WEBVTT - The Science of Resurrecting Extinct Species 0:00:00.440 --> 0:00:07.560 For two good girl. This is the sound of legin 0:00:07.680 --> 0:00:10.760 and far too to Northern white rhinos interacting with a 0:00:10.880 --> 0:00:14.400 rhino keeper. These rhinos are mother and daughter and they 0:00:14.440 --> 0:00:18.439 live at the Old Pagetta Conservancy in equatorial central Kenya, 0:00:18.880 --> 0:00:21.400 roaming the grassy plains and woodland at the foot of 0:00:21.400 --> 0:00:25.200 Mount Kenya. They're the last of their species, the only 0:00:25.280 --> 0:00:30.560 two Northern white rhinos left. Northern white rhinos are functionally extinct. 0:00:31.120 --> 0:00:34.600 That means they can't reproduce. There are no living males, 0:00:34.680 --> 0:00:36.600 and both in the gene and fatto team to have 0:00:36.760 --> 0:00:41.000 problems with their reproductive system. When they die, that's it 0:00:41.640 --> 0:00:44.600 the end of the species. It may seem like the 0:00:44.680 --> 0:00:48.000 rhinos have crossed the point of no return, but Richard Vine, 0:00:48.080 --> 0:00:51.560 the managing director of the conservancy in Kenya, says there's 0:00:51.560 --> 0:00:54.360 a small hope that science can save them. The whole 0:00:54.400 --> 0:00:57.600 technique for the reintroduction of embryos into rhinos will have 0:00:57.680 --> 0:01:00.720 to be developed from scratch, so it's it's long shot. 0:01:01.360 --> 0:01:04.600 The chances of it working are small, but if the 0:01:04.640 --> 0:01:07.360 species is to be recovered, that is the process that 0:01:07.400 --> 0:01:11.720 we now have to go through. With breakthroughs in DNA sequencing, 0:01:11.840 --> 0:01:15.479 scientists might one day reconstruct the genomes of extinct species, 0:01:15.920 --> 0:01:19.680 and with stem cells, they might turn skin samples into embryos. 0:01:19.840 --> 0:01:23.080 This is the science that makes reviving extinct species plausible. 0:01:23.440 --> 0:01:27.040 But will there be consequences to d extinction? Should scientists 0:01:27.040 --> 0:01:29.959 be doing this at all? I'm Pa Gadkari and I'm 0:01:30.040 --> 0:01:37.480 Christin V. Brown. You're listening to Decrypted. The world's rhino 0:01:37.560 --> 0:01:41.560 population has been falling precipitously for decades. A hundred years ago, 0:01:41.760 --> 0:01:46.400 some five hundred thousand rhinos roamed Africa and Asia, according 0:01:46.400 --> 0:01:50.040 to the World Wildlife Fund, but today very few exist 0:01:50.080 --> 0:01:53.160 outside of national parks and reserves, and Richard at the 0:01:53.200 --> 0:01:56.520 Conservancy in Kenya says the black market for rhino horn 0:01:56.640 --> 0:01:58.600 is to blame, so approaching for the horn is the 0:01:58.600 --> 0:02:02.600 principal reason that rhino populations across Africa and Asia have 0:02:03.320 --> 0:02:06.560 decreased dramatically in the last sort of fifty sixty seventy years. 0:02:08.520 --> 0:02:12.360 Sometimes people display rhinos as trophies, but usually it's the 0:02:12.400 --> 0:02:17.000 horn thereafter. In traditional medicine in many Asian countries, rhino 0:02:17.040 --> 0:02:20.160 horn is believed to be a powerful cure when shaved 0:02:20.320 --> 0:02:24.320 or ground into a powder, but these days, Richard says 0:02:24.440 --> 0:02:27.560 it's become more of a status symbol, he said. People 0:02:27.600 --> 0:02:31.440 even sprinkle in cocktails. According to one report, at the 0:02:31.520 --> 0:02:35.160 rhino market's peak, in horns, we're going for about eighty 0:02:35.240 --> 0:02:38.560 thousand dollars a kilo on the black market. That's twice 0:02:38.639 --> 0:02:41.679 the price of gold. Those prices have fallen, but a 0:02:41.800 --> 0:02:44.440 kilo of rhino horn can still fetch upwards of twenty 0:02:44.480 --> 0:02:47.639 thousand dollars. As the rhino population dwindled in the wild, 0:02:47.720 --> 0:02:50.639 conservationists were rushing to breed the last few that live 0:02:50.639 --> 0:02:54.320 in captivity. Until two thousand and nine, Nijin and Fatu 0:02:54.400 --> 0:02:56.400 had been living in a zoo in the Czech Republic. 0:02:56.840 --> 0:02:59.239 Now they had had a population a small population of 0:02:59.320 --> 0:03:02.960 northern white rhine those held in captivity and zoo conditions 0:03:03.040 --> 0:03:05.720 for for quite a period of time, but as it's 0:03:05.760 --> 0:03:09.320 quite common in rhinos, they had struggled to breed them 0:03:09.320 --> 0:03:13.760 regularly within the zoo as a result of their being 0:03:13.800 --> 0:03:17.160 held in zoo conditions, which are considered to be fairly unnatural. 0:03:17.480 --> 0:03:20.799 That's why these last northern white rhinos arrived in Kenya. 0:03:20.840 --> 0:03:23.720 They were moved there along with two male rhinos, which 0:03:23.720 --> 0:03:27.000 have both since passed away. In Kenya, they could roam 0:03:27.120 --> 0:03:30.760 vast plans and live in semi wild conditions. The zoo 0:03:30.840 --> 0:03:32.920 thought it might be easier for the rhinos to breed 0:03:33.040 --> 0:03:35.960 outside the confines of a zoo. There was quite a 0:03:36.000 --> 0:03:38.800 lot of mating behavior, but unfortunately the two females never 0:03:38.840 --> 0:03:42.080 became pregnant, and it turns out after examination of those 0:03:42.080 --> 0:03:46.240 two females that they have um they have reproductive issues 0:03:46.280 --> 0:03:49.680 which makes it difficult for them to get pregnant, which 0:03:49.680 --> 0:03:52.400 are probably untreatable as a function of age and probably 0:03:52.400 --> 0:03:54.960 as a function of their being held in captivity in 0:03:55.080 --> 0:03:57.000 zoos and not being able to breed for a long 0:03:57.080 --> 0:03:59.680 period of time. Getting the rhinos to reproduce is all 0:03:59.760 --> 0:04:02.480 the or urgent because no Gin and Fatu are aging 0:04:03.120 --> 0:04:05.480 and now there are no living males for them to 0:04:05.560 --> 0:04:08.480 breed with, so Richard and his team began looking at 0:04:08.520 --> 0:04:13.880 another option, in vitro fertilization or IVF. It's unclear whether 0:04:13.960 --> 0:04:17.120 Nagin and Fatu are even still producing eggs, but if 0:04:17.120 --> 0:04:19.400 they are, the thinking is that egg production could be 0:04:19.400 --> 0:04:23.320 stimulated with hormones. Then those eggs could be harvested and 0:04:23.360 --> 0:04:27.159 fertilized with frozen sperm taken from mail rhinos over the years, 0:04:27.600 --> 0:04:30.359 and from there the process would in theory look a 0:04:30.400 --> 0:04:33.400 lot like the way humans do it, fertilizing the sperm 0:04:33.440 --> 0:04:36.400 and the egg and implanting the embryo in a surrogate. 0:04:36.760 --> 0:04:40.320 The plan is extremely experimental. It's pushing the limits of 0:04:40.320 --> 0:04:44.320 reproductive technology. Even if it is possible to harvest eggs 0:04:44.320 --> 0:04:47.760 from nigin and fatu, nobody knows if this plan will succeed. 0:04:50.400 --> 0:04:52.600 The real complication is the fact that it's never been 0:04:52.640 --> 0:04:56.200 done in rhinos before. Rhinos have a quite complex reproductive 0:04:56.240 --> 0:04:59.440 system and so a whole system for the removal of 0:04:59.480 --> 0:05:01.560 eggs are wise referred to as over and pick up 0:05:01.600 --> 0:05:03.760 has to be developed, and that is the process that 0:05:03.800 --> 0:05:07.240 we're currently undertaking at the moment. Scientists from Europe has 0:05:07.279 --> 0:05:09.560 scheduled to go to Kenya this year to see if 0:05:09.560 --> 0:05:12.240 they can harvest eggs from nijin in fatu. Some of 0:05:12.279 --> 0:05:15.159 these techniques have been tried on southern white rhinos, which 0:05:15.200 --> 0:05:19.000 are close genetic relatives and still thrive in Africa's southern tip. 0:05:19.600 --> 0:05:22.360 So far, scientists have been able to extract eggs from 0:05:22.360 --> 0:05:26.159 a female and fertilize them. They even created an embryo 0:05:26.279 --> 0:05:29.480 that was a cross between a northern and southern white rhino, 0:05:29.680 --> 0:05:32.640 but the resulting embryos haven't yet lived long enough to 0:05:32.680 --> 0:05:36.479 be frozen for implantation. This whole plan is a long shot. 0:05:36.920 --> 0:05:40.000 Like we mentioned, scientists don't know if nijin and fast 0:05:40.080 --> 0:05:42.440 you have eggs to harvest, and even if they do, 0:05:42.760 --> 0:05:45.599 implanting an embryo comes with a high risk of failure. 0:05:46.120 --> 0:05:48.520 But if this doesn't work, there is one more thing 0:05:48.560 --> 0:05:52.560 to try, a plan that's perhaps even less likely to succeed, 0:05:53.200 --> 0:06:02.560 making eggs from scratch from stem cells. Is it's really 0:06:04.480 --> 0:06:07.320 people are like, that's it, that's funny. There is another 0:06:07.360 --> 0:06:10.440 group of scientists also trying to save the northern white rhino. 0:06:11.200 --> 0:06:14.520 Their home base is in Escondido, California, at the San 0:06:14.560 --> 0:06:18.440 Diego Zoos Institute for Conservation Research. The heart of their 0:06:18.480 --> 0:06:21.000 work is a place called the Frozen Zoo. I went 0:06:21.040 --> 0:06:24.200 there to visit them. The Frozen Zoo is not much 0:06:24.279 --> 0:06:26.599 to look at. It's in a windowless room at the 0:06:26.600 --> 0:06:28.960 back of an office building full of lots of big 0:06:29.000 --> 0:06:32.800 metal tanks. Those tanks are cryo tanks. They're full of 0:06:32.839 --> 0:06:36.480 liquid nitrogen and the temperature inside is minus a hundred 0:06:36.520 --> 0:06:39.839 and ninety six degrees celsius. I love this part, so 0:06:39.839 --> 0:06:47.559 I'm glad you don't like noise. That is the sound 0:06:47.680 --> 0:06:50.960 of the Frozen Zoos curator Marlis Howk pulling a rack 0:06:51.000 --> 0:06:54.200 of slender vials filled with millions of frozen cells out 0:06:54.240 --> 0:06:57.080 of one of them. This is a bunch of different animals. 0:06:57.120 --> 0:07:00.600 So this is a box of a hundred vials, and 0:07:00.640 --> 0:07:02.840 we use color codes, so that's what you're seeing. And 0:07:02.920 --> 0:07:07.839 you can see their numbered one through ten and rows 0:07:07.880 --> 0:07:11.320 all the way down to a hundred. And then I 0:07:11.440 --> 0:07:22.760 take off the lid. Oh there they are. They Wow. 0:07:22.920 --> 0:07:25.320 I mean, that's so crazy that just you know, here 0:07:26.120 --> 0:07:29.960 are the potential future of a species and these little 0:07:29.960 --> 0:07:34.160 teeny whiles. The Frozen Zoo has been collecting and freezing 0:07:34.160 --> 0:07:37.080 cell samples from all kinds of animals for the last 0:07:37.120 --> 0:07:40.000 four decades or so. There are more than a thousand 0:07:40.000 --> 0:07:43.600 species and about ten thousand individual animals and the Frozen 0:07:43.680 --> 0:07:48.400 Zoos collection. The zoo gets biological samples from animals when 0:07:48.400 --> 0:07:51.840 they die or maybe have surgery or get tagged. Usually 0:07:52.440 --> 0:07:55.280 those samples are skin biopsies, and there are three full 0:07:55.320 --> 0:07:58.240 time cell culturists at the zoo who extract and grow 0:07:58.320 --> 0:08:01.640 the cells. If you keep cells at the right temperature 0:08:02.000 --> 0:08:04.080 and feed them the right food, they will just keep 0:08:04.080 --> 0:08:07.680 dividing and multiplying until there are millions of cells. On 0:08:07.720 --> 0:08:11.000 any given day, cells from forty species might be incubating 0:08:11.040 --> 0:08:13.240 in the lab. It takes about a month to grow 0:08:13.360 --> 0:08:16.360 enough cells to freeze. All of these cultures are of 0:08:16.400 --> 0:08:20.040 cells known as fibroblasts. It's the most common cell type 0:08:20.080 --> 0:08:23.760 and animal connective tissue. Once enough cells are cultured, they 0:08:23.760 --> 0:08:26.960 can be frozen and preserved in the liquid nitrogen and 0:08:27.000 --> 0:08:30.480 revived at any point in the future. The Frozen Zoo 0:08:30.560 --> 0:08:33.360 has samples from twelve northern white rhinos, including the two 0:08:33.400 --> 0:08:36.160 that are still alive. For the rhinos, the Frozen Zoo 0:08:36.240 --> 0:08:39.280 is the last resort. Those frozen cells are the key 0:08:39.320 --> 0:08:53.080 to an ambitious plan to save them. If you thought 0:08:53.160 --> 0:08:55.719 the scientists trying to harvest eggs from the rhinos in 0:08:55.800 --> 0:08:58.600 Kenya had an uncertain task ahead of them, the odds 0:08:58.640 --> 0:09:02.800 of the frozen zoos plan working even more unknown. Remember, 0:09:02.840 --> 0:09:05.240 the first group of scientists is hoping that at least 0:09:05.280 --> 0:09:08.200 one of the remaining rhinos will produce eggs, which can 0:09:08.240 --> 0:09:11.559 then be harvested and fertilized, but the Frozen Zoo wants 0:09:11.600 --> 0:09:14.760 to take rhino skin cells and make an egg out 0:09:14.800 --> 0:09:18.800 of that. One of the scientists in charge of this 0:09:18.880 --> 0:09:22.440 project is Barbara Durant, director of Reproductive Sciences at the 0:09:22.480 --> 0:09:25.040 San Diego Zoo. She said the idea for this plan 0:09:25.200 --> 0:09:28.720 came from a groundbreaking technique which was first developed in Japan. 0:09:29.520 --> 0:09:32.360 Scientists were able to take skin cells from mice and 0:09:32.440 --> 0:09:36.760 reprogrammed them, changing them from skin cells into something known 0:09:36.880 --> 0:09:40.240 as a plury potent stem cell. The stem cell is 0:09:40.280 --> 0:09:43.080 a basic building block of life. These are cells that 0:09:43.160 --> 0:09:46.000 can turn into many other types of cells. That's how 0:09:46.040 --> 0:09:48.040 a baby can start off as an egg and a 0:09:48.080 --> 0:09:51.520 sperm and develop into an embryo with blood cells and 0:09:51.600 --> 0:09:55.280 brain cells and skin cells. But these scientists managed to 0:09:55.320 --> 0:09:58.680 do it in reverse. The work one a Nobel prize. 0:10:00.240 --> 0:10:02.520 Scientists at the Zoo wanted to see if they could 0:10:02.600 --> 0:10:04.920 use the same methods to turn the rhino cells back 0:10:04.960 --> 0:10:08.240 into stem cells so they could eventually be reprogrammed to 0:10:08.320 --> 0:10:11.920 become rhino sperm and eggs. Before going I had to 0:10:11.960 --> 0:10:15.679 turn rhino skin into rhino stem cells. Researchers had to 0:10:15.679 --> 0:10:18.240 figure out whether they had enough genetic diversity in their 0:10:18.240 --> 0:10:22.199 collection to even try it. This is a really important 0:10:22.200 --> 0:10:25.920 consideration if your goal is to bring back an entire species. 0:10:26.440 --> 0:10:29.280 They wanted it to be a healthy population and not 0:10:29.440 --> 0:10:33.720 inbred and riddled with genetic disease. Barbara believed there was 0:10:33.880 --> 0:10:37.760 enough genetic diversity, so they began their work, and so 0:10:37.800 --> 0:10:41.160 we're at that stage now, and we see that those 0:10:41.880 --> 0:10:46.440 chloripotent stem cells are in fact colorI potent. They can 0:10:46.559 --> 0:10:51.280 be directed to differentiate into all three of the um 0:10:51.480 --> 0:10:57.480 embrhonic cell types, and they are functional in those cell types. 0:10:57.520 --> 0:11:02.040 So everything we've done so far has been successful turning 0:11:02.040 --> 0:11:05.719 those skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. It's a 0:11:05.840 --> 0:11:10.120 very important early step. It's quite a complex process, but 0:11:10.240 --> 0:11:13.640 so far it's working quite well. The ultimate goal, of course, 0:11:14.280 --> 0:11:17.720 is to turn those stem cells into spermin eggs, but 0:11:17.840 --> 0:11:19.920 that's not the only thing that would need to happen 0:11:20.120 --> 0:11:23.960 to turn those skin samples into baby rhinos. What my 0:11:24.120 --> 0:11:28.520 team is doing um in parallel with that work is 0:11:28.600 --> 0:11:33.439 we are perfecting optimizing the assisted reproductive techniques that will 0:11:33.480 --> 0:11:38.199 be needed to actually take those spermin eggs and fertilize 0:11:38.240 --> 0:11:42.320 them in the lab, grow the embryos, which is again 0:11:42.400 --> 0:11:48.800 another few, another couple of procedures that require a thousand 0:11:48.800 --> 0:11:51.440 little steps. It's not as easy as just, you know, 0:11:51.520 --> 0:11:54.640 putting them together in vitro. When you hear it explained 0:11:54.679 --> 0:11:57.040 like this, it can sometimes seem simple, but a lot 0:11:57.080 --> 0:11:59.520 of these steps have never been done before in rhinos, 0:11:59.559 --> 0:12:01.600 so there's a fair amount of trial and error. Just 0:12:01.679 --> 0:12:04.760 because scientists in Japan were successful when working with my 0:12:04.920 --> 0:12:07.720 cells doesn't mean it's going to work with a rhino. 0:12:07.800 --> 0:12:11.480 Between species, there is a lot of biological diversity, and 0:12:11.520 --> 0:12:13.880 that means that what works for one species in a 0:12:13.960 --> 0:12:17.640 lab doesn't necessarily work for another. But if all of 0:12:17.679 --> 0:12:21.320 that goes well, hopefully Barbara's team will have a viable embryo. 0:12:21.600 --> 0:12:24.080 The next step would be to implant the lab grown 0:12:24.200 --> 0:12:28.040 rhino embryo into a Southern white rhino, a close genetic relative. 0:12:28.559 --> 0:12:31.959 But then Barbara's team will face the same challenges as 0:12:31.960 --> 0:12:35.839 those European scientists working with the Conservancy. No one has 0:12:35.880 --> 0:12:39.240 ever done an embryo transfer in a rhino either. I 0:12:39.320 --> 0:12:43.000 asked Barbara how realistic this idea really is. I mean, 0:12:43.240 --> 0:12:48.240 it honestly just sounds like science fiction. Yes, it's very ambitious, 0:12:48.280 --> 0:12:52.760 we understand that and the chances of failure are not 0:12:52.760 --> 0:13:00.280 not insignificant, but we do think that scientifically it is possible. Okay, Christen, 0:13:00.360 --> 0:13:02.680 So we've explained how scientists are planning to go about 0:13:02.720 --> 0:13:06.319 saving the rhinos. Now let's sum out why put all 0:13:06.360 --> 0:13:08.679 of this effort into trying to save the species that's 0:13:08.760 --> 0:13:12.680 already functionally extinct. This is a really valid question. Not 0:13:12.840 --> 0:13:15.600 everyone thinks we should be doing this, but the strongest 0:13:15.679 --> 0:13:18.640 argument in favor of using science to bring back extinct 0:13:18.679 --> 0:13:22.319 animals is that there is an environmental benefit. Every time 0:13:22.360 --> 0:13:27.360 people really work to put a species back in a habitat, 0:13:27.679 --> 0:13:31.680 no matter how long it's been missing, there are these 0:13:31.760 --> 0:13:36.960 amazing gains to conservation. This has been novack Head scientists 0:13:36.960 --> 0:13:40.760 and an organization called Revive and Restore. This group is 0:13:40.840 --> 0:13:44.720 undertaking some of the most cutting edge and controversial work 0:13:44.760 --> 0:13:47.240 happening in this space. He's trying to bring back the 0:13:47.280 --> 0:13:51.920 passenger pigeon which died off on the wooly mammoth, which 0:13:51.960 --> 0:13:55.480 has been extinct for about three thousand years. It's really 0:13:56.280 --> 0:13:59.959 a crucial element or restorative ecology. We want to put 0:14:00.000 --> 0:14:04.000 the passenger pigeon back in the forest for wildlife. It's 0:14:04.000 --> 0:14:09.839 not necessarily just for helping human needs and for creating 0:14:09.840 --> 0:14:14.000 the ecological services that humans want. But the mammoth is 0:14:14.040 --> 0:14:19.400 actually about converting habitat. It's not about enriching a habitat 0:14:19.440 --> 0:14:26.040 that exists. It's completely converting habitat for very human driven needs. 0:14:26.240 --> 0:14:28.720 So Christen, what are the conservation gains that Ben thinks 0:14:28.720 --> 0:14:30.840 we're going to see? Ben gave me the example of 0:14:30.840 --> 0:14:33.800 the gray wolf and Yellowstone National Park. The wolf was 0:14:33.880 --> 0:14:36.160 hunted out of existence in the American West, but in 0:14:36.200 --> 0:14:40.120 the nineties gray wolves from Canada were reintroduced to Yellowstone. 0:14:40.680 --> 0:14:43.480 Today the parks as wolves have made a huge difference 0:14:43.520 --> 0:14:46.160 in the local ecology. There aren't just more wolves, they 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:49.720 are also more beavers and aspen trees. So that does 0:14:49.760 --> 0:14:51.880 sound promising, But don't you think that, well, the gray 0:14:51.880 --> 0:14:55.160 wolf was gone from Yellowstone for just a couple of generations. 0:14:55.200 --> 0:14:57.120 It sounds like a very different thing to bring back 0:14:57.120 --> 0:15:00.200 the Willie mammoth, which has been gone for millennia, right, 0:15:00.360 --> 0:15:02.520 And I should say, scientists debate how much the gray 0:15:02.520 --> 0:15:06.240 wolf has really helped Yellowstone ecosystem. In the decades the 0:15:06.240 --> 0:15:08.960 wolf was gone, so much in the park has changed 0:15:09.280 --> 0:15:14.040 bringing one predator back can't possibly fix an entire ecosystem. Yeah, 0:15:14.080 --> 0:15:16.840 and just personally that idea of bringing back a species 0:15:16.880 --> 0:15:19.200 like the wily mammoth, which has been gone for so long, 0:15:19.480 --> 0:15:21.640 it sounds a bit like humans messing with nature in 0:15:21.680 --> 0:15:25.280 a way that could have unexpected ramifications further down the line, Right, 0:15:25.520 --> 0:15:28.960 And that's not the only argument against providing your stink species. 0:15:29.120 --> 0:15:31.600 I also talked to Ross McPhee about this. He's one 0:15:31.640 --> 0:15:34.560 of the strongest critics out there. He's a curator at 0:15:34.560 --> 0:15:37.240 the American Museum of Natural History in New York and 0:15:37.280 --> 0:15:41.760 a paleo mammologist, which means he studies ancient mammals as usual. 0:15:41.880 --> 0:15:44.120 As it is all about some of our needs are 0:15:44.520 --> 0:15:48.360 and because we've made a mess of the planet and 0:15:48.400 --> 0:15:51.280 are continuing to do so, somehow we want to get 0:15:51.280 --> 0:15:53.760 a technological fix. So this isn't the fix. It's going 0:15:53.800 --> 0:15:57.680 to make a difference. It's not Ras said that trying 0:15:57.760 --> 0:16:00.600 to resurrect the wooly mammoth or even the northern white 0:16:00.680 --> 0:16:05.600 rhino is missing the point fixing the wrong problem. The problem, 0:16:05.640 --> 0:16:09.280 he said, is humans, things like poaching and destruction of 0:16:09.360 --> 0:16:12.880 natural habitats. Why bring back a species from the past 0:16:13.000 --> 0:16:16.120 instead of solving the problems that continue to threaten living 0:16:16.160 --> 0:16:19.240 species today. If you want to spend money and attention 0:16:19.320 --> 0:16:22.920 on problems that really do have some merit, and surely 0:16:23.440 --> 0:16:25.880 those are the kinds of problems that do not trying 0:16:25.920 --> 0:16:30.000 to you know, sort of thing books a post and 0:16:30.080 --> 0:16:31.920 say that you're going to bring back things in some 0:16:32.000 --> 0:16:35.120 sort of balance as they were at the end of 0:16:35.160 --> 0:16:38.080 the price to say this is this is produment. It's 0:16:38.120 --> 0:16:40.920 not anything that is ever going to happen. So he's 0:16:40.960 --> 0:16:43.440 saying it's a waste of resources that could be going 0:16:43.440 --> 0:16:46.720 to help save species that are still alive. Ross said, 0:16:46.760 --> 0:16:49.800 it is also not clear that reintroducing law species will 0:16:49.840 --> 0:16:53.480 have any positive impact on the environment. So Kristen, I 0:16:53.560 --> 0:16:57.160 actually find Ross's argument pretty compelling that you know, even 0:16:57.200 --> 0:16:59.960 if after all this process a baby rhino is born, 0:17:00.360 --> 0:17:02.440 there will still be poaches out there who are after 0:17:02.480 --> 0:17:05.199 it's horn. Right, this is a multi pronged problem, and 0:17:05.280 --> 0:17:08.679 science can't fix everything. But you know, I'm a science reporter. 0:17:09.160 --> 0:17:11.320 I love science, and I tend to think that his 0:17:11.400 --> 0:17:15.280 perspective is actually too narrow. There is value in the 0:17:15.359 --> 0:17:18.480 idea of science for the sake of science. You know, sure, 0:17:18.560 --> 0:17:21.560 this is expensive to do right now, and there are 0:17:21.600 --> 0:17:25.320 other species that aren't extinct that are threatened, but who 0:17:25.400 --> 0:17:28.199 knows where the science will lead or how expensive it 0:17:28.240 --> 0:17:31.200 will be in the future. The first genome sequence caused 0:17:31.240 --> 0:17:33.560 billions of dollars, and now you can get a full 0:17:33.600 --> 0:17:36.320 sequencing for a thousand dollars or twenty three and me 0:17:36.600 --> 0:17:39.720 test for a hundreds, So who knows where this will lead? 0:17:40.040 --> 0:17:43.000 You know, Kristen, my perspective on this issue has actually 0:17:43.080 --> 0:17:45.000 changed over the course of the last few weeks that 0:17:45.040 --> 0:17:47.760 we've been working on it together. You know, at the outset, 0:17:48.280 --> 0:17:51.159 I went into this thinking much more about how saving 0:17:51.200 --> 0:17:53.400 the rhinos is a noble cause, it's something we should 0:17:53.440 --> 0:17:56.280 be doing because it's an altruistic thing to do. But 0:17:56.320 --> 0:17:58.560 then a few weeks ago, the intake of a mental 0:17:58.680 --> 0:18:03.200 panel on climate change released this devastating report which talked 0:18:03.240 --> 0:18:06.680 about how a million different species could be at risk 0:18:06.680 --> 0:18:09.440 of extinction in the coming decades, and that really made 0:18:09.480 --> 0:18:12.119 me think about how our own destiny as a civilization 0:18:12.560 --> 0:18:16.439 depends upon the health and abundance of the natural world. 0:18:16.640 --> 0:18:19.240 You know, the raw materials that we use for manufacturing 0:18:19.600 --> 0:18:22.280 the food and fresh water that we rely on to survive. 0:18:22.600 --> 0:18:26.200 All of these things depend on having plentiful natural habitats, 0:18:26.359 --> 0:18:28.919 and it made me think about conserving the rhinos in 0:18:28.960 --> 0:18:31.560 a different light. One thing I was thinking a lot 0:18:31.600 --> 0:18:33.720 about when we were recording this is, you know, what 0:18:33.840 --> 0:18:37.520 it means to restore something, what it means to save 0:18:37.560 --> 0:18:42.000 a species. You know, we talked about restoring the passenger pigeon, 0:18:42.040 --> 0:18:45.320 which one extinct in nineteen fourteen, But very little of 0:18:45.359 --> 0:18:49.360 our world looks like it did in nineteen fourteen when 0:18:49.520 --> 0:18:52.480 we talked about conservation, when we're talking in these really 0:18:52.640 --> 0:18:56.719 static terms, but I think the world is really a 0:18:56.760 --> 0:18:59.920 lot more dynamic than that. So I mean, like, po, 0:19:00.280 --> 0:19:03.720 how how do you think about conservation in a world 0:19:03.760 --> 0:19:06.879 that's fluid. On the one hand, we don't want to 0:19:06.920 --> 0:19:10.119 be nostalgic and be trying to bring back things that 0:19:10.160 --> 0:19:13.240 have passed out of existence already. On the other hand, 0:19:13.280 --> 0:19:15.560 we really do need to pay attention to save what's 0:19:15.560 --> 0:19:18.040 still left. And I wonder I would be interested to 0:19:18.080 --> 0:19:20.800 see where the further out and line some of these 0:19:21.119 --> 0:19:24.600 new emerging scientific techniques are able to, you know, once 0:19:24.640 --> 0:19:27.040 they've been tested and refined on a species like the rhino, 0:19:27.400 --> 0:19:30.960 maybe there will be a more mainstream and more potent 0:19:31.080 --> 0:19:34.439 application for it. Right, So those fight is much bigger 0:19:34.440 --> 0:19:36.439 than the rhino. It's about saving what's left of the 0:19:36.440 --> 0:19:40.359 world's natural habitats and recognizing that we also derive economic 0:19:40.480 --> 0:19:45.960 benefit from a healthy planet. That's it for this week's 0:19:45.960 --> 0:19:49.199 episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always want to 0:19:49.240 --> 0:19:51.120 know what you think of the show. You can write 0:19:51.119 --> 0:19:54.880 to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm 0:19:54.920 --> 0:19:58.360 on Twitter at Kristin B. Brown and I'm at pare 0:19:58.359 --> 0:20:01.679 Gatkari and please help us spread the word about our 0:20:01.720 --> 0:20:04.760 show by leaving us a rating or review wherever you 0:20:04.840 --> 0:20:07.960 like to listen. This episode was produced by Pia Goodcary 0:20:08.119 --> 0:20:12.320 and Lindsay Cratterwell. Our story editor was Emily Busso. Thank 0:20:12.359 --> 0:20:16.959 you also to Akido and Vandermain and Brad Stone. Francesca 0:20:17.040 --> 0:20:20.320 Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll see you next week.