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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, well,

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why have we focused on these two animals?

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Well, point number one, each of them

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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,

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we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them.

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In the case of the gastric brooding frog,

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we may have "fungicided" it to death.

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There's a dreadful fungus that's sort of moving

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through the world 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 is that,

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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, but I think we've got

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a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can.

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Okay. 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,

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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 until eventually

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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

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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 how that frog is managing

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the way its tummy works, is there information

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here that we need to understand or could usefully use

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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 we might want

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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, Professor Mike Tyler

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in the University of Adelaide.

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He was the last person who had this frog,

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a colony of these things, in his lab.

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And I said, "Mike, by any chance -- "

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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, and he went to his deep freezer,

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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

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and it contained tissues of these frogs.

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This was very exciting, but there was no reason

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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,

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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

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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

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of the extinct frog 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, 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. And then the egg divided again.

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And then again. And pretty soon, we had

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early stage embryos 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.

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It's not a frog. 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. We haven't announced this publicly before.

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We're excited. 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. I think we're going to have this frog

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hopping glad to be back in the world again.

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Thank you. (Applause)

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We haven't done it yet, but keep those 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.

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It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch,

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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 rainforests

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of Australia about 25 million years ago,

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and the National Geographic Society is helping us

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to explore these fossil deposits. 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. 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

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on the ground.

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

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But what they were dropping on was not only

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other weird animals 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 to carry

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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,

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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, only one left.

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By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared

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from New Guinea, and unfortunately

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by 4,000 years ago, somebodies,

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we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes --

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this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia.

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And as you can see, dingoes are very similar

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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

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some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore

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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, the next sad part of the thylacine story

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is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought

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with them the things they valued, 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,

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let's get rid of them, and they paid people

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to slaughter every one that they saw.

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By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines

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had been murdered. It was a disaster,

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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, have

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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, having swept this species

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nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect,

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the keepers didn't let it into the hutch

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on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure,

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and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin,

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they still cared so little for this animal

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that they threw the body in the dump.

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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. I've always been obsessed with these animals.

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And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out

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their relationships to other sorts of animals,

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and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar,

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was a little girl thylacine pup, 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.

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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. 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

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of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go.

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I put a team together.

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We went into that pup to see what was in there,

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and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment.

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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. 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 when the information

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was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around

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and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old

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horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. (Laughter)

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It would've kept the curator very happy,

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but it wasn't going to keep us happy.

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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,

247
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hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers,

248
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and we found much better quality DNA.

249
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We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there.

250
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So we got it.

251
00:11:49,804 --> 00:11:52,088
Okay. What could we do with this stuff?

252
00:11:52,088 --> 00:11:54,120
Well, George Church in his book, "Regenesis,"

253
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has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing

254
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to work with fragmented DNA.

255
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We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back

256
00:12:02,329 --> 00:12:06,181
into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project,

257
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get that stuff into an egg of a host species.

258
00:12:09,987 --> 00:12:11,276
It has to be a different species.

259
00:12:11,276 --> 00:12:14,143
What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil?

260
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They're related distantly to thylacines.

261
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And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop

262
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a thylacine out the south end.

263
00:12:21,288 --> 00:12:24,041
Critics of this project say, hang on.

264
00:12:24,041 --> 00:12:28,221
Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt.

265
00:12:28,221 --> 00:12:31,275
No, it's not. These are marsupials.

266
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They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean.

267
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That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth.

268
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It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest

269
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Tasmanian devil baby in the world,

270
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so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going.

271
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Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated

272
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this might not be a waste of time.

273
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And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet,

274
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but it's the kind of thing we want to think about.

275
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They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA

276
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and they spliced it into a mouse genome,

277
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but they put a tag on it so that anything

278
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that this thylacine DNA produced

279
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would appear blue-green in the mouse baby.

280
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In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced

281
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by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized.

282
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When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues.

283
00:13:19,831 --> 00:13:22,563
And that tells us if we can get that genome back together,

284
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get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff.

285
00:13:27,356 --> 00:13:29,021
Is this a risk?

286
00:13:29,021 --> 00:13:31,077
You've taken the bits of one animal

287
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and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal.

288
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Are we going to get a Frankenstein?

289
00:13:35,708 --> 00:13:38,304
You know, some kind of weird hybrid chimera?

290
00:13:38,304 --> 00:13:39,791
And the answer is no.

291
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If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell

292
00:13:43,204 --> 00:13:45,661
is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out

293
00:13:45,661 --> 00:13:48,053
the other end of the devil.

294
00:13:48,053 --> 00:13:52,055
Okay, if we can do this, could we put it back?

295
00:13:52,055 --> 00:13:53,836
This is a key question for everybody.

296
00:13:53,836 --> 00:13:55,494
Does it have to stay in a laboratory,

297
00:13:55,494 --> 00:13:57,177
or could we put it back where it belongs?

298
00:13:57,177 --> 00:13:59,746
Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts

299
00:13:59,746 --> 00:14:02,402
in Tasmania where it belongs, restore that ecosystem?

300
00:14:02,402 --> 00:14:05,196
Or has Tasmania changed so much

301
00:14:05,196 --> 00:14:06,826
that that's no longer possible?

302
00:14:06,826 --> 00:14:09,871
I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas

303
00:14:09,871 --> 00:14:11,293
where the thylacines were common.

304
00:14:11,293 --> 00:14:14,528
I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here,

305
00:14:14,528 --> 00:14:16,989
who when I spoke to him was 90 years old,

306
00:14:16,989 --> 00:14:20,699
but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother

307
00:14:20,699 --> 00:14:23,575
caught thylacines. They trapped them.

308
00:14:23,575 --> 00:14:25,389
And it just, when I spoke to this man,

309
00:14:25,389 --> 00:14:27,967
I was looking in his eyes and thinking,

310
00:14:27,967 --> 00:14:30,086
behind those eyes is a brain

311
00:14:30,086 --> 00:14:34,182
that has memories of what thylacines feel like,

312
00:14:34,182 --> 00:14:36,644
what they smelled like, what they sounded like.

313
00:14:36,644 --> 00:14:38,182
He led them around on a rope.

314
00:14:38,182 --> 00:14:40,280
He has personal experiences

315
00:14:40,280 --> 00:14:43,732
that I would give my left leg to have in my head.

316
00:14:43,732 --> 00:14:46,235
We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen.

317
00:14:46,235 --> 00:14:48,531
Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance,

318
00:14:48,531 --> 00:14:50,979
could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines.

319
00:14:50,979 --> 00:14:53,422
My interest was in whether the environment had changed.

320
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He thought hard. I mean, it was nearly 80 years before this

321
00:14:56,474 --> 00:14:57,791
that he'd been at this hut.

322
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At any rate, he led us down this bush track,

323
00:14:59,846 --> 00:15:03,283
and there, right where he remembered, was the hut,

324
00:15:03,283 --> 00:15:05,853
and tears came into his eyes.

325
00:15:05,853 --> 00:15:07,251
He looked at the hut. We went inside.

326
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There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut

327
00:15:09,354 --> 00:15:12,198
where he and his father and his brother had slept at night.

328
00:15:12,198 --> 00:15:14,841
And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories.

329
00:15:14,841 --> 00:15:17,848
He said, "I remember the thylacines going around the hut

330
00:15:17,848 --> 00:15:20,224
wondering what was inside," and he said

331
00:15:20,224 --> 00:15:22,755
they made sounds like "Yip! Yip! Yip!"

332
00:15:22,755 --> 00:15:25,927
All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers.

333
00:15:25,927 --> 00:15:29,005
And the key question for me was to ask Peter,

334
00:15:29,005 --> 00:15:30,980
has it changed? And he said no.

335
00:15:30,980 --> 00:15:32,936
The southern beech forests surrounded his hut

336
00:15:32,936 --> 00:15:35,651
just like it was when he was there in 1926.

337
00:15:35,651 --> 00:15:37,644
The grasslands were sweeping away.

338
00:15:37,644 --> 00:15:39,503
That's classic thylacine habitat.

339
00:15:39,503 --> 00:15:41,645
And the animals in those areas were the same

340
00:15:41,645 --> 00:15:43,484
that were there when the thylacine was around.

341
00:15:43,484 --> 00:15:46,652
So could we put it back? Yes.

342
00:15:46,652 --> 00:15:49,751
Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question.

343
00:15:49,751 --> 00:15:52,563
Sometimes you might be able to put it back,

344
00:15:52,563 --> 00:15:54,376
but is that the safest way to make sure

345
00:15:54,376 --> 00:15:57,228
it never goes extinct again, and I don't think so.

346
00:15:57,228 --> 00:16:00,079
I think gradually, as we see species all around the world,

347
00:16:00,079 --> 00:16:03,353
it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly

348
00:16:03,353 --> 00:16:04,553
not safe in the wild.

349
00:16:04,553 --> 00:16:06,623
We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't.

350
00:16:06,623 --> 00:16:09,256
We need other parallel strategies coming online.

351
00:16:09,256 --> 00:16:10,511
And this one interests me.

352
00:16:10,511 --> 00:16:13,123
Some of the thylacines that were being turned into zoos,

353
00:16:13,123 --> 00:16:15,176
sanctuaries, even at the museums,

354
00:16:15,176 --> 00:16:17,316
had collar marks on the neck.

355
00:16:17,316 --> 00:16:19,428
They were being kept as pets,

356
00:16:19,428 --> 00:16:22,488
and we know a lot of bush tales and memories

357
00:16:22,488 --> 00:16:23,884
of people who had them as pets,

358
00:16:23,884 --> 00:16:26,209
and they say they were wonderful, friendly.

359
00:16:26,209 --> 00:16:29,052
This particular one came in out of the forest

360
00:16:29,052 --> 00:16:31,565
to lick this boy and curled up

361
00:16:31,565 --> 00:16:34,440
around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal.

362
00:16:34,440 --> 00:16:37,254
And I'd like to ask the question, all of --

363
00:16:37,254 --> 00:16:38,564
we need to think about this.

364
00:16:38,564 --> 00:16:43,084
If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets

365
00:16:43,084 --> 00:16:46,349
then, would the thylacine be extinct now?

366
00:16:46,349 --> 00:16:48,313
And I'm positive it wouldn't.

367
00:16:48,313 --> 00:16:51,018
We need to think about this in today's world.

368
00:16:51,018 --> 00:16:54,044
Could it be that getting animals close to us

369
00:16:54,044 --> 00:16:57,337
so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct?

370
00:16:57,337 --> 00:16:59,365
And this is such a critical issue for us,

371
00:16:59,365 --> 00:17:01,919
because if we don't do that, we're going to watch

372
00:17:01,919 --> 00:17:05,007
more of these animals plunge off the precipice.

373
00:17:05,007 --> 00:17:07,061
As far as I'm concerned, this is why

374
00:17:07,061 --> 00:17:10,399
we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects.

375
00:17:10,399 --> 00:17:13,642
We are trying to restore that balance of nature

376
00:17:13,642 --> 00:17:15,542
that we have upset.

377
00:17:15,542 --> 00:17:16,899
Thank you.

378
00:17:16,899 --> 00:17:19,673
(Applause)