0:00:00.684,0:00:03.793
I do want to test this question we're all interested in:

0:00:03.793,0:00:06.605
Does extinction have to be forever?

0:00:06.605,0:00:09.547
I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about.

0:00:09.547,0:00:11.387
One is the Thylacine Project.

0:00:11.387,0:00:13.075
The other one is the Lazarus Project,

0:00:13.075,0:00:15.492
and that's focused on the gastric brooding frog.

0:00:15.492,0:00:17.509
And it would be a fair question to ask, well,

0:00:17.509,0:00:20.176
why have we focused on these two animals?

0:00:20.176,0:00:23.163
Well, point number one, each of them

0:00:23.163,0:00:25.716
represents a unique family of its own.

0:00:25.716,0:00:27.131
We've lost a whole family.

0:00:27.131,0:00:29.759
That's a big chunk of the global genome gone.

0:00:29.759,0:00:31.362
I'd like it back.

0:00:31.362,0:00:35.687
The second reason is that we killed these things.

0:00:35.687,0:00:38.868
In the case of the thylacine, regrettably,

0:00:38.868,0:00:42.418
we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them.

0:00:42.418,0:00:44.818
In the case of the gastric brooding frog,

0:00:44.818,0:00:47.727
we may have "fungicided" it to death.

0:00:47.727,0:00:49.604
There's a dreadful fungus that's sort of moving

0:00:49.604,0:00:51.553
through the world that's called the chytrid fungus,

0:00:51.553,0:00:54.308
and it's nailing frogs all over the world.

0:00:54.308,0:00:56.267
We think that's probably what got this frog,

0:00:56.267,0:00:58.911
and humans are spreading this fungus.

0:00:58.911,0:01:01.681
And this introduces a very important ethical point,

0:01:01.681,0:01:03.581
and I think you will have heard this many times

0:01:03.581,0:01:05.555
when this topic comes up.

0:01:05.555,0:01:07.975
What I think is important is that,

0:01:07.975,0:01:11.096
if it's clear that we exterminated these species,

0:01:11.096,0:01:14.365
then I think we not only have a moral obligation

0:01:14.365,0:01:16.304
to see what we can do about it, but I think we've got

0:01:16.304,0:01:20.367
a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can.

0:01:20.367,0:01:23.506
Okay. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project.

0:01:23.506,0:01:26.241
It's a frog. And you think, frog.

0:01:26.241,0:01:29.706
Yeah, but this was not just any frog.

0:01:29.706,0:01:32.699
Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water

0:01:32.699,0:01:35.328
and goes away and wishes its froglets well,

0:01:35.328,0:01:38.868
this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs,

0:01:38.868,0:01:42.517
swallowed them into the stomach where it should be having food,

0:01:42.517,0:01:44.120
didn't digest the eggs,

0:01:44.120,0:01:47.189
and turned its stomach into a uterus.

0:01:47.189,0:01:50.470
In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles,

0:01:50.470,0:01:54.293
and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs,

0:01:54.293,0:01:57.045
and they grew in the stomach until eventually

0:01:57.045,0:02:00.162
the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart.

0:02:00.162,0:02:02.372
It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes

0:02:02.372,0:02:04.217
sprays of little frogs.

0:02:04.217,0:02:07.093
Now, when biologists saw this, they were agog.

0:02:07.093,0:02:08.967
They thought, this is incredible.

0:02:08.967,0:02:12.804
No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this,

0:02:12.804,0:02:14.806
to change one organ in the body into another.

0:02:14.806,0:02:18.780
And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well.

0:02:18.780,0:02:21.640
If we could understand how that frog is managing

0:02:21.640,0:02:24.121
the way its tummy works, is there information

0:02:24.121,0:02:27.136
here that we need to understand or could usefully use

0:02:27.136,0:02:29.373
to help ourselves?

0:02:29.373,0:02:32.435
Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach,

0:02:32.435,0:02:34.434
but I am suggesting it's possible we might want

0:02:34.434,0:02:36.823
to manage gastric secretion in the gut.

0:02:36.823,0:02:39.731
And just as everybody got excited about it, bang!

0:02:39.731,0:02:41.855
It was extinct.

0:02:41.855,0:02:44.538
I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler

0:02:44.538,0:02:45.667
in the University of Adelaide.

0:02:45.667,0:02:48.229
He was the last person who had this frog,

0:02:48.229,0:02:50.384
a colony of these things, in his lab.

0:02:50.384,0:02:52.075
And I said, "Mike, by any chance -- "

0:02:52.075,0:02:53.476
this was 30 or 40 years ago —

0:02:53.476,0:02:57.247
"by any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog?"

0:02:57.247,0:03:00.169
And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer,

0:03:00.169,0:03:02.329
minus 20 degrees centigrade,

0:03:02.329,0:03:03.870
and he poured through everything in the freezer,

0:03:03.870,0:03:05.610
and there in the bottom was a jar

0:03:05.610,0:03:08.650
and it contained tissues of these frogs.

0:03:08.650,0:03:11.543
This was very exciting, but there was no reason

0:03:11.543,0:03:13.468
why we should expect that this would work,

0:03:13.468,0:03:17.415
because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it,

0:03:17.415,0:03:21.187
cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen.

0:03:21.187,0:03:23.892
And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands,

0:03:23.892,0:03:25.363
and the same thing happens in a cell.

0:03:25.363,0:03:27.555
If you freeze tissues, the water expands,

0:03:27.555,0:03:29.960
damages or bursts the cell walls.

0:03:29.960,0:03:32.191
Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope.

0:03:32.191,0:03:34.852
It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact.

0:03:34.852,0:03:36.951
So we thought, let's give it a go.

0:03:36.951,0:03:38.711
What we did is something called

0:03:38.711,0:03:41.529
somatic cell nuclear transplantation.

0:03:41.529,0:03:45.171
We took the eggs of a related species, a living frog,

0:03:45.171,0:03:48.272
and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg.

0:03:48.272,0:03:50.828
We used ultraviolet radiation to do that.

0:03:50.828,0:03:54.023
And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue

0:03:54.023,0:03:58.335
of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg.

0:03:58.335,0:04:01.973
Now by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project,

0:04:01.973,0:04:04.490
like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different,

0:04:04.490,0:04:07.574
because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells.

0:04:07.574,0:04:09.866
That was a miracle, but it was workable.

0:04:09.866,0:04:13.682
What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species

0:04:13.682,0:04:17.168
and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work.

0:04:17.168,0:04:19.441
Well, we had no real reason to expect it would,

0:04:19.441,0:04:22.777
and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these.

0:04:22.777,0:04:25.607
And just last February, the last time we did these trials,

0:04:25.607,0:04:28.434
I saw a miracle starting to happen.

0:04:28.434,0:04:32.345
What we found was, most of these eggs didn't work,

0:04:32.345,0:04:35.371
but then suddenly one of them began to divide.

0:04:35.371,0:04:38.531
That was so exciting. And then the egg divided again.

0:04:38.531,0:04:41.110
And then again. And pretty soon, we had

0:04:41.110,0:04:45.531
early stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those.

0:04:45.531,0:04:47.974
We even DNA tested some of these cells,

0:04:47.974,0:04:52.150
and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells.

0:04:52.150,0:04:54.251
So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole.

0:04:54.251,0:04:58.584
It's not a frog. But it's a long way along the journey

0:04:58.584,0:05:01.182
to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species.

0:05:01.182,0:05:03.973
And this is news. We haven't announced this publicly before.

0:05:03.973,0:05:07.235
We're excited. We've got to get past this point.

0:05:07.235,0:05:10.004
We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate,

0:05:10.004,0:05:13.126
to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues.

0:05:13.126,0:05:16.588
It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog.

0:05:16.588,0:05:19.364
Watch this space. I think we're going to have this frog

0:05:19.364,0:05:21.752
hopping glad to be back in the world again.

0:05:21.752,0:05:27.564
Thank you. (Applause)

0:05:27.564,0:05:30.844
We haven't done it yet, but keep those applause ready.

0:05:30.844,0:05:35.063
The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project.

0:05:35.063,0:05:38.971
The thylacine looks a bit, to most people, like a dog,

0:05:38.971,0:05:40.742
or maybe like a tiger, because it has stripes.

0:05:40.742,0:05:42.836
But it's not related to any of those.

0:05:42.836,0:05:45.550
It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch,

0:05:45.550,0:05:47.876
like a koala or a kangaroo would do,

0:05:47.876,0:05:53.032
and it has a long history, a long, fascinating history,

0:05:53.032,0:05:55.836
that goes back 25 million years.

0:05:55.836,0:05:58.097
But it's also a tragic history.

0:05:58.097,0:06:02.008
The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rainforests

0:06:02.008,0:06:04.935
of Australia about 25 million years ago,

0:06:04.935,0:06:07.837
and the National Geographic Society is helping us

0:06:07.837,0:06:11.326
to explore these fossil deposits. This is Riversleigh.

0:06:11.326,0:06:14.391
In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals.

0:06:14.391,0:06:16.321
We found marsupial lions.

0:06:16.321,0:06:19.031
We found carnivorous kangaroos.

0:06:19.031,0:06:20.693
It's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo,

0:06:20.693,0:06:22.516
but these are meat-eating kangaroos.

0:06:22.516,0:06:25.031
We found the biggest bird in the world,

0:06:25.031,0:06:27.033
bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar,

0:06:27.033,0:06:31.040
and it too was a flesh-eater. It was a giant, weird duck.

0:06:31.040,0:06:33.917
And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either.

0:06:33.917,0:06:36.222
You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing,

0:06:36.222,0:06:37.721
sitting in a pool of water.

0:06:37.721,0:06:40.373
These crocodiles were actually out on the land

0:06:40.373,0:06:43.594
and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey

0:06:43.594,0:06:45.360
on the ground.

0:06:45.360,0:06:50.430
We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist.

0:06:50.430,0:06:52.580
But what they were dropping on was not only

0:06:52.580,0:06:55.259
other weird animals but also thylacines.

0:06:55.259,0:06:58.922
There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests,

0:06:58.922,0:07:03.105
and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones

0:07:03.105,0:07:07.085
to one that was about the size of a chihuahua.

0:07:07.085,0:07:08.798
Paris Hilton would have been able to carry

0:07:08.798,0:07:11.012
one of these things around in a little handbag,

0:07:11.012,0:07:13.342
until a drop croc landed on her.

0:07:13.342,0:07:15.319
At any rate, it was a fascinating place,

0:07:15.319,0:07:18.006
but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way.

0:07:18.006,0:07:21.624
Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time,

0:07:21.624,0:07:24.639
and gradually, the forests disappeared,

0:07:24.639,0:07:26.272
the country began to dry out,

0:07:26.272,0:07:28.502
and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline,

0:07:28.502,0:07:31.598
until by five million years ago, only one left.

0:07:31.598,0:07:33.578
By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared

0:07:33.578,0:07:37.442
from New Guinea, and unfortunately

0:07:37.442,0:07:40.732
by 4,000 years ago, somebodies,

0:07:40.732,0:07:43.701
we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes --

0:07:43.701,0:07:46.891
this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia.

0:07:46.891,0:07:48.959
And as you can see, dingoes are very similar

0:07:48.959,0:07:51.154
in their body form to thylacines.

0:07:51.154,0:07:54.204
That similarity meant they probably competed.

0:07:54.204,0:07:55.635
They were eating the same kinds of foods.

0:07:55.635,0:07:58.201
It's even possible that aborigines were keeping

0:07:58.201,0:08:01.094
some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore

0:08:01.094,0:08:04.038
they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival.

0:08:04.038,0:08:06.545
All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in,

0:08:06.545,0:08:09.150
thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland,

0:08:09.150,0:08:13.556
and after that they only survived in Tasmania.

0:08:13.556,0:08:16.799
Then, unfortunately, the next sad part of the thylacine story

0:08:16.799,0:08:19.848
is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought

0:08:19.848,0:08:23.801
with them the things they valued, and that included sheep.

0:08:23.801,0:08:27.016
They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania,

0:08:27.016,0:08:30.037
and they thought, hang on, this is not going to work.

0:08:30.037,0:08:32.842
That guy is going to eat all our sheep.

0:08:32.842,0:08:34.823
That was not what happened, actually.

0:08:34.823,0:08:38.645
Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep, but the thylacine got a bad rap.

0:08:38.645,0:08:41.022
But immediately, the government said, that's it,

0:08:41.022,0:08:44.339
let's get rid of them, and they paid people

0:08:44.339,0:08:46.157
to slaughter every one that they saw.

0:08:46.157,0:08:51.176
By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines

0:08:51.176,0:08:54.240
had been murdered. It was a disaster,

0:08:54.240,0:08:56.618
and they were about to hit the wall.

0:08:56.618,0:08:59.627
Have a look at this bit of film footage.

0:08:59.627,0:09:03.406
It makes me very sad, because, while, it's a fascinating animal,

0:09:03.406,0:09:08.368
and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it

0:09:08.368,0:09:12.468
before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction,

0:09:12.468,0:09:15.297
we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have

0:09:15.297,0:09:19.214
a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species.

0:09:19.214,0:09:22.607
These are photos of the last surviving thylacine, Benjamin,

0:09:22.607,0:09:25.557
who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart.

0:09:25.557,0:09:28.956
To add insult to injury, having swept this species

0:09:28.956,0:09:33.421
nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect,

0:09:33.421,0:09:35.345
the keepers didn't let it into the hutch

0:09:35.345,0:09:39.526
on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure,

0:09:39.526,0:09:41.834
and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin,

0:09:41.834,0:09:44.866
they still cared so little for this animal

0:09:44.866,0:09:48.231
that they threw the body in the dump.

0:09:48.231,0:09:51.292
Does it have to stay this way?

0:09:51.292,0:09:54.062
In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum.

0:09:54.062,0:09:57.969
I was fascinated by thylacines. I've always been obsessed with these animals.

0:09:57.969,0:09:59.781
And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out

0:09:59.781,0:10:02.412
their relationships to other sorts of animals,

0:10:02.412,0:10:05.793
and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar,

0:10:05.793,0:10:10.352
was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old.

0:10:10.352,0:10:12.898
The guy who had found it and killed the mother

0:10:12.898,0:10:16.471
had pickled the pup and they pickled it in alcohol.

0:10:16.471,0:10:20.173
I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative.

0:10:20.173,0:10:24.256
But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends,

0:10:24.256,0:10:26.519
couldn't we think about going into this pup

0:10:26.519,0:10:29.671
and extracting DNA, if it's there,

0:10:29.671,0:10:31.655
and then somewhere down the line in the future,

0:10:31.655,0:10:33.770
we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back?

0:10:33.770,0:10:38.554
The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly.

0:10:38.554,0:10:41.481
Cloning was science fiction. It had not happened.

0:10:41.481,0:10:44.131
But then suddenly cloning did happen.

0:10:44.131,0:10:46.167
And I thought, when I became director

0:10:46.167,0:10:48.602
of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go.

0:10:48.602,0:10:50.090
I put a team together.

0:10:50.090,0:10:53.205
We went into that pup to see what was in there,

0:10:53.205,0:10:56.252
and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment.

0:10:56.252,0:10:57.270
We were very excited.

0:10:57.270,0:11:01.149
Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA.

0:11:01.149,0:11:04.266
Every old curator who'd been in that museum

0:11:04.266,0:11:05.848
had seen this wonderful specimen,

0:11:05.848,0:11:08.040
put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought,

0:11:08.040,0:11:10.654
"Wow, look at that," plop, dropped it back in the jar,

0:11:10.654,0:11:12.520
contaminating this specimen.

0:11:12.520,0:11:16.213
And that was a worry. If the goal here was to get the DNA out

0:11:16.213,0:11:19.960
and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back,

0:11:19.960,0:11:22.607
what we didn't want happening when the information

0:11:22.607,0:11:24.536
was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around

0:11:24.536,0:11:26.899
and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old

0:11:26.899,0:11:30.483
horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. (Laughter)

0:11:30.483,0:11:32.141
It would've kept the curator very happy,

0:11:32.141,0:11:33.958
but it wasn't going to keep us happy.

0:11:33.958,0:11:37.157
So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around,

0:11:37.157,0:11:40.438
and particularly we looked into the teeth of skulls,

0:11:40.438,0:11:43.469
hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers,

0:11:43.469,0:11:45.897
and we found much better quality DNA.

0:11:45.897,0:11:48.683
We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there.

0:11:48.683,0:11:49.804
So we got it.

0:11:49.804,0:11:52.088
Okay. What could we do with this stuff?

0:11:52.088,0:11:54.120
Well, George Church in his book, "Regenesis,"

0:11:54.120,0:11:57.479
has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing

0:11:57.479,0:11:59.245
to work with fragmented DNA.

0:11:59.245,0:12:02.329
We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back

0:12:02.329,0:12:06.181
into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project,

0:12:06.181,0:12:09.987
get that stuff into an egg of a host species.

0:12:09.987,0:12:11.276
It has to be a different species.

0:12:11.276,0:12:14.143
What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil?

0:12:14.143,0:12:16.280
They're related distantly to thylacines.

0:12:16.280,0:12:18.577
And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop

0:12:18.577,0:12:21.288
a thylacine out the south end.

0:12:21.288,0:12:24.041
Critics of this project say, hang on.

0:12:24.041,0:12:28.221
Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt.

0:12:28.221,0:12:31.275
No, it's not. These are marsupials.

0:12:31.275,0:12:33.890
They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean.

0:12:33.890,0:12:37.123
That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth.

0:12:37.123,0:12:40.094
It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest

0:12:40.094,0:12:41.972
Tasmanian devil baby in the world,

0:12:41.972,0:12:46.063
so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going.

0:12:46.063,0:12:48.716
Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated

0:12:48.716,0:12:50.611
this might not be a waste of time.

0:12:50.611,0:12:52.803
And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet,

0:12:52.803,0:12:54.446
but it's the kind of thing we want to think about.

0:12:54.446,0:12:58.132
They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA

0:12:58.132,0:13:01.552
and they spliced it into a mouse genome,

0:13:01.552,0:13:04.112
but they put a tag on it so that anything

0:13:04.112,0:13:06.911
that this thylacine DNA produced

0:13:06.911,0:13:10.133
would appear blue-green in the mouse baby.

0:13:10.133,0:13:12.507
In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced

0:13:12.507,0:13:15.915
by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized.

0:13:15.915,0:13:19.831
When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues.

0:13:19.831,0:13:22.563
And that tells us if we can get that genome back together,

0:13:22.563,0:13:27.356
get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff.

0:13:27.356,0:13:29.021
Is this a risk?

0:13:29.021,0:13:31.077
You've taken the bits of one animal

0:13:31.077,0:13:33.569
and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal.

0:13:33.569,0:13:35.708
Are we going to get a Frankenstein?

0:13:35.708,0:13:38.304
You know, some kind of weird hybrid chimera?

0:13:38.304,0:13:39.791
And the answer is no.

0:13:39.791,0:13:43.204
If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell

0:13:43.204,0:13:45.661
is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out

0:13:45.661,0:13:48.053
the other end of the devil.

0:13:48.053,0:13:52.055
Okay, if we can do this, could we put it back?

0:13:52.055,0:13:53.836
This is a key question for everybody.

0:13:53.836,0:13:55.494
Does it have to stay in a laboratory,

0:13:55.494,0:13:57.177
or could we put it back where it belongs?

0:13:57.177,0:13:59.746
Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts

0:13:59.746,0:14:02.402
in Tasmania where it belongs, restore that ecosystem?

0:14:02.402,0:14:05.196
Or has Tasmania changed so much

0:14:05.196,0:14:06.826
that that's no longer possible?

0:14:06.826,0:14:09.871
I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas

0:14:09.871,0:14:11.293
where the thylacines were common.

0:14:11.293,0:14:14.528
I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here,

0:14:14.528,0:14:16.989
who when I spoke to him was 90 years old,

0:14:16.989,0:14:20.699
but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother

0:14:20.699,0:14:23.575
caught thylacines. They trapped them.

0:14:23.575,0:14:25.389
And it just, when I spoke to this man,

0:14:25.389,0:14:27.967
I was looking in his eyes and thinking,

0:14:27.967,0:14:30.086
behind those eyes is a brain

0:14:30.086,0:14:34.182
that has memories of what thylacines feel like,

0:14:34.182,0:14:36.644
what they smelled like, what they sounded like.

0:14:36.644,0:14:38.182
He led them around on a rope.

0:14:38.182,0:14:40.280
He has personal experiences

0:14:40.280,0:14:43.732
that I would give my left leg to have in my head.

0:14:43.732,0:14:46.235
We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen.

0:14:46.235,0:14:48.531
Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance,

0:14:48.531,0:14:50.979
could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines.

0:14:50.979,0:14:53.422
My interest was in whether the environment had changed.

0:14:53.422,0:14:56.474
He thought hard. I mean, it was nearly 80 years before this

0:14:56.474,0:14:57.791
that he'd been at this hut.

0:14:57.791,0:14:59.846
At any rate, he led us down this bush track,

0:14:59.846,0:15:03.283
and there, right where he remembered, was the hut,

0:15:03.283,0:15:05.853
and tears came into his eyes.

0:15:05.853,0:15:07.251
He looked at the hut. We went inside.

0:15:07.251,0:15:09.354
There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut

0:15:09.354,0:15:12.198
where he and his father and his brother had slept at night.

0:15:12.198,0:15:14.841
And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories.

0:15:14.841,0:15:17.848
He said, "I remember the thylacines going around the hut

0:15:17.848,0:15:20.224
wondering what was inside," and he said

0:15:20.224,0:15:22.755
they made sounds like "Yip! Yip! Yip!"

0:15:22.755,0:15:25.927
All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers.

0:15:25.927,0:15:29.005
And the key question for me was to ask Peter,

0:15:29.005,0:15:30.980
has it changed? And he said no.

0:15:30.980,0:15:32.936
The southern beech forests surrounded his hut

0:15:32.936,0:15:35.651
just like it was when he was there in 1926.

0:15:35.651,0:15:37.644
The grasslands were sweeping away.

0:15:37.644,0:15:39.503
That's classic thylacine habitat.

0:15:39.503,0:15:41.645
And the animals in those areas were the same

0:15:41.645,0:15:43.484
that were there when the thylacine was around.

0:15:43.484,0:15:46.652
So could we put it back? Yes.

0:15:46.652,0:15:49.751
Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question.

0:15:49.751,0:15:52.563
Sometimes you might be able to put it back,

0:15:52.563,0:15:54.376
but is that the safest way to make sure

0:15:54.376,0:15:57.228
it never goes extinct again, and I don't think so.

0:15:57.228,0:16:00.079
I think gradually, as we see species all around the world,

0:16:00.079,0:16:03.353
it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly

0:16:03.353,0:16:04.553
not safe in the wild.

0:16:04.553,0:16:06.623
We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't.

0:16:06.623,0:16:09.256
We need other parallel strategies coming online.

0:16:09.256,0:16:10.511
And this one interests me.

0:16:10.511,0:16:13.123
Some of the thylacines that were being turned into zoos,

0:16:13.123,0:16:15.176
sanctuaries, even at the museums,

0:16:15.176,0:16:17.316
had collar marks on the neck.

0:16:17.316,0:16:19.428
They were being kept as pets,

0:16:19.428,0:16:22.488
and we know a lot of bush tales and memories

0:16:22.488,0:16:23.884
of people who had them as pets,

0:16:23.884,0:16:26.209
and they say they were wonderful, friendly.

0:16:26.209,0:16:29.052
This particular one came in out of the forest

0:16:29.052,0:16:31.565
to lick this boy and curled up

0:16:31.565,0:16:34.440
around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal.

0:16:34.440,0:16:37.254
And I'd like to ask the question, all of --

0:16:37.254,0:16:38.564
we need to think about this.

0:16:38.564,0:16:43.084
If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets

0:16:43.084,0:16:46.349
then, would the thylacine be extinct now?

0:16:46.349,0:16:48.313
And I'm positive it wouldn't.

0:16:48.313,0:16:51.018
We need to think about this in today's world.

0:16:51.018,0:16:54.044
Could it be that getting animals close to us

0:16:54.044,0:16:57.337
so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct?

0:16:57.337,0:16:59.365
And this is such a critical issue for us,

0:16:59.365,0:17:01.919
because if we don't do that, we're going to watch

0:17:01.919,0:17:05.007
more of these animals plunge off the precipice.

0:17:05.007,0:17:07.061
As far as I'm concerned, this is why

0:17:07.061,0:17:10.399
we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects.

0:17:10.399,0:17:13.642
We are trying to restore that balance of nature

0:17:13.642,0:17:15.542
that we have upset.

0:17:15.542,0:17:16.899
Thank you.

0:17:16.899,0:17:19.673
(Applause)