Speaker 1: For two good girl. This is the sound of legin
Speaker 1: and far too to Northern white rhinos interacting with a
Speaker 1: rhino keeper. These rhinos are mother and daughter and they
Speaker 1: live at the Old Pagetta Conservancy in equatorial central Kenya,
Speaker 1: roaming the grassy plains and woodland at the foot of
Speaker 1: Mount Kenya. They're the last of their species, the only
Speaker 1: two Northern white rhinos left. Northern white rhinos are functionally extinct.
Speaker 1: That means they can't reproduce. There are no living males,
Speaker 1: and both in the gene and fatto team to have
Speaker 1: problems with their reproductive system. When they die, that's it
Speaker 1: the end of the species. It may seem like the
Speaker 1: rhinos have crossed the point of no return, but Richard Vine,
Speaker 1: the managing director of the conservancy in Kenya, says there's
Speaker 1: a small hope that science can save them. The whole
Speaker 1: technique for the reintroduction of embryos into rhinos will have
Speaker 1: to be developed from scratch, so it's it's long shot.
Speaker 1: The chances of it working are small, but if the
Speaker 1: species is to be recovered, that is the process that
Speaker 1: we now have to go through. With breakthroughs in DNA sequencing,
Speaker 1: scientists might one day reconstruct the genomes of extinct species,
Speaker 1: and with stem cells, they might turn skin samples into embryos.
Speaker 1: This is the science that makes reviving extinct species plausible.
Speaker 1: But will there be consequences to d extinction? Should scientists
Speaker 1: be doing this at all? I'm Pa Gadkari and I'm
Speaker 1: Christin V. Brown. You're listening to Decrypted. The world's rhino
Speaker 1: population has been falling precipitously for decades. A hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: some five hundred thousand rhinos roamed Africa and Asia, according
Speaker 1: to the World Wildlife Fund, but today very few exist
Speaker 1: outside of national parks and reserves, and Richard at the
Speaker 1: Conservancy in Kenya says the black market for rhino horn
Speaker 1: is to blame, so approaching for the horn is the
Speaker 1: principal reason that rhino populations across Africa and Asia have
Speaker 1: decreased dramatically in the last sort of fifty sixty seventy years.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people display rhinos as trophies, but usually it's the
Speaker 1: horn thereafter. In traditional medicine in many Asian countries, rhino
Speaker 1: horn is believed to be a powerful cure when shaved
Speaker 1: or ground into a powder, but these days, Richard says
Speaker 1: it's become more of a status symbol, he said. People
Speaker 1: even sprinkle in cocktails. According to one report, at the
Speaker 1: rhino market's peak, in horns, we're going for about eighty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a kilo on the black market. That's twice
Speaker 1: the price of gold. Those prices have fallen, but a
Speaker 1: kilo of rhino horn can still fetch upwards of twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. As the rhino population dwindled in the wild,
Speaker 1: conservationists were rushing to breed the last few that live
Speaker 1: in captivity. Until two thousand and nine, Nijin and Fatu
Speaker 1: had been living in a zoo in the Czech Republic.
Speaker 1: Now they had had a population a small population of
Speaker 1: northern white rhine those held in captivity and zoo conditions
Speaker 1: for for quite a period of time, but as it's
Speaker 1: quite common in rhinos, they had struggled to breed them
Speaker 1: regularly within the zoo as a result of their being
Speaker 1: held in zoo conditions, which are considered to be fairly unnatural.
Speaker 1: That's why these last northern white rhinos arrived in Kenya.
Speaker 1: They were moved there along with two male rhinos, which
Speaker 1: have both since passed away. In Kenya, they could roam
Speaker 1: vast plans and live in semi wild conditions. The zoo
Speaker 1: thought it might be easier for the rhinos to breed
Speaker 1: outside the confines of a zoo. There was quite a
Speaker 1: lot of mating behavior, but unfortunately the two females never
Speaker 1: became pregnant, and it turns out after examination of those
Speaker 1: two females that they have um they have reproductive issues
Speaker 1: which makes it difficult for them to get pregnant, which
Speaker 1: are probably untreatable as a function of age and probably
Speaker 1: as a function of their being held in captivity in
Speaker 1: zoos and not being able to breed for a long
Speaker 1: period of time. Getting the rhinos to reproduce is all
Speaker 1: the or urgent because no Gin and Fatu are aging
Speaker 1: and now there are no living males for them to
Speaker 1: breed with, so Richard and his team began looking at
Speaker 1: another option, in vitro fertilization or IVF. It's unclear whether
Speaker 1: Nagin and Fatu are even still producing eggs, but if
Speaker 1: they are, the thinking is that egg production could be
Speaker 1: stimulated with hormones. Then those eggs could be harvested and
Speaker 1: fertilized with frozen sperm taken from mail rhinos over the years,
Speaker 1: and from there the process would in theory look a
Speaker 1: lot like the way humans do it, fertilizing the sperm
Speaker 1: and the egg and implanting the embryo in a surrogate.
Speaker 1: The plan is extremely experimental. It's pushing the limits of
Speaker 1: reproductive technology. Even if it is possible to harvest eggs
Speaker 1: from nigin and fatu, nobody knows if this plan will succeed.
Speaker 1: The real complication is the fact that it's never been
Speaker 1: done in rhinos before. Rhinos have a quite complex reproductive
Speaker 1: system and so a whole system for the removal of
Speaker 1: eggs are wise referred to as over and pick up
Speaker 1: has to be developed, and that is the process that
Speaker 1: we're currently undertaking at the moment. Scientists from Europe has
Speaker 1: scheduled to go to Kenya this year to see if
Speaker 1: they can harvest eggs from nijin in fatu. Some of
Speaker 1: these techniques have been tried on southern white rhinos, which
Speaker 1: are close genetic relatives and still thrive in Africa's southern tip.
Speaker 1: So far, scientists have been able to extract eggs from
Speaker 1: a female and fertilize them. They even created an embryo
Speaker 1: that was a cross between a northern and southern white rhino,
Speaker 1: but the resulting embryos haven't yet lived long enough to
Speaker 1: be frozen for implantation. This whole plan is a long shot.
Speaker 1: Like we mentioned, scientists don't know if nijin and fast
Speaker 1: you have eggs to harvest, and even if they do,
Speaker 1: implanting an embryo comes with a high risk of failure.
Speaker 1: But if this doesn't work, there is one more thing
Speaker 1: to try, a plan that's perhaps even less likely to succeed,
Speaker 1: making eggs from scratch from stem cells. Is it's really
Speaker 1: people are like, that's it, that's funny. There is another
Speaker 1: group of scientists also trying to save the northern white rhino.
Speaker 1: Their home base is in Escondido, California, at the San
Speaker 1: Diego Zoos Institute for Conservation Research. The heart of their
Speaker 1: work is a place called the Frozen Zoo. I went
Speaker 1: there to visit them. The Frozen Zoo is not much
Speaker 1: to look at. It's in a windowless room at the
Speaker 1: back of an office building full of lots of big
Speaker 1: metal tanks. Those tanks are cryo tanks. They're full of
Speaker 1: liquid nitrogen and the temperature inside is minus a hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety six degrees celsius. I love this part, so
Speaker 1: I'm glad you don't like noise. That is the sound
Speaker 1: of the Frozen Zoos curator Marlis Howk pulling a rack
Speaker 1: of slender vials filled with millions of frozen cells out
Speaker 1: of one of them. This is a bunch of different animals.
Speaker 1: So this is a box of a hundred vials, and
Speaker 1: we use color codes, so that's what you're seeing. And
Speaker 1: you can see their numbered one through ten and rows
Speaker 1: all the way down to a hundred. And then I
Speaker 1: take off the lid. Oh there they are. They Wow.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's so crazy that just you know, here
Speaker 1: are the potential future of a species and these little
Speaker 1: teeny whiles. The Frozen Zoo has been collecting and freezing
Speaker 1: cell samples from all kinds of animals for the last
Speaker 1: four decades or so. There are more than a thousand
Speaker 1: species and about ten thousand individual animals and the Frozen
Speaker 1: Zoos collection. The zoo gets biological samples from animals when
Speaker 1: they die or maybe have surgery or get tagged. Usually
Speaker 1: those samples are skin biopsies, and there are three full
Speaker 1: time cell culturists at the zoo who extract and grow
Speaker 1: the cells. If you keep cells at the right temperature
Speaker 1: and feed them the right food, they will just keep
Speaker 1: dividing and multiplying until there are millions of cells. On
Speaker 1: any given day, cells from forty species might be incubating
Speaker 1: in the lab. It takes about a month to grow
Speaker 1: enough cells to freeze. All of these cultures are of
Speaker 1: cells known as fibroblasts. It's the most common cell type
Speaker 1: and animal connective tissue. Once enough cells are cultured, they
Speaker 1: can be frozen and preserved in the liquid nitrogen and
Speaker 1: revived at any point in the future. The Frozen Zoo
Speaker 1: has samples from twelve northern white rhinos, including the two
Speaker 1: that are still alive. For the rhinos, the Frozen Zoo
Speaker 1: is the last resort. Those frozen cells are the key
Speaker 1: to an ambitious plan to save them. If you thought
Speaker 1: the scientists trying to harvest eggs from the rhinos in
Speaker 1: Kenya had an uncertain task ahead of them, the odds
Speaker 1: of the frozen zoos plan working even more unknown. Remember,
Speaker 1: the first group of scientists is hoping that at least
Speaker 1: one of the remaining rhinos will produce eggs, which can
Speaker 1: then be harvested and fertilized, but the Frozen Zoo wants
Speaker 1: to take rhino skin cells and make an egg out
Speaker 1: of that. One of the scientists in charge of this
Speaker 1: project is Barbara Durant, director of Reproductive Sciences at the
Speaker 1: San Diego Zoo. She said the idea for this plan
Speaker 1: came from a groundbreaking technique which was first developed in Japan.
Speaker 1: Scientists were able to take skin cells from mice and
Speaker 1: reprogrammed them, changing them from skin cells into something known
Speaker 1: as a plury potent stem cell. The stem cell is
Speaker 1: a basic building block of life. These are cells that
Speaker 1: can turn into many other types of cells. That's how
Speaker 1: a baby can start off as an egg and a
Speaker 1: sperm and develop into an embryo with blood cells and
Speaker 1: brain cells and skin cells. But these scientists managed to
Speaker 1: do it in reverse. The work one a Nobel prize.
Speaker 1: Scientists at the Zoo wanted to see if they could
Speaker 1: use the same methods to turn the rhino cells back
Speaker 1: into stem cells so they could eventually be reprogrammed to
Speaker 1: become rhino sperm and eggs. Before going I had to
Speaker 1: turn rhino skin into rhino stem cells. Researchers had to
Speaker 1: figure out whether they had enough genetic diversity in their
Speaker 1: collection to even try it. This is a really important
Speaker 1: consideration if your goal is to bring back an entire species.
Speaker 1: They wanted it to be a healthy population and not
Speaker 1: inbred and riddled with genetic disease. Barbara believed there was
Speaker 1: enough genetic diversity, so they began their work, and so
Speaker 1: we're at that stage now, and we see that those
Speaker 1: chloripotent stem cells are in fact colorI potent. They can
Speaker 1: be directed to differentiate into all three of the um
Speaker 1: embrhonic cell types, and they are functional in those cell types.
Speaker 1: So everything we've done so far has been successful turning
Speaker 1: those skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. It's a
Speaker 1: very important early step. It's quite a complex process, but
Speaker 1: so far it's working quite well. The ultimate goal, of course,
Speaker 1: is to turn those stem cells into spermin eggs, but
Speaker 1: that's not the only thing that would need to happen
Speaker 1: to turn those skin samples into baby rhinos. What my
Speaker 1: team is doing um in parallel with that work is
Speaker 1: we are perfecting optimizing the assisted reproductive techniques that will
Speaker 1: be needed to actually take those spermin eggs and fertilize
Speaker 1: them in the lab, grow the embryos, which is again
Speaker 1: another few, another couple of procedures that require a thousand
Speaker 1: little steps. It's not as easy as just, you know,
Speaker 1: putting them together in vitro. When you hear it explained
Speaker 1: like this, it can sometimes seem simple, but a lot
Speaker 1: of these steps have never been done before in rhinos,
Speaker 1: so there's a fair amount of trial and error. Just
Speaker 1: because scientists in Japan were successful when working with my
Speaker 1: cells doesn't mean it's going to work with a rhino.
Speaker 1: Between species, there is a lot of biological diversity, and
Speaker 1: that means that what works for one species in a
Speaker 1: lab doesn't necessarily work for another. But if all of
Speaker 1: that goes well, hopefully Barbara's team will have a viable embryo.
Speaker 1: The next step would be to implant the lab grown
Speaker 1: rhino embryo into a Southern white rhino, a close genetic relative.
Speaker 1: But then Barbara's team will face the same challenges as
Speaker 1: those European scientists working with the Conservancy. No one has
Speaker 1: ever done an embryo transfer in a rhino either. I
Speaker 1: asked Barbara how realistic this idea really is. I mean,
Speaker 1: it honestly just sounds like science fiction. Yes, it's very ambitious,
Speaker 1: we understand that and the chances of failure are not
Speaker 1: not insignificant, but we do think that scientifically it is possible. Okay, Christen,
Speaker 1: So we've explained how scientists are planning to go about
Speaker 1: saving the rhinos. Now let's sum out why put all
Speaker 1: of this effort into trying to save the species that's
Speaker 1: already functionally extinct. This is a really valid question. Not
Speaker 1: everyone thinks we should be doing this, but the strongest
Speaker 1: argument in favor of using science to bring back extinct
Speaker 1: animals is that there is an environmental benefit. Every time
Speaker 1: people really work to put a species back in a habitat,
Speaker 1: no matter how long it's been missing, there are these
Speaker 1: amazing gains to conservation. This has been novack Head scientists
Speaker 1: and an organization called Revive and Restore. This group is
Speaker 1: undertaking some of the most cutting edge and controversial work
Speaker 1: happening in this space. He's trying to bring back the
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon which died off on the wooly mammoth, which
Speaker 1: has been extinct for about three thousand years. It's really
Speaker 1: a crucial element or restorative ecology. We want to put
Speaker 1: the passenger pigeon back in the forest for wildlife. It's
Speaker 1: not necessarily just for helping human needs and for creating
Speaker 1: the ecological services that humans want. But the mammoth is
Speaker 1: actually about converting habitat. It's not about enriching a habitat
Speaker 1: that exists. It's completely converting habitat for very human driven needs.
Speaker 1: So Christen, what are the conservation gains that Ben thinks
Speaker 1: we're going to see? Ben gave me the example of
Speaker 1: the gray wolf and Yellowstone National Park. The wolf was
Speaker 1: hunted out of existence in the American West, but in
Speaker 1: the nineties gray wolves from Canada were reintroduced to Yellowstone.
Speaker 1: Today the parks as wolves have made a huge difference
Speaker 1: in the local ecology. There aren't just more wolves, they
Speaker 1: are also more beavers and aspen trees. So that does
Speaker 1: sound promising, But don't you think that, well, the gray
Speaker 1: wolf was gone from Yellowstone for just a couple of generations.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a very different thing to bring back
Speaker 1: the Willie mammoth, which has been gone for millennia, right,
Speaker 1: And I should say, scientists debate how much the gray
Speaker 1: wolf has really helped Yellowstone ecosystem. In the decades the
Speaker 1: wolf was gone, so much in the park has changed
Speaker 1: bringing one predator back can't possibly fix an entire ecosystem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just personally that idea of bringing back a species
Speaker 1: like the wily mammoth, which has been gone for so long,
Speaker 1: it sounds a bit like humans messing with nature in
Speaker 1: a way that could have unexpected ramifications further down the line, Right,
Speaker 1: And that's not the only argument against providing your stink species.
Speaker 1: I also talked to Ross McPhee about this. He's one
Speaker 1: of the strongest critics out there. He's a curator at
Speaker 1: the American Museum of Natural History in New York and
Speaker 1: a paleo mammologist, which means he studies ancient mammals as usual.
Speaker 1: As it is all about some of our needs are
Speaker 1: and because we've made a mess of the planet and
Speaker 1: are continuing to do so, somehow we want to get
Speaker 1: a technological fix. So this isn't the fix. It's going
Speaker 1: to make a difference. It's not Ras said that trying
Speaker 1: to resurrect the wooly mammoth or even the northern white
Speaker 1: rhino is missing the point fixing the wrong problem. The problem,
Speaker 1: he said, is humans, things like poaching and destruction of
Speaker 1: natural habitats. Why bring back a species from the past
Speaker 1: instead of solving the problems that continue to threaten living
Speaker 1: species today. If you want to spend money and attention
Speaker 1: on problems that really do have some merit, and surely
Speaker 1: those are the kinds of problems that do not trying
Speaker 1: to you know, sort of thing books a post and
Speaker 1: say that you're going to bring back things in some
Speaker 1: sort of balance as they were at the end of
Speaker 1: the price to say this is this is produment. It's
Speaker 1: not anything that is ever going to happen. So he's
Speaker 1: saying it's a waste of resources that could be going
Speaker 1: to help save species that are still alive. Ross said,
Speaker 1: it is also not clear that reintroducing law species will
Speaker 1: have any positive impact on the environment. So Kristen, I
Speaker 1: actually find Ross's argument pretty compelling that you know, even
Speaker 1: if after all this process a baby rhino is born,
Speaker 1: there will still be poaches out there who are after
Speaker 1: it's horn. Right, this is a multi pronged problem, and
Speaker 1: science can't fix everything. But you know, I'm a science reporter.
Speaker 1: I love science, and I tend to think that his
Speaker 1: perspective is actually too narrow. There is value in the
Speaker 1: idea of science for the sake of science. You know, sure,
Speaker 1: this is expensive to do right now, and there are
Speaker 1: other species that aren't extinct that are threatened, but who
Speaker 1: knows where the science will lead or how expensive it
Speaker 1: will be in the future. The first genome sequence caused
Speaker 1: billions of dollars, and now you can get a full
Speaker 1: sequencing for a thousand dollars or twenty three and me
Speaker 1: test for a hundreds, So who knows where this will lead?
Speaker 1: You know, Kristen, my perspective on this issue has actually
Speaker 1: changed over the course of the last few weeks that
Speaker 1: we've been working on it together. You know, at the outset,
Speaker 1: I went into this thinking much more about how saving
Speaker 1: the rhinos is a noble cause, it's something we should
Speaker 1: be doing because it's an altruistic thing to do. But
Speaker 1: then a few weeks ago, the intake of a mental
Speaker 1: panel on climate change released this devastating report which talked
Speaker 1: about how a million different species could be at risk
Speaker 1: of extinction in the coming decades, and that really made
Speaker 1: me think about how our own destiny as a civilization
Speaker 1: depends upon the health and abundance of the natural world.
Speaker 1: You know, the raw materials that we use for manufacturing
Speaker 1: the food and fresh water that we rely on to survive.
Speaker 1: All of these things depend on having plentiful natural habitats,
Speaker 1: and it made me think about conserving the rhinos in
Speaker 1: a different light. One thing I was thinking a lot
Speaker 1: about when we were recording this is, you know, what
Speaker 1: it means to restore something, what it means to save
Speaker 1: a species. You know, we talked about restoring the passenger pigeon,
Speaker 1: which one extinct in nineteen fourteen, But very little of
Speaker 1: our world looks like it did in nineteen fourteen when
Speaker 1: we talked about conservation, when we're talking in these really
Speaker 1: static terms, but I think the world is really a
Speaker 1: lot more dynamic than that. So I mean, like, po,
Speaker 1: how how do you think about conservation in a world
Speaker 1: that's fluid. On the one hand, we don't want to
Speaker 1: be nostalgic and be trying to bring back things that
Speaker 1: have passed out of existence already. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: we really do need to pay attention to save what's
Speaker 1: still left. And I wonder I would be interested to
Speaker 1: see where the further out and line some of these
Speaker 1: new emerging scientific techniques are able to, you know, once
Speaker 1: they've been tested and refined on a species like the rhino,
Speaker 1: maybe there will be a more mainstream and more potent
Speaker 1: application for it. Right, So those fight is much bigger
Speaker 1: than the rhino. It's about saving what's left of the
Speaker 1: world's natural habitats and recognizing that we also derive economic
Speaker 1: benefit from a healthy planet. That's it for this week's
Speaker 1: episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always want to
Speaker 1: know what you think of the show. You can write
Speaker 1: to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Kristin B. Brown and I'm at pare
Speaker 1: Gatkari and please help us spread the word about our
Speaker 1: show by leaving us a rating or review wherever you
Speaker 1: like to listen. This episode was produced by Pia Goodcary
Speaker 1: and Lindsay Cratterwell. Our story editor was Emily Busso. Thank
Speaker 1: you also to Akido and Vandermain and Brad Stone. Francesca
Speaker 1: Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll see you next week.