Can we bring animals back from extinction? | The Royal Society

good evening everyone and welcome to this evening's british science week event can we bring animals back from extinction the event tonight explores the exciting world of genetics and ancient dna looking at whether it's possible to bring animals back from extinction and perhaps the more important question should we we've got an excellent panel joining us for tonight's discussion and i'm so excited to hear what they have to say if you'd like to get involved this evening please go to slido.com and use code b163 you can also follow the slido link in the video description throughout the event we will be put we will be using this to hear from you you can also submit questions for the panel here and upvote your favorite questions we'll be trying to answer as many questions as possible over the course of the discussion but we may not be able to answer everything that is submitted we also have live captioning available for this evening if you'd like to see that these please click the subtitles closed caption button button in the bottom bar if you'd like to tweet during the event please tag at royal society and use the hashtag british science week well first of all i'll kick off by introducing myself i'm lucy cook and um i studied zoology many moons ago these days i'm more often found writing got a book out at the moment called uh revolutionary guide sex evolution and the female animal there were no extinct animals in my book but i'm looking forward to finding out more about how those could be brought back to life from the guests this evening and they are first of all if you'd like to introduce yourself mike benton good evening my name's mike benton i'm a paleontologist at the university of bristol i'm interested in dinosaurs and particularly bringing dinosaurs back to life in a different context not in the sense of dna but working out what they looked like and i will show my book which was published recently and this is visions of dinosaurs what they looked like and in particular our discovery a number of years ago that you can reconstruct color and and you can use um data from the fossils often to learn extraordinary things about what they looked like that people would have thought was impossible at one time fabulous thank you so much mike and now beth would you like to introduce yourself beth shapiro sure uh my name is beth shapiro i am a professor at the university of california santa cruz where it's morning time right now so if any of my students walk in that door i apologize in advance um i also have some books i didn't know we were going to do show and tell but i'm going to do it anyway i have um one that just came out in october this is the british uh version of it i knew she let a little fingerprint piggies life as we made it but probably more pertinent to this conversation my first book is called how to clone a mammoth so if you want to do it there's the instruction manual right there so yeah quite straightforward really looking forward to the discussion and uh yeah that's it for now fantastic thanks so much beth great to meet you um and george church finally please introduce yourself uh yeah i feel like i'm the person that maybe forgot to bring to my duck but here is here's my book uh regenesis it does have a mammoth-like creature on the front uh and i i'm a professor at harvard and mit i work mainly on technology uh for reading and writing dna and and then any of the marvelous organisms uh ranging from dogs and pigs to elephants so that we engineer in various ways fantastic well to get started um i hope everybody's got their slido uh on on the go because we'd like to hear back from you on the question if you could bring back any animal from extinction what would it be so we're going to have a poll on that so if you could all answer that question and let us know that would be fantastic but to kick off the discussion um i'm going to start with you george in fact you're i mean one of the pioneers of genetics and gene editing could you give us a quick introduction to what this field of science is and why you find it so exciting right so uh gene editing uh is part of being able to to write uh change make changes in the genome and how it plays out in microbes in plants animals and human it's something like gene editing can be considered very broadly where you're introducing dna new dna or you're changing in a small way or in a large way i mean it's really it's a very broad term it can be um and and when we use it in humans it's usually termed gene therapy um and though and something very much like gene therapy is involved in the vaccines that we've just many of us have taken for cobit 19. in agriculture it can help plants deal with pests and things like that without using chemical pesticides and then with animals that's used for veterinary use in very similar ways that we use in humans and finally um we we can uh use you can we can make very radical changes in a in a genome to um adapt them to uh to transplant free transplanting organs or to fill a niche that has disappeared as a keystone species or as a endangered or recently extinct species fantastic thank you george um so i mean that it says that the technology is has has multiple uses so this this bringing animals back to life is really just sort of one aspect of of this technology um and beth i'd like to turn to you now and just sort of you know when we talk about genetics for bringing extinct animals back we can't just go out and collect dna as easily as we can from humans or animals that are alive how do we find this ancient dna and how is it still usable after such a long time um i'm just watching the slido too so i like this idea of the people putting in what they want and the dodo is currently winning just so everyone knows that's very exciting for me this is very exciting time i'm a very big fan of the dodo it was the first animal i worked on so how do we get how do we get dna actually it is pretty straightforward the the problem is that once an organism dies the dna that's in all of its cells starts to break down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until eventually there's not enough left that's going to be useful but we have all sorts of technologies that allow us to go out into the field mostly in cold places because you can imagine just like when you stick something in the freezer compared to in the fridge compared to leaving it on the surface if something is really cold it stays better preserved for longer so a lot of early work in ancient dna the field that i work in has been in cold places like the arctic which is one of the reasons we know so much about mammoths right they've lived in cold places and so we find their bones and we can go there and grind up a little piece of that bone and digest it to release all of the dna and then we can look at each of those pieces and we've learned something about these these fragments they tend to be really short things like uv light can hit the dna and break it into smaller and smaller pieces just like happens during life when we go outside and where why we wear sunscreen right also freezing and thawing will break the dna and then most importantly microbes things like fungi and bacteria they get into those samples and just chew it all up digesting it to make it turn into something else in the future but we can go in there and extract this dna we get millions or billions of these tiny little short fragments of dna a lot of it is that microbes the bacteria and fungi but some of it will be mammoth dna maybe as much as 10 or 50 percent of the dna that's in there will be mammoth dna and then we can take those little tiny fragments and we map them using a computer to the elephant genome which we've sequenced from living elephants and see where along that genome sequence each of those little tiny fragments goes and if we sequence enough of it we can build up a scaffold where we can see all of the places in the whole dna code of an elephant and a mammoth where the two species differ from each other and that will give us the instructions that we need for doing what george was just talking about which is going into that elephant cell growing in addition a lab and gradually tweaking it a little bit at a time using the tools of gene editing to cut out the elephant bit where it's different from what we now know a mammoth looked like and paste in its place the version that was the mammoth genome so we can go out and get dna from an extinct species as long as it's relatively recently extinct dinosaurs i guess we'll have to talk about in a little bit but and we can do that relatively straightforwardly the next steps are are harder fantastic thanks so much beth um i'm gonna i'm just gonna remind the audience now the um of the slido code when you go in you've got to you've got to use hashtag b163 and we're getting some great questions in already and one of them beth i'm going to follow on because it follows on from what you're talking about is um rv lee willingham has asked how do you would you account for the epigenetics of the extinct uh extinct species you know there's there's a lot of things that we don't really understand about what parts of our genomes make species look and act the way that they do and one of those is the idea of epigenetics this is you know what happens in the environment that makes some genes turn on or turn up or turn down or turn off we don't really know how to reconstruct these in living species there are ways that we can use molecular biology to figure out where there are epigenetic markers in genomes so that's possible but knowing what of those are actually important to making an animal look and act the way it did is really hard um but i think one of the things that i would say in defense is that we know that the environment is super important to making us all look and act the way we do um if if it weren't then identical twins which are essentially genetic clones of each other would be completely identical and we know that they're not right so obviously environmental influences which include epigenetic changes that will change gene expression are going to be important are they going to be so important that it means we're not going to create an arctic adapted elephant if we want to use this gene editing technology i tend to doubt it but i would push that over to george he's probably thought about this a little bit as well yeah i was going to say what does george think on this yeah i uh basically agree with beth that it's uh we're we're getting quite good at manipulating epigenetics and that and that kind of knowledge and technology is improving exponentially for example we have uh um you know a couple of companies that that their whole point is to is to manipulate epigenetics um to make organs for uh transplant or or other things like that and uh so and that's and that's the epigenetics of going from a fertilized egg to an adult and it is environmentally sensitive but we also are understanding how to manipulate the environment uh so that they they go where we want them to go so i there certainly are gaps in our knowledge but it's amazing what one can engineer without knowing everything i think we need to be humble about how how little we know but how little we need to know and have historically known and still sometimes gotten a very powerful technology so for example a smallpox vaccine was done at a time when almost nothing was known about viruses or immunology nevertheless it had a very positive impact on a very scary disease fantastic thank you george i'd like let's go let's go over to mike now with one of the questions that that is proving to be very popular on on slido which is has anyone ever bought an extinct animal back yet i don't believe they have and and we people have been trying with recently extinct species but beth will maybe correct me perunian ibex and various others people have got close but it's been quite tricky and of course all of this started in a a popular way with the the film jurassic park back in 1993 which was from a very smart um novel written by michael crichton who in fact had had a training in biomedical sciences so he was very aware of what was going on and if we go back to 1993 i think everybody's either seen the film or are aware of the scenario and generally people thought at the time could this just about happen now of course i think we have a more sophisticated understanding but back in 1993 the polymerase chain reaction pcr method had been devised was coming into wide use michael crichton was aware of this and it gave the opportunity to take very tiny tiny samples uh and clone them and sequence and and that had not been possible before and then this opens the possibility of looking at ancient dna and i remember a series of papers that were happening and in a way fiction was ahead of fact and people were reporting dna from ancient insects you'll remember that the scenario of the film and the book were that um blood was inside the stomach of a mosquito that had sucked the blood from a dinosaur and the scientists were and the the mosquito the fossil mosquito was preserved in amber so that every detail could be seen and hence the assumption was it would be very beautifully well preserved and somehow the scientists extracted this tiny amount of blood from the stomach of the cretaceous hundred million year old mosquito using pcr they were able to clone it multiply it up to substantial quantities inject it into a frog or some living animal and that it would somehow take over the dna within that living animal so that was the scenario and there was a series of papers culminating in 1995 94 where somebody did say we've got dinosaur dna and they said this is dinosaur dna because it's different from the crocodile it's different from the bird but very quickly it was pointed out the reason it was different was it was human and that they had mistakenly got a little bit of sweat or something that one of the technicians had dropped into the pcr machine it had multiplied it up and technically at that point that showed people they had to be really really careful about ancient dna yeah we call those the dark days of ancient dna where we were still really trying to figure out what was going on and and it turns out that contamination like this is super common and most people who have ancient dna labs now they have these specialized facilities where everybody goes in and they wear this full body gear it's like going into a crazy virus lab except rather than protecting you from the samples you're working with we're protecting the samples from us some of all of those really ancient bits of dna that were published that insects the dinosaurs it was all proven to be contamination of different types in the early days and and to date the oldest dna that's been recovered is um it was actually published in january of last year it's a mammoth some mammoth genome sequences from bones that were preserved in permafrost so this is soils that was that have been frozen since the time of deposition which is probably the the only reason they've survived for this long but they're thought to be around 1.2 to maybe 1.5 million years old this is hugely old until this the oldest sample was a horse that we found in canada that dates to around 750 000 years old but that was also exceptional and most ancient dna samples that we have date to the last couple of tens of thousands of years really within definitely within the last hundred thousand years um any older of which then it tends to be really really poorly preserved i also tried early in my days of ancient dna while i was at oxford in fact to try to get dna out of insects preserved in amber and also out of amber that didn't have any insects in it and i always got something you know there's always dna in things but it was never what i thought it was going to be it's clearly a contaminant so even if we try really hard not to get contamination we have to look carefully at all the results we get to make sure that it isn't something that is going to mess up our results so it's it's not straightforward but it's possible now to have the right sorts of controls and and really look carefully at these sequences to see to see to make sure that we're what we get is authentic but we can do it so it's it seems to me the scientists are feeling pretty pretty punchy about this like this is this is definitely something that that that's within our power to do is that is that a resounding yes well it depends what you mean by this if this means get dna out of old remains then yeah we know we can do this and it's really exciting and we can learn things about how species and populations and entire ecosystems have changed with big environmental changes like the peak of the last ice age and the rapid warming after that or the first introduction of a predator but if this is de-extinction then it starts to get a little bit more hazy and and i always say is the extinction possible well it depends on what you're willing to accept as a de-extinct species and i think everybody who's genuinely working on this isn't thinking we're going to be bring something back that is 100 identical to a species that was here or a particular organism that was here and is now extinct because we know for reasons like we can't sequence whole genomes we don't know about epigenetics we don't know about environmental impacts we can't really piece together all these differences that this isn't this isn't possible but organisms are more than their dna sequences so we can't reconstruct an environment that no longer exists but can we use these technologies to create an organism that is similar in what it provides to its ecosystem to something that used to be alive and potentially use that as a way of reinvigorating reinvigorating that ecosystem or restoring missing ecological interactions or missing components of ecosystems and helping to make that ecosystem healthier yes i think we're getting to a point and in different ways with different species you know we know a lot more about mammals than we do about birds for example but we're certainly pushing toward a point where we can use these technologies to do just that fantastic well we've got a great question that sort of really follows on from that that's uh the most popular question at the moment george i'm going to come to you with it it's from allah and she asked would it be easier to bring back an extinct plant as opposed to an animal uh probably the easiest thing right now is to engineer is a a mammal uh so of the animals the mammal is slightly easier to engineer um and and plants uh so i have a a an agriculture seed company that's engineering plants but there's special issues i mean they have the advantage that ever almost every part of the plant can produce a new plant um rather than just sperm and eggs for for um typical mammal but you can change it so that so that you can derive from almost any cell in the mammal a stem cell and then and then it's just like the plants so i think in general mammals are easier but they're all feasible they're that um to do um and in terms of ancient dna we have plenty of ancient plant dna that's that's quite true it all boils down to what you want uh so it i you need somebody to advocate something in an ancient plant that isn't uh already present in the wide diversity of plants in general one of some of the enthusiasm for bringing back parts of the ancient world but you know we're not talking about specific species but but all kinds of specific genes which you can bring back um some of the gene functionality from billions of years back even if you can only bring the dna back from 1.2 million years and those genes can have can be used in a whole variety of ways so for example restoring diversity to a species we can we're no longer limited to the herd the last herd uh or the last few animals we can go all over the world and backwards in time to get diversity so that's that's one key reason that uh we might want to go back in time and reach for individual parts of the plants or animals i've got a i've got a question here that's that's very popular i'm going to ask um mike this question there's a lot of people want to know is the dodo genome fully sequenced see fully sequenced are we is is the dodo something that we could bring back it's very popular in the poll as well yes and i can see why it's popular because obviously the dodo is such an amazing bird we know it's related to pigeons and doesn't look much like a pigeon and human beings of course wrote about it illustrated it and and saw it alive and and then exterminated it the dodo genome is known and has been sequenced not in its entirety but but substantial amounts um and it's one that you could make a case to say well yes maybe that would be interesting because i think a question that you raised before that we haven't fully got to of course is what do you do if you bring something back to life and if you've seen the jurassic park films that raises rather obvious conclusions if you bring t-rex back to life maybe that wouldn't be the most popular thing because it would run wild and cause havoc whereas people have talked about mammoths and they have a known habitat that is potentially available the dodo has a known habitat that would be potentially available and we could say bringing back something that isn't so ancient would be much more feasible in terms of impact on the environment in terms of actually engineering that dodo i think you would face all the problems that people have faced and that bethenny was talking about and george about the reality of generating a whole a whole new species whether you could inject parts of that dodo um dna into a modern pigeon dna and somehow generate a dodo i've got no idea it would probably look nothing quite like what we expect a dodo to look like can i also answer this question um because yes the dodo genome is entirely sequenced because we sequenced it and it's not been published yet but it does exist and we're working on it right now um we have a fantastic specimen i tried for a long time to get dna from the specimen that was that's in oxford in fact it was the very first ancient dna project that i worked on we got a tiny little bit of dna out of it and we're able to show that it's most closely related to a pigeon called the nicobar pigeon which is a gorgeous pigeon that is broadly distributed across the indian ocean but it's that particular sample didn't have sufficiently well preserved dna i don't really know much about its preservation history to get a whole genome but there is a specimen in in denmark at the natural history museum in copenhagen that we were able to through collaboration with the curator there get a small piece of and now we have a a very high coverage high quality dodo genome that will will soon be be published so yes the answer to that is yes um for birds though as far as bringing them back and this is one of the reasons that george said mammals is simpler one of the key steps that everyone is considering when we're thinking about this is is if i have a cell and it's living in a dish in the lab and i've edited it so that it used to be a nick of our pigeon cell and now it has a bit of dodo dna or it or it was a or is an asian elephant cell and i've stuck in some mammoth dna replaced bits of it so it's now it's more mammoth like how do i then transform that cell into a whole living breathing actual animal right and and the way that we would do this is to clone it uh using somatic cell nuclear transfer the same approach that's um that that was used to create dolly the most famous clone right um we can do that with mammals um we can't we don't know how to do that with birds because of the intricacies of their reproductive pathways so there needs to be another approach for birds so there's this one really fundamental technological hurdle in de-extinction or reinvigorating new genomes or bringing back individuals and things like that it's a is a technical hurdle that we've yet to cross with birds now there are groups that are working on different approaches for doing this and i have little doubt that we're going to get there but it is an additional hurdle for birds that we don't necessarily have for mammals at this point so we're going to have to wait we're going to have to wait the dodo's probably not going to happen before uh some some kind of rat in fact was it was in the uh was in was in the news today that's uh uh being talked about um the christmas island yeah yeah the christmas island rat yeah it's it i i feel like it's it's likely to be some sort of small brown mammal that's that's likely to be the first creature that comes forward is that does that feel because we know more about them you know we don't know more about their rats we've had in labs as model animals for a long time we know a lot about rat reproduction and how to keep them healthy and happy in a captive breeding environment we know a lot about how to how to make them reproduce and this is helpful when we're doing this these are all different technical hurdles that one would need to overcome to do to do this type of work so yes yeah probably will be something that we understand a lot better i mean i i personally i i'd i'd love to see a dodo i mean who wouldn't love to see a dodo maybe maybe less keen on another rats being on this planet but i think that brings us interestingly to the poll that we'd like to i'd like to throw out to the audience um on theslido.com the results of the last

poll lots of people like me want to see the dodo the direwolf which i i'm going to have to look up actually because i don't think i know the direwolf um is is incredibly popular and the thylacine which of course um fantastic marsupial from tasmania that would be amazing there are people obviously i've met in tasmania who actually think the thylacine cylosine still lives so it might be easier to see that again but uh interesting to see your results a huge range there of of of species that people are keen to see come back but the next poll that i'd i'd like you to answer um on slido using the hashtag b163 of course is is what concerns you most about potentially bringing animals back because you know as we've been saying you know bringing a bird back bringing the dodo not massive impact but you know bringing back mammals bringing back dinosaurs what would that mean to the planet so so if we could um just uh if you could answer that that would be fantastic i'd like to to set that poll going and that brings me to the most popular question actually because from talking about the the practicalities of how we do this we're sort of moving on to the kind of ethics of this really which is um the most popular question currently on slido is from alicia ingle which is how would bringing back the animals benefit them and the ecosystem for example if we were to bring back an animal how can we support it with the habitat loss and invasive predators um how about mike do you want to have a go at that i'll have a go and i certainly can't give a complete answer but i think that does relate to the point of uh it also relates to the technical feasibility because as we've heard from beth and george it's it's easier to do this where you have close living species um and i think ecologically speaking this would be the same issue that if you bring t-rex back or a giant sauropod dinosaur what on earth do you do with the blasted thing and and then how many do you bring back to make a breeding population or what's the point and technically practically ethically it could be potentially a nightmare and of course in the jurassic park films they have them living on some mythical island we don't know quite where that island is but of course that's meant to keep them safe but then there's also risk they're going to escape and the flying ones get away and all that kind of stuff people have discussed that for the mammoth they've discussed it for the dodo and i think in these cases we can see what the habitats were some of those habitats still exist but there would still be a lot of issues who looks after them or who takes responsibility um would they be capable of living in the wild without a lot of support or are they just going to be curiosities in a zoo those are my thoughts and in a way the ethical issues are there um the technology may someday uh confront us with actually solving these beth i'm sure you've thought about this do you do you have something to add on on on this question sorry i was muted about the uh environmental impact or yeah the question was was was um was about you know should we be doing this you know what what what you know what would be the the the the um the the benefits to doing this to the environment you know what i i think that this is gonna be it's different depending on what species that species we're thinking about and every species is gonna have different technical ethical and ecological challenges that it has to address but they also have different rationale for wanting to consider it to my mind i think that the most exciting thing about these sorts of technologies is that as they are being developed and you know i think everybody loves the idea of the extinction because it allows them to think outside the box and be creative and really engage with something that's exciting but the same technologies that you would need to create a mammoth or an arctic adapted elephant would be useful for conserving and protecting species that are alive today i saw one of the questions that was posted was about willa for example this this black-footed ferret that was cloned recently these are the same technologies that one would need to develop for the extinction didn't involve any gene editing but what happened was a team of researchers at the san diego zoo and fish and wildlife and a non-profit called revive at a restore work together to take some cells that have been frozen from black-footed ferrets for almost 40 years and use cloning to create a living breathing animal from those frozen cells and what's critical about this animal she's named elizabeth ann and she's adorable and you should look her up because there's you know she's just an absolutely adorable little black foot ferret is that all the black-footed ferrets that are alive today are derived from seven founders seven individuals that are all very closely related this is a highly endangered species that is really on the brink of becoming extinct the only reason they're still alive is because of this successful captive breeding program that's been established about a decade ago but willa her dna is entirely different than the other the other individuals that are there because she's from a different population and so when she reaches breeding age she's going to be reintroduced into this community and provide a super welcome burst of genetic diversity now this is really great for black-footed ferrets but it might not be enough to save them because there is one other thing that uh they are facing and that is plague that's been introduced into their populations and so when a black-footed ferret goes out and eats a prairie dog which is their favorite prey the prairie dog is often infected with plague black-footed ferret gets plagued and it dies so just introducing genetic diversity might not help them they can be vaccinated but they have to be caught and re-vaccinated and this is not a really great long-term conservation strategy however there's another solution that comes from the family of technologies that would be needed if we were going to successfully de-extinct a species and that is that the domestic ferret which is an evolutionary cousin of the black-footed ferret is naturally immune to plague so this group of researchers are right now trying to figure out what it is in the domestic ferrets genome that makes them naturally immune to plague and once this is discovered they can use these same technologies growing cells and dishes in lab gene editing those cells moving dna between species in this case from the domestic ferrets or potentially another species into the black-footed ferret genome to make it naturally immune to plague it's the same technologies that one would need for de-extinction but here applied explicitly for the purposes of keeping a species that is currently endangered from becoming extinct and one can imagine other ways that we would use this if we could identify um genes that make corals better able to survive in warmer or more acidic waters we could use these technologies to move those genes between populations and species even the work that's being done to help figure out how to create an arctic adapted elephant could be useful to help protect elephants from becoming extinct so i think there are so many amazing opportunities that will come from development of this suite of resources that come from people's excitement about the extinction not just limited to bringing these back and there are so many potentially amazing impacts on populations and ecosystems if we have these technologies as yet another tool in our conservation toolkit that this is why i'm excited about pushing these these approaches forward i like the comment from one of the uh commentators i'd like to taste some of these extinct animals but then that's another ethical dimension if you're going to create them they could cause havoc in ecosystems if you only create them in order to be able to eat them well that's another matter maybe but you know hunting and hunters were absolutely critical to the early conservation movement at the turn of the 20th century and i think um you know we really have to think about all the different ways that we might i mean as people we're incredibly good at changing our environment to make it a better place for us and if that means creating new sources of food particularly if we're talking about plants or engineering things that are going to make our lives easier or better then maybe it's easier for us to find the motivation there for developing these technologies that will also be useful just for protecting and preserving species and ecosystems so i wouldn't dismiss it just out of hand there's another interesting question from from rv lee willingham here that's that's got a lot of votes um how can we ensure the extinction is a purely ecological process and inhibit it from turning into a commercial one um couldn't this process once possible be turned on its head and be used for unecological reasons i.e private collections and mass farming um who wants to get george yeah so there there's a not that fundamental of difference between a non-profit and a profit in practice they can be either one of them can do uh very very good things for society if they're if there's a if there's sufficient motivation so for example there are carbon credits which is a way that you can reward companies uh for doing the right thing in terms of global warming and that's a way of aligning incentives uh for for for both non-profit and for-profit uh organizations there's nothing that stops the non-profit from making a lot of money so for example the cystic fibrosis foundation made billions of dollars on a drug that that helps people with cystic fibrosis so that's that's part of it the other uh part of it is it they they can do well by doing good by by bringing technology that will help um in a medical sense in a veterinary sense or in a uh environmental sense is almost all the technologies that we're using that are positive uh in the environment um you know had had a a component that was commercial that's how you often how you bring things into the real world as you get and if and it's sort of up to us as citizens and consumers to vote with our wallet to to say this is what we want uh to spend our money on so if we insist on spending all our money on the uh domesticated animals that we're going to eat and we now not now that now constitutes 60 percent of mammals are our human domesticated mammals and 96 if you include humans themselves um so if that's what we want to do then that's what the commercial farms are going to produce but if we decide we want to be vegans and and uh eat uh plants that's going to be a different outcome so it's don't blame it on the companies blame it on the consumers that's a that's a a fair comment i i one one of the other questions that's very popular here at the moment which is another sort of ethical question which is um you know how would would destination not be detrimental to living species conservation as the view would be to preserve genetic material because it's it's fine we'll bring them back later i mean you know we we conservation is you know really underfunded as it stands and you know is there a danger of of of you know de-extinction it's a fantastic exciting idea but but could it distract away and make people just sort of feel like they can just carry on eating meat and and and you know driving suvs and not really caring because science will just sort it out and just bring those animals back from extinction it'll all be okay and and and uh we don't have to worry about the habitats is that is that something that we have to be worried about do you think beth so i think that this assumes something both beautiful and incorrect uh kind of separately about people um first it assumes that most people care about the extinction and would suddenly that not do so most people care about conservation and would suddenly not do so if this were possible which i just unfortunately think isn't true people don't really care about extinction in as much as it doesn't impact them personally maybe that's not true about the people who've come here but the people who've come here to listen to this are probably not your average person out there it also assumes that us the people who are here listening to this who do care about conservation are all of a sudden going to stop doing so because some technologically particularly difficult thing that is not going to bring back an identical copy of something else is now going to save the world which i think it's unfair to imagine that we all believe that that is true right so we understand that there is challenges here and i also think that one one of the comments that we often get is that you know these efforts are taking away from resources that would otherwise go to conservation which i also think isn't true i mean the the people who are funding traditional conservation are not the same people who are funding this sort of research i mean if you saw the news last week there's company out there called colossal that i'm consulting for that um just raised 75 million dollars these are this is not money that's come from the same people that are out there trying to save the panda or the koala um it is it's in my mind absolutely fantastic that this sort of crazy technological solution that may not ever work has brought in so much new money and new excitement to a field where it is so hard to get funding i think that quite the opposite to the accusations of taking money away it's actually bringing new money in and it's money that is sorely needed for technology that i think has tremendous potential to help conservation well it it's certainly something that concerns the uh the the audience because a lot of these questions that are coming through are exactly you you preempted that question beth and i you've been in enough of these discussions to to to know that that's that's on the cards and so it's it's obviously something that concerns people i've got another one here which is will this later become a biohazard risk i.e will it be possible will it possibly bring back contagious diseases that could impact other species obviously that's something that's very much on our mind in these days so uh who who fancies answering that i'll take that one since my laboratory does work on infectious diseases we worked on on diagnostic therapeutics and vaccines for covin 19 for example i think this is a reason for not bringing back an exact copy of a ancient species blindly just blindly turning ancient dna into modern dna i think we should do it selectively we should do it for enriching endangered species and modern ecosystems and we should do it one gene at a time because there are um viruses lurking in the genomes of organisms um for exam in effect the only two sp the only two genomes that have been actually fully brought back uh from extinction are viruses there's a retrovirus and an influenza virus that have been brought back from extinction uh for i you know we didn't do it but but i think for good reasons other people did it um [Music] but we don't want to just go in and recreate random viruses that have just because they happen to be in the mammoth genome or some other genome we want to do it more thoughtfully and say these are the cold resistant genes that that would enrich the current elephant species would allow them to to extend into vast regions where there aren't aren't human beings we've eliminated we've even gone the other direction we've eliminated dangerous viruses from the genome of pigs completely eliminated them proven that and now those pigs are more suitable for providing medical resources like organs so you you can do it either way but you just have to be very cautious i think is the point and and where would we i mean there's i mean there's a lot of these concerns around around this area and and also you know that they wouldn't survive in our ecosystem and and how would they affect existing ecosystems um is there anybody who wants to to tackle any of that i suppose i can just say a very brief word i mean we we talked earlier about this people have talked about the mammoth and the dodo and they are in a position i suppose where nothing has replaced them uh in their former habitats to a certain extent um and then in that case you could imagine reinserting them and somehow recreating the ecosystem that was already there whether in practice that could ever happen i don't know but the concern of course with with more um um randomly doing this of course bringing species back uh and and planting them here and there on the earth could be catastrophic for all sorts of reasons that we've discussed and we have species at risk today bringing back former species who knows it it wouldn't necessarily improve the chances of other species to survive i mean i've got to ask you do you do you ever see a dinosaur coming i mean obviously we have dinosaurs we have birds you know but d do you think that that's a a reality that could happen one day mike no i think uh this is what got people thinking so much because of the jurassic park story but um the the the the all the steps along the way as beth and george were outlining make it very very unlikely that that would happen what has been done is engineering of the genome of living birds to try to recover deep within that genome remembrances of genetic fossils of dinosaurs and and very early in um genetic engineering people were able to um in a sense trick the genome of chickens into generating teeth and there are many experiments of that kind where people can get horses to generate multiple toes and these sort of activisms or throwbacks and those approaches might work but whether you would call your chicken with teeth a dinosaur i've got no idea yeah i mean and the other thing of course that we haven't discussed is is behavior you know i mean how how would how would an animal that's that's been brought back to life you know extinct how how would how would it behave how would it how would it how would you tackle that george or beth beth you're there i was just gonna say you know the genome is the blueprint for all of this and that in combination with the environment and you know things that an individual can learn from its parents i see there's a question about how something learns to act like like uh how you bring something back that is born to an elephant and how do you teach it to become a mammoth i think you know this is these are all things that are different you know this will what is behavior it's a combination of the genes and the proteins that are made and the environment in which the individual lives and probably it's loads of genes that are interacting with each other in different ways in the environment i guess my the thing that i keep coming back to with this is does it matter you know if we really are trying to target something in particular like we want to create an elephant that's just able to live in the cold so it can wander around and stir up the sediments and move plants around and interact in a way that a mammoth used to does it matter that it's not 100 identical to a mammoth if the goal is to just create something that can fill that niche and and replace some of those ecological variables and i would say it doesn't you know the goal is not to create an identical copy of an animal that used to be alive because we know that we can't do that and so when we're considering these projects we really have to think why we want to do it what the ultimate goal is do these risk assessments about whether the ecosystem is going to be impacted in a way that we can predict by putting these things back back in an environment or putting a proxy for something that used to live there back in the environment and in many cases you know we don't we're not going to be able to fully understand the impacts of these changes before we do it but we do this all the time because as people we have been moving species between habitats because we wanted to for as long as we've existed as a lineage and sometimes it has terrible devastating consequences and sometimes it doesn't but you know ecosystems are not stable either you know there's we don't have an ecosystem that an extinct species a species disappeared 10 000 years and it's just stayed there in this time frozen and waiting for this thing to come back that doesn't happen either you know even the dodo's environment is different and mauritius if we wanted to bring a dodo back we would have to first solve the problem that made them go extinct in the first place which is that there are loads of rats and cats and pigs and dogs that people introduced onto the island that ate the egg that the dodo laid on a nest on the ground until we can solve that if we were to recreate a bird that laid an egg in a nest on the ground and stick it there that egg would just be eaten the way the dodo's eggs were so all of these things are yes they're problems that people in the audience and people also have correctly identified but does that mean that we shouldn't imagine what these technologies might be able to do are are the risks of things that we don't know or can't understand greater than the risk of not allowing ourselves the freedom to explore what these technologies might be able to do to save species and ecosystems that are under threat today i don't think so we take risks as people all the time yes we should have to evaluate them and we should have global conversations like we are right now about what these risks are and what risks we're willing to take as a global international community and it's great that we're doing that before these technologies really exist right but i worry that people are so scared of things that they haven't yet thought of that they should be scared of that we're going to stop ourselves from really moving down this road from from identifying what these technologies can do to help us to protect species and ecosystems today as the the people have correctly pointed out who are commenting there are millions of species that are at risk of becoming extinct these tools could be tools that we can use to stop those extinctions from happening and it's a tremendous risk not to allow ourselves to evaluate the tools okay well uh we're sort of coming towards the end now and and i guess to sort of wind up um let's start with you george where where do you see this field going in the next 10 years and and what do you think that scientists will actually be able to achieve well i think it's it's safe to say that it is where it's going is going there exponentially fast that is to say we have brought down the costs of things of both medical and veterinary significance by 10 million fold most of it in the last decade so that's giving you some idea of how fast this is going i think it's also going in a in a good direction it seems like the people that are donating money or investing money are more and more motivated by climate change and by um uh cert species that are endangered than than than anything else uh and so so i think that it bodes well for the next five ten years and i think that uh we're going to have many of the technologies we've talked about here will be considered routine and available for veterinary and um uh endangered species probably far more than than extinct extinction is just the rallying cry it's it's a way of getting diversity um into modern species for the benefit of ecosystems admittedly they will be benefiting ecosystems that humans like if if we can make an ecosystem produce uh less methane into the atmosphere then that's from a human standpoint a good ecosystem it's not good in some kind of global perfect way but their technologies may avert um massive extinctions if if heaven forbid 1400 giga tons of methane is in the arctic were to go up into the atmosphere that would be a global warming far beyond any of the predictions uh that have been based purely on anthropogenic sources so that's just an example of where of both where the technology is going and where the applications are going well i think that's a it's a good place for us to ask our final poll from the audience which is you've heard the scientists have spoken do you the audience think that we should bring animals back from extinction so please answer that um what are we looking at now we've got a we've got it's a yes and a maybe not many no's and not many i don't knows it's uh yeah yes the uh you've been very persuasive you've um you've convinced the audience there's there's uh not a lot of no's coming up and although they are creeping up but no that it is people believe in in in this as a as an exciting future for um for our planet i think it would be nice to say do you think we should develop these technologies uh we don't need to bring species back from extinction to capitalize on these technologies for the purposes of preserving biodiversity and that i think is where i'm i'm most excited about this and that's why i would vote yes maybe yes that's a great clarification beth yeah so so in the in the end that de-extinction's a sort of kind of a buzz thing but actually that the technologies from what we've heard today are have a much more a wider use well i mean it's been completely fascinating to uh to hear from me and we could we could talk about this for many many more hours but i'm afraid i'm gonna have to bring the conversation to a close now but it has been completely fascinating thank you to all of you who have joined us do do continue the conversation on social media tweet us at royal society and use the hashtag british science week um please subscribe to the royal society's youtube channel to stay up to date on the latest events alternatively you can find out the latest information on the royal society's website or by signing up to their newsletter the link can be found in the youtube description as well as one of our short evaluation surveys where you can tell us what you thought of the event you can also catch up with this discussion and all of our events on the royal society's youtube channel i'd just like to say a huge thank you to mike benton george church and best shapiro for such a fascinating insight into a really exciting science and that's all for tonight viewers and we hope to see you again soon you

2022-03-20 07:24

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