because National Geographic has the theory that 00:07:24.546 --> 00:07:27.919 the last century, discovery was basically finding things, 00:07:27.919 --> 00:07:31.996 and in this century, discovery is basically making things. 00:07:31.996 --> 00:07:33.820 De-extinction falls in that category. 00:07:33.820 --> 00:07:37.654 So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, 00:07:37.654 --> 00:07:40.934 they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, 00:07:40.934 --> 00:07:44.350 basically meeting to see if they had work to do together. 00:07:44.350 --> 00:07:46.716 Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical. 00:07:46.716 --> 00:07:50.278 There's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species, 00:07:50.278 --> 00:07:53.399 they're recreating extinct ecosystems 00:07:53.399 --> 00:07:57.267 in northern Siberia, in the Netherlands, and in Hawaii. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:57.267 --> 00:07:59.542 Henri, from the Netherlands, 00:07:59.542 --> 00:08:02.233 with a Dutch last name I won't try to pronounce, 00:08:02.233 --> 00:08:04.478 is working on the aurochs. 00:08:04.478 --> 00:08:08.831 The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, 00:08:08.831 --> 00:08:14.405 and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed. 00:08:14.405 --> 00:08:16.819 So what they're doing is working with seven breeds 00:08:16.819 --> 00:08:21.574 of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there 00:08:21.574 --> 00:08:25.039 to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding, 00:08:25.039 --> 00:08:27.102 the aurochs. 00:08:27.102 --> 00:08:30.135 Now, re-wilding is moving faster in Korea 00:08:30.135 --> 00:08:31.994 than it is in America, 00:08:31.994 --> 00:08:35.654 and so the plan is, with these re-wilded areas all over Europe, 00:08:35.654 --> 00:08:38.862 they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job, 00:08:38.862 --> 00:08:40.804 its old ecological role, 00:08:40.804 --> 00:08:44.063 of clearing the somewhat barren, closed-canopy forest 00:08:44.063 --> 00:08:47.874 so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:47.874 --> 00:08:49.689 Another amazing story 00:08:49.689 --> 00:08:53.087 came from Alberto Fernández-Arias. 00:08:53.087 --> 00:08:56.406 Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain. 00:08:56.406 --> 00:08:59.239 The last bucardo was a female named Celia 00:08:59.239 --> 00:09:03.802 who was still alive, but then they captured her, 00:09:03.802 --> 00:09:06.214 they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, 00:09:06.214 --> 00:09:09.398 they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, 00:09:09.398 --> 00:09:11.184 released her back into the wild, 00:09:11.184 --> 00:09:14.934 but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree. 00:09:14.934 --> 00:09:17.542 They took the DNA from that ear, 00:09:17.542 --> 00:09:20.982 they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, 00:09:20.982 --> 00:09:23.056 the pregnancy came to term, 00:09:23.056 --> 00:09:25.271 and a live baby bucardo was born. 00:09:25.271 --> 00:09:28.119 It was the first de-extinction in history. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:28.119 --> 00:09:31.662 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:31.662 --> 00:09:32.889 It was short-lived. 00:09:32.889 --> 00:09:36.527 Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems. 00:09:36.527 --> 00:09:39.568 This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes, 00:09:39.568 --> 00:09:42.648 but Alberto was confident that 00:09:42.648 --> 00:09:45.048 cloning has moved along well since then, 00:09:45.048 --> 00:09:46.587 and this will move ahead, and eventually 00:09:46.587 --> 00:09:48.594 there will be a population of bucardos 00:09:48.594 --> 00:09:51.851 back in the mountains in northern Spain. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:51.851 --> 00:09:55.677 Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder. 00:09:55.677 --> 00:09:58.064 At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo 00:09:58.064 --> 00:10:02.015 has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species 00:10:02.015 --> 00:10:04.993 over the last 35 years. 00:10:04.993 --> 00:10:07.024 Now, when it's frozen that deep, 00:10:07.024 --> 00:10:09.744 minus 196 degrees Celsius, 00:10:09.744 --> 00:10:12.376 the cells are intact and the DNA is intact. 00:10:12.376 --> 00:10:14.453 They're basically viable cells, 00:10:14.453 --> 00:10:18.081 so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology 00:10:18.081 --> 00:10:21.296 took some of that tissue from an endangered animal 00:10:21.296 --> 00:10:23.490 called the Javan banteng, put it in a cow, 00:10:23.490 --> 00:10:26.540 the cow went to term, and what was born 00:10:26.540 --> 00:10:31.621 was a live, healthy baby Javan banteng, 00:10:31.621 --> 00:10:35.024 who thrived and is still alive. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:35.024 --> 00:10:37.800 The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza 00:10:37.800 --> 00:10:40.488 is the ability now to take any kind of cell 00:10:40.488 --> 00:10:42.936 with induced pluripotent stem cells 00:10:42.936 --> 00:10:46.909 and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:46.909 --> 00:10:49.192 So now we go to Mike McGrew 00:10:49.192 --> 00:10:52.688 who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, 00:10:52.688 --> 00:10:54.992 and Mike's doing miracles with birds. 00:10:54.992 --> 00:10:58.512 So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast, 00:10:58.512 --> 00:11:01.300 turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells. 00:11:01.300 --> 00:11:04.730 Since it's so pluripotent, it can become germ plasm. 00:11:04.730 --> 00:11:06.986 He then has a way to put the germ plasm 00:11:06.986 --> 00:11:10.530 into the embryo of a chicken egg 00:11:10.530 --> 00:11:13.801 so that that chicken will have, basically, 00:11:13.801 --> 00:11:15.642 the gonads of a falcon. 00:11:15.642 --> 00:11:17.556 You get a male and a female each of those, 00:11:17.556 --> 00:11:20.497 and out of them comes falcons. 00:11:20.497 --> 00:11:22.456 (Laughter) 00:11:22.456 --> 00:11:27.581 Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:27.581 --> 00:11:30.058 Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting. 00:11:30.058 --> 00:11:32.487 He showed how all of this can be put together. 00:11:32.487 --> 00:11:35.033 The sequence of events: he'll put together the genomes 00:11:35.033 --> 00:11:37.411 of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon, 00:11:37.411 --> 00:11:40.361 he'll take the techniques of George Church 00:11:40.361 --> 00:11:42.642 and get passenger pigeon DNA, 00:11:42.642 --> 00:11:45.327 the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew, 00:11:45.327 --> 00:11:47.586 get that DNA into chicken gonads, 00:11:47.586 --> 00:11:51.805 and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs, squabs, 00:11:51.805 --> 00:11:55.291 and now you're getting a population of passenger pigeons. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:55.291 --> 00:11:57.235 It does raise the question of, 00:11:57.235 --> 00:11:59.208 they're not going to have passenger pigeon parents 00:11:59.208 --> 00:12:01.834 to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon. 00:12:01.834 --> 00:12:04.090 So what do you do about that? 00:12:04.090 --> 00:12:06.763 Well birds are pretty hard-wired, as it happens, 00:12:06.763 --> 00:12:09.130 so most of that is already in their DNA, 00:12:09.130 --> 00:12:11.914 but to supplement it, part of Ben's idea 00:12:11.914 --> 00:12:13.570 is to use homing pigeons 00:12:13.570 --> 00:12:16.740 to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock 00:12:16.740 --> 00:12:19.474 and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds 00:12:19.474 --> 00:12:22.623 and feeding grounds. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:22.623 --> 00:12:24.261 There were some conservationists, 00:12:24.261 --> 00:12:27.337 really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, 00:12:27.337 --> 00:12:29.953 who is one of the founders of conservation biology, 00:12:29.953 --> 00:12:34.609 and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List. 00:12:34.609 --> 00:12:36.570 They're excited about all this, 00:12:36.570 --> 00:12:39.073 but they're also concerned that it might be competitive 00:12:39.073 --> 00:12:42.111 with the extremely important efforts to protect 00:12:42.111 --> 00:12:44.321 endangered species that are still alive, 00:12:44.321 --> 00:12:46.167 that haven't gone extinct yet. 00:12:46.167 --> 00:12:48.540 You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there. 00:12:48.540 --> 00:12:52.769 You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down 00:12:52.769 --> 00:12:56.647 so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:56.647 --> 00:12:59.697 But at the same time, conservation biologists are realizing 00:12:59.697 --> 00:13:02.281 that bad news bums people out. 00:13:02.281 --> 00:13:05.006 And so the Red List is really important, keep track of 00:13:05.006 --> 00:13:08.330 what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on. 00:13:08.330 --> 00:13:11.355 But they're about to create what they call a Green List, 00:13:11.355 --> 00:13:15.737 and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you, 00:13:15.737 --> 00:13:18.041 species that were endangered, like the bald eagle, 00:13:18.041 --> 00:13:21.656 but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work, 00:13:21.656 --> 00:13:23.822 and protected areas around the world 00:13:23.822 --> 00:13:25.583 that are very, very well managed. 00:13:25.583 --> 00:13:29.686 So basically, they're learning how to build on good news. 00:13:29.686 --> 00:13:32.797 And they see reviving extinct species 00:13:32.797 --> 00:13:35.677 as the kind of good news you might be able to build on. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:35.677 --> 00:13:39.002 Here's a couple related examples. 00:13:39.002 --> 00:13:42.213 Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species. 00:13:42.213 --> 00:13:45.629 The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987. 00:13:45.629 --> 00:13:47.338 Everybody thought is was finished. 00:13:47.338 --> 00:13:50.158 Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo, 00:13:50.158 --> 00:13:54.178 there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild. 00:13:54.178 --> 00:13:58.387 That technology will be used on de-extincted animals. 00:13:58.387 --> 00:14:01.854 Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa. 00:14:01.854 --> 00:14:05.237 In 1981, Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct. 00:14:05.237 --> 00:14:07.270 There were just 254 left. 00:14:07.270 --> 00:14:10.809 Now there are 880. They're increasing in population 00:14:10.809 --> 00:14:12.902 by three percent a year. 00:14:12.902 --> 00:14:16.293 The secret is, they have an eco-tourism program, 00:14:16.293 --> 00:14:17.962 which is absolutely brilliant. 00:14:17.962 --> 00:14:20.597 So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan 00:14:20.597 --> 00:14:23.373 with an iPhone. 00:14:23.373 --> 00:14:27.688 That's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:27.688 --> 00:14:31.423 Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help, 00:14:31.423 --> 00:14:33.334 is the northern white rhinoceros. 00:14:33.334 --> 00:14:35.295 There's no breeding pairs left. 00:14:35.295 --> 00:14:37.465 But this is the kind of thing that 00:14:37.465 --> 00:14:41.605 a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo. 00:14:41.605 --> 00:14:44.400 A bit of cloning, you can get them back. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:44.400 --> 00:14:46.590 So where do we go from here? 00:14:46.590 --> 00:14:48.254 These have been private meetings so far. 00:14:48.254 --> 00:14:50.911 I think it's time for the subject to go public. 00:14:50.911 --> 00:14:52.378 What do people think about it? 00:14:52.378 --> 00:14:54.457 You know, do you want extinct species back? 00:14:54.457 --> 00:14:57.309 Do you want extinct species back? NOTE Paragraph 00:14:57.309 --> 00:15:02.575 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:15:02.575 --> 00:15:05.071 Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down. 00:15:05.071 --> 00:15:06.285 It is a Tinker Bell moment, 00:15:06.285 --> 00:15:08.681 because what are people excited about with this? 00:15:08.681 --> 00:15:10.732 What are they concerned about? NOTE Paragraph 00:15:10.732 --> 00:15:13.179 We're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon. 00:15:13.179 --> 00:15:16.949 So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group 00:15:16.949 --> 00:15:20.270 that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz. 00:15:20.270 --> 00:15:21.658 They're going to work on the genomes 00:15:21.658 --> 00:15:23.945 of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon. 00:15:23.945 --> 00:15:27.854 As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, 00:15:27.854 --> 00:15:31.749 who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that. 00:15:31.749 --> 00:15:34.593 We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew 00:15:34.593 --> 00:15:37.660 to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens 00:15:37.660 --> 00:15:40.228 that can produce passenger pigeon squabs 00:15:40.228 --> 00:15:42.692 that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents, 00:15:42.692 --> 00:15:44.948 and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way, 00:15:44.948 --> 00:15:48.084 maybe for the next six million years. 00:15:48.084 --> 00:15:50.399 You can do the same thing, as the costs come down, 00:15:50.399 --> 00:15:53.621 for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk, 00:15:53.621 --> 00:15:56.416 for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker, 00:15:56.416 --> 00:15:58.522 for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal, 00:15:58.522 --> 00:16:01.388 for the woolly mammoth. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:01.388 --> 00:16:03.864 Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole 00:16:03.864 --> 00:16:06.954 in nature in the last 10,000 years. 00:16:06.954 --> 00:16:08.993 We have the ability now, 00:16:08.993 --> 00:16:13.857 and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage. 00:16:13.857 --> 00:16:18.405 Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands, 00:16:18.405 --> 00:16:20.074 by expanding and protecting 00:16:20.074 --> 00:16:24.601 the populations of endangered species. 00:16:24.601 --> 00:16:26.756 But some species 00:16:26.756 --> 00:16:31.939 that we killed off totally 00:16:31.939 --> 00:16:35.253 we could consider bringing back 00:16:35.253 --> 00:16:38.420 to a world that misses them. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:38.420 --> 00:16:40.630 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:40.630 --> 00:16:51.828 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:16:51.828 --> 00:16:53.682 Chris Anderson: Thank you. 00:16:53.682 --> 00:16:55.494 I've got a question. 00:16:55.494 --> 00:17:00.244 So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand. 00:17:00.244 --> 00:17:03.100 I suspect there are some people out there sitting, 00:17:03.100 --> 00:17:06.109 kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about, 00:17:06.109 --> 00:17:08.019 well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, 00:17:08.019 --> 00:17:11.116 there's something wrong with mankind 00:17:11.116 --> 00:17:14.596 interfering in nature in this way. 00:17:14.596 --> 00:17:18.068 There's going to be unintended consequences. 00:17:18.068 --> 00:17:20.845 You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box 00:17:20.845 --> 00:17:24.831 of who-knows-what. Do they have a point? NOTE Paragraph 00:17:24.831 --> 00:17:26.331 Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is 00:17:26.331 --> 00:17:29.882 we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct, 00:17:29.882 --> 00:17:32.423 and many of them were keystone species, 00:17:32.423 --> 00:17:34.932 and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in 00:17:34.932 --> 00:17:36.725 by letting them go. 00:17:36.725 --> 00:17:39.306 Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is, 00:17:39.306 --> 00:17:40.844 so when these things come back, 00:17:40.844 --> 00:17:43.135 they might replace some birds that are there 00:17:43.135 --> 00:17:45.529 that people really know and love. 00:17:45.529 --> 00:17:48.276 I think that's, you know, part of how it'll work. 00:17:48.276 --> 00:17:51.161 This is a long, slow process -- 00:17:51.161 --> 00:17:53.395 One of the things I like about it, it's multi-generation. 00:17:53.395 --> 00:17:55.452 We will get woolly mammoths back. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:55.452 --> 00:17:57.228 CA: Well it feels like both the conversation 00:17:57.228 --> 00:17:59.516 and the potential here are pretty thrilling. 00:17:59.516 --> 00:18:01.230 Thank you so much for presenting. SB: Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:01.230 --> 00:18:03.953 CA: Thank you. (Applause)