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I do want to test this question
we're all interested in:

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Does extinction have to be forever?

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I'm focused on two projects
I want to tell you about.

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One is the Thylacine Project.

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The other one is the Lazarus Project,

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and that's focused
on the gastric-brooding frog.

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And it would be a fair question to ask,

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why have we focused on these two animals?

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Well, point number one, each of them
represents a unique family of its own.

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We've lost a whole family.

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That's a big chunk
of the global genome gone.

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I'd like it back.

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The second reason
is that we killed these things.

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In the case of the thylacine, regrettably,
we shot every one that we saw.

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We slaughtered them.

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In the case of the gastric-brooding frog,
we may have "fungicided" it to death.

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There's a dreadful fungus
that's moving through the world

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that's called the chytrid fungus,

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and it's nailing frogs all over the world.

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We think that's probably
what got this frog,

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and humans are spreading this fungus.

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And this introduces
a very important ethical point,

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and I think you will have heard
this many times

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when this topic comes up.

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What I think is important

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is that, if it's clear
that we exterminated these species,

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then I think we not only
have a moral obligation

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to see what we can do about it,

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but I think we've got a moral imperative
to try to do something, if we can.

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OK. Let me talk to you
about the Lazarus Project.

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It's a frog. And you think, frog.

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Yeah, but this was not just any frog.

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Unlike a normal frog,
which lays its eggs in the water

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and goes away
and wishes its froglets well,

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this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs,

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swallowed them into the stomach,
where it should be having food,

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didn't digest the eggs,
and turned its stomach into a uterus.

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In the stomach, the eggs
went on to develop into tadpoles,

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and in the stomach, the tadpoles
went on to develop into frogs,

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and they grew in the stomach

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until eventually the poor old frog
was at risk of bursting apart.

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It has a little cough and a hiccup,
and out comes sprays of little frogs.

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Now, when biologists saw this,
they were agog.

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They thought, this is incredible.

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No animal, let alone a frog,
has been known to do this,

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to change one organ
in the body into another.

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And you can imagine the medical world
went nuts over this as well.

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If we could understand

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how that frog is managing
the way its tummy works,

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is there information here
that we need to understand

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or could usefully use to help ourselves?

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Now, I'm not suggesting we want
to raise our babies in our stomach,

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but I am suggesting it's possible

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we might want to manage
gastric secretion in the gut.

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And just as everybody
got excited about it, bang!

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It was extinct.

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I called up my friend,

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Professor Mike Tyler
in the University of Adelaide.

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He was the last person who had this frog,
a colony of these things, in his lab.

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And I said, "Mike, by any chance --"
This was 30 or 40 years ago.

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"By any chance had you kept
any frozen tissue of this frog?"

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And he thought about it,

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and he went to his deep freezer,
minus 20 degrees centigrade,

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and he poured through
everything in the freezer,

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and there in the bottom was a jar
and it contained tissues of these frogs.

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This was very exciting,

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but there was no reason
why we should expect that this would work,

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because this tissue
had not had any antifreeze put in it,

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cryoprotectants, to look after it
when it was frozen.

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And normally, when water freezes,
as you know, it expands,

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and the same thing happens in a cell.

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If you freeze tissues, the water expands,
damages or bursts the cell walls.

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Well, we looked at the tissue
under the microscope.

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It actually didn't look bad.
The cell walls looked intact.

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So we thought, let's give it a go.

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What we did is something called
somatic cell nuclear transplantation.

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We took the eggs
of a related species, a living frog,

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and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg.

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We used ultraviolet radiation to do that.

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And then we took the dead nucleus
from the dead tissue of the extinct frog

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and we inserted those nuclei
into that egg.

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Now, by rights, this is
kind of like a cloning project,

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like what produced Dolly,

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but it's actually very different,

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because Dolly was live sheep
into live sheep cells.

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That was a miracle, but it was workable.

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What we're trying to do is take
a dead nucleus from an extinct species

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and put it into a completely different
species and expect that to work.

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Well, we had no real reason
to expect it would,

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and we tried hundreds
and hundreds of these.

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And just last February,
the last time we did these trials,

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I saw a miracle starting to happen.

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What we found was
most of these eggs didn't work,

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but then suddenly,
one of them began to divide.

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That was so exciting.

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And then the egg divided again.
And then again.

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And pretty soon,
we had early-stage embryos

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with hundreds of cells forming those.

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We even DNA-tested some of these cells,

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and the DNA of the extinct frog
is in those cells.

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So we're very excited.
This is not a tadpole. It's not a frog.

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But it's a long way along the journey

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to producing, or bringing back,
an extinct species.

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And this is news.

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We haven't announced this publicly before.

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We're excited.

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We've got to get past this point.

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We now want this ball of cells
to start to gastrulate,

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to turn in so that it will produce
the other tissues.

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It'll go on and produce
a tadpole and then a frog.

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Watch this space.

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I think we're going to have
this frog hopping

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glad to be back in the world again.

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(Applause)

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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We haven't done it yet,
but keep the applause ready.

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The second project I want to talk
to you about is the Thylacine Project.

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The thylacine looks a bit,
to most people, like a dog,

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or maybe like a tiger,
because it has stripes.

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But it's not related to any of those.
It's a marsupial.

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It raised its young in a pouch,
like a koala or a kangaroo would do,

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and it has a long history,
a long, fascinating history,

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that goes back 25 million years.

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But it's also a tragic history.

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The first one that we see occurs
in the ancient rain forests of Australia

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about 25 million years ago,

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and the National Geographic Society

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is helping us to explore
these fossil deposits.

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This is Riversleigh.

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In those fossil rocks
are some amazing animals.

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We found marsupial lions.

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We found carnivorous kangaroos.

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It's not what you usually
think about as a kangaroo,

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but these are meat-eating kangaroos.

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We found the biggest bird in the world,

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bigger than that thing
that was in Madagascar,

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and it too was a flesh eater.

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It was a giant, weird duck.

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And crocodiles were not behaving
at that time either.

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You think of crocodiles
as doing their ugly thing,

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sitting in a pool of water.

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These crocodiles
were actually out on the land

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and they were even climbing trees
and jumping on prey on the ground.

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We had, in Australia, drop crocs.
They really do exist.

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(Laughter)

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But what they were dropping on
was not only other weird animals

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but also thylacines.

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There were five different kinds
of thylacines in those ancient forests,

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and they ranged from great big ones
to middle-sized ones

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to one that was
about the size of a chihuahua.

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Paris Hilton would have been able

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to carry one of these things around
in a little handbag,

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until a drop croc landed on her.

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At any rate, it was a fascinating place,

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but unfortunately,
Australia didn't stay this way.

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Climate change has affected the world
for a long period of time,

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and gradually, the forests disappeared,
the country began to dry out,

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and the number of kinds
of thylacines began to decline,

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until by five million years ago,

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only one left.

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By 10,000 years ago,
they had disappeared from New Guinea,

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and unfortunately, by 4,000 years ago,
somebodies, we don't know who this was,

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introduced dingoes --
this is a very archaic kind of a dog --

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into Australia.

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And as you can see,

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dingoes are very similar
in their body form to thylacines.

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That similarity meant
they probably competed.

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They were eating the same kinds of foods.

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It's even possible that aborigines were
keeping some of these dingoes as pets,

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and therefore they may have had
an advantage in the battle for survival.

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All we know is, soon after
the dingoes were brought in,

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thylacines were extinct
in the Australian mainland,

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and after that they only
survived in Tasmania.

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Then, unfortunately,

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the next sad part of the thylacine story
is that Europeans arrived in 1788,

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and they brought with them
the things they valued,

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and that included sheep.

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They took one look
at the thylacine in Tasmania,

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and they thought, hang on,
this is not going to work.

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That guy is going to eat all our sheep.

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That was not what happened, actually.

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Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep,
but the thylacine got a bad rap.

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But immediately, the government said,
that's it, let's get rid of them,

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and they paid people
to slaughter every one that they saw.

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By the early 1930s,

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3,000 to 4,000 thylacines
had been murdered.

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It was a disaster,
and they were about to hit the wall.

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Have a look at this bit of film footage.

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It makes me very sad because,
while it's a fascinating animal,

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and it's amazing to think
that we had the technology to film it

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before it actually plunged off
that cliff of extinction,

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we didn't, unfortunately,
at this same time,

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have a molecule of concern
about the welfare for this species.

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These are photos of the last
surviving thylacine, Benjamin,

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who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart.

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To add insult to injury,

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having swept this species
nearly off the table,

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this animal, when it died of neglect --

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The keepers didn't let it
into the hutch on a cold night in Hobart.

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It died of exposure, and in the morning,
when they found the body of Benjamin,

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they still cared so little for this animal
that they threw the body in the dump.

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00:09:48,600 --> 00:09:50,520
Does it have to stay this way?

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In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum.

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I was fascinated by thylacines.

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I've always been obsessed
with these animals.

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And I was studying skulls,

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trying to figure out their relationships
to other sorts of animals,

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00:10:02,560 --> 00:10:04,536
and I saw this jar,

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00:10:04,560 --> 00:10:09,096
and here, in the jar,
was a little girl thylacine pup,

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00:10:09,120 --> 00:10:10,816
perhaps six months old.

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00:10:10,840 --> 00:10:13,176
The guy who had found it
and killed the mother

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00:10:13,200 --> 00:10:16,336
had pickled the pup,
and they pickled it in alcohol.

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00:10:16,360 --> 00:10:19,976
I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew
alcohol was a DNA preservative.

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00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:24,336
But this was 1990,
and I asked my geneticist friends,

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00:10:24,360 --> 00:10:26,776
couldn't we think
about going into this pup

217
00:10:26,800 --> 00:10:29,776
and extracting DNA, if it's there,

218
00:10:29,800 --> 00:10:32,016
and then somewhere
down the line in the future,

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00:10:32,040 --> 00:10:34,256
we'll use this DNA
to bring the thylacine back?

220
00:10:34,280 --> 00:10:38,035
The geneticists laughed.
But this was six years before Dolly.

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Cloning was science fiction.

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It had not happened.

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00:10:41,820 --> 00:10:44,216
But then suddenly cloning did happen.

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And I thought, when I became
director of the Australian Museum,

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00:10:47,400 --> 00:10:48,736
I'm going to give this a go.

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I put a team together.

227
00:10:50,240 --> 00:10:53,096
We went into that pup
to see what was in it,

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and we did find thylacine DNA.

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00:10:55,320 --> 00:10:57,496
It was a eureka moment.
We were very excited.

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Unfortunately, we also found
a lot of human DNA.

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00:11:01,240 --> 00:11:04,216
Every old curator
who'd been in that museum

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00:11:04,240 --> 00:11:06,096
had seen this wonderful specimen,

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00:11:06,120 --> 00:11:08,616
put their hand in the jar,
pulled it out and thought,

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00:11:08,640 --> 00:11:11,176
"Wow, look at that,"
plop, dropped it back in the jar,

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00:11:11,200 --> 00:11:12,776
contaminating this specimen.

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And that was a worry.

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00:11:14,120 --> 00:11:16,336
If the goal here was to get the DNA out

238
00:11:16,360 --> 00:11:20,296
and use the DNA down the track
to try to bring a thylacine back,

239
00:11:20,320 --> 00:11:21,736
what we didn't want happening

240
00:11:21,760 --> 00:11:24,016
when the information
was shoved into the machine

241
00:11:24,040 --> 00:11:26,456
and the wheel turned around
and the lights flashed,

242
00:11:26,480 --> 00:11:30,456
was to have a wizened old horrible curator
pop out the other end of the machine.

243
00:11:30,480 --> 00:11:34,176
It would've kept the curator very happy,
but it wasn't going to keep us happy.

244
00:11:34,200 --> 00:11:37,256
So we went back to these specimens
and we started digging around,

245
00:11:37,280 --> 00:11:40,416
and particularly,
we looked into the teeth of skulls,

246
00:11:40,440 --> 00:11:43,496
hard parts where humans
had not been able to get their fingers,

247
00:11:43,520 --> 00:11:45,464
and we found much better quality DNA.

248
00:11:46,000 --> 00:11:48,176
We found nuclear mitochondrial genes.

249
00:11:48,200 --> 00:11:49,696
It's there. So we got it.

250
00:11:49,720 --> 00:11:52,176
OK. What could we do with this stuff?

251
00:11:52,200 --> 00:11:54,396
Well, George Church,
in his book, "Regenesis,"

252
00:11:54,420 --> 00:11:57,456
has mentioned many of the techniques
that are rapidly advancing

253
00:11:57,480 --> 00:11:59,094
to work with fragmented DNA.

254
00:11:59,520 --> 00:12:04,136
We would hope that we'll be able
to get that DNA back into a viable form,

255
00:12:04,160 --> 00:12:06,816
and then, much like we've done
with the Lazarus Project,

256
00:12:06,840 --> 00:12:09,896
get that stuff into an egg
of a host species.

257
00:12:09,920 --> 00:12:12,336
It has to be a different species.
What could it be?

258
00:12:12,360 --> 00:12:14,136
Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil?

259
00:12:14,160 --> 00:12:16,226
They're related, distantly, to thylacines.

260
00:12:16,760 --> 00:12:20,450
And then the Tasmanian devil is going
to pop a thylacine out the south end.

261
00:12:21,164 --> 00:12:24,176
Critics of this project say, hang on.

262
00:12:24,200 --> 00:12:27,807
Thylacine, Tasmanian devil?
That's going to hurt.

263
00:12:28,320 --> 00:12:31,176
No, it's not. These are marsupials.

264
00:12:31,200 --> 00:12:34,056
They give birth to babies
that are the size of a jelly bean.

265
00:12:34,080 --> 00:12:37,456
That Tasmanian devil's
not even going to know it gave birth.

266
00:12:37,480 --> 00:12:38,936
It is, shortly, going to think

267
00:12:38,960 --> 00:12:42,056
it's got the ugliest
Tasmanian devil baby in the world,

268
00:12:42,080 --> 00:12:44,993
so maybe it'll need some help
to keep it going.

269
00:12:46,440 --> 00:12:48,696
Andrew Pask and his colleagues
have demonstrated

270
00:12:48,720 --> 00:12:50,576
this might not be a waste of time.

271
00:12:50,600 --> 00:12:53,296
And it's sort of in the future,
we haven't got there yet,

272
00:12:53,320 --> 00:12:55,696
but it's the kind of thing
we want to think about.

273
00:12:55,720 --> 00:12:58,256
They took some of this same
pickled thylacine DNA

274
00:12:58,280 --> 00:13:01,576
and they spliced it into a mouse genome,

275
00:13:01,600 --> 00:13:03,096
but they put a tag on it

276
00:13:03,120 --> 00:13:07,096
so that anything
that this thylacine DNA produced

277
00:13:07,120 --> 00:13:09,976
would appear blue-green in the mouse baby.

278
00:13:10,000 --> 00:13:14,136
In other words, if thylacine tissues
were being produced by the thylacine DNA,

279
00:13:14,160 --> 00:13:16,056
it would be able to be recognized.

280
00:13:16,080 --> 00:13:20,096
When the baby popped up,
it was filled with blue-green tissues.

281
00:13:20,120 --> 00:13:22,896
And that tells us if we can get
that genome back together,

282
00:13:22,920 --> 00:13:24,376
get it into a live cell,

283
00:13:24,400 --> 00:13:26,894
it's going to produce thylacine stuff.

284
00:13:27,440 --> 00:13:28,976
Is this a risk?

285
00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:30,936
You've taken the bits of one animal

286
00:13:30,960 --> 00:13:34,207
and you've mixed them into the cell
of a different kind of an animal.

287
00:13:34,231 --> 00:13:38,336
Are we going to get a Frankenstein?
Some kind of weird hybrid chimera?

288
00:13:38,360 --> 00:13:39,616
And the answer is no.

289
00:13:39,640 --> 00:13:44,376
If the only nuclear DNA that goes
into this hybrid cell is thylacine DNA,

290
00:13:44,400 --> 00:13:47,570
that's the only thing that can pop out
the other end of the devil.

291
00:13:48,520 --> 00:13:52,016
OK, if we can do this,
could we put it back?

292
00:13:52,040 --> 00:13:53,816
This is a key question for everybody.

293
00:13:53,840 --> 00:13:57,576
Does it have to stay in a laboratory,
or could we put it back where it belongs?

294
00:13:57,600 --> 00:14:00,976
Could we put it back in the throne
of the king of beasts in Tasmania,

295
00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:02,496
restore that ecosystem?

296
00:14:02,520 --> 00:14:06,429
Or has Tasmania changed so much
that that's no longer possible?

297
00:14:07,000 --> 00:14:08,776
I've been to Tasmania.

298
00:14:08,800 --> 00:14:11,816
I've been to many of the areas
where the thylacines were common.

299
00:14:11,840 --> 00:14:14,696
I've even spoken to people,
like Peter Carter here,

300
00:14:14,720 --> 00:14:16,976
who when I spoke to him, was 90 years old,

301
00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:20,856
but in 1926, this man
and his father and his brother

302
00:14:20,880 --> 00:14:22,256
caught thylacines.

303
00:14:22,280 --> 00:14:23,616
They trapped them.

304
00:14:23,640 --> 00:14:27,936
And when I spoke to this man,
I was looking in his eyes and thinking,

305
00:14:27,960 --> 00:14:34,136
"Behind those eyes is a brain that has
memories of what thylacines feel like,

306
00:14:34,160 --> 00:14:36,616
what they smelled like,
what they sounded like."

307
00:14:36,640 --> 00:14:38,176
He led them around on a rope.

308
00:14:38,200 --> 00:14:40,256
He has personal experiences

309
00:14:40,280 --> 00:14:43,499
that I would give my left leg
to have in my head.

310
00:14:44,000 --> 00:14:46,296
We'd all love to have
this sort of thing happen.

311
00:14:46,320 --> 00:14:48,576
Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance,

312
00:14:48,600 --> 00:14:51,336
could he take us back
to where he caught those thylacines.

313
00:14:51,360 --> 00:14:53,976
My interest was in whether
the environment had changed.

314
00:14:54,000 --> 00:14:57,776
He thought hard. It was nearly 80 years
before this that he'd been at this hut.

315
00:14:57,800 --> 00:15:00,056
At any rate, he led us
down this bush track,

316
00:15:00,080 --> 00:15:02,056
and there, right where he remembered,

317
00:15:02,080 --> 00:15:03,336
was the hut,

318
00:15:03,360 --> 00:15:05,816
and tears came into his eyes.

319
00:15:05,840 --> 00:15:07,656
He looked at the hut. We went inside.

320
00:15:07,680 --> 00:15:10,136
There were the wooden boards
on the sides of the hut

321
00:15:10,160 --> 00:15:12,936
where he and his father
and his brother had slept at night.

322
00:15:12,960 --> 00:15:15,616
And he told me, as it all
was flooding back in memories.

323
00:15:15,640 --> 00:15:18,296
He said, "I remember
the thylacines going around the hut

324
00:15:18,320 --> 00:15:19,656
wondering what was inside,"

325
00:15:19,680 --> 00:15:23,176
and he said they made sounds
like "Yip! Yip! Yip!"

326
00:15:23,200 --> 00:15:26,416
All of these are parts of his life
and what he remembers.

327
00:15:26,440 --> 00:15:29,856
And the key question for me
was to ask Peter, has it changed?

328
00:15:29,880 --> 00:15:31,096
And he said no.

329
00:15:31,120 --> 00:15:33,256
The southern beech forests
surrounded his hut

330
00:15:33,280 --> 00:15:35,616
just like it was
when he was there in 1926.

331
00:15:35,640 --> 00:15:37,616
The grasslands were sweeping away.

332
00:15:37,640 --> 00:15:39,616
That's classic thylacine habitat.

333
00:15:39,640 --> 00:15:42,496
And the animals in those areas
were the same that were there

334
00:15:42,520 --> 00:15:43,976
when the thylacine was around.

335
00:15:44,000 --> 00:15:45,520
So could we put it back? Yes.

336
00:15:46,640 --> 00:15:50,256
Is that all we would do?
And this is an interesting question.

337
00:15:50,280 --> 00:15:52,536
Sometimes you might
be able to put it back,

338
00:15:52,560 --> 00:15:55,776
but is that the safest way
to make sure it never goes extinct again?

339
00:15:55,800 --> 00:15:57,336
And I don't think so.

340
00:15:57,360 --> 00:16:00,656
I think gradually, as we see species
all around the world,

341
00:16:00,680 --> 00:16:04,456
it's kind of a mantra that wildlife
is increasingly not safe in the wild.

342
00:16:04,480 --> 00:16:06,671
We'd love to think it is,
but we know it isn't.

343
00:16:06,695 --> 00:16:09,096
We need other parallel
strategies coming online.

344
00:16:09,120 --> 00:16:10,616
And this one interests me.

345
00:16:10,640 --> 00:16:13,362
Some of the thylacines
that were being turned in to zoos,

346
00:16:13,386 --> 00:16:15,136
sanctuaries, even at the museums,

347
00:16:15,160 --> 00:16:17,005
had collar marks on the neck.

348
00:16:17,520 --> 00:16:19,416
They were being kept as pets,

349
00:16:19,440 --> 00:16:22,416
and we know a lot
of bush tales and memories

350
00:16:22,440 --> 00:16:23,976
of people who had them as pets,

351
00:16:24,000 --> 00:16:26,176
and they say they were
wonderful, friendly.

352
00:16:26,200 --> 00:16:27,416
This particular one

353
00:16:27,440 --> 00:16:30,416
came in out of the forest to lick this boy

354
00:16:30,440 --> 00:16:33,050
and curled up around
the fireplace to go to sleep.

355
00:16:33,074 --> 00:16:34,456
A wild animal.

356
00:16:34,480 --> 00:16:38,776
And I'd like to ask the question.
We need to think about this.

357
00:16:38,800 --> 00:16:44,256
If it had not been illegal
to keep these thylacines as pets then,

358
00:16:44,280 --> 00:16:46,456
would the thylacine be extinct now?

359
00:16:46,480 --> 00:16:48,216
And I'm positive it wouldn't.

360
00:16:48,240 --> 00:16:50,732
We need to think
about this in today's world.

361
00:16:51,240 --> 00:16:55,776
Could it be that getting animals
close to us so that we value them,

362
00:16:55,800 --> 00:16:57,176
maybe they won't go extinct?

363
00:16:57,200 --> 00:16:59,736
And this is such a critical issue for us

364
00:16:59,760 --> 00:17:01,096
because if we don't do that,

365
00:17:01,120 --> 00:17:05,256
we're going to watch more of these animals
plunge off the precipice.

366
00:17:05,280 --> 00:17:06,496
As far as I'm concerned,

367
00:17:06,520 --> 00:17:10,656
this is why we're trying to do
these kinds of de-extinction projects.

368
00:17:10,680 --> 00:17:13,736
We are trying to restore
that balance of nature

369
00:17:13,760 --> 00:17:15,325
that we have upset.

370
00:17:15,793 --> 00:17:16,976
Thank you.

371
00:17:17,000 --> 00:17:19,720
(Applause)