WEBVTT

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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?

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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,

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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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and I saw this jar,

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and here, in the jar,
was a little girl thylacine pup,

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perhaps six months old.

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The guy who had found it
and killed the mother

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had pickled the pup,
and they pickled it in alcohol.

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I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew
alcohol was a DNA preservative.

NOTE Paragraph

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But this was 1990,
and I asked my geneticist friends,

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couldn't we think
about going into this pup

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and extracting DNA, if it's there,

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and then somewhere
down the line in the future,

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we'll use this DNA
to bring the thylacine back?

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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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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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I'm going to give this a go.

NOTE Paragraph

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I put a team together.

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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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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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Every old curator
who'd been in that museum

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had seen this wonderful specimen,

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put their hand in the jar,
pulled it out and thought,

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"Wow, look at that,"
plop, dropped it back in the jar,

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contaminating this specimen.

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And that was a worry.

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If the goal here was to get the DNA out

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and use the DNA down the track
to try to bring a thylacine back,

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what we didn't want happening

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when the information
was shoved into the machine

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and the wheel turned around
and the lights flashed,

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was to have a wizened old horrible curator
pop out the other end of the machine.

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It would've kept the curator very happy,
but it wasn't going to keep us happy.

NOTE Paragraph

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So we went back to these specimens
and we started digging around,

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and particularly,
we looked into the teeth of skulls,

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hard parts where humans
had not been able to get their fingers,

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and we found much better quality DNA.

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We found nuclear mitochondrial genes.

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It's there. So we got it.

NOTE Paragraph

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OK. What could we do with this stuff?

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Well, George Church,
in his book, "Regenesis,"

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has mentioned many of the techniques
that are rapidly advancing

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to work with fragmented DNA.

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We would hope that we'll be able
to get that DNA back into a viable form,

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and then, much like we've done
with the Lazarus Project,

00:12:06.840 --> 00:12:09.896
get that stuff into an egg
of a host species.

00:12:09.920 --> 00:12:12.336
It has to be a different species.
What could it be?

00:12:12.360 --> 00:12:14.136
Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil?

00:12:14.160 --> 00:12:16.226
They're related, distantly, to thylacines.

00:12:16.760 --> 00:12:20.450
And then the Tasmanian devil is going
to pop a thylacine out the south end.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:21.164 --> 00:12:24.176
Critics of this project say, hang on.

00:12:24.200 --> 00:12:27.807
Thylacine, Tasmanian devil?
That's going to hurt.

00:12:28.320 --> 00:12:31.176
No, it's not. These are marsupials.

00:12:31.200 --> 00:12:34.056
They give birth to babies
that are the size of a jelly bean.

00:12:34.080 --> 00:12:37.456
That Tasmanian devil's
not even going to know it gave birth.

00:12:37.480 --> 00:12:38.936
It is, shortly, going to think

00:12:38.960 --> 00:12:42.056
it's got the ugliest
Tasmanian devil baby in the world,

00:12:42.080 --> 00:12:44.993
so maybe it'll need some help
to keep it going.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:46.440 --> 00:12:48.696
Andrew Pask and his colleagues
have demonstrated

00:12:48.720 --> 00:12:50.576
this might not be a waste of time.

00:12:50.600 --> 00:12:53.296
And it's sort of in the future,
we haven't got there yet,

00:12:53.320 --> 00:12:55.696
but it's the kind of thing
we want to think about.

00:12:55.720 --> 00:12:58.256
They took some of this same
pickled thylacine DNA

00:12:58.280 --> 00:13:01.576
and they spliced it into a mouse genome,

00:13:01.600 --> 00:13:03.096
but they put a tag on it

00:13:03.120 --> 00:13:07.096
so that anything
that this thylacine DNA produced

00:13:07.120 --> 00:13:09.976
would appear blue-green in the mouse baby.

00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:14.136
In other words, if thylacine tissues
were being produced by the thylacine DNA,

00:13:14.160 --> 00:13:16.056
it would be able to be recognized.

00:13:16.080 --> 00:13:20.096
When the baby popped up,
it was filled with blue-green tissues.

00:13:20.120 --> 00:13:22.896
And that tells us if we can get
that genome back together,

00:13:22.920 --> 00:13:24.376
get it into a live cell,

00:13:24.400 --> 00:13:26.894
it's going to produce thylacine stuff.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:27.440 --> 00:13:28.976
Is this a risk?

00:13:29.000 --> 00:13:30.936
You've taken the bits of one animal

00:13:30.960 --> 00:13:34.207
and you've mixed them into the cell
of a different kind of an animal.

00:13:34.231 --> 00:13:38.336
Are we going to get a Frankenstein?
Some kind of weird hybrid chimera?

00:13:38.360 --> 00:13:39.616
And the answer is no.

00:13:39.640 --> 00:13:44.376
If the only nuclear DNA that goes
into this hybrid cell is thylacine DNA,

00:13:44.400 --> 00:13:47.570
that's the only thing that can pop out
the other end of the devil.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:48.520 --> 00:13:52.016
OK, if we can do this,
could we put it back?

00:13:52.040 --> 00:13:53.816
This is a key question for everybody.

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?

00:13:57.600 --> 00:14:00.976
Could we put it back in the throne
of the king of beasts in Tasmania,

00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:02.496
restore that ecosystem?

00:14:02.520 --> 00:14:06.429
Or has Tasmania changed so much
that that's no longer possible?

00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:08.776
I've been to Tasmania.

00:14:08.800 --> 00:14:11.816
I've been to many of the areas
where the thylacines were common.

00:14:11.840 --> 00:14:14.696
I've even spoken to people,
like Peter Carter here,

00:14:14.720 --> 00:14:16.976
who when I spoke to him, was 90 years old,

00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:20.856
but in 1926, this man
and his father and his brother

00:14:20.880 --> 00:14:22.256
caught thylacines.

00:14:22.280 --> 00:14:23.616
They trapped them.

00:14:23.640 --> 00:14:27.936
And when I spoke to this man,
I was looking in his eyes and thinking,

00:14:27.960 --> 00:14:34.136
"Behind those eyes is a brain that has
memories of what thylacines feel like,

00:14:34.160 --> 00:14:36.616
what they smelled like,
what they sounded like."

00:14:36.640 --> 00:14:38.176
He led them around on a rope.

00:14:38.200 --> 00:14:40.256
He has personal experiences

00:14:40.280 --> 00:14:43.499
that I would give my left leg
to have in my head.

00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:46.296
We'd all love to have
this sort of thing happen.

00:14:46.320 --> 00:14:48.576
Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance,

00:14:48.600 --> 00:14:51.336
could he take us back
to where he caught those thylacines.

00:14:51.360 --> 00:14:53.976
My interest was in whether
the environment had changed.

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.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:57.800 --> 00:15:00.056
At any rate, he led us
down this bush track,

00:15:00.080 --> 00:15:02.056
and there, right where he remembered,

00:15:02.080 --> 00:15:03.336
was the hut,

00:15:03.360 --> 00:15:05.816
and tears came into his eyes.

00:15:05.840 --> 00:15:07.656
He looked at the hut. We went inside.

00:15:07.680 --> 00:15:10.136
There were the wooden boards
on the sides of the hut

00:15:10.160 --> 00:15:12.936
where he and his father
and his brother had slept at night.

00:15:12.960 --> 00:15:15.616
And he told me, as it all
was flooding back in memories.

00:15:15.640 --> 00:15:18.296
He said, "I remember
the thylacines going around the hut

00:15:18.320 --> 00:15:19.656
wondering what was inside,"

00:15:19.680 --> 00:15:23.176
and he said they made sounds
like "Yip! Yip! Yip!"

00:15:23.200 --> 00:15:26.416
All of these are parts of his life
and what he remembers.

00:15:26.440 --> 00:15:29.856
And the key question for me
was to ask Peter, has it changed?

00:15:29.880 --> 00:15:31.096
And he said no.

00:15:31.120 --> 00:15:33.256
The southern beech forests
surrounded his hut

00:15:33.280 --> 00:15:35.616
just like it was
when he was there in 1926.

00:15:35.640 --> 00:15:37.616
The grasslands were sweeping away.

00:15:37.640 --> 00:15:39.616
That's classic thylacine habitat.

00:15:39.640 --> 00:15:42.496
And the animals in those areas
were the same that were there

00:15:42.520 --> 00:15:43.976
when the thylacine was around.

00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:45.520
So could we put it back? Yes.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:46.640 --> 00:15:50.256
Is that all we would do?
And this is an interesting question.

00:15:50.280 --> 00:15:52.536
Sometimes you might
be able to put it back,

00:15:52.560 --> 00:15:55.776
but is that the safest way
to make sure it never goes extinct again?

00:15:55.800 --> 00:15:57.336
And I don't think so.

00:15:57.360 --> 00:16:00.656
I think gradually, as we see species
all around the world,

00:16:00.680 --> 00:16:04.456
it's kind of a mantra that wildlife
is increasingly not safe in the wild.

00:16:04.480 --> 00:16:06.671
We'd love to think it is,
but we know it isn't.

00:16:06.695 --> 00:16:09.096
We need other parallel
strategies coming online.

00:16:09.120 --> 00:16:10.616
And this one interests me.

00:16:10.640 --> 00:16:13.362
Some of the thylacines
that were being turned in to zoos,

00:16:13.386 --> 00:16:15.136
sanctuaries, even at the museums,

00:16:15.160 --> 00:16:17.005
had collar marks on the neck.

00:16:17.520 --> 00:16:19.416
They were being kept as pets,

00:16:19.440 --> 00:16:22.416
and we know a lot
of bush tales and memories

00:16:22.440 --> 00:16:23.976
of people who had them as pets,

00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:26.176
and they say they were
wonderful, friendly.

00:16:26.200 --> 00:16:27.416
This particular one

00:16:27.440 --> 00:16:30.416
came in out of the forest to lick this boy

00:16:30.440 --> 00:16:33.050
and curled up around
the fireplace to go to sleep.

00:16:33.074 --> 00:16:34.456
A wild animal.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:34.480 --> 00:16:38.776
And I'd like to ask the question.
We need to think about this.

00:16:38.800 --> 00:16:44.256
If it had not been illegal
to keep these thylacines as pets then,

00:16:44.280 --> 00:16:46.456
would the thylacine be extinct now?

00:16:46.480 --> 00:16:48.216
And I'm positive it wouldn't.

00:16:48.240 --> 00:16:50.732
We need to think
about this in today's world.

00:16:51.240 --> 00:16:55.776
Could it be that getting animals
close to us so that we value them,

00:16:55.800 --> 00:16:57.176
maybe they won't go extinct?

00:16:57.200 --> 00:16:59.736
And this is such a critical issue for us

00:16:59.760 --> 00:17:01.096
because if we don't do that,

00:17:01.120 --> 00:17:05.256
we're going to watch more of these animals
plunge off the precipice.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:05.280 --> 00:17:06.496
As far as I'm concerned,

00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:10.656
this is why we're trying to do
these kinds of de-extinction projects.

00:17:10.680 --> 00:17:13.736
We are trying to restore
that balance of nature

00:17:13.760 --> 00:17:15.325
that we have upset.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:15.793 --> 00:17:16.976
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:17.000 --> 00:17:19.720
(Applause)