March 12, 2014 • 42 mins
Is it possible to bring extinct species back to life? We look at the science and controversy around de-extinction.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says from my
heart and from my hand, why don't people understand my intention?
(00:20):
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Volcaba, and I'm Joe McCormick. So, guys,
have you have you ever watched? Uh it's a little
known documentary film called Jurassic Park. I only saw Jurassic
Park three, but it was fantastic. Uh No, I saw
Jurassic Park in the theater when I was a kid,
and it blew my mind. I probably I got the
(00:43):
VHS tape when it came out and I watched it
until the tape was no more right. I mean, it
was certainly one of those that sparked people's imaginations. For
one thing, of course, it was a great example of
c g I in an era when before that you
didn't really see it at that level of sophistication. It
was for the time, really believable effects. Oh yeah, people
(01:05):
love c G I in the nineties, but if you
go back and watch most of those nineties movies now
they look awful. Yeah, they definitely Yeah, well it's you know,
in Jurassic Park was one of the ones that really
incorporated puppets and also practical and cg those a good choice.
How things held up yep, yep. And so here's the thing, guys,
um you know, it kind of popularized this idea of
(01:28):
what if we could get some sort of genetic material
from long extinct species and then through some sort of
science application, bring those extinct species back to life all
odd Jurassic Park. You notice in Jurassic Park when they're
taking them through the lab, they kind of skipped through
all the hard parts. Well, I love that the science
(01:48):
is all delivered by a cartoon character that is dumbing
everything down for the lowest common denominator. And part of
that is so that the writers don't have to go
to the trouble of actually explaining how it works or
how it would work if it could work right. Well,
the book To Be Fair went a little bit more
into that, but it's still absolutely a work of fiction.
And even though Michael Crichton has has this cute tendency
(02:09):
of footnoting his fictional works, that doesn't mean that those
footnotes are based on whoa whoa whoa work of fiction. Now,
I thought we had already cloned a few dinosaurs. Is
that not true? We we don't have resurrected raptors and
t rex is somewhere in Texas only in my heart, Yeah,
sadly no. So the reason why this this is part
(02:32):
of our discussion today is because in the news recently
there have been some articles about de extinction and we
wanted to talk about what the extinction is and UH
and what its applications could be and why there is
controversy around it. But to start off kind of helps
lay the groundwork if we actually talk about just the
whole problem of extinction in the first place. So, first,
(02:56):
how many species go extinct every year? I don't know
how you could even guess? Yeah, yeah, it turns out
that that that's very difficult. You can really just estimate.
For one thing, we don't even know how many species
there are, do we absolutely not. We are still discovering
some like fifteen thousand species every year, and UH researchers
(03:16):
think that that of the one point to million that
we've already documented on on this our wonderful planet Earth,
that might be a part of some eight point seven
million that are kicking around. Wow. So yeah, we still
have quite a bit of quite a few more species
to discover before we get close to it. We're like
not even a quarter of the way there. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:37):
there might be some some eight percent of life on
Earth that is yet undiscovered. Um. But but here's the thing.
A lot of the ones that we're currently discovering are
already endangered. Yeah. So they're already you know, the populations
already so small that that the smallest of of influences
could make these populations go extinct. Things could be going
extinct before we have even documented them. And it's worth
(03:59):
pointing out that things go extinct naturally. I mean that
happens all the time, and not just when meteors hit either, right, No,
I mean just due to the pressures of nature, you know,
food supply and predation. Things go out of business, sometimes
a species is gone. But also we drive things to
extinction knowing yes, there's a there's natural background extinction, which
(04:21):
is what the rate of extinction would be if humans
were not part of the picture, and it is significantly
lower than once you factor humans in. How significantly well
scientists estimate that the extincion extinction rate is one thousand
to ten thousand times greater than that background extinction rate
according to the World Wildlife Fund. So that's one thousand
(04:42):
to ten thousand times. I mean, that's human influence right there.
On top of that. That means that anywhere between point
zero one and point one percent of all species go
extinct every year. And again the reason why I point
zero one to point one is because we don't know
how many species there are, nor can we really get
an estimate on exactly how many are going extinct every year.
(05:05):
So these are all you know, based on on like
wide ranges and guesses and if you want to know
how wide, well, the estimation on how many species are
out there, uh, and the extinction rates taken into as
a combination mean that something between two hundred and one
hundred thousand species are going extinct every year. So on
(05:27):
the low end, two hundred species not great, but you know,
not a hundred thousand. But again, all of this is
just based on those those crazy estimations of how many
species are out there and how many are actually dying
out right. And I do want to put in that
not all of these species are like adorable monkeys. Um,
there's a lot of bacteria and stuff like that involved
in these calculations, right. Uh. And some of them, however,
(05:48):
are totally adorable. Some of them are adorable monkeys or
or some other you know, equally adorable animal. And according
to the i u c N Red List criteria, there
are sixteen thousand, ninety eight species on the endangered list,
and the same list identify as nine hundred five species
that are now extinct in the wild, now extinct, like
(06:10):
since the beginning of this classification. Yeah, essentially they're identifying
species some of these there are still examples of those species,
but they are all in captivity. None of them are
in the y I see what you mean, Like in
zoos exactly, you won't. You won't find them in their
home ecosystems anymore, at least none have been spotted for
at least a few decades. Uh. And in fact, that's
(06:31):
one of the problems with listing animals as extinct. You know,
it's all based upon our observations. It's not like we
have a little light on a giant switchboard and when
the light goes out, you know that that species has gone.
So it's a little complicated. Okay, So now that we
can see how fast the problem is getting worse that
we're we're changing ecosystems constantly by knocking species out of business.
(06:52):
This can't be a great idea to just drive species
to extinction with no forethought. Is it possible to reverse
the polarity? Um? Okay, so we're going star trek on this. Okay, Uh,
technically it's it depends. It depends upon the species and
how long it's been extinct. So for example, Jurassic Park,
(07:15):
that's the example with all the dinosaurs coming back. Is
that realistic? As it turns out, it is not. And
the reason for that is because DNA degrades over time.
It does not remain completely pristine. Even if you were
to find a mosquito buried in amber that had dinosaur
blood in it, that DNA will degrade within the little
(07:36):
gut of that mosquito. So it's not like you're going
to suddenly have a perfect strand of DNA where you
can sequence a dinosaurs genome. It's just not going to happen. Well,
you're not even going to get like a few little
strands like I don't know, give me some numbers here.
The thing is is that DNA is is only really
readable for about a million years. It's it's got a
half life of five and twenty one years, which means
(07:58):
that that how of the nucleu tide bonds and it
will break down every one years, right, um, Which means
that basically anything over a million years old is effectively gibberish,
and anything over some six point eight million is effectively destroyed. Um,
which is pretty impressive for for DNA. That's a lot
longer than we actually thought originally that it was going
to last. But the thing is that the dinosaur extinction
(08:21):
event happened some sixty three million years ago. Um. The
the oldest sample of DNA have read about being used
to create a successful clone was only frozen for sixteen years. Yeah. Okay,
so but here's a question I always had about Jurassic Park,
which is, even if you could get that DNA, even
if what you're talking about didn't happen, how would you
(08:42):
make it into an egg that hatches? Yeah, we'd have to. Um.
I feel like they skipped over that part in the movie.
I don't remember what they said. Well, they combined, they combined,
they filled in gaps in the genome that they had,
and we'll talk a little bit about filling in gaps,
because that actually is something that people are trying to do.
You know that they've filled it with the DNA of
(09:03):
a frog. I guess the question is more like physical
how they get it into an egg. They also they
also used frog eggs, I believe, for for cloning purposes.
The way that cloning works is usually you scoop the
DNA out of existing cell nucleus and put new DNA
material in there right right, and you and then you
hope it ends up forming an embryo. Yeah. The problem
(09:25):
is that that egg cells contain mitochondria, which contain their
own little bits of DNA from the donor animal. And
unlike in say Star Trek, when Klingons and humans which
evolved on completely separate planets, can produce viable offspring, or
even in Jurassic Park, where it just gave them plot
dependent hero saving weaknesses. Um, really, it's it's more likely
(09:46):
that these cells would just be be unviable. They would
not be able to germinate, would not produce any kind
of any kind of life. Yeah, and also I should
point out that it wasn't just weaknesses. It also gave
them their strength because that was what gave dinosaurs the
ability to spontaneously switch sexes. So that allowed them to
continue to have because they were supposed to all be female,
(10:07):
and then uh they a couple of them ended up
being able because because the jenet material they had was
taken from frogs that were able to change their genders. Basically, yeah, okay,
so I guess we can't bring dinosaurs back. What can
we do? Can we? Maybe we can't resurrect a t rex?
Can we resurrect something like a mammoth? Actually, there are
(10:29):
a lot of people working on exactly that. The wooly
mammoth has become kind of the poster animal for a
lot of different efforts. Not the only one, We've got,
another one will chat about. Yeah, populations of William mammoth's
were around as as early late as about ten thousand
years ago, or possibly as recently as four thousand years ago. Yeah,
(10:49):
so that's certainly a viable, a viable option. I most
of the time I hear around ten thousand years is
about what people expect to be able to bring back
from extinction. That's like a kind of a round figure
that people throw around. But as for actual efforts, like
real scientists doing real science trying to bring extinct animals back.
(11:10):
We've got two examples we can talk about right now
that we're semi successful. Uh, semi successful meaning that ultimately
you didn't have an animal survive very long, but but
there was development yet technically successful. So if you get
sad about stories about furry animals not living very long,
(11:33):
you may want to skip ahead a little bit because
I'm gonna tell you about Celia. Lay it on me,
all right. Ce Celia was the last known living brocado,
which is a type of ibex and and for those
of us who don't encounter ibex is very frequently, that's
sort of kind of like a goat like animals, the
ones that have the really long round horns and like
(11:54):
they loop back. Well, the bricado was one population, one
one species, so it uh had dwindled until they really
only thought there was this one living brocado left, and
they named her Celia, fitted her with a collar, kept
her in the wild. The collar monitored Celia's life signs,
(12:16):
and then one day the collar essentially indicated that Celia's
heart had stopped beating. A team went out to find
out what had happened. And discovered that Celia had been
crushed to death by the limb of a falling tree.
They they managed to harvest them cells from celia and
they froze them, they preserved them, and then years later
(12:37):
another team researchers and scientists decided to try and bring
the brocado back. It was only about three years later,
so this was so the cells had not been in
cold storage for very long. Yeah, they ended up harvesting
the nuclei from those cells, and then they used emptied
goat eggs cells and injected the nuclei from the brocado
(12:57):
into the goat egg cells and then landed those into
surrogate mothers. And they did fifties seven attempts. Only seven
of those resulted in pregnancy, and six of those ended
a miscarriage. However, that that last example was actually brought
all the way up to where you had a baby
brocado delivered by c section um. The baby brocado or
(13:20):
the kid, unfortunately didn't have its lungs developed properly. One
of its lungs actually formed essentially like a solid mass
of tissue kind of like they described it being more
like a liver. That good breeding. Yeah, and it. It
essentially suffocated to death shortly after it was born, so
it only it only survived a couple of minutes. So
that's very sad. But it did lay the groundwork and
(13:43):
foundation for a lot of other UH groups to kind
of make this attempt. This was back in in two
thousand three, so this was you know, you know, more
than a decade ago. Now there's another project called the
Lazarus Project, which UM is the University of new Castle, Australia,
and they decided to go with a totally different kind
(14:03):
of cute cuddly animal, a frog. It gives birth by
regurgitating its babies. Yeah, it's a it's a frog that
gives birth through its mouth, essentially regurgitates its babies. But
if you kiss it, it regurgitates the prince. No, it
actually regurgitates prints and he'll sing purple rain. It turns
(14:23):
into a prince that regurgitates frogs. I think we might
be getting off track. What actually happens is the way
this frog reproduces. It lays eggs, The eggs are fertilized,
and then the frog swallows the eggs to protect them,
and then once the eggs hatch, it pukes up the babies.
So this particular frog though, had gone extinct. Joe, this
(14:46):
is no laughing matter. This is this is I'm just
protecting them from Well, sure, when you put it like that,
it sounds like it's you know, obscene, but no, it's
it's really how these animals, how these animals survive. And um,
this particular animal that the rio back trachius silas frog
has gone when extinct back in the you know, nineteen seventies,
(15:10):
but some of its cells had been in deep freeze,
in a regular freezer actually since the nineteen seventies. And
so the Lazarus Project harvested the nuclei and then they
put them into emptied frog cells from great barred frogs,
which are a fairly close relative to the frog that
had gun extinct. So some of the cells began to
(15:32):
divide and go right into the embryo stage, but none
of the embryos survived past a few days. So again
sort of promising results but not not a full success.
Then you have another group called Revive and restore. This
is one that I thought was really interesting. There are
several articles that published in early fourteen about their particular
(15:54):
drive to de extinction technologies. And their approach is a
little different from, um, what we've been talking about. They're
looking at creating a chimera, which is not, uh, the
mythological creature that you know, you may be familiar with,
particularly if you played a lot of dudgeons and dragons.
And although that would be cool, can can we de extinctify? Well,
(16:16):
we gotta, we gotta wait till the end of the
podcast before we talk about that, but we we will
address that, yes, um, but yes, Reviving Restore was looking
at creating this These these animals that outwardly resemble one species,
but internally have some elements of a different species, So
they are a chimera of two different species. And the
(16:37):
example that was used in all the articles because one
of the people involved in Reviving Restore is so passionate
about this particular species, is the passenger pigeon. Now, I
don't know how much you guys know about passenger pigeons.
At one time it was the dominant species of birds
in the United States. There were something like five billion
of them. I've I've read reports of like the flocks
(16:59):
of them blotting out the sun. Yeah, they made up
sixty percent of all birds in the us. So to
think that we went from a population that enormous too
completely extinct in just a couple of decades due to
hunting and and other problems as well, it is pretty
eye opening to think that, you know, essentially that's saying like,
no species is safe. If you think of something that
(17:21):
looks that plentiful and yet could go extinct that quickly,
it's a real eye opener. Well, the idea behind the
passenger pigeon approach is to uh sequence the passenger pigeon
genome by harvesting cells from various museum exhibits that have
passenger pigeons, like no stuffed on display, to take some
cells from that and to try and sequence the genome.
(17:44):
And there's gaps in that genome, kind of like in
Jurassic Park, and so to fill in those gaps, they
start looking at some of the closest relatives to the
passenger pigeon and trying to kind of, you know, fudge
it a little bit, fill it in. Yeah, the modern
band tailed pigeon, I think is one of the closest,
and the idea is to get to a point where
they can sequence d n A so that they can
(18:06):
inject it directly into an egg of a band tailed pigeon.
They'd actually make a little hole in the egg, inject
the DNA down into it, and then patch the hole
with essentially what looks like saran wrap, and allow it
to continue to develop until it hatches into a hatchling. Now,
the hatchling is going to look and behave just like
(18:26):
a band tailed pigeon. It is, to all outward appearances,
a simple band tailed pigeon, but it's reproductive cells as
in its egg or sperm cells will be passenger pigeon cells.
So if you can take a male and female band
tailed pigeon that's been altered in this way and breed
them together, then in theory, you would get a passenger pigeon.
(18:47):
Kind of cool, also weird, little terrifying, pretty cool. The
weirdest part is our I don't know if it's the
weirdest part, but a weird part is that they're not
really sure how to teach the passenger pigeons how to
be passenger pigeons, assuming that this works, because this is
not this is not something that's happened yet. It's it's
something that they hypothesize would be possible, but they haven't
(19:09):
proved it yet. But the thing that they're wondering is, Okay,
if it hatches into this passenger pigeon after you know
it's it's two generations removed from when things, Um, will
it behave like a band tailed pigeon or would some
behaviors be innate pigeons. That would come down to the
(19:30):
question of whether its behaviors are more learned or instinctual. Sure,
and I'm I'm wondering in the case of pigeons, I mean,
and no offense to to pigeon aficionados out there, but
but exactly how big the differences and whether or not
that's uh, whether or not that's the operative point when
you're talking pigeons. I think the biggest difference is migratory
patterns because the passenger pigeon wasn't very didn't migrate very much,
(19:55):
and some of these other pigeons do. So it's one
of those things where you're not there. They're not sure
if this is even possible. And if we do bring
passenger pigeons back, will they behave the way passenger pigeons
of old did or will they be some sort of
new species that are very close to what passenger pigeons were,
but behave in a different way, and honestly, people aren't sure.
(20:18):
And those are important questions because that also puts an
impact upon the ecosystem that the passenger pigeon encounters, like
you have to remember, and that we're going to talk
about this a lot in our next section, about the
fact that the world is this really interconnected, complicated system,
and just because you add one thing in one place
(20:38):
doesn't mean it's not somehow going to affect something else
really far away, just through uh this whole you know,
kind of domino effect or chaos theory if you're a
certain mathematician. So this brings us to this question of
if let's assuming that these these different approaches bear fruit,
(20:59):
that they are able to bring at least some types
of extinct species back to life through one of these methods,
what are some of the other ethical and practical considerations
we have to make, uh with this technology in mind.
One of the ones I've seen, though I take some
(21:19):
issue with it, is this view that, well, it might
be a zero sum game, you know, so that if
we're putting money and effort and time and attention into
bringing extinct species back from the dead. Are we going
to be therefore losing all of those same types of
investments that we should be putting into keeping endangered species alive? Well? Yeah,
(21:45):
I mean, if it's the super flashy, sexy kind of
technology where you could tell people, hey, the majestic wooly
mammoth could stride across the plains again, I mean, people
are going to get excited about that. But it's something
that none of us have ever seen. Hares about pandas.
Let's to be fair, even conservationists say, who cares about
(22:05):
pandas because they claim, or at least the ones I
read claim, are the panda. The panda thing is like
pandas are plentiful compared to say, white rhinos, Well, who
cares about white rhinos? Let's bring willy mammoth. See that
that's the worry, right, And and like you said, it's
kind of two pronged. It's worrying about taking attention away
from conservation efforts and also and probably more importantly, money
(22:29):
from conservation efforts. Yeah. So if that were really how
it worked, Like in order to invest in bringing something
back from extinction, you have to take money away from conservation,
I would consider that a very legitimate complaint. I don't
think it necessarily works that way, Like no, and I
think that really, in fact, you're you're going to be
drawing attention to the overall issue. And I mean I
(22:51):
would imagine, well, I know that a lot of these
projects specifically take conservation as one of their big concerns,
so that they they acknowledge that conservation is very important
and that they don't want to be considered an alternative
conservation that's more of a supplement to conservation efforts. But
the way specifically saying it's not a zero sum game, right.
(23:13):
The problem is that when you start reporting on this stuff,
and I mean it's easy to see why this this
happens in the media, but the attention is this is
super awesome, cool technology that could really be interesting if
it works, uh, and it would be able to bring
species that most of us have never ever seen back
(23:33):
to life. That's really enticing. And it may not be.
The real story may not be that it's you know,
de extinction versus conservation. It's just that the way the
media portrays it, it seems like de extinction is the
cool thing and conservation isn't really mentioned very frequently except
in some of those more in depth articles where they
really try to to to dig down deep and get
(23:54):
into the story. And we read quite a few of
those articles, and some of them are amazing. They really
look at all facets of the story and they take
this head on. And I would agree that I think
conservation and de extinction can survive side by side. They
can they can complement one another. I do also think
that when it comes to someone giving their money to
(24:16):
a cause, the de extinction one can might seem more
attractive to certain people just because it does seem more
exotic and flashy. But I don't think it's gonna be
something that funnels like the funding away from conservation. Yeah,
and I don't think that anyone is going to um
going to just say like, well, well screw those pandas
(24:38):
because we can just revive them later. Yeah, if I mean, yeah,
it seems like some people do take that complaint. Let
me if I can advocate something here, despite the fact
that this is a future technology kind of show we're
doing here, if you are really actually forced to choose
between conservation and d action, go with conservation obviously, right. Well,
(25:04):
and and we'll talk a little bit about how some
of these approaches can help in conservation efforts as well.
And I should also point out that everyone says, not
that I have a money figure to put on this,
but everyone says that this de extinction approach is going
to be complicated, it's going to be, especially in the
early years, unreliable or or difficult, and it's going to
(25:26):
be really expensive. So it's not something that is going
to be done for every single species that has ever
gone extinct. There's going to be choices made. Uh. And
so it may very well be that this is something
that happens with a few passion projects where people are
really pushing to bring back certain species and others are
left behind. And it's not because one is better than
(25:48):
the other. It's just that that's where people were able
to direct the money and effort toward. Sure, but let's
talk about a few of those reasons why we would
want to. I mean, if we really only had ten
dollars um and those ten dollars could fund either the
extinction forever or conservation forever, why should we go with conservation.
I'd say one thing is that it's something you can
(26:09):
trust in because you can see it like it's our
conservation actually works, Like there's no question about uh, you know,
what will happen if we stop killing these animals, right,
you know, like, Okay, if we stopped killing them, that
actually will work. The extinction is questionable. It might work,
it might not sure, So there's a risk on on return.
(26:32):
I mean, just based upon that. If you're if you
want to just separate yourself from the whole animal thing,
it's there's there's one method that you know is going
towards helping actual living creatures right now, and one method
that could possibly maybe bring something back, but we aren't sure.
We also know that any animal that is sustaining a
(26:52):
population on Earth today, at least barring major human intervention,
has a place in its current ecosystem, right In other words,
the ecosystem is able to support that population. Uh. I,
So I would say, well, maybe let's bring back the
wooly mammoth. Well, I'm not sure that the wooly mammoth
necessarily has a place in today's ecosis. And that is
(27:13):
another great argument that people make about this, the extinction question.
It's that you can't really be sure with some of
these species that they would have a place in the
world where they could survive, let alone thrive. And for
species that have been extinct for a few thousand years,
the question is is more you know unknown? We don't know,
(27:36):
because ecosystems do change over time, not necessarily rapidly unless
there's outside intervention in the form of you know, humans
messing with an ecosystem or something really massive like a
meteor strike or whatever. Meteor right, I guess I should
say strike. But these systems do change over time, and
it's possible that some species would find it very difficult
to survive in today's ecosystems. Absolutely, and we're not just
(27:59):
talking about the macro scale of of predators and prey
and all that kind of stuff. Also the micro scale.
I mean, the more that we learned about the microbiome,
the more we think it could have a serious impact
on on any given macro organisms um quality of life
and even survival. We we talked recently in our episodes
about antibiotics and hygiene that that germs aren't always harp harmful. Um.
(28:22):
You know, a lot of them evolved in tandem with
multicellular species, and that really weird stuff happens when we
killed too many germs off. Right now, for a species
that have gone extinct relatively recently, it may be that
there are plenty of ecosystems in which it could survive
and thrive. So something that died out ten years ago
(28:43):
or fifty years ago might still have a place to
survive and be relatively fine. But for things that when
extinct much longer ago, the question is, well, is the
has the world changed so much that this creature would
have a real hard time to survive? And is it
fair to bring something back to life if it's just
going to die out again? Right? And I think that
(29:05):
question is crucial because even if we're just talking about
species that were driven to extinction by humans and not
by natural forces, this is not just like hunters going
out and killing all of them. A lot of what
we're talking about, In fact, I don't know for sure,
but I would guess that most of it is due
to habitat destruction. Sure, but the people building cities and
(29:27):
going further and further into the surrounding environments to cut
down trees, make past your land, all that kind of stuff,
food sources are breeding grounds or anything like that slowly disappearing. Yes,
So I mean, one of the easiest ways to kill
an animal is not to go out looking for all
of them and kill them for their tusks or whatever.
Much more action packed. Well, yeah, it's to destroy their habitat.
(29:50):
They don't have a place to live and thrive and
occupy that there's no chance for them. One more argument
that I've heard against the extinction is based a lot
on the fact that we just don't know very much
about what will happen should this technology prove to be
useful to to actually work, uh. And that is that
species may be able to spread or cause disease or
(30:13):
otherwise harm and ecosystem. So it may be that a
species that was extinct when it comes back, becomes a
carrier for a disease and then spreads it much more
quickly than it would have if that species had never
been brought back. That's one. It's really an argument from
the unknown, right, we just don't know this is a
plausible outcome, but we don't know if it's or at
(30:36):
least a possible log and we don't know how plausible
it is. Uh. And also just to worry about how
it would end up affecting the ecosystem you introduce it to,
assuming that you're not just bringing species back to put
them in zoos then putting them into any kind of
ecosystem is going to affect that ecosystem, sure, and even
even bits of stuff from other ecosystems that currently exist
(30:58):
on the planet can be very detrimental. I mean, look
at a kudzu or um the little zebra muscles of
the Great Lakes, or or rats everywhere um or dogs
and cats in say Australia, New Zealand, which ended up
wiping out a lot of both the other predators and
prey uh in that region. So yeah, I mean, we
(31:18):
we've seen how bringing a foreign species into an ecosystem
can wreak havoc among the rest of the life forms
that are there. And for these extinct animals, especially some
of them that you could consider them, you know, an
alien species to that ecosystem, depending upon how long they've
been gone. Well probably alien more so than any foreign
(31:40):
species currently on Earth. Right Well yeah, arguably, I mean,
depending I guess, I guess it really depends. We've got
some really crazy life forms in some very specific ecosystems
and to take them out and put them into something
else with uh definitely be unethical. Don't do that. So
one other thing I wanted to touch on before we
conclude is other ways this technology could be used. And
(32:03):
I had mentioned that there is the possibility that they
could use this technology to help in conservation efforts, in
other words, specifically helping out endangered species rather than necessarily
trying to bring back an extinct one, to try and
create more biodiversity in existing small population. So for some
species we're talking you know, there's some animals out there
(32:24):
where the only known members of that population it adds
up to maybe a couple of dozen or maybe even
fewer than that. That's not going to be healthy. If
their gene pool is that small, exactly, you you start
to really worry about the biodiversity in that population. They
can become more prone to birth defects and illnesses. So
(32:45):
if you're able to increase that biodiversity, perhaps through using
similar methods from the ones we were talking about earlier,
but instead of trying to create a new species, you're
just you're trying to create new babies in that population,
but from diverse samples of DNA, perhaps gathered from you know,
either zoos or in the case of animals that are
(33:06):
no longer you know, they're they're endangered in the wild,
but we still have a zoo population somewhere, or animals
from you, material from museums, things like that, to help
increase biodiversity and thus make the populations more hardy in
addition to giving them more genetic diversity. I wonder if
genetic engineering could come in to help an animal species
(33:28):
that has been endangered by a specific threat. Say like
if you have a fish that is a great risk
because of one specific chemical pollutant and its water supply,
could you introduce into the genome of that fish a
gene that makes it more resistant to that pollutant. Getting
into genetic engineering here, and that certainly has its own
(33:50):
huge list of controversial elements to it, as we talked
about in our food GMO and GMO genetically modified organ is. UM.
It doesn't necessarily have to just refer to plants. It
can talk We can talk about animals as well. UM.
I mean in in theory or at least you know,
you could hypothesize that such a thing as possible. I
(34:12):
don't know how long it would take talking about such
a specific application. It's it's a little tricky because I mean,
one thing, it would give you a lot of focus
and whatever it was you were trying to attempt. But
the worry would be that whatever whatever, whenever you got
to a point where you could address the problem, the
problem would either have changed or the population would be
dead anyway. So but but it's an interesting idea and
(34:34):
just interesting application of the technology and maybe a little
bit more practical than trying to bring back philosopraptors. Well,
definitely who wants those. They're terrible, Uh, they're awful at
parties there. But on the other hand, if you were
going to try to do something like that, then again
(34:56):
you're tampering and introducing this unknown factor. Right, like talked
about with with other options earlier, You're you're changing an organism,
which is kind of like introducing an alien organism ecosystem.
You don't know exactly how that new organism, with its
different genetic profile is going to function in that ecosystem.
What if by giving this fish a gene to make
(35:18):
it resistant to this pollutant, suddenly it takes over and
now it's it's an invasive species. Right, the superfish might
turn out to be way more detrimental than than what
would have happened if you had just let alone. Yeah,
like this, this kind of brings us to the final point,
which is this idea that you could create whole new
(35:39):
species in a way. That's kind of what would be
happening with the passenger pigeon, right news. So not just
like a pollutant resistant fish, but maybe like a fish
with eight eyes and a human arm. Yeah, or a
machine gun. You know. Okay, it has the equivalent of
you're you're talking Dr Moreau. Yeah, I'm telling Dodger Moreau
in a way, I mean even more than Dr Moreau,
(36:00):
which was kind of like the Chimera approach where he
was combining various animals and making them trying anthropomorphized and
all this kind of stuff. Jonathan, can you do the voice?
Just just do the voice? Well, you want to do
Marlon Brando as Dr Monroe, Dr Munro Monroe Morrow, That
Monroe would be the one for the Simpsons. Uh No,
I cannot do that. You got attempted, but I'm not
(36:21):
going to because I can't remember the line anymore. Val
Kilmer do it. I do a terrible impersonation of Val
Kilmer doing a terrible impersonation of Marlon Brando doing Dr Morrow.
So that's the way that chain goes. But at any rate, Uh,
the idea is here that you know, if you could,
if you could sequence, if you could construct a workable
(36:43):
genome for an animal that has never existed, which in
a way is kind of what some of these people
are doing. You know, they're combining a genome for one
species with genomes from very closely related species in an
effort to try and revive extinct like the extinct passenger pigeon.
That's specifically the example. But if you take this idea
and you extend it into the future, and you think, well,
(37:06):
what about once we figure out how to actually build
those genomes, what stops us from eventually designing a genome
for a species that never existed. It's not that it's
something that went extinct and we got some of its
DNA back and we filled in the gaps with other DNA.
This is DNA we have completely built from the ground up,
like retro engineering of velociraptor. Yeah, essentially, that would be
(37:28):
the idea, is that you could in theory, if assuming
that all of this would work. I mean, these are
big assumptions. This is really talking like crazy like singularity
level future ideas. But yes, you could do that. You
could say, well, now we can build ourselves a dinosaur.
We can't. We can't resurrect the dinosaurs make a chicken
(37:48):
really big and extra mean pretty much. Wasn't that even
a plot point in the novel Jurassic Park? Like the
dinosaurs they were making weren't exactly dinosaurs. They were making
these things that are were what people wanted to see
when they came to see a dinosaur, but they specifically
change them around a little bit to make them more
tourist happy. Yeah. Yeah, although they did have several of
(38:11):
the behaviors that confirmed the one uh the one paleontologists theories,
like the fact that they would migrate, you know, that
was that was very important in the book towards the
very end, as I recall. But anyway, yeah, so that's
kind of an interesting idea. We don't know that it
will ever happen, for one thing, I mean, we still
are waiting for the real success story of bringing a
(38:32):
species back from extinction. Personally, I hope that it does happen.
I would love to see some extinct species come back.
I would really love to see this technology being dedicated
to help in conservation efforts. Obviously, um I would really
really love to see human beings behave in a responsible
manner to the species around them and not kill them
(38:53):
off through destroying their habitats or otherwise. That would be lovely. Hippie,
you don't like Panda stakes, get off this podcast. How
pandas can go? I mean, there they can go. They
had their time. But now I'm just kidding guys. I
as as you all know, I love all the critters
of the forest, and I only joke. Yes, yes, we are.
(39:15):
We are making some light of what is otherwise a
pretty heavy situation here. But anyway, we will make sure
to share a lot of the the articles that we
read in preparation for this episode, because a lot of
them go into great detail and and give a really
full examination of the story. Some of them are more
like profile pieces, but a lot of them really kind
of dive into it. Make sure that that that you
(39:37):
can tell the reporter went through the trouble of interviewing
various experts with differing points of view to kind of
get the full story. So we'll definitely share those in
the future. And uh, yeah, this was a fun topic
to to consider because I mean, just throwing it out there.
I know. This is kind of similar to the question
I had about if you could have any sort of
robot animal, what would it be? If you could bring
(40:00):
back any extinct species, what would it be beholder an
actual species, not not constructing a new species, I mean
a real species that once lived on the earth and
now is no more. I you didn't prepare me for this.
I can't think of what it would be. Um uh, Dodo.
(40:24):
Dodo is good. That was my choice for robot animal.
I like do um. I'm really curious about about actually
horticulture the way that it existed a few hundred or
a few thousand years ago. Like I want to taste
the strawberries that that Queen Victoria had in her childhood. Yeah,
or have a decent banana since all the really good
species have pretty much died out. Oh, I'm raising my hand. Megalodon, Oh, Megalodon?
(40:49):
You want to us because that way we can have
an even better version of Jaws. Yeah? Oh no, there
are plenty of Megalodon moving. I'm aware of them. I
know someone who produced one. Well, but we need a documentary,
I mean a real documentary. Yeah, well, can you imagine
Megalodon week? Actually we can we watch megalodon movies so
(41:15):
we can tell you about the future of megalodons now
since you didn't ask, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
I'm gonna choose wooly mammoth. I know it's the popular
choice everyone talks about, but it's uh, they're so furry.
I mean, it would just be I can't imagine the
intellectual and emotional experience I would I would undergo witnessing
(41:35):
a wooly mammoth walking around. I can't imagine a better
way to feed a megalodon than a wooly mammoth. Just
dangle a giant wooly mammoth over the megalodon. Megalodons aren't
gonna want to eat modern animals. They're gonna want to
eat wooly mammoth's it wants to hunt, all right, So
we're gonna we're gonna wrap this up on that cheerful note. So, guys,
(41:57):
if you have any suggestions for our discussions, maybe you
want to join in. Maybe there's something about this particular
topic you would like to contribute to. Well, let us know.
We have an email address you can send us mail.
It is FW thinking at Discovery dot com, or you
can make contact with us all the various social networks
that we often can be found on. Those include Twitter, Facebook,
(42:20):
and Google Plus with the handle f W thinking and
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward
thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says from my
heart and from my hand, why don't people understand my intention?
(00:20):
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Volcaba, and I'm Joe McCormick. So, guys,
have you have you ever watched? Uh it's a little
known documentary film called Jurassic Park. I only saw Jurassic
Park three, but it was fantastic. Uh No, I saw
Jurassic Park in the theater when I was a kid,
and it blew my mind. I probably I got the
(00:43):
VHS tape when it came out and I watched it
until the tape was no more right. I mean, it
was certainly one of those that sparked people's imaginations. For
one thing, of course, it was a great example of
c g I in an era when before that you
didn't really see it at that level of sophistication. It
was for the time, really believable effects. Oh yeah, people
(01:05):
love c G I in the nineties, but if you
go back and watch most of those nineties movies now
they look awful. Yeah, they definitely Yeah, well it's you know,
in Jurassic Park was one of the ones that really
incorporated puppets and also practical and cg those a good choice.
How things held up yep, yep. And so here's the thing, guys,
um you know, it kind of popularized this idea of
(01:28):
what if we could get some sort of genetic material
from long extinct species and then through some sort of
science application, bring those extinct species back to life all
odd Jurassic Park. You notice in Jurassic Park when they're
taking them through the lab, they kind of skipped through
all the hard parts. Well, I love that the science
(01:48):
is all delivered by a cartoon character that is dumbing
everything down for the lowest common denominator. And part of
that is so that the writers don't have to go
to the trouble of actually explaining how it works or
how it would work if it could work right. Well,
the book To Be Fair went a little bit more
into that, but it's still absolutely a work of fiction.
And even though Michael Crichton has has this cute tendency
(02:09):
of footnoting his fictional works, that doesn't mean that those
footnotes are based on whoa whoa whoa work of fiction. Now,
I thought we had already cloned a few dinosaurs. Is
that not true? We we don't have resurrected raptors and
t rex is somewhere in Texas only in my heart, Yeah,
sadly no. So the reason why this this is part
(02:32):
of our discussion today is because in the news recently
there have been some articles about de extinction and we
wanted to talk about what the extinction is and UH
and what its applications could be and why there is
controversy around it. But to start off kind of helps
lay the groundwork if we actually talk about just the
whole problem of extinction in the first place. So, first,
(02:56):
how many species go extinct every year? I don't know
how you could even guess? Yeah, yeah, it turns out
that that that's very difficult. You can really just estimate.
For one thing, we don't even know how many species
there are, do we absolutely not. We are still discovering
some like fifteen thousand species every year, and UH researchers
(03:16):
think that that of the one point to million that
we've already documented on on this our wonderful planet Earth,
that might be a part of some eight point seven
million that are kicking around. Wow. So yeah, we still
have quite a bit of quite a few more species
to discover before we get close to it. We're like
not even a quarter of the way there. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:37):
there might be some some eight percent of life on
Earth that is yet undiscovered. Um. But but here's the thing.
A lot of the ones that we're currently discovering are
already endangered. Yeah. So they're already you know, the populations
already so small that that the smallest of of influences
could make these populations go extinct. Things could be going
extinct before we have even documented them. And it's worth
(03:59):
pointing out that things go extinct naturally. I mean that
happens all the time, and not just when meteors hit either, right, No,
I mean just due to the pressures of nature, you know,
food supply and predation. Things go out of business, sometimes
a species is gone. But also we drive things to
extinction knowing yes, there's a there's natural background extinction, which
(04:21):
is what the rate of extinction would be if humans
were not part of the picture, and it is significantly
lower than once you factor humans in. How significantly well
scientists estimate that the extincion extinction rate is one thousand
to ten thousand times greater than that background extinction rate
according to the World Wildlife Fund. So that's one thousand
(04:42):
to ten thousand times. I mean, that's human influence right there.
On top of that. That means that anywhere between point
zero one and point one percent of all species go
extinct every year. And again the reason why I point
zero one to point one is because we don't know
how many species there are, nor can we really get
an estimate on exactly how many are going extinct every year.
(05:05):
So these are all you know, based on on like
wide ranges and guesses and if you want to know
how wide, well, the estimation on how many species are
out there, uh, and the extinction rates taken into as
a combination mean that something between two hundred and one
hundred thousand species are going extinct every year. So on
(05:27):
the low end, two hundred species not great, but you know,
not a hundred thousand. But again, all of this is
just based on those those crazy estimations of how many
species are out there and how many are actually dying
out right. And I do want to put in that
not all of these species are like adorable monkeys. Um,
there's a lot of bacteria and stuff like that involved
in these calculations, right. Uh. And some of them, however,
(05:48):
are totally adorable. Some of them are adorable monkeys or
or some other you know, equally adorable animal. And according
to the i u c N Red List criteria, there
are sixteen thousand, ninety eight species on the endangered list,
and the same list identify as nine hundred five species
that are now extinct in the wild, now extinct, like
(06:10):
since the beginning of this classification. Yeah, essentially they're identifying
species some of these there are still examples of those species,
but they are all in captivity. None of them are
in the y I see what you mean, Like in
zoos exactly, you won't. You won't find them in their
home ecosystems anymore, at least none have been spotted for
at least a few decades. Uh. And in fact, that's
(06:31):
one of the problems with listing animals as extinct. You know,
it's all based upon our observations. It's not like we
have a little light on a giant switchboard and when
the light goes out, you know that that species has gone.
So it's a little complicated. Okay, So now that we
can see how fast the problem is getting worse that
we're we're changing ecosystems constantly by knocking species out of business.
(06:52):
This can't be a great idea to just drive species
to extinction with no forethought. Is it possible to reverse
the polarity? Um? Okay, so we're going star trek on this. Okay, Uh,
technically it's it depends. It depends upon the species and
how long it's been extinct. So for example, Jurassic Park,
(07:15):
that's the example with all the dinosaurs coming back. Is
that realistic? As it turns out, it is not. And
the reason for that is because DNA degrades over time.
It does not remain completely pristine. Even if you were
to find a mosquito buried in amber that had dinosaur
blood in it, that DNA will degrade within the little
(07:36):
gut of that mosquito. So it's not like you're going
to suddenly have a perfect strand of DNA where you
can sequence a dinosaurs genome. It's just not going to happen. Well,
you're not even going to get like a few little
strands like I don't know, give me some numbers here.
The thing is is that DNA is is only really
readable for about a million years. It's it's got a
half life of five and twenty one years, which means
(07:58):
that that how of the nucleu tide bonds and it
will break down every one years, right, um, Which means
that basically anything over a million years old is effectively gibberish,
and anything over some six point eight million is effectively destroyed. Um,
which is pretty impressive for for DNA. That's a lot
longer than we actually thought originally that it was going
to last. But the thing is that the dinosaur extinction
(08:21):
event happened some sixty three million years ago. Um. The
the oldest sample of DNA have read about being used
to create a successful clone was only frozen for sixteen years. Yeah. Okay,
so but here's a question I always had about Jurassic Park,
which is, even if you could get that DNA, even
if what you're talking about didn't happen, how would you
(08:42):
make it into an egg that hatches? Yeah, we'd have to. Um.
I feel like they skipped over that part in the movie.
I don't remember what they said. Well, they combined, they combined,
they filled in gaps in the genome that they had,
and we'll talk a little bit about filling in gaps,
because that actually is something that people are trying to do.
You know that they've filled it with the DNA of
(09:03):
a frog. I guess the question is more like physical
how they get it into an egg. They also they
also used frog eggs, I believe, for for cloning purposes.
The way that cloning works is usually you scoop the
DNA out of existing cell nucleus and put new DNA
material in there right right, and you and then you
hope it ends up forming an embryo. Yeah. The problem
(09:25):
is that that egg cells contain mitochondria, which contain their
own little bits of DNA from the donor animal. And
unlike in say Star Trek, when Klingons and humans which
evolved on completely separate planets, can produce viable offspring, or
even in Jurassic Park, where it just gave them plot
dependent hero saving weaknesses. Um, really, it's it's more likely
(09:46):
that these cells would just be be unviable. They would
not be able to germinate, would not produce any kind
of any kind of life. Yeah, and also I should
point out that it wasn't just weaknesses. It also gave
them their strength because that was what gave dinosaurs the
ability to spontaneously switch sexes. So that allowed them to
continue to have because they were supposed to all be female,
(10:07):
and then uh they a couple of them ended up
being able because because the jenet material they had was
taken from frogs that were able to change their genders. Basically, yeah, okay,
so I guess we can't bring dinosaurs back. What can
we do? Can we? Maybe we can't resurrect a t rex?
Can we resurrect something like a mammoth? Actually, there are
(10:29):
a lot of people working on exactly that. The wooly
mammoth has become kind of the poster animal for a
lot of different efforts. Not the only one, We've got,
another one will chat about. Yeah, populations of William mammoth's
were around as as early late as about ten thousand
years ago, or possibly as recently as four thousand years ago. Yeah,
(10:49):
so that's certainly a viable, a viable option. I most
of the time I hear around ten thousand years is
about what people expect to be able to bring back
from extinction. That's like a kind of a round figure
that people throw around. But as for actual efforts, like
real scientists doing real science trying to bring extinct animals back.
(11:10):
We've got two examples we can talk about right now
that we're semi successful. Uh, semi successful meaning that ultimately
you didn't have an animal survive very long, but but
there was development yet technically successful. So if you get
sad about stories about furry animals not living very long,
(11:33):
you may want to skip ahead a little bit because
I'm gonna tell you about Celia. Lay it on me,
all right. Ce Celia was the last known living brocado,
which is a type of ibex and and for those
of us who don't encounter ibex is very frequently, that's
sort of kind of like a goat like animals, the
ones that have the really long round horns and like
(11:54):
they loop back. Well, the bricado was one population, one
one species, so it uh had dwindled until they really
only thought there was this one living brocado left, and
they named her Celia, fitted her with a collar, kept
her in the wild. The collar monitored Celia's life signs,
(12:16):
and then one day the collar essentially indicated that Celia's
heart had stopped beating. A team went out to find
out what had happened. And discovered that Celia had been
crushed to death by the limb of a falling tree.
They they managed to harvest them cells from celia and
they froze them, they preserved them, and then years later
(12:37):
another team researchers and scientists decided to try and bring
the brocado back. It was only about three years later,
so this was so the cells had not been in
cold storage for very long. Yeah, they ended up harvesting
the nuclei from those cells, and then they used emptied
goat eggs cells and injected the nuclei from the brocado
(12:57):
into the goat egg cells and then landed those into
surrogate mothers. And they did fifties seven attempts. Only seven
of those resulted in pregnancy, and six of those ended
a miscarriage. However, that that last example was actually brought
all the way up to where you had a baby
brocado delivered by c section um. The baby brocado or
(13:20):
the kid, unfortunately didn't have its lungs developed properly. One
of its lungs actually formed essentially like a solid mass
of tissue kind of like they described it being more
like a liver. That good breeding. Yeah, and it. It
essentially suffocated to death shortly after it was born, so
it only it only survived a couple of minutes. So
that's very sad. But it did lay the groundwork and
(13:43):
foundation for a lot of other UH groups to kind
of make this attempt. This was back in in two
thousand three, so this was you know, you know, more
than a decade ago. Now there's another project called the
Lazarus Project, which UM is the University of new Castle, Australia,
and they decided to go with a totally different kind
(14:03):
of cute cuddly animal, a frog. It gives birth by
regurgitating its babies. Yeah, it's a it's a frog that
gives birth through its mouth, essentially regurgitates its babies. But
if you kiss it, it regurgitates the prince. No, it
actually regurgitates prints and he'll sing purple rain. It turns
(14:23):
into a prince that regurgitates frogs. I think we might
be getting off track. What actually happens is the way
this frog reproduces. It lays eggs, The eggs are fertilized,
and then the frog swallows the eggs to protect them,
and then once the eggs hatch, it pukes up the babies.
So this particular frog though, had gone extinct. Joe, this
(14:46):
is no laughing matter. This is this is I'm just
protecting them from Well, sure, when you put it like that,
it sounds like it's you know, obscene, but no, it's
it's really how these animals, how these animals survive. And um,
this particular animal that the rio back trachius silas frog
has gone when extinct back in the you know, nineteen seventies,
(15:10):
but some of its cells had been in deep freeze,
in a regular freezer actually since the nineteen seventies. And
so the Lazarus Project harvested the nuclei and then they
put them into emptied frog cells from great barred frogs,
which are a fairly close relative to the frog that
had gun extinct. So some of the cells began to
(15:32):
divide and go right into the embryo stage, but none
of the embryos survived past a few days. So again
sort of promising results but not not a full success.
Then you have another group called Revive and restore. This
is one that I thought was really interesting. There are
several articles that published in early fourteen about their particular
(15:54):
drive to de extinction technologies. And their approach is a
little different from, um, what we've been talking about. They're
looking at creating a chimera, which is not, uh, the
mythological creature that you know, you may be familiar with,
particularly if you played a lot of dudgeons and dragons.
And although that would be cool, can can we de extinctify? Well,
(16:16):
we gotta, we gotta wait till the end of the
podcast before we talk about that, but we we will
address that, yes, um, but yes, Reviving Restore was looking
at creating this These these animals that outwardly resemble one species,
but internally have some elements of a different species, So
they are a chimera of two different species. And the
(16:37):
example that was used in all the articles because one
of the people involved in Reviving Restore is so passionate
about this particular species, is the passenger pigeon. Now, I
don't know how much you guys know about passenger pigeons.
At one time it was the dominant species of birds
in the United States. There were something like five billion
of them. I've I've read reports of like the flocks
(16:59):
of them blotting out the sun. Yeah, they made up
sixty percent of all birds in the us. So to
think that we went from a population that enormous too
completely extinct in just a couple of decades due to
hunting and and other problems as well, it is pretty
eye opening to think that, you know, essentially that's saying like,
no species is safe. If you think of something that
(17:21):
looks that plentiful and yet could go extinct that quickly,
it's a real eye opener. Well, the idea behind the
passenger pigeon approach is to uh sequence the passenger pigeon
genome by harvesting cells from various museum exhibits that have
passenger pigeons, like no stuffed on display, to take some
cells from that and to try and sequence the genome.
(17:44):
And there's gaps in that genome, kind of like in
Jurassic Park, and so to fill in those gaps, they
start looking at some of the closest relatives to the
passenger pigeon and trying to kind of, you know, fudge
it a little bit, fill it in. Yeah, the modern
band tailed pigeon, I think is one of the closest,
and the idea is to get to a point where
they can sequence d n A so that they can
(18:06):
inject it directly into an egg of a band tailed pigeon.
They'd actually make a little hole in the egg, inject
the DNA down into it, and then patch the hole
with essentially what looks like saran wrap, and allow it
to continue to develop until it hatches into a hatchling. Now,
the hatchling is going to look and behave just like
(18:26):
a band tailed pigeon. It is, to all outward appearances,
a simple band tailed pigeon, but it's reproductive cells as
in its egg or sperm cells will be passenger pigeon cells.
So if you can take a male and female band
tailed pigeon that's been altered in this way and breed
them together, then in theory, you would get a passenger pigeon.
(18:47):
Kind of cool, also weird, little terrifying, pretty cool. The
weirdest part is our I don't know if it's the
weirdest part, but a weird part is that they're not
really sure how to teach the passenger pigeons how to
be passenger pigeons, assuming that this works, because this is
not this is not something that's happened yet. It's it's
something that they hypothesize would be possible, but they haven't
(19:09):
proved it yet. But the thing that they're wondering is, Okay,
if it hatches into this passenger pigeon after you know
it's it's two generations removed from when things, Um, will
it behave like a band tailed pigeon or would some
behaviors be innate pigeons. That would come down to the
(19:30):
question of whether its behaviors are more learned or instinctual. Sure,
and I'm I'm wondering in the case of pigeons, I mean,
and no offense to to pigeon aficionados out there, but
but exactly how big the differences and whether or not
that's uh, whether or not that's the operative point when
you're talking pigeons. I think the biggest difference is migratory
patterns because the passenger pigeon wasn't very didn't migrate very much,
(19:55):
and some of these other pigeons do. So it's one
of those things where you're not there. They're not sure
if this is even possible. And if we do bring
passenger pigeons back, will they behave the way passenger pigeons
of old did or will they be some sort of
new species that are very close to what passenger pigeons were,
but behave in a different way, and honestly, people aren't sure.
(20:18):
And those are important questions because that also puts an
impact upon the ecosystem that the passenger pigeon encounters, like
you have to remember, and that we're going to talk
about this a lot in our next section, about the
fact that the world is this really interconnected, complicated system,
and just because you add one thing in one place
(20:38):
doesn't mean it's not somehow going to affect something else
really far away, just through uh this whole you know,
kind of domino effect or chaos theory if you're a
certain mathematician. So this brings us to this question of
if let's assuming that these these different approaches bear fruit,
(20:59):
that they are able to bring at least some types
of extinct species back to life through one of these methods,
what are some of the other ethical and practical considerations
we have to make, uh with this technology in mind.
One of the ones I've seen, though I take some
(21:19):
issue with it, is this view that, well, it might
be a zero sum game, you know, so that if
we're putting money and effort and time and attention into
bringing extinct species back from the dead. Are we going
to be therefore losing all of those same types of
investments that we should be putting into keeping endangered species alive? Well? Yeah,
(21:45):
I mean, if it's the super flashy, sexy kind of
technology where you could tell people, hey, the majestic wooly
mammoth could stride across the plains again, I mean, people
are going to get excited about that. But it's something
that none of us have ever seen. Hares about pandas.
Let's to be fair, even conservationists say, who cares about
(22:05):
pandas because they claim, or at least the ones I
read claim, are the panda. The panda thing is like
pandas are plentiful compared to say, white rhinos, Well, who
cares about white rhinos? Let's bring willy mammoth. See that
that's the worry, right, And and like you said, it's
kind of two pronged. It's worrying about taking attention away
from conservation efforts and also and probably more importantly, money
(22:29):
from conservation efforts. Yeah. So if that were really how
it worked, Like in order to invest in bringing something
back from extinction, you have to take money away from conservation,
I would consider that a very legitimate complaint. I don't
think it necessarily works that way, Like no, and I
think that really, in fact, you're you're going to be
drawing attention to the overall issue. And I mean I
(22:51):
would imagine, well, I know that a lot of these
projects specifically take conservation as one of their big concerns,
so that they they acknowledge that conservation is very important
and that they don't want to be considered an alternative
conservation that's more of a supplement to conservation efforts. But
the way specifically saying it's not a zero sum game, right.
(23:13):
The problem is that when you start reporting on this stuff,
and I mean it's easy to see why this this
happens in the media, but the attention is this is
super awesome, cool technology that could really be interesting if
it works, uh, and it would be able to bring
species that most of us have never ever seen back
(23:33):
to life. That's really enticing. And it may not be.
The real story may not be that it's you know,
de extinction versus conservation. It's just that the way the
media portrays it, it seems like de extinction is the
cool thing and conservation isn't really mentioned very frequently except
in some of those more in depth articles where they
really try to to to dig down deep and get
(23:54):
into the story. And we read quite a few of
those articles, and some of them are amazing. They really
look at all facets of the story and they take
this head on. And I would agree that I think
conservation and de extinction can survive side by side. They
can they can complement one another. I do also think
that when it comes to someone giving their money to
(24:16):
a cause, the de extinction one can might seem more
attractive to certain people just because it does seem more
exotic and flashy. But I don't think it's gonna be
something that funnels like the funding away from conservation. Yeah,
and I don't think that anyone is going to um
going to just say like, well, well screw those pandas
(24:38):
because we can just revive them later. Yeah, if I mean, yeah,
it seems like some people do take that complaint. Let
me if I can advocate something here, despite the fact
that this is a future technology kind of show we're
doing here, if you are really actually forced to choose
between conservation and d action, go with conservation obviously, right. Well,
(25:04):
and and we'll talk a little bit about how some
of these approaches can help in conservation efforts as well.
And I should also point out that everyone says, not
that I have a money figure to put on this,
but everyone says that this de extinction approach is going
to be complicated, it's going to be, especially in the
early years, unreliable or or difficult, and it's going to
(25:26):
be really expensive. So it's not something that is going
to be done for every single species that has ever
gone extinct. There's going to be choices made. Uh. And
so it may very well be that this is something
that happens with a few passion projects where people are
really pushing to bring back certain species and others are
left behind. And it's not because one is better than
(25:48):
the other. It's just that that's where people were able
to direct the money and effort toward. Sure, but let's
talk about a few of those reasons why we would
want to. I mean, if we really only had ten
dollars um and those ten dollars could fund either the
extinction forever or conservation forever, why should we go with conservation.
I'd say one thing is that it's something you can
(26:09):
trust in because you can see it like it's our
conservation actually works, Like there's no question about uh, you know,
what will happen if we stop killing these animals, right,
you know, like, Okay, if we stopped killing them, that
actually will work. The extinction is questionable. It might work,
it might not sure, So there's a risk on on return.
(26:32):
I mean, just based upon that. If you're if you
want to just separate yourself from the whole animal thing,
it's there's there's one method that you know is going
towards helping actual living creatures right now, and one method
that could possibly maybe bring something back, but we aren't sure.
We also know that any animal that is sustaining a
(26:52):
population on Earth today, at least barring major human intervention,
has a place in its current ecosystem, right In other words,
the ecosystem is able to support that population. Uh. I,
So I would say, well, maybe let's bring back the
wooly mammoth. Well, I'm not sure that the wooly mammoth
necessarily has a place in today's ecosis. And that is
(27:13):
another great argument that people make about this, the extinction question.
It's that you can't really be sure with some of
these species that they would have a place in the
world where they could survive, let alone thrive. And for
species that have been extinct for a few thousand years,
the question is is more you know unknown? We don't know,
(27:36):
because ecosystems do change over time, not necessarily rapidly unless
there's outside intervention in the form of you know, humans
messing with an ecosystem or something really massive like a
meteor strike or whatever. Meteor right, I guess I should
say strike. But these systems do change over time, and
it's possible that some species would find it very difficult
to survive in today's ecosystems. Absolutely, and we're not just
(27:59):
talking about the macro scale of of predators and prey
and all that kind of stuff. Also the micro scale.
I mean, the more that we learned about the microbiome,
the more we think it could have a serious impact
on on any given macro organisms um quality of life
and even survival. We we talked recently in our episodes
about antibiotics and hygiene that that germs aren't always harp harmful. Um.
(28:22):
You know, a lot of them evolved in tandem with
multicellular species, and that really weird stuff happens when we
killed too many germs off. Right now, for a species
that have gone extinct relatively recently, it may be that
there are plenty of ecosystems in which it could survive
and thrive. So something that died out ten years ago
(28:43):
or fifty years ago might still have a place to
survive and be relatively fine. But for things that when
extinct much longer ago, the question is, well, is the
has the world changed so much that this creature would
have a real hard time to survive? And is it
fair to bring something back to life if it's just
going to die out again? Right? And I think that
(29:05):
question is crucial because even if we're just talking about
species that were driven to extinction by humans and not
by natural forces, this is not just like hunters going
out and killing all of them. A lot of what
we're talking about, In fact, I don't know for sure,
but I would guess that most of it is due
to habitat destruction. Sure, but the people building cities and
(29:27):
going further and further into the surrounding environments to cut
down trees, make past your land, all that kind of stuff,
food sources are breeding grounds or anything like that slowly disappearing. Yes,
So I mean, one of the easiest ways to kill
an animal is not to go out looking for all
of them and kill them for their tusks or whatever.
Much more action packed. Well, yeah, it's to destroy their habitat.
(29:50):
They don't have a place to live and thrive and
occupy that there's no chance for them. One more argument
that I've heard against the extinction is based a lot
on the fact that we just don't know very much
about what will happen should this technology prove to be
useful to to actually work, uh. And that is that
species may be able to spread or cause disease or
(30:13):
otherwise harm and ecosystem. So it may be that a
species that was extinct when it comes back, becomes a
carrier for a disease and then spreads it much more
quickly than it would have if that species had never
been brought back. That's one. It's really an argument from
the unknown, right, we just don't know this is a
plausible outcome, but we don't know if it's or at
(30:36):
least a possible log and we don't know how plausible
it is. Uh. And also just to worry about how
it would end up affecting the ecosystem you introduce it to,
assuming that you're not just bringing species back to put
them in zoos then putting them into any kind of
ecosystem is going to affect that ecosystem, sure, and even
even bits of stuff from other ecosystems that currently exist
(30:58):
on the planet can be very detrimental. I mean, look
at a kudzu or um the little zebra muscles of
the Great Lakes, or or rats everywhere um or dogs
and cats in say Australia, New Zealand, which ended up
wiping out a lot of both the other predators and
prey uh in that region. So yeah, I mean, we
(31:18):
we've seen how bringing a foreign species into an ecosystem
can wreak havoc among the rest of the life forms
that are there. And for these extinct animals, especially some
of them that you could consider them, you know, an
alien species to that ecosystem, depending upon how long they've
been gone. Well probably alien more so than any foreign
(31:40):
species currently on Earth. Right Well yeah, arguably, I mean,
depending I guess, I guess it really depends. We've got
some really crazy life forms in some very specific ecosystems
and to take them out and put them into something
else with uh definitely be unethical. Don't do that. So
one other thing I wanted to touch on before we
conclude is other ways this technology could be used. And
(32:03):
I had mentioned that there is the possibility that they
could use this technology to help in conservation efforts, in
other words, specifically helping out endangered species rather than necessarily
trying to bring back an extinct one, to try and
create more biodiversity in existing small population. So for some
species we're talking you know, there's some animals out there
(32:24):
where the only known members of that population it adds
up to maybe a couple of dozen or maybe even
fewer than that. That's not going to be healthy. If
their gene pool is that small, exactly, you you start
to really worry about the biodiversity in that population. They
can become more prone to birth defects and illnesses. So
(32:45):
if you're able to increase that biodiversity, perhaps through using
similar methods from the ones we were talking about earlier,
but instead of trying to create a new species, you're
just you're trying to create new babies in that population,
but from diverse samples of DNA, perhaps gathered from you know,
either zoos or in the case of animals that are
(33:06):
no longer you know, they're they're endangered in the wild,
but we still have a zoo population somewhere, or animals
from you, material from museums, things like that, to help
increase biodiversity and thus make the populations more hardy in
addition to giving them more genetic diversity. I wonder if
genetic engineering could come in to help an animal species
(33:28):
that has been endangered by a specific threat. Say like
if you have a fish that is a great risk
because of one specific chemical pollutant and its water supply,
could you introduce into the genome of that fish a
gene that makes it more resistant to that pollutant. Getting
into genetic engineering here, and that certainly has its own
(33:50):
huge list of controversial elements to it, as we talked
about in our food GMO and GMO genetically modified organ is. UM.
It doesn't necessarily have to just refer to plants. It
can talk We can talk about animals as well. UM.
I mean in in theory or at least you know,
you could hypothesize that such a thing as possible. I
(34:12):
don't know how long it would take talking about such
a specific application. It's it's a little tricky because I mean,
one thing, it would give you a lot of focus
and whatever it was you were trying to attempt. But
the worry would be that whatever whatever, whenever you got
to a point where you could address the problem, the
problem would either have changed or the population would be
dead anyway. So but but it's an interesting idea and
(34:34):
just interesting application of the technology and maybe a little
bit more practical than trying to bring back philosopraptors. Well,
definitely who wants those. They're terrible, Uh, they're awful at
parties there. But on the other hand, if you were
going to try to do something like that, then again
(34:56):
you're tampering and introducing this unknown factor. Right, like talked
about with with other options earlier, You're you're changing an organism,
which is kind of like introducing an alien organism ecosystem.
You don't know exactly how that new organism, with its
different genetic profile is going to function in that ecosystem.
What if by giving this fish a gene to make
(35:18):
it resistant to this pollutant, suddenly it takes over and
now it's it's an invasive species. Right, the superfish might
turn out to be way more detrimental than than what
would have happened if you had just let alone. Yeah,
like this, this kind of brings us to the final point,
which is this idea that you could create whole new
(35:39):
species in a way. That's kind of what would be
happening with the passenger pigeon, right news. So not just
like a pollutant resistant fish, but maybe like a fish
with eight eyes and a human arm. Yeah, or a
machine gun. You know. Okay, it has the equivalent of
you're you're talking Dr Moreau. Yeah, I'm telling Dodger Moreau
in a way, I mean even more than Dr Moreau,
(36:00):
which was kind of like the Chimera approach where he
was combining various animals and making them trying anthropomorphized and
all this kind of stuff. Jonathan, can you do the voice?
Just just do the voice? Well, you want to do
Marlon Brando as Dr Monroe, Dr Munro Monroe Morrow, That
Monroe would be the one for the Simpsons. Uh No,
I cannot do that. You got attempted, but I'm not
(36:21):
going to because I can't remember the line anymore. Val
Kilmer do it. I do a terrible impersonation of Val
Kilmer doing a terrible impersonation of Marlon Brando doing Dr Morrow.
So that's the way that chain goes. But at any rate, Uh,
the idea is here that you know, if you could,
if you could sequence, if you could construct a workable
(36:43):
genome for an animal that has never existed, which in
a way is kind of what some of these people
are doing. You know, they're combining a genome for one
species with genomes from very closely related species in an
effort to try and revive extinct like the extinct passenger pigeon.
That's specifically the example. But if you take this idea
and you extend it into the future, and you think, well,
(37:06):
what about once we figure out how to actually build
those genomes, what stops us from eventually designing a genome
for a species that never existed. It's not that it's
something that went extinct and we got some of its
DNA back and we filled in the gaps with other DNA.
This is DNA we have completely built from the ground up,
like retro engineering of velociraptor. Yeah, essentially, that would be
(37:28):
the idea, is that you could in theory, if assuming
that all of this would work. I mean, these are
big assumptions. This is really talking like crazy like singularity
level future ideas. But yes, you could do that. You
could say, well, now we can build ourselves a dinosaur.
We can't. We can't resurrect the dinosaurs make a chicken
(37:48):
really big and extra mean pretty much. Wasn't that even
a plot point in the novel Jurassic Park? Like the
dinosaurs they were making weren't exactly dinosaurs. They were making
these things that are were what people wanted to see
when they came to see a dinosaur, but they specifically
change them around a little bit to make them more
tourist happy. Yeah. Yeah, although they did have several of
(38:11):
the behaviors that confirmed the one uh the one paleontologists theories,
like the fact that they would migrate, you know, that
was that was very important in the book towards the
very end, as I recall. But anyway, yeah, so that's
kind of an interesting idea. We don't know that it
will ever happen, for one thing, I mean, we still
are waiting for the real success story of bringing a
(38:32):
species back from extinction. Personally, I hope that it does happen.
I would love to see some extinct species come back.
I would really love to see this technology being dedicated
to help in conservation efforts. Obviously, um I would really
really love to see human beings behave in a responsible
manner to the species around them and not kill them
(38:53):
off through destroying their habitats or otherwise. That would be lovely. Hippie,
you don't like Panda stakes, get off this podcast. How
pandas can go? I mean, there they can go. They
had their time. But now I'm just kidding guys. I
as as you all know, I love all the critters
of the forest, and I only joke. Yes, yes, we are.
(39:15):
We are making some light of what is otherwise a
pretty heavy situation here. But anyway, we will make sure
to share a lot of the the articles that we
read in preparation for this episode, because a lot of
them go into great detail and and give a really
full examination of the story. Some of them are more
like profile pieces, but a lot of them really kind
of dive into it. Make sure that that that you
(39:37):
can tell the reporter went through the trouble of interviewing
various experts with differing points of view to kind of
get the full story. So we'll definitely share those in
the future. And uh, yeah, this was a fun topic
to to consider because I mean, just throwing it out there.
I know. This is kind of similar to the question
I had about if you could have any sort of
robot animal, what would it be? If you could bring
(40:00):
back any extinct species, what would it be beholder an
actual species, not not constructing a new species, I mean
a real species that once lived on the earth and
now is no more. I you didn't prepare me for this.
I can't think of what it would be. Um uh, Dodo.
(40:24):
Dodo is good. That was my choice for robot animal.
I like do um. I'm really curious about about actually
horticulture the way that it existed a few hundred or
a few thousand years ago. Like I want to taste
the strawberries that that Queen Victoria had in her childhood. Yeah,
or have a decent banana since all the really good
species have pretty much died out. Oh, I'm raising my hand. Megalodon, Oh, Megalodon?
(40:49):
You want to us because that way we can have
an even better version of Jaws. Yeah? Oh no, there
are plenty of Megalodon moving. I'm aware of them. I
know someone who produced one. Well, but we need a documentary,
I mean a real documentary. Yeah, well, can you imagine
Megalodon week? Actually we can we watch megalodon movies so
(41:15):
we can tell you about the future of megalodons now
since you didn't ask, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
I'm gonna choose wooly mammoth. I know it's the popular
choice everyone talks about, but it's uh, they're so furry.
I mean, it would just be I can't imagine the
intellectual and emotional experience I would I would undergo witnessing
(41:35):
a wooly mammoth walking around. I can't imagine a better
way to feed a megalodon than a wooly mammoth. Just
dangle a giant wooly mammoth over the megalodon. Megalodons aren't
gonna want to eat modern animals. They're gonna want to
eat wooly mammoth's it wants to hunt, all right, So
we're gonna we're gonna wrap this up on that cheerful note. So, guys,
(41:57):
if you have any suggestions for our discussions, maybe you
want to join in. Maybe there's something about this particular
topic you would like to contribute to. Well, let us know.
We have an email address you can send us mail.
It is FW thinking at Discovery dot com, or you
can make contact with us all the various social networks
that we often can be found on. Those include Twitter, Facebook,
(42:20):
and Google Plus with the handle f W thinking and
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward
thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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