Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says from my
Speaker 1: heart and from my hand, why don't people understand my intention?
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Volcaba, and I'm Joe McCormick. So, guys,
Speaker 1: have you have you ever watched? Uh it's a little
Speaker 1: known documentary film called Jurassic Park. I only saw Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park three, but it was fantastic. Uh No, I saw
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park in the theater when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: and it blew my mind. I probably I got the
Speaker 1: VHS tape when it came out and I watched it
Speaker 1: until the tape was no more right. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was certainly one of those that sparked people's imaginations. For
Speaker 1: one thing, of course, it was a great example of
Speaker 1: c g I in an era when before that you
Speaker 1: didn't really see it at that level of sophistication. It
Speaker 1: was for the time, really believable effects. Oh yeah, people
Speaker 1: love c G I in the nineties, but if you
Speaker 1: go back and watch most of those nineties movies now
Speaker 1: they look awful. Yeah, they definitely Yeah, well it's you know,
Speaker 1: in Jurassic Park was one of the ones that really
Speaker 1: incorporated puppets and also practical and cg those a good choice.
Speaker 1: How things held up yep, yep. And so here's the thing, guys,
Speaker 1: um you know, it kind of popularized this idea of
Speaker 1: what if we could get some sort of genetic material
Speaker 1: from long extinct species and then through some sort of
Speaker 1: science application, bring those extinct species back to life all
Speaker 1: odd Jurassic Park. You notice in Jurassic Park when they're
Speaker 1: taking them through the lab, they kind of skipped through
Speaker 1: all the hard parts. Well, I love that the science
Speaker 1: is all delivered by a cartoon character that is dumbing
Speaker 1: everything down for the lowest common denominator. And part of
Speaker 1: that is so that the writers don't have to go
Speaker 1: to the trouble of actually explaining how it works or
Speaker 1: how it would work if it could work right. Well,
Speaker 1: the book To Be Fair went a little bit more
Speaker 1: into that, but it's still absolutely a work of fiction.
Speaker 1: And even though Michael Crichton has has this cute tendency
Speaker 1: of footnoting his fictional works, that doesn't mean that those
Speaker 1: footnotes are based on whoa whoa whoa work of fiction. Now,
Speaker 1: I thought we had already cloned a few dinosaurs. Is
Speaker 1: that not true? We we don't have resurrected raptors and
Speaker 1: t rex is somewhere in Texas only in my heart, Yeah,
Speaker 1: sadly no. So the reason why this this is part
Speaker 1: of our discussion today is because in the news recently
Speaker 1: there have been some articles about de extinction and we
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about what the extinction is and UH
Speaker 1: and what its applications could be and why there is
Speaker 1: controversy around it. But to start off kind of helps
Speaker 1: lay the groundwork if we actually talk about just the
Speaker 1: whole problem of extinction in the first place. So, first,
Speaker 1: how many species go extinct every year? I don't know
Speaker 1: how you could even guess? Yeah, yeah, it turns out
Speaker 1: that that that's very difficult. You can really just estimate.
Speaker 1: For one thing, we don't even know how many species
Speaker 1: there are, do we absolutely not. We are still discovering
Speaker 1: some like fifteen thousand species every year, and UH researchers
Speaker 1: think that that of the one point to million that
Speaker 1: we've already documented on on this our wonderful planet Earth,
Speaker 1: that might be a part of some eight point seven
Speaker 1: million that are kicking around. Wow. So yeah, we still
Speaker 1: have quite a bit of quite a few more species
Speaker 1: to discover before we get close to it. We're like
Speaker 1: not even a quarter of the way there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there might be some some eight percent of life on
Speaker 1: Earth that is yet undiscovered. Um. But but here's the thing.
Speaker 1: A lot of the ones that we're currently discovering are
Speaker 1: already endangered. Yeah. So they're already you know, the populations
Speaker 1: already so small that that the smallest of of influences
Speaker 1: could make these populations go extinct. Things could be going
Speaker 1: extinct before we have even documented them. And it's worth
Speaker 1: pointing out that things go extinct naturally. I mean that
Speaker 1: happens all the time, and not just when meteors hit either, right, No,
Speaker 1: I mean just due to the pressures of nature, you know,
Speaker 1: food supply and predation. Things go out of business, sometimes
Speaker 1: a species is gone. But also we drive things to
Speaker 1: extinction knowing yes, there's a there's natural background extinction, which
Speaker 1: is what the rate of extinction would be if humans
Speaker 1: were not part of the picture, and it is significantly
Speaker 1: lower than once you factor humans in. How significantly well
Speaker 1: scientists estimate that the extincion extinction rate is one thousand
Speaker 1: to ten thousand times greater than that background extinction rate
Speaker 1: according to the World Wildlife Fund. So that's one thousand
Speaker 1: to ten thousand times. I mean, that's human influence right there.
Speaker 1: On top of that. That means that anywhere between point
Speaker 1: zero one and point one percent of all species go
Speaker 1: extinct every year. And again the reason why I point
Speaker 1: zero one to point one is because we don't know
Speaker 1: how many species there are, nor can we really get
Speaker 1: an estimate on exactly how many are going extinct every year.
Speaker 1: So these are all you know, based on on like
Speaker 1: wide ranges and guesses and if you want to know
Speaker 1: how wide, well, the estimation on how many species are
Speaker 1: out there, uh, and the extinction rates taken into as
Speaker 1: a combination mean that something between two hundred and one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand species are going extinct every year. So on
Speaker 1: the low end, two hundred species not great, but you know,
Speaker 1: not a hundred thousand. But again, all of this is
Speaker 1: just based on those those crazy estimations of how many
Speaker 1: species are out there and how many are actually dying
Speaker 1: out right. And I do want to put in that
Speaker 1: not all of these species are like adorable monkeys. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of bacteria and stuff like that involved
Speaker 1: in these calculations, right. Uh. And some of them, however,
Speaker 1: are totally adorable. Some of them are adorable monkeys or
Speaker 1: or some other you know, equally adorable animal. And according
Speaker 1: to the i u c N Red List criteria, there
Speaker 1: are sixteen thousand, ninety eight species on the endangered list,
Speaker 1: and the same list identify as nine hundred five species
Speaker 1: that are now extinct in the wild, now extinct, like
Speaker 1: since the beginning of this classification. Yeah, essentially they're identifying
Speaker 1: species some of these there are still examples of those species,
Speaker 1: but they are all in captivity. None of them are
Speaker 1: in the y I see what you mean, Like in
Speaker 1: zoos exactly, you won't. You won't find them in their
Speaker 1: home ecosystems anymore, at least none have been spotted for
Speaker 1: at least a few decades. Uh. And in fact, that's
Speaker 1: one of the problems with listing animals as extinct. You know,
Speaker 1: it's all based upon our observations. It's not like we
Speaker 1: have a little light on a giant switchboard and when
Speaker 1: the light goes out, you know that that species has gone.
Speaker 1: So it's a little complicated. Okay, So now that we
Speaker 1: can see how fast the problem is getting worse that
Speaker 1: we're we're changing ecosystems constantly by knocking species out of business.
Speaker 1: This can't be a great idea to just drive species
Speaker 1: to extinction with no forethought. Is it possible to reverse
Speaker 1: the polarity? Um? Okay, so we're going star trek on this. Okay, Uh,
Speaker 1: technically it's it depends. It depends upon the species and
Speaker 1: how long it's been extinct. So for example, Jurassic Park,
Speaker 1: that's the example with all the dinosaurs coming back. Is
Speaker 1: that realistic? As it turns out, it is not. And
Speaker 1: the reason for that is because DNA degrades over time.
Speaker 1: It does not remain completely pristine. Even if you were
Speaker 1: to find a mosquito buried in amber that had dinosaur
Speaker 1: blood in it, that DNA will degrade within the little
Speaker 1: gut of that mosquito. So it's not like you're going
Speaker 1: to suddenly have a perfect strand of DNA where you
Speaker 1: can sequence a dinosaurs genome. It's just not going to happen. Well,
Speaker 1: you're not even going to get like a few little
Speaker 1: strands like I don't know, give me some numbers here.
Speaker 1: The thing is is that DNA is is only really
Speaker 1: readable for about a million years. It's it's got a
Speaker 1: half life of five and twenty one years, which means
Speaker 1: that that how of the nucleu tide bonds and it
Speaker 1: will break down every one years, right, um, Which means
Speaker 1: that basically anything over a million years old is effectively gibberish,
Speaker 1: and anything over some six point eight million is effectively destroyed. Um,
Speaker 1: which is pretty impressive for for DNA. That's a lot
Speaker 1: longer than we actually thought originally that it was going
Speaker 1: to last. But the thing is that the dinosaur extinction
Speaker 1: event happened some sixty three million years ago. Um. The
Speaker 1: the oldest sample of DNA have read about being used
Speaker 1: to create a successful clone was only frozen for sixteen years. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: so but here's a question I always had about Jurassic Park,
Speaker 1: which is, even if you could get that DNA, even
Speaker 1: if what you're talking about didn't happen, how would you
Speaker 1: make it into an egg that hatches? Yeah, we'd have to. Um.
Speaker 1: I feel like they skipped over that part in the movie.
Speaker 1: I don't remember what they said. Well, they combined, they combined,
Speaker 1: they filled in gaps in the genome that they had,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk a little bit about filling in gaps,
Speaker 1: because that actually is something that people are trying to do.
Speaker 1: You know that they've filled it with the DNA of
Speaker 1: a frog. I guess the question is more like physical
Speaker 1: how they get it into an egg. They also they
Speaker 1: also used frog eggs, I believe, for for cloning purposes.
Speaker 1: The way that cloning works is usually you scoop the
Speaker 1: DNA out of existing cell nucleus and put new DNA
Speaker 1: material in there right right, and you and then you
Speaker 1: hope it ends up forming an embryo. Yeah. The problem
Speaker 1: is that that egg cells contain mitochondria, which contain their
Speaker 1: own little bits of DNA from the donor animal. And
Speaker 1: unlike in say Star Trek, when Klingons and humans which
Speaker 1: evolved on completely separate planets, can produce viable offspring, or
Speaker 1: even in Jurassic Park, where it just gave them plot
Speaker 1: dependent hero saving weaknesses. Um, really, it's it's more likely
Speaker 1: that these cells would just be be unviable. They would
Speaker 1: not be able to germinate, would not produce any kind
Speaker 1: of any kind of life. Yeah, and also I should
Speaker 1: point out that it wasn't just weaknesses. It also gave
Speaker 1: them their strength because that was what gave dinosaurs the
Speaker 1: ability to spontaneously switch sexes. So that allowed them to
Speaker 1: continue to have because they were supposed to all be female,
Speaker 1: and then uh they a couple of them ended up
Speaker 1: being able because because the jenet material they had was
Speaker 1: taken from frogs that were able to change their genders. Basically, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so I guess we can't bring dinosaurs back. What can
Speaker 1: we do? Can we? Maybe we can't resurrect a t rex?
Speaker 1: Can we resurrect something like a mammoth? Actually, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of people working on exactly that. The wooly
Speaker 1: mammoth has become kind of the poster animal for a
Speaker 1: lot of different efforts. Not the only one, We've got,
Speaker 1: another one will chat about. Yeah, populations of William mammoth's
Speaker 1: were around as as early late as about ten thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, or possibly as recently as four thousand years ago. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's certainly a viable, a viable option. I most
Speaker 1: of the time I hear around ten thousand years is
Speaker 1: about what people expect to be able to bring back
Speaker 1: from extinction. That's like a kind of a round figure
Speaker 1: that people throw around. But as for actual efforts, like
Speaker 1: real scientists doing real science trying to bring extinct animals back.
Speaker 1: We've got two examples we can talk about right now
Speaker 1: that we're semi successful. Uh, semi successful meaning that ultimately
Speaker 1: you didn't have an animal survive very long, but but
Speaker 1: there was development yet technically successful. So if you get
Speaker 1: sad about stories about furry animals not living very long,
Speaker 1: you may want to skip ahead a little bit because
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you about Celia. Lay it on me,
Speaker 1: all right. Ce Celia was the last known living brocado,
Speaker 1: which is a type of ibex and and for those
Speaker 1: of us who don't encounter ibex is very frequently, that's
Speaker 1: sort of kind of like a goat like animals, the
Speaker 1: ones that have the really long round horns and like
Speaker 1: they loop back. Well, the bricado was one population, one
Speaker 1: one species, so it uh had dwindled until they really
Speaker 1: only thought there was this one living brocado left, and
Speaker 1: they named her Celia, fitted her with a collar, kept
Speaker 1: her in the wild. The collar monitored Celia's life signs,
Speaker 1: and then one day the collar essentially indicated that Celia's
Speaker 1: heart had stopped beating. A team went out to find
Speaker 1: out what had happened. And discovered that Celia had been
Speaker 1: crushed to death by the limb of a falling tree.
Speaker 1: They they managed to harvest them cells from celia and
Speaker 1: they froze them, they preserved them, and then years later
Speaker 1: another team researchers and scientists decided to try and bring
Speaker 1: the brocado back. It was only about three years later,
Speaker 1: so this was so the cells had not been in
Speaker 1: cold storage for very long. Yeah, they ended up harvesting
Speaker 1: the nuclei from those cells, and then they used emptied
Speaker 1: goat eggs cells and injected the nuclei from the brocado
Speaker 1: into the goat egg cells and then landed those into
Speaker 1: surrogate mothers. And they did fifties seven attempts. Only seven
Speaker 1: of those resulted in pregnancy, and six of those ended
Speaker 1: a miscarriage. However, that that last example was actually brought
Speaker 1: all the way up to where you had a baby
Speaker 1: brocado delivered by c section um. The baby brocado or
Speaker 1: the kid, unfortunately didn't have its lungs developed properly. One
Speaker 1: of its lungs actually formed essentially like a solid mass
Speaker 1: of tissue kind of like they described it being more
Speaker 1: like a liver. That good breeding. Yeah, and it. It
Speaker 1: essentially suffocated to death shortly after it was born, so
Speaker 1: it only it only survived a couple of minutes. So
Speaker 1: that's very sad. But it did lay the groundwork and
Speaker 1: foundation for a lot of other UH groups to kind
Speaker 1: of make this attempt. This was back in in two
Speaker 1: thousand three, so this was you know, you know, more
Speaker 1: than a decade ago. Now there's another project called the
Speaker 1: Lazarus Project, which UM is the University of new Castle, Australia,
Speaker 1: and they decided to go with a totally different kind
Speaker 1: of cute cuddly animal, a frog. It gives birth by
Speaker 1: regurgitating its babies. Yeah, it's a it's a frog that
Speaker 1: gives birth through its mouth, essentially regurgitates its babies. But
Speaker 1: if you kiss it, it regurgitates the prince. No, it
Speaker 1: actually regurgitates prints and he'll sing purple rain. It turns
Speaker 1: into a prince that regurgitates frogs. I think we might
Speaker 1: be getting off track. What actually happens is the way
Speaker 1: this frog reproduces. It lays eggs, The eggs are fertilized,
Speaker 1: and then the frog swallows the eggs to protect them,
Speaker 1: and then once the eggs hatch, it pukes up the babies.
Speaker 1: So this particular frog though, had gone extinct. Joe, this
Speaker 1: is no laughing matter. This is this is I'm just
Speaker 1: protecting them from Well, sure, when you put it like that,
Speaker 1: it sounds like it's you know, obscene, but no, it's
Speaker 1: it's really how these animals, how these animals survive. And um,
Speaker 1: this particular animal that the rio back trachius silas frog
Speaker 1: has gone when extinct back in the you know, nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: but some of its cells had been in deep freeze,
Speaker 1: in a regular freezer actually since the nineteen seventies. And
Speaker 1: so the Lazarus Project harvested the nuclei and then they
Speaker 1: put them into emptied frog cells from great barred frogs,
Speaker 1: which are a fairly close relative to the frog that
Speaker 1: had gun extinct. So some of the cells began to
Speaker 1: divide and go right into the embryo stage, but none
Speaker 1: of the embryos survived past a few days. So again
Speaker 1: sort of promising results but not not a full success.
Speaker 1: Then you have another group called Revive and restore. This
Speaker 1: is one that I thought was really interesting. There are
Speaker 1: several articles that published in early fourteen about their particular
Speaker 1: drive to de extinction technologies. And their approach is a
Speaker 1: little different from, um, what we've been talking about. They're
Speaker 1: looking at creating a chimera, which is not, uh, the
Speaker 1: mythological creature that you know, you may be familiar with,
Speaker 1: particularly if you played a lot of dudgeons and dragons.
Speaker 1: And although that would be cool, can can we de extinctify? Well,
Speaker 1: we gotta, we gotta wait till the end of the
Speaker 1: podcast before we talk about that, but we we will
Speaker 1: address that, yes, um, but yes, Reviving Restore was looking
Speaker 1: at creating this These these animals that outwardly resemble one species,
Speaker 1: but internally have some elements of a different species, So
Speaker 1: they are a chimera of two different species. And the
Speaker 1: example that was used in all the articles because one
Speaker 1: of the people involved in Reviving Restore is so passionate
Speaker 1: about this particular species, is the passenger pigeon. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't know how much you guys know about passenger pigeons.
Speaker 1: At one time it was the dominant species of birds
Speaker 1: in the United States. There were something like five billion
Speaker 1: of them. I've I've read reports of like the flocks
Speaker 1: of them blotting out the sun. Yeah, they made up
Speaker 1: sixty percent of all birds in the us. So to
Speaker 1: think that we went from a population that enormous too
Speaker 1: completely extinct in just a couple of decades due to
Speaker 1: hunting and and other problems as well, it is pretty
Speaker 1: eye opening to think that, you know, essentially that's saying like,
Speaker 1: no species is safe. If you think of something that
Speaker 1: looks that plentiful and yet could go extinct that quickly,
Speaker 1: it's a real eye opener. Well, the idea behind the
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon approach is to uh sequence the passenger pigeon
Speaker 1: genome by harvesting cells from various museum exhibits that have
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons, like no stuffed on display, to take some
Speaker 1: cells from that and to try and sequence the genome.
Speaker 1: And there's gaps in that genome, kind of like in
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park, and so to fill in those gaps, they
Speaker 1: start looking at some of the closest relatives to the
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon and trying to kind of, you know, fudge
Speaker 1: it a little bit, fill it in. Yeah, the modern
Speaker 1: band tailed pigeon, I think is one of the closest,
Speaker 1: and the idea is to get to a point where
Speaker 1: they can sequence d n A so that they can
Speaker 1: inject it directly into an egg of a band tailed pigeon.
Speaker 1: They'd actually make a little hole in the egg, inject
Speaker 1: the DNA down into it, and then patch the hole
Speaker 1: with essentially what looks like saran wrap, and allow it
Speaker 1: to continue to develop until it hatches into a hatchling. Now,
Speaker 1: the hatchling is going to look and behave just like
Speaker 1: a band tailed pigeon. It is, to all outward appearances,
Speaker 1: a simple band tailed pigeon, but it's reproductive cells as
Speaker 1: in its egg or sperm cells will be passenger pigeon cells.
Speaker 1: So if you can take a male and female band
Speaker 1: tailed pigeon that's been altered in this way and breed
Speaker 1: them together, then in theory, you would get a passenger pigeon.
Speaker 1: Kind of cool, also weird, little terrifying, pretty cool. The
Speaker 1: weirdest part is our I don't know if it's the
Speaker 1: weirdest part, but a weird part is that they're not
Speaker 1: really sure how to teach the passenger pigeons how to
Speaker 1: be passenger pigeons, assuming that this works, because this is
Speaker 1: not this is not something that's happened yet. It's it's
Speaker 1: something that they hypothesize would be possible, but they haven't
Speaker 1: proved it yet. But the thing that they're wondering is, Okay,
Speaker 1: if it hatches into this passenger pigeon after you know
Speaker 1: it's it's two generations removed from when things, Um, will
Speaker 1: it behave like a band tailed pigeon or would some
Speaker 1: behaviors be innate pigeons. That would come down to the
Speaker 1: question of whether its behaviors are more learned or instinctual. Sure,
Speaker 1: and I'm I'm wondering in the case of pigeons, I mean,
Speaker 1: and no offense to to pigeon aficionados out there, but
Speaker 1: but exactly how big the differences and whether or not
Speaker 1: that's uh, whether or not that's the operative point when
Speaker 1: you're talking pigeons. I think the biggest difference is migratory
Speaker 1: patterns because the passenger pigeon wasn't very didn't migrate very much,
Speaker 1: and some of these other pigeons do. So it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where you're not there. They're not sure
Speaker 1: if this is even possible. And if we do bring
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons back, will they behave the way passenger pigeons
Speaker 1: of old did or will they be some sort of
Speaker 1: new species that are very close to what passenger pigeons were,
Speaker 1: but behave in a different way, and honestly, people aren't sure.
Speaker 1: And those are important questions because that also puts an
Speaker 1: impact upon the ecosystem that the passenger pigeon encounters, like
Speaker 1: you have to remember, and that we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about this a lot in our next section, about the
Speaker 1: fact that the world is this really interconnected, complicated system,
Speaker 1: and just because you add one thing in one place
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's not somehow going to affect something else
Speaker 1: really far away, just through uh this whole you know,
Speaker 1: kind of domino effect or chaos theory if you're a
Speaker 1: certain mathematician. So this brings us to this question of
Speaker 1: if let's assuming that these these different approaches bear fruit,
Speaker 1: that they are able to bring at least some types
Speaker 1: of extinct species back to life through one of these methods,
Speaker 1: what are some of the other ethical and practical considerations
Speaker 1: we have to make, uh with this technology in mind.
Speaker 1: One of the ones I've seen, though I take some
Speaker 1: issue with it, is this view that, well, it might
Speaker 1: be a zero sum game, you know, so that if
Speaker 1: we're putting money and effort and time and attention into
Speaker 1: bringing extinct species back from the dead. Are we going
Speaker 1: to be therefore losing all of those same types of
Speaker 1: investments that we should be putting into keeping endangered species alive? Well? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if it's the super flashy, sexy kind of
Speaker 1: technology where you could tell people, hey, the majestic wooly
Speaker 1: mammoth could stride across the plains again, I mean, people
Speaker 1: are going to get excited about that. But it's something
Speaker 1: that none of us have ever seen. Hares about pandas.
Speaker 1: Let's to be fair, even conservationists say, who cares about
Speaker 1: pandas because they claim, or at least the ones I
Speaker 1: read claim, are the panda. The panda thing is like
Speaker 1: pandas are plentiful compared to say, white rhinos, Well, who
Speaker 1: cares about white rhinos? Let's bring willy mammoth. See that
Speaker 1: that's the worry, right, And and like you said, it's
Speaker 1: kind of two pronged. It's worrying about taking attention away
Speaker 1: from conservation efforts and also and probably more importantly, money
Speaker 1: from conservation efforts. Yeah. So if that were really how
Speaker 1: it worked, Like in order to invest in bringing something
Speaker 1: back from extinction, you have to take money away from conservation,
Speaker 1: I would consider that a very legitimate complaint. I don't
Speaker 1: think it necessarily works that way, Like no, and I
Speaker 1: think that really, in fact, you're you're going to be
Speaker 1: drawing attention to the overall issue. And I mean I
Speaker 1: would imagine, well, I know that a lot of these
Speaker 1: projects specifically take conservation as one of their big concerns,
Speaker 1: so that they they acknowledge that conservation is very important
Speaker 1: and that they don't want to be considered an alternative
Speaker 1: conservation that's more of a supplement to conservation efforts. But
Speaker 1: the way specifically saying it's not a zero sum game, right.
Speaker 1: The problem is that when you start reporting on this stuff,
Speaker 1: and I mean it's easy to see why this this
Speaker 1: happens in the media, but the attention is this is
Speaker 1: super awesome, cool technology that could really be interesting if
Speaker 1: it works, uh, and it would be able to bring
Speaker 1: species that most of us have never ever seen back
Speaker 1: to life. That's really enticing. And it may not be.
Speaker 1: The real story may not be that it's you know,
Speaker 1: de extinction versus conservation. It's just that the way the
Speaker 1: media portrays it, it seems like de extinction is the
Speaker 1: cool thing and conservation isn't really mentioned very frequently except
Speaker 1: in some of those more in depth articles where they
Speaker 1: really try to to to dig down deep and get
Speaker 1: into the story. And we read quite a few of
Speaker 1: those articles, and some of them are amazing. They really
Speaker 1: look at all facets of the story and they take
Speaker 1: this head on. And I would agree that I think
Speaker 1: conservation and de extinction can survive side by side. They
Speaker 1: can they can complement one another. I do also think
Speaker 1: that when it comes to someone giving their money to
Speaker 1: a cause, the de extinction one can might seem more
Speaker 1: attractive to certain people just because it does seem more
Speaker 1: exotic and flashy. But I don't think it's gonna be
Speaker 1: something that funnels like the funding away from conservation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't think that anyone is going to um
Speaker 1: going to just say like, well, well screw those pandas
Speaker 1: because we can just revive them later. Yeah, if I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like some people do take that complaint. Let
Speaker 1: me if I can advocate something here, despite the fact
Speaker 1: that this is a future technology kind of show we're
Speaker 1: doing here, if you are really actually forced to choose
Speaker 1: between conservation and d action, go with conservation obviously, right. Well,
Speaker 1: and and we'll talk a little bit about how some
Speaker 1: of these approaches can help in conservation efforts as well.
Speaker 1: And I should also point out that everyone says, not
Speaker 1: that I have a money figure to put on this,
Speaker 1: but everyone says that this de extinction approach is going
Speaker 1: to be complicated, it's going to be, especially in the
Speaker 1: early years, unreliable or or difficult, and it's going to
Speaker 1: be really expensive. So it's not something that is going
Speaker 1: to be done for every single species that has ever
Speaker 1: gone extinct. There's going to be choices made. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so it may very well be that this is something
Speaker 1: that happens with a few passion projects where people are
Speaker 1: really pushing to bring back certain species and others are
Speaker 1: left behind. And it's not because one is better than
Speaker 1: the other. It's just that that's where people were able
Speaker 1: to direct the money and effort toward. Sure, but let's
Speaker 1: talk about a few of those reasons why we would
Speaker 1: want to. I mean, if we really only had ten
Speaker 1: dollars um and those ten dollars could fund either the
Speaker 1: extinction forever or conservation forever, why should we go with conservation.
Speaker 1: I'd say one thing is that it's something you can
Speaker 1: trust in because you can see it like it's our
Speaker 1: conservation actually works, Like there's no question about uh, you know,
Speaker 1: what will happen if we stop killing these animals, right,
Speaker 1: you know, like, Okay, if we stopped killing them, that
Speaker 1: actually will work. The extinction is questionable. It might work,
Speaker 1: it might not sure, So there's a risk on on return.
Speaker 1: I mean, just based upon that. If you're if you
Speaker 1: want to just separate yourself from the whole animal thing,
Speaker 1: it's there's there's one method that you know is going
Speaker 1: towards helping actual living creatures right now, and one method
Speaker 1: that could possibly maybe bring something back, but we aren't sure.
Speaker 1: We also know that any animal that is sustaining a
Speaker 1: population on Earth today, at least barring major human intervention,
Speaker 1: has a place in its current ecosystem, right In other words,
Speaker 1: the ecosystem is able to support that population. Uh. I,
Speaker 1: So I would say, well, maybe let's bring back the
Speaker 1: wooly mammoth. Well, I'm not sure that the wooly mammoth
Speaker 1: necessarily has a place in today's ecosis. And that is
Speaker 1: another great argument that people make about this, the extinction question.
Speaker 1: It's that you can't really be sure with some of
Speaker 1: these species that they would have a place in the
Speaker 1: world where they could survive, let alone thrive. And for
Speaker 1: species that have been extinct for a few thousand years,
Speaker 1: the question is is more you know unknown? We don't know,
Speaker 1: because ecosystems do change over time, not necessarily rapidly unless
Speaker 1: there's outside intervention in the form of you know, humans
Speaker 1: messing with an ecosystem or something really massive like a
Speaker 1: meteor strike or whatever. Meteor right, I guess I should
Speaker 1: say strike. But these systems do change over time, and
Speaker 1: it's possible that some species would find it very difficult
Speaker 1: to survive in today's ecosystems. Absolutely, and we're not just
Speaker 1: talking about the macro scale of of predators and prey
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff. Also the micro scale.
Speaker 1: I mean, the more that we learned about the microbiome,
Speaker 1: the more we think it could have a serious impact
Speaker 1: on on any given macro organisms um quality of life
Speaker 1: and even survival. We we talked recently in our episodes
Speaker 1: about antibiotics and hygiene that that germs aren't always harp harmful. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of them evolved in tandem with
Speaker 1: multicellular species, and that really weird stuff happens when we
Speaker 1: killed too many germs off. Right now, for a species
Speaker 1: that have gone extinct relatively recently, it may be that
Speaker 1: there are plenty of ecosystems in which it could survive
Speaker 1: and thrive. So something that died out ten years ago
Speaker 1: or fifty years ago might still have a place to
Speaker 1: survive and be relatively fine. But for things that when
Speaker 1: extinct much longer ago, the question is, well, is the
Speaker 1: has the world changed so much that this creature would
Speaker 1: have a real hard time to survive? And is it
Speaker 1: fair to bring something back to life if it's just
Speaker 1: going to die out again? Right? And I think that
Speaker 1: question is crucial because even if we're just talking about
Speaker 1: species that were driven to extinction by humans and not
Speaker 1: by natural forces, this is not just like hunters going
Speaker 1: out and killing all of them. A lot of what
Speaker 1: we're talking about, In fact, I don't know for sure,
Speaker 1: but I would guess that most of it is due
Speaker 1: to habitat destruction. Sure, but the people building cities and
Speaker 1: going further and further into the surrounding environments to cut
Speaker 1: down trees, make past your land, all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: food sources are breeding grounds or anything like that slowly disappearing. Yes,
Speaker 1: So I mean, one of the easiest ways to kill
Speaker 1: an animal is not to go out looking for all
Speaker 1: of them and kill them for their tusks or whatever.
Speaker 1: Much more action packed. Well, yeah, it's to destroy their habitat.
Speaker 1: They don't have a place to live and thrive and
Speaker 1: occupy that there's no chance for them. One more argument
Speaker 1: that I've heard against the extinction is based a lot
Speaker 1: on the fact that we just don't know very much
Speaker 1: about what will happen should this technology prove to be
Speaker 1: useful to to actually work, uh. And that is that
Speaker 1: species may be able to spread or cause disease or
Speaker 1: otherwise harm and ecosystem. So it may be that a
Speaker 1: species that was extinct when it comes back, becomes a
Speaker 1: carrier for a disease and then spreads it much more
Speaker 1: quickly than it would have if that species had never
Speaker 1: been brought back. That's one. It's really an argument from
Speaker 1: the unknown, right, we just don't know this is a
Speaker 1: plausible outcome, but we don't know if it's or at
Speaker 1: least a possible log and we don't know how plausible
Speaker 1: it is. Uh. And also just to worry about how
Speaker 1: it would end up affecting the ecosystem you introduce it to,
Speaker 1: assuming that you're not just bringing species back to put
Speaker 1: them in zoos then putting them into any kind of
Speaker 1: ecosystem is going to affect that ecosystem, sure, and even
Speaker 1: even bits of stuff from other ecosystems that currently exist
Speaker 1: on the planet can be very detrimental. I mean, look
Speaker 1: at a kudzu or um the little zebra muscles of
Speaker 1: the Great Lakes, or or rats everywhere um or dogs
Speaker 1: and cats in say Australia, New Zealand, which ended up
Speaker 1: wiping out a lot of both the other predators and
Speaker 1: prey uh in that region. So yeah, I mean, we
Speaker 1: we've seen how bringing a foreign species into an ecosystem
Speaker 1: can wreak havoc among the rest of the life forms
Speaker 1: that are there. And for these extinct animals, especially some
Speaker 1: of them that you could consider them, you know, an
Speaker 1: alien species to that ecosystem, depending upon how long they've
Speaker 1: been gone. Well probably alien more so than any foreign
Speaker 1: species currently on Earth. Right Well yeah, arguably, I mean,
Speaker 1: depending I guess, I guess it really depends. We've got
Speaker 1: some really crazy life forms in some very specific ecosystems
Speaker 1: and to take them out and put them into something
Speaker 1: else with uh definitely be unethical. Don't do that. So
Speaker 1: one other thing I wanted to touch on before we
Speaker 1: conclude is other ways this technology could be used. And
Speaker 1: I had mentioned that there is the possibility that they
Speaker 1: could use this technology to help in conservation efforts, in
Speaker 1: other words, specifically helping out endangered species rather than necessarily
Speaker 1: trying to bring back an extinct one, to try and
Speaker 1: create more biodiversity in existing small population. So for some
Speaker 1: species we're talking you know, there's some animals out there
Speaker 1: where the only known members of that population it adds
Speaker 1: up to maybe a couple of dozen or maybe even
Speaker 1: fewer than that. That's not going to be healthy. If
Speaker 1: their gene pool is that small, exactly, you you start
Speaker 1: to really worry about the biodiversity in that population. They
Speaker 1: can become more prone to birth defects and illnesses. So
Speaker 1: if you're able to increase that biodiversity, perhaps through using
Speaker 1: similar methods from the ones we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: but instead of trying to create a new species, you're
Speaker 1: just you're trying to create new babies in that population,
Speaker 1: but from diverse samples of DNA, perhaps gathered from you know,
Speaker 1: either zoos or in the case of animals that are
Speaker 1: no longer you know, they're they're endangered in the wild,
Speaker 1: but we still have a zoo population somewhere, or animals
Speaker 1: from you, material from museums, things like that, to help
Speaker 1: increase biodiversity and thus make the populations more hardy in
Speaker 1: addition to giving them more genetic diversity. I wonder if
Speaker 1: genetic engineering could come in to help an animal species
Speaker 1: that has been endangered by a specific threat. Say like
Speaker 1: if you have a fish that is a great risk
Speaker 1: because of one specific chemical pollutant and its water supply,
Speaker 1: could you introduce into the genome of that fish a
Speaker 1: gene that makes it more resistant to that pollutant. Getting
Speaker 1: into genetic engineering here, and that certainly has its own
Speaker 1: huge list of controversial elements to it, as we talked
Speaker 1: about in our food GMO and GMO genetically modified organ is. UM.
Speaker 1: It doesn't necessarily have to just refer to plants. It
Speaker 1: can talk We can talk about animals as well. UM.
Speaker 1: I mean in in theory or at least you know,
Speaker 1: you could hypothesize that such a thing as possible. I
Speaker 1: don't know how long it would take talking about such
Speaker 1: a specific application. It's it's a little tricky because I mean,
Speaker 1: one thing, it would give you a lot of focus
Speaker 1: and whatever it was you were trying to attempt. But
Speaker 1: the worry would be that whatever whatever, whenever you got
Speaker 1: to a point where you could address the problem, the
Speaker 1: problem would either have changed or the population would be
Speaker 1: dead anyway. So but but it's an interesting idea and
Speaker 1: just interesting application of the technology and maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit more practical than trying to bring back philosopraptors. Well,
Speaker 1: definitely who wants those. They're terrible, Uh, they're awful at
Speaker 1: parties there. But on the other hand, if you were
Speaker 1: going to try to do something like that, then again
Speaker 1: you're tampering and introducing this unknown factor. Right, like talked
Speaker 1: about with with other options earlier, You're you're changing an organism,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like introducing an alien organism ecosystem.
Speaker 1: You don't know exactly how that new organism, with its
Speaker 1: different genetic profile is going to function in that ecosystem.
Speaker 1: What if by giving this fish a gene to make
Speaker 1: it resistant to this pollutant, suddenly it takes over and
Speaker 1: now it's it's an invasive species. Right, the superfish might
Speaker 1: turn out to be way more detrimental than than what
Speaker 1: would have happened if you had just let alone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like this, this kind of brings us to the final point,
Speaker 1: which is this idea that you could create whole new
Speaker 1: species in a way. That's kind of what would be
Speaker 1: happening with the passenger pigeon, right news. So not just
Speaker 1: like a pollutant resistant fish, but maybe like a fish
Speaker 1: with eight eyes and a human arm. Yeah, or a
Speaker 1: machine gun. You know. Okay, it has the equivalent of
Speaker 1: you're you're talking Dr Moreau. Yeah, I'm telling Dodger Moreau
Speaker 1: in a way, I mean even more than Dr Moreau,
Speaker 1: which was kind of like the Chimera approach where he
Speaker 1: was combining various animals and making them trying anthropomorphized and
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. Jonathan, can you do the voice?
Speaker 1: Just just do the voice? Well, you want to do
Speaker 1: Marlon Brando as Dr Monroe, Dr Munro Monroe Morrow, That
Speaker 1: Monroe would be the one for the Simpsons. Uh No,
Speaker 1: I cannot do that. You got attempted, but I'm not
Speaker 1: going to because I can't remember the line anymore. Val
Speaker 1: Kilmer do it. I do a terrible impersonation of Val
Speaker 1: Kilmer doing a terrible impersonation of Marlon Brando doing Dr Morrow.
Speaker 1: So that's the way that chain goes. But at any rate, Uh,
Speaker 1: the idea is here that you know, if you could,
Speaker 1: if you could sequence, if you could construct a workable
Speaker 1: genome for an animal that has never existed, which in
Speaker 1: a way is kind of what some of these people
Speaker 1: are doing. You know, they're combining a genome for one
Speaker 1: species with genomes from very closely related species in an
Speaker 1: effort to try and revive extinct like the extinct passenger pigeon.
Speaker 1: That's specifically the example. But if you take this idea
Speaker 1: and you extend it into the future, and you think, well,
Speaker 1: what about once we figure out how to actually build
Speaker 1: those genomes, what stops us from eventually designing a genome
Speaker 1: for a species that never existed. It's not that it's
Speaker 1: something that went extinct and we got some of its
Speaker 1: DNA back and we filled in the gaps with other DNA.
Speaker 1: This is DNA we have completely built from the ground up,
Speaker 1: like retro engineering of velociraptor. Yeah, essentially, that would be
Speaker 1: the idea, is that you could in theory, if assuming
Speaker 1: that all of this would work. I mean, these are
Speaker 1: big assumptions. This is really talking like crazy like singularity
Speaker 1: level future ideas. But yes, you could do that. You
Speaker 1: could say, well, now we can build ourselves a dinosaur.
Speaker 1: We can't. We can't resurrect the dinosaurs make a chicken
Speaker 1: really big and extra mean pretty much. Wasn't that even
Speaker 1: a plot point in the novel Jurassic Park? Like the
Speaker 1: dinosaurs they were making weren't exactly dinosaurs. They were making
Speaker 1: these things that are were what people wanted to see
Speaker 1: when they came to see a dinosaur, but they specifically
Speaker 1: change them around a little bit to make them more
Speaker 1: tourist happy. Yeah. Yeah, although they did have several of
Speaker 1: the behaviors that confirmed the one uh the one paleontologists theories,
Speaker 1: like the fact that they would migrate, you know, that
Speaker 1: was that was very important in the book towards the
Speaker 1: very end, as I recall. But anyway, yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: kind of an interesting idea. We don't know that it
Speaker 1: will ever happen, for one thing, I mean, we still
Speaker 1: are waiting for the real success story of bringing a
Speaker 1: species back from extinction. Personally, I hope that it does happen.
Speaker 1: I would love to see some extinct species come back.
Speaker 1: I would really love to see this technology being dedicated
Speaker 1: to help in conservation efforts. Obviously, um I would really
Speaker 1: really love to see human beings behave in a responsible
Speaker 1: manner to the species around them and not kill them
Speaker 1: off through destroying their habitats or otherwise. That would be lovely. Hippie,
Speaker 1: you don't like Panda stakes, get off this podcast. How
Speaker 1: pandas can go? I mean, there they can go. They
Speaker 1: had their time. But now I'm just kidding guys. I
Speaker 1: as as you all know, I love all the critters
Speaker 1: of the forest, and I only joke. Yes, yes, we are.
Speaker 1: We are making some light of what is otherwise a
Speaker 1: pretty heavy situation here. But anyway, we will make sure
Speaker 1: to share a lot of the the articles that we
Speaker 1: read in preparation for this episode, because a lot of
Speaker 1: them go into great detail and and give a really
Speaker 1: full examination of the story. Some of them are more
Speaker 1: like profile pieces, but a lot of them really kind
Speaker 1: of dive into it. Make sure that that that you
Speaker 1: can tell the reporter went through the trouble of interviewing
Speaker 1: various experts with differing points of view to kind of
Speaker 1: get the full story. So we'll definitely share those in
Speaker 1: the future. And uh, yeah, this was a fun topic
Speaker 1: to to consider because I mean, just throwing it out there.
Speaker 1: I know. This is kind of similar to the question
Speaker 1: I had about if you could have any sort of
Speaker 1: robot animal, what would it be? If you could bring
Speaker 1: back any extinct species, what would it be beholder an
Speaker 1: actual species, not not constructing a new species, I mean
Speaker 1: a real species that once lived on the earth and
Speaker 1: now is no more. I you didn't prepare me for this.
Speaker 1: I can't think of what it would be. Um uh, Dodo.
Speaker 1: Dodo is good. That was my choice for robot animal.
Speaker 1: I like do um. I'm really curious about about actually
Speaker 1: horticulture the way that it existed a few hundred or
Speaker 1: a few thousand years ago. Like I want to taste
Speaker 1: the strawberries that that Queen Victoria had in her childhood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or have a decent banana since all the really good
Speaker 1: species have pretty much died out. Oh, I'm raising my hand. Megalodon, Oh, Megalodon?
Speaker 1: You want to us because that way we can have
Speaker 1: an even better version of Jaws. Yeah? Oh no, there
Speaker 1: are plenty of Megalodon moving. I'm aware of them. I
Speaker 1: know someone who produced one. Well, but we need a documentary,
Speaker 1: I mean a real documentary. Yeah, well, can you imagine
Speaker 1: Megalodon week? Actually we can we watch megalodon movies so
Speaker 1: we can tell you about the future of megalodons now
Speaker 1: since you didn't ask, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna choose wooly mammoth. I know it's the popular
Speaker 1: choice everyone talks about, but it's uh, they're so furry.
Speaker 1: I mean, it would just be I can't imagine the
Speaker 1: intellectual and emotional experience I would I would undergo witnessing
Speaker 1: a wooly mammoth walking around. I can't imagine a better
Speaker 1: way to feed a megalodon than a wooly mammoth. Just
Speaker 1: dangle a giant wooly mammoth over the megalodon. Megalodons aren't
Speaker 1: gonna want to eat modern animals. They're gonna want to
Speaker 1: eat wooly mammoth's it wants to hunt, all right, So
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna wrap this up on that cheerful note. So, guys,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestions for our discussions, maybe you
Speaker 1: want to join in. Maybe there's something about this particular
Speaker 1: topic you would like to contribute to. Well, let us know.
Speaker 1: We have an email address you can send us mail.
Speaker 1: It is FW thinking at Discovery dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can make contact with us all the various social networks
Speaker 1: that we often can be found on. Those include Twitter, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and Google Plus with the handle f W thinking and
Speaker 1: we will talk to you again really soon. For more
Speaker 1: on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward
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