WEBVTT 00:00:00.684 --> 00:00:03.793 I do want to test this question we're all interested in: 00:00:03.793 --> 00:00:06.605 Does extinction have to be forever? NOTE Paragraph 00:00:06.605 --> 00:00:09.547 I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about. 00:00:09.547 --> 00:00:11.387 One is the Thylacine Project. 00:00:11.387 --> 00:00:13.075 The other one is the Lazarus Project, 00:00:13.075 --> 00:00:15.492 and that's focused on the gastric brooding frog. 00:00:15.492 --> 00:00:17.509 And it would be a fair question to ask, well, 00:00:17.509 --> 00:00:20.176 why have we focused on these two animals? 00:00:20.176 --> 00:00:23.163 Well, point number one, each of them 00:00:23.163 --> 00:00:25.716 represents a unique family of its own. 00:00:25.716 --> 00:00:27.131 We've lost a whole family. 00:00:27.131 --> 00:00:29.759 That's a big chunk of the global genome gone. 00:00:29.759 --> 00:00:31.362 I'd like it back. 00:00:31.362 --> 00:00:35.687 The second reason is that we killed these things. 00:00:35.687 --> 00:00:38.868 In the case of the thylacine, regrettably, 00:00:38.868 --> 00:00:42.418 we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them. 00:00:42.418 --> 00:00:44.818 In the case of the gastric brooding frog, 00:00:44.818 --> 00:00:47.727 we may have "fungicided" it to death. 00:00:47.727 --> 00:00:49.604 There's a dreadful fungus that's sort of moving 00:00:49.604 --> 00:00:51.553 through the world that's called the chytrid fungus, 00:00:51.553 --> 00:00:54.308 and it's nailing frogs all over the world. 00:00:54.308 --> 00:00:56.267 We think that's probably what got this frog, 00:00:56.267 --> 00:00:58.911 and humans are spreading this fungus. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:58.911 --> 00:01:01.681 And this introduces a very important ethical point, 00:01:01.681 --> 00:01:03.581 and I think you will have heard this many times 00:01:03.581 --> 00:01:05.555 when this topic comes up. 00:01:05.555 --> 00:01:07.975 What I think is important is that, 00:01:07.975 --> 00:01:11.096 if it's clear that we exterminated these species, 00:01:11.096 --> 00:01:14.365 then I think we not only have a moral obligation 00:01:14.365 --> 00:01:16.304 to see what we can do about it, but I think we've got 00:01:16.304 --> 00:01:20.367 a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:20.367 --> 00:01:23.506 Okay. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project. 00:01:23.506 --> 00:01:26.241 It's a frog. And you think, frog. 00:01:26.241 --> 00:01:29.706 Yeah, but this was not just any frog. 00:01:29.706 --> 00:01:32.699 Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water 00:01:32.699 --> 00:01:35.328 and goes away and wishes its froglets well, 00:01:35.328 --> 00:01:38.868 this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs, 00:01:38.868 --> 00:01:42.517 swallowed them into the stomach where it should be having food, 00:01:42.517 --> 00:01:44.120 didn't digest the eggs, 00:01:44.120 --> 00:01:47.189 and turned its stomach into a uterus. 00:01:47.189 --> 00:01:50.470 In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles, 00:01:50.470 --> 00:01:54.293 and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs, 00:01:54.293 --> 00:01:57.045 and they grew in the stomach until eventually 00:01:57.045 --> 00:02:00.162 the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart. 00:02:00.162 --> 00:02:02.372 It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes 00:02:02.372 --> 00:02:04.217 sprays of little frogs. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:04.217 --> 00:02:07.093 Now, when biologists saw this, they were agog. 00:02:07.093 --> 00:02:08.967 They thought, this is incredible. 00:02:08.967 --> 00:02:12.804 No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this, 00:02:12.804 --> 00:02:14.806 to change one organ in the body into another. 00:02:14.806 --> 00:02:18.780 And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well. 00:02:18.780 --> 00:02:21.640 If we could understand how that frog is managing 00:02:21.640 --> 00:02:24.121 the way its tummy works, is there information 00:02:24.121 --> 00:02:27.136 here that we need to understand or could usefully use 00:02:27.136 --> 00:02:29.373 to help ourselves? 00:02:29.373 --> 00:02:32.435 Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach, 00:02:32.435 --> 00:02:34.434 but I am suggesting it's possible we might want 00:02:34.434 --> 00:02:36.823 to manage gastric secretion in the gut. 00:02:36.823 --> 00:02:39.731 And just as everybody got excited about it, bang! 00:02:39.731 --> 00:02:41.855 It was extinct. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:41.855 --> 00:02:44.538 I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler 00:02:44.538 --> 00:02:45.667 in the University of Adelaide. 00:02:45.667 --> 00:02:48.229 He was the last person who had this frog, 00:02:48.229 --> 00:02:50.384 a colony of these things, in his lab. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:50.384 --> 00:02:52.075 And I said, "Mike, by any chance -- " 00:02:52.075 --> 00:02:53.476 this was 30 or 40 years ago — 00:02:53.476 --> 00:02:57.247 "by any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog?" NOTE Paragraph 00:02:57.247 --> 00:03:00.169 And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer, 00:03:00.169 --> 00:03:02.329 minus 20 degrees centigrade, 00:03:02.329 --> 00:03:03.870 and he poured through everything in the freezer, 00:03:03.870 --> 00:03:05.610 and there in the bottom was a jar 00:03:05.610 --> 00:03:08.650 and it contained tissues of these frogs. 00:03:08.650 --> 00:03:11.543 This was very exciting, but there was no reason 00:03:11.543 --> 00:03:13.468 why we should expect that this would work, 00:03:13.468 --> 00:03:17.415 because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it, 00:03:17.415 --> 00:03:21.187 cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen. 00:03:21.187 --> 00:03:23.892 And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands, 00:03:23.892 --> 00:03:25.363 and the same thing happens in a cell. 00:03:25.363 --> 00:03:27.555 If you freeze tissues, the water expands, 00:03:27.555 --> 00:03:29.960 damages or bursts the cell walls. 00:03:29.960 --> 00:03:32.191 Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope. 00:03:32.191 --> 00:03:34.852 It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact. 00:03:34.852 --> 00:03:36.951 So we thought, let's give it a go. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:36.951 --> 00:03:38.711 What we did is something called 00:03:38.711 --> 00:03:41.529 somatic cell nuclear transplantation. 00:03:41.529 --> 00:03:45.171 We took the eggs of a related species, a living frog, 00:03:45.171 --> 00:03:48.272 and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg. 00:03:48.272 --> 00:03:50.828 We used ultraviolet radiation to do that. 00:03:50.828 --> 00:03:54.023 And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue 00:03:54.023 --> 00:03:58.335 of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg. 00:03:58.335 --> 00:04:01.973 Now by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project, 00:04:01.973 --> 00:04:04.490 like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different, 00:04:04.490 --> 00:04:07.574 because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells. 00:04:07.574 --> 00:04:09.866 That was a miracle, but it was workable. 00:04:09.866 --> 00:04:13.682 What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species 00:04:13.682 --> 00:04:17.168 and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work. 00:04:17.168 --> 00:04:19.441 Well, we had no real reason to expect it would, 00:04:19.441 --> 00:04:22.777 and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these. 00:04:22.777 --> 00:04:25.607 And just last February, the last time we did these trials, 00:04:25.607 --> 00:04:28.434 I saw a miracle starting to happen. 00:04:28.434 --> 00:04:32.345 What we found was, most of these eggs didn't work, 00:04:32.345 --> 00:04:35.371 but then suddenly one of them began to divide. 00:04:35.371 --> 00:04:38.531 That was so exciting. And then the egg divided again. 00:04:38.531 --> 00:04:41.110 And then again. And pretty soon, we had 00:04:41.110 --> 00:04:45.531 early stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those. 00:04:45.531 --> 00:04:47.974 We even DNA tested some of these cells, 00:04:47.974 --> 00:04:52.150 and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells. 00:04:52.150 --> 00:04:54.251 So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole. 00:04:54.251 --> 00:04:58.584 It's not a frog. But it's a long way along the journey 00:04:58.584 --> 00:05:01.182 to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species. 00:05:01.182 --> 00:05:03.973 And this is news. We haven't announced this publicly before. 00:05:03.973 --> 00:05:07.235 We're excited. We've got to get past this point. 00:05:07.235 --> 00:05:10.004 We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate, 00:05:10.004 --> 00:05:13.126 to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues. 00:05:13.126 --> 00:05:16.588 It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog. 00:05:16.588 --> 00:05:19.364 Watch this space. I think we're going to have this frog 00:05:19.364 --> 00:05:21.752 hopping glad to be back in the world again. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:21.752 --> 00:05:27.564 Thank you. (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:05:27.564 --> 00:05:30.844 We haven't done it yet, but keep those applause ready. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:30.844 --> 00:05:35.063 The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project. 00:05:35.063 --> 00:05:38.971 The thylacine looks a bit, to most people, like a dog, 00:05:38.971 --> 00:05:40.742 or maybe like a tiger, because it has stripes. 00:05:40.742 --> 00:05:42.836 But it's not related to any of those. 00:05:42.836 --> 00:05:45.550 It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch, 00:05:45.550 --> 00:05:47.876 like a koala or a kangaroo would do, 00:05:47.876 --> 00:05:53.032 and it has a long history, a long, fascinating history, 00:05:53.032 --> 00:05:55.836 that goes back 25 million years. 00:05:55.836 --> 00:05:58.097 But it's also a tragic history. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:58.097 --> 00:06:02.008 The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rainforests 00:06:02.008 --> 00:06:04.935 of Australia about 25 million years ago, 00:06:04.935 --> 00:06:07.837 and the National Geographic Society is helping us 00:06:07.837 --> 00:06:11.326 to explore these fossil deposits. This is Riversleigh. 00:06:11.326 --> 00:06:14.391 In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals. 00:06:14.391 --> 00:06:16.321 We found marsupial lions. 00:06:16.321 --> 00:06:19.031 We found carnivorous kangaroos. 00:06:19.031 --> 00:06:20.693 It's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo, 00:06:20.693 --> 00:06:22.516 but these are meat-eating kangaroos. 00:06:22.516 --> 00:06:25.031 We found the biggest bird in the world, 00:06:25.031 --> 00:06:27.033 bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar, 00:06:27.033 --> 00:06:31.040 and it too was a flesh-eater. It was a giant, weird duck. 00:06:31.040 --> 00:06:33.917 And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either. 00:06:33.917 --> 00:06:36.222 You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing, 00:06:36.222 --> 00:06:37.721 sitting in a pool of water. 00:06:37.721 --> 00:06:40.373 These crocodiles were actually out on the land 00:06:40.373 --> 00:06:43.594 and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey 00:06:43.594 --> 00:06:45.360 on the ground. 00:06:45.360 --> 00:06:50.430 We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist. 00:06:50.430 --> 00:06:52.580 But what they were dropping on was not only 00:06:52.580 --> 00:06:55.259 other weird animals but also thylacines. 00:06:55.259 --> 00:06:58.922 There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests, 00:06:58.922 --> 00:07:03.105 and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones 00:07:03.105 --> 00:07:07.085 to one that was about the size of a chihuahua. 00:07:07.085 --> 00:07:08.798 Paris Hilton would have been able to carry 00:07:08.798 --> 00:07:11.012 one of these things around in a little handbag, 00:07:11.012 --> 00:07:13.342 until a drop croc landed on her. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:13.342 --> 00:07:15.319 At any rate, it was a fascinating place, 00:07:15.319 --> 00:07:18.006 but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way. 00:07:18.006 --> 00:07:21.624 Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time, 00:07:21.624 --> 00:07:24.639 and gradually, the forests disappeared, 00:07:24.639 --> 00:07:26.272 the country began to dry out, 00:07:26.272 --> 00:07:28.502 and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline, 00:07:28.502 --> 00:07:31.598 until by five million years ago, only one left. 00:07:31.598 --> 00:07:33.578 By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared 00:07:33.578 --> 00:07:37.442 from New Guinea, and unfortunately 00:07:37.442 --> 00:07:40.732 by 4,000 years ago, somebodies, 00:07:40.732 --> 00:07:43.701 we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes -- 00:07:43.701 --> 00:07:46.891 this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia. 00:07:46.891 --> 00:07:48.959 And as you can see, dingoes are very similar 00:07:48.959 --> 00:07:51.154 in their body form to thylacines. 00:07:51.154 --> 00:07:54.204 That similarity meant they probably competed. 00:07:54.204 --> 00:07:55.635 They were eating the same kinds of foods. 00:07:55.635 --> 00:07:58.201 It's even possible that aborigines were keeping 00:07:58.201 --> 00:08:01.094 some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore 00:08:01.094 --> 00:08:04.038 they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival. 00:08:04.038 --> 00:08:06.545 All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in, 00:08:06.545 --> 00:08:09.150 thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland, 00:08:09.150 --> 00:08:13.556 and after that they only survived in Tasmania. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:13.556 --> 00:08:16.799 Then, unfortunately, the next sad part of the thylacine story 00:08:16.799 --> 00:08:19.848 is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought 00:08:19.848 --> 00:08:23.801 with them the things they valued, and that included sheep. 00:08:23.801 --> 00:08:27.016 They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania, 00:08:27.016 --> 00:08:30.037 and they thought, hang on, this is not going to work. 00:08:30.037 --> 00:08:32.842 That guy is going to eat all our sheep. 00:08:32.842 --> 00:08:34.823 That was not what happened, actually. 00:08:34.823 --> 00:08:38.645 Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep, but the thylacine got a bad rap. 00:08:38.645 --> 00:08:41.022 But immediately, the government said, that's it, 00:08:41.022 --> 00:08:44.339 let's get rid of them, and they paid people 00:08:44.339 --> 00:08:46.157 to slaughter every one that they saw. 00:08:46.157 --> 00:08:51.176 By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines 00:08:51.176 --> 00:08:54.240 had been murdered. It was a disaster, 00:08:54.240 --> 00:08:56.618 and they were about to hit the wall. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:56.618 --> 00:08:59.627 Have a look at this bit of film footage. 00:08:59.627 --> 00:09:03.406 It makes me very sad, because, while, it's a fascinating animal, 00:09:03.406 --> 00:09:08.368 and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it 00:09:08.368 --> 00:09:12.468 before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction, 00:09:12.468 --> 00:09:15.297 we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have 00:09:15.297 --> 00:09:19.214 a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species. 00:09:19.214 --> 00:09:22.607 These are photos of the last surviving thylacine, Benjamin, 00:09:22.607 --> 00:09:25.557 who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. 00:09:25.557 --> 00:09:28.956 To add insult to injury, having swept this species 00:09:28.956 --> 00:09:33.421 nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect, 00:09:33.421 --> 00:09:35.345 the keepers didn't let it into the hutch 00:09:35.345 --> 00:09:39.526 on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure, 00:09:39.526 --> 00:09:41.834 and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin, 00:09:41.834 --> 00:09:44.866 they still cared so little for this animal 00:09:44.866 --> 00:09:48.231 that they threw the body in the dump. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:48.231 --> 00:09:51.292 Does it have to stay this way? 00:09:51.292 --> 00:09:54.062 In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum. 00:09:54.062 --> 00:09:57.969 I was fascinated by thylacines. I've always been obsessed with these animals. 00:09:57.969 --> 00:09:59.781 And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out 00:09:59.781 --> 00:10:02.412 their relationships to other sorts of animals, 00:10:02.412 --> 00:10:05.793 and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar, 00:10:05.793 --> 00:10:10.352 was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old. 00:10:10.352 --> 00:10:12.898 The guy who had found it and killed the mother 00:10:12.898 --> 00:10:16.471 had pickled the pup and they pickled it in alcohol. 00:10:16.471 --> 00:10:20.173 I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative. 00:10:20.173 --> 00:10:24.256 But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends, 00:10:24.256 --> 00:10:26.519 couldn't we think about going into this pup 00:10:26.519 --> 00:10:29.671 and extracting DNA, if it's there, 00:10:29.671 --> 00:10:31.655 and then somewhere down the line in the future, 00:10:31.655 --> 00:10:33.770 we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back? 00:10:33.770 --> 00:10:38.554 The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly. 00:10:38.554 --> 00:10:41.481 Cloning was science fiction. It had not happened. 00:10:41.481 --> 00:10:44.131 But then suddenly cloning did happen. 00:10:44.131 --> 00:10:46.167 And I thought, when I became director 00:10:46.167 --> 00:10:48.602 of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go. 00:10:48.602 --> 00:10:50.090 I put a team together. 00:10:50.090 --> 00:10:53.205 We went into that pup to see what was in there, 00:10:53.205 --> 00:10:56.252 and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment. 00:10:56.252 --> 00:10:57.270 We were very excited. 00:10:57.270 --> 00:11:01.149 Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA. 00:11:01.149 --> 00:11:04.266 Every old curator who'd been in that museum 00:11:04.266 --> 00:11:05.848 had seen this wonderful specimen, 00:11:05.848 --> 00:11:08.040 put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought, 00:11:08.040 --> 00:11:10.654 "Wow, look at that," plop, dropped it back in the jar, 00:11:10.654 --> 00:11:12.520 contaminating this specimen. 00:11:12.520 --> 00:11:16.213 And that was a worry. If the goal here was to get the DNA out 00:11:16.213 --> 00:11:19.960 and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back, 00:11:19.960 --> 00:11:22.607 what we didn't want happening when the information 00:11:22.607 --> 00:11:24.536 was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around 00:11:24.536 --> 00:11:26.899 and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old 00:11:26.899 --> 00:11:30.483 horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. (Laughter) 00:11:30.483 --> 00:11:32.141 It would've kept the curator very happy, 00:11:32.141 --> 00:11:33.958 but it wasn't going to keep us happy. 00:11:33.958 --> 00:11:37.157 So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around, 00:11:37.157 --> 00:11:40.438 and particularly we looked into the teeth of skulls, 00:11:40.438 --> 00:11:43.469 hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers, 00:11:43.469 --> 00:11:45.897 and we found much better quality DNA. 00:11:45.897 --> 00:11:48.683 We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there. 00:11:48.683 --> 00:11:49.804 So we got it. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:49.804 --> 00:11:52.088 Okay. What could we do with this stuff? 00:11:52.088 --> 00:11:54.120 Well, George Church in his book, "Regenesis," 00:11:54.120 --> 00:11:57.479 has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing 00:11:57.479 --> 00:11:59.245 to work with fragmented DNA. 00:11:59.245 --> 00:12:02.329 We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back 00:12:02.329 --> 00:12:06.181 into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project, 00:12:06.181 --> 00:12:09.987 get that stuff into an egg of a host species. 00:12:09.987 --> 00:12:11.276 It has to be a different species. 00:12:11.276 --> 00:12:14.143 What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil? 00:12:14.143 --> 00:12:16.280 They're related distantly to thylacines. 00:12:16.280 --> 00:12:18.577 And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop 00:12:18.577 --> 00:12:21.288 a thylacine out the south end. 00:12:21.288 --> 00:12:24.041 Critics of this project say, hang on. 00:12:24.041 --> 00:12:28.221 Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt. 00:12:28.221 --> 00:12:31.275 No, it's not. These are marsupials. 00:12:31.275 --> 00:12:33.890 They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean. 00:12:33.890 --> 00:12:37.123 That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth. 00:12:37.123 --> 00:12:40.094 It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest 00:12:40.094 --> 00:12:41.972 Tasmanian devil baby in the world, 00:12:41.972 --> 00:12:46.063 so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:46.063 --> 00:12:48.716 Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated 00:12:48.716 --> 00:12:50.611 this might not be a waste of time. 00:12:50.611 --> 00:12:52.803 And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet, 00:12:52.803 --> 00:12:54.446 but it's the kind of thing we want to think about. 00:12:54.446 --> 00:12:58.132 They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA 00:12:58.132 --> 00:13:01.552 and they spliced it into a mouse genome, 00:13:01.552 --> 00:13:04.112 but they put a tag on it so that anything 00:13:04.112 --> 00:13:06.911 that this thylacine DNA produced 00:13:06.911 --> 00:13:10.133 would appear blue-green in the mouse baby. 00:13:10.133 --> 00:13:12.507 In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced 00:13:12.507 --> 00:13:15.915 by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized. 00:13:15.915 --> 00:13:19.831 When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues. 00:13:19.831 --> 00:13:22.563 And that tells us if we can get that genome back together, 00:13:22.563 --> 00:13:27.356 get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:27.356 --> 00:13:29.021 Is this a risk? 00:13:29.021 --> 00:13:31.077 You've taken the bits of one animal 00:13:31.077 --> 00:13:33.569 and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal. 00:13:33.569 --> 00:13:35.708 Are we going to get a Frankenstein? 00:13:35.708 --> 00:13:38.304 You know, some kind of weird hybrid chimera? 00:13:38.304 --> 00:13:39.791 And the answer is no. 00:13:39.791 --> 00:13:43.204 If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell 00:13:43.204 --> 00:13:45.661 is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out 00:13:45.661 --> 00:13:48.053 the other end of the devil. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:48.053 --> 00:13:52.055 Okay, if we can do this, could we put it back? 00:13:52.055 --> 00:13:53.836 This is a key question for everybody. 00:13:53.836 --> 00:13:55.494 Does it have to stay in a laboratory, 00:13:55.494 --> 00:13:57.177 or could we put it back where it belongs? 00:13:57.177 --> 00:13:59.746 Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts 00:13:59.746 --> 00:14:02.402 in Tasmania where it belongs, restore that ecosystem? 00:14:02.402 --> 00:14:05.196 Or has Tasmania changed so much 00:14:05.196 --> 00:14:06.826 that that's no longer possible? 00:14:06.826 --> 00:14:09.871 I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas 00:14:09.871 --> 00:14:11.293 where the thylacines were common. 00:14:11.293 --> 00:14:14.528 I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here, 00:14:14.528 --> 00:14:16.989 who when I spoke to him was 90 years old, 00:14:16.989 --> 00:14:20.699 but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother 00:14:20.699 --> 00:14:23.575 caught thylacines. They trapped them. 00:14:23.575 --> 00:14:25.389 And it just, when I spoke to this man, 00:14:25.389 --> 00:14:27.967 I was looking in his eyes and thinking, 00:14:27.967 --> 00:14:30.086 behind those eyes is a brain 00:14:30.086 --> 00:14:34.182 that has memories of what thylacines feel like, 00:14:34.182 --> 00:14:36.644 what they smelled like, what they sounded like. 00:14:36.644 --> 00:14:38.182 He led them around on a rope. 00:14:38.182 --> 00:14:40.280 He has personal experiences 00:14:40.280 --> 00:14:43.732 that I would give my left leg to have in my head. 00:14:43.732 --> 00:14:46.235 We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen. 00:14:46.235 --> 00:14:48.531 Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance, 00:14:48.531 --> 00:14:50.979 could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines. 00:14:50.979 --> 00:14:53.422 My interest was in whether the environment had changed. 00:14:53.422 --> 00:14:56.474 He thought hard. I mean, it was nearly 80 years before this 00:14:56.474 --> 00:14:57.791 that he'd been at this hut. 00:14:57.791 --> 00:14:59.846 At any rate, he led us down this bush track, 00:14:59.846 --> 00:15:03.283 and there, right where he remembered, was the hut, 00:15:03.283 --> 00:15:05.853 and tears came into his eyes. 00:15:05.853 --> 00:15:07.251 He looked at the hut. We went inside. 00:15:07.251 --> 00:15:09.354 There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut 00:15:09.354 --> 00:15:12.198 where he and his father and his brother had slept at night. 00:15:12.198 --> 00:15:14.841 And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories. 00:15:14.841 --> 00:15:17.848 He said, "I remember the thylacines going around the hut 00:15:17.848 --> 00:15:20.224 wondering what was inside," and he said 00:15:20.224 --> 00:15:22.755 they made sounds like "Yip! Yip! Yip!" 00:15:22.755 --> 00:15:25.927 All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers. 00:15:25.927 --> 00:15:29.005 And the key question for me was to ask Peter, 00:15:29.005 --> 00:15:30.980 has it changed? And he said no. 00:15:30.980 --> 00:15:32.936 The southern beech forests surrounded his hut 00:15:32.936 --> 00:15:35.651 just like it was when he was there in 1926. 00:15:35.651 --> 00:15:37.644 The grasslands were sweeping away. 00:15:37.644 --> 00:15:39.503 That's classic thylacine habitat. 00:15:39.503 --> 00:15:41.645 And the animals in those areas were the same 00:15:41.645 --> 00:15:43.484 that were there when the thylacine was around. 00:15:43.484 --> 00:15:46.652 So could we put it back? Yes. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:46.652 --> 00:15:49.751 Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question. 00:15:49.751 --> 00:15:52.563 Sometimes you might be able to put it back, 00:15:52.563 --> 00:15:54.376 but is that the safest way to make sure 00:15:54.376 --> 00:15:57.228 it never goes extinct again, and I don't think so. 00:15:57.228 --> 00:16:00.079 I think gradually, as we see species all around the world, 00:16:00.079 --> 00:16:03.353 it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly 00:16:03.353 --> 00:16:04.553 not safe in the wild. 00:16:04.553 --> 00:16:06.623 We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't. 00:16:06.623 --> 00:16:09.256 We need other parallel strategies coming online. 00:16:09.256 --> 00:16:10.511 And this one interests me. 00:16:10.511 --> 00:16:13.123 Some of the thylacines that were being turned into zoos, 00:16:13.123 --> 00:16:15.176 sanctuaries, even at the museums, 00:16:15.176 --> 00:16:17.316 had collar marks on the neck. 00:16:17.316 --> 00:16:19.428 They were being kept as pets, 00:16:19.428 --> 00:16:22.488 and we know a lot of bush tales and memories 00:16:22.488 --> 00:16:23.884 of people who had them as pets, 00:16:23.884 --> 00:16:26.209 and they say they were wonderful, friendly. 00:16:26.209 --> 00:16:29.052 This particular one came in out of the forest 00:16:29.052 --> 00:16:31.565 to lick this boy and curled up 00:16:31.565 --> 00:16:34.440 around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal. 00:16:34.440 --> 00:16:37.254 And I'd like to ask the question, all of -- 00:16:37.254 --> 00:16:38.564 we need to think about this. 00:16:38.564 --> 00:16:43.084 If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets 00:16:43.084 --> 00:16:46.349 then, would the thylacine be extinct now? 00:16:46.349 --> 00:16:48.313 And I'm positive it wouldn't. 00:16:48.313 --> 00:16:51.018 We need to think about this in today's world. 00:16:51.018 --> 00:16:54.044 Could it be that getting animals close to us 00:16:54.044 --> 00:16:57.337 so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct? 00:16:57.337 --> 00:16:59.365 And this is such a critical issue for us, 00:16:59.365 --> 00:17:01.919 because if we don't do that, we're going to watch 00:17:01.919 --> 00:17:05.007 more of these animals plunge off the precipice. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:05.007 --> 00:17:07.061 As far as I'm concerned, this is why 00:17:07.061 --> 00:17:10.399 we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects. 00:17:10.399 --> 00:17:13.642 We are trying to restore that balance of nature 00:17:13.642 --> 00:17:15.542 that we have upset. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:15.542 --> 00:17:16.899 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:16.899 --> 00:17:19.673 (Applause)