1954 and the entire time they faced resistance from religious leaders, Civic Leaders official leaders and never back down and kept punishing. One of the analogy former force member she said i always felt like we were those guys in sun dance kid at the end when butch and sun dance were followed and lose these guys and the people that are tracking them stay up behind theming and use techniques to lose them and bush cast city say who are these guys . That was the response many people are in omaha who are these guys what do they want and why are they here . That was a great question because if to you look to any state, that wowrve is the response but it wasnt another one of the groups because there wasnt another group like that. One with of of the most pornt parts is it was such a pioneering effort in such an unlikely place. For more information on cities visited by our local content vehicles go to cspan. Org local content. Beth shapiro is next on book tv her book how to clone a mammoth takes look at Climate Change and migration patterns and roll both played in extinction of mammoths. [silence] may or may not be able to hear me. [laughter] adjust the height. But, hello everyone. Thanks for joining us tonight my name is serena on behalf of harbor bookstore delighted discuss her new book how to climb a mammoth. This evening talk is one of the many great efforts harbor book stores is hosting this spring, this friday David Roberts will join us in the store to read from his new book, a lost world of the old ones discoveries from ancient southwest, and tickets are Still Available presenting the brights brothers at the first ferris church. To learn more visit harvard online or pick up a copy next to the door on the way out this evening. Tonights talk will conclude can questions, after which well have a book signing here at this table. We have copies of how to clone a mammoth 20 off this evening. Part of how we say thanks at the harbor bookstore. Purchases support the author series and ensure the future bookstore so thank you. Finally just a quick reminder to silence your cell phones. [laughter] were very pleased to have cspan booktv here taping this evenings events when asking questions and q and a please know that youll be recorded3and maybe wait a moment for the microphone to come over to you before you ask your question. And so now im very pleased to introduce tonights author, beth shapiro is associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the university of california santa cruz. In 2009 recipient of the macarthur record and appeared in public cases including nature, sign f science,c and molecular biology and evolution. Tonight shell be presenting how to clone a mammoth. National geographic. Com calls it a sharp whitty and arguing book and south american writes in the map for the nations discipline of extinction shapiro examines not only how to resurrect long banished species but also when we should not. Please join me in welcoming beth shapiro. [applause] thank you. All right. So thanks for inviting me, and thanks you guys for coming, it is a Beautiful Day out there, and i understand one of the first in what is a wonderful spring and summer right so thank you for spending an hour or so in here instead of out there where you probably should be because its probably more entertaining to be outside instead of listening to me. Anyway one of the many hats that i wear is as a National Geographic emerging explorer which is kind of a silt silly thing im not sure how im emerge but i want to start with a video that describes work that i do and kind of the field work that i do in the art to give you a taste of where we are so far. This is really cool. Oh, just down you can see one two, three four pieces here. This is part [inaudible] that zone. Still frozen. [inaudible] big glass of water back there. Here comes the water. We better get out of here. Okay. So that last part is a little bit silly. But in my defense that water is really gross. [laughter] so what it is is this is near city in canada Yukon Territory with active cold mining where when the snow melts quarter is in big Holding Ponds and then pumped up using High Pressure water hoses quarter is washed away that is lawed away from first couple of layers at exposure and then they wait when they get to the frozen stuff melts and then they wash inches down. Thursday goal is to get rid of all of the frozen dirt to the gold bearing gravel underneath while theyre doing that hundreds of thousands of impeccably frozen bones are uncovered and we come along and collect them. So im a biologist evolutionary biologist, or paleontologist genetic cyst called lofts things so what does a biologist want with frozen mammoth bones recovered it from the permafrost . My research is really about Climate Change an how species and communities adapt and respond to Climate Change. And when we hear about Climate Change, we often hear about changing in precipitation pattern that lead to distribution and abundance of plants and animal and storm patterns that leaves people in dire straights in different parts of the world. Of course o species that are responsibly at the brink of extinction. When we read about this in the popular press often what we get are incredible doomsday scenarios so as a biologist one might wonder what can we do to actually to actually stop this, i got ahead of myself given this talk too many times. If youve heard about this Climate Change literature one of the plots that youre accustom to seeing is this, michaelmans hockey stick plot because 2 looks like a hockey stick and comes up hire. What this is is the big line across the middle is average global temperature of about 1960, and then Everything Else is kind of relative to that. So over the last thousand years the climate, the temperature was pretty stable. Maybe declining a little bit. And then in the last couple hundred years it increased by about one with and a half degrees. This plot can be extended forward in time and people are predicting much more rapid and extensive increases in global climate. This is not the first time in earths history, however that weve seen a very rapid and large scale change in global temperatures. If we extend this scale back of the 50,000 years ago, moving forward to about 1,000 years ago we see this one period right here, this 20,000 years ago thftion the about the peak of the last ice age. Here 12,000 years a transition into the interval that were in today, and this particular transition right right around this last bit 4 degrees. Research that were doing is suggesting that this would be rapid increase probably happened over maybe a century or less. So this is actually a past period of equally rapid equally temperature change that should have affected plants and a animals everywhere. My research tries to go back in time with sample dna sequences from space an time and see how do they respond to past periods of Climate Change with hope of learning some things that welcome then apply to making more informed decisions about what we can do with our limited energy, resource that we have to deal with Climate Change. Excuse me in the present day. So the field that i work is calmed ancient dna it is not old peoples dna but from stuff that is old like mammoth bones. I work in the part of the world that you can see spanning from kind of like a canada territory across alaska into siberia this kind of far part. You see white coloration under here that is kind of shallower seas and during ice ages when much of the water on the planet was taken into making glaciers sea level was lower than it is todays and all of those white areas were exposed they were exposed and incredibly rich graph lands that supported enormous ecosystem of diverse species. It was also an important corridor for movement between the continent moves from north america to asia and bison moved into north america. Today this part of world looks like this. Im in that helicopter shadow taking this picture and ill show you a image of that beautiful helicopter in moments. But in the ice age it looked more like this. Where we had things like mammoth and camel and giant bears that stood 16 feet tall on their hind legislation two different species of horse like a regular one today an also stilt legged horses and weird things like lots of different species of cats and five foot tall beaver which is funniest extinct animal. Anyway, so this is the helicopter that we used to fly out and this was a particular exhibition that we went on into the North Central part of the peninsula. You can see that there are some windows missing in this helicopter here. That was actual particularly useful because after question got off in to the air on about the thished or fourth attempt, the french and russian people thought it might be great to celebrate by lighting off a cigarette while on the gas tank those things on the side are gas tanks. Might have happened it so we throw out incredible machines and stay in five star accommodation not sure if you can see this. I took a picture of my tent walking backward and unfocussing my camera so you can see depth of mosquitoes that we have to deal with when were out in the field up in high arctic. Then we wand wither along places where the permafrost is melting back in yukoner it story near dawson city washing down this permafrost with water hoses, and people are kind of standing around wandering around picking up bones as they wash out. So in the typical day work out near dawson city we pick up somewhere between 5 and maybe two dozen bags like weve collected. Bison also mammoth and caribou we find carnivore like wolves and bear and lions. We take a chunk out of the bones that is a degular tool with a cutting disk we take a chunk out and take it back to the lab, grind it up into a find powder and extract dna from this. And then we correlate amount of diversity that we see medic diversity in populations and any one point and time with how big that population is. Lots of diversity is big populations. Not vooch diversity means small population we can use this to decide to see when populations were growing or shrinking when they were moving across space when a local population went extinct replaced by something moving from somewhere else something that you cant necessarily see by kowcting and looking at the fossils themselves. So we learned it a lot over the course of the last couple of decades my group and other groups working in and chengt dna gathering this information. Seen bison and horses and mammoth peak in population size around 40,000 years ago and decline after that. Had is interesting because the two main hypothesis that caused it to go extinct are that they didnt like ice age it was bad for them or that humans turned up and killed them all. If the decline began 40 to 35,000 years ago, that was somewhere like 15,000 years before the peak of the last ice age and 20,000 years before large number of people in north america that kind of lets us off the hook at least for the early stages of the decline towards extinction of mammoth still not willing to let us off hook for ultimate extinction event. We watch carnivores increase and decrease in population size and move acrossed land scad responding to herbivore abundance and kaish beau survive to the present day. You can do it. Why cave lions went extinct and phone call from the press and im always superexcited to tell them what weve learn and apply to present conservation problems to use this information in the present day. But they only ever ask me one thing and it is kind of aa no no annoying to be honest no byte response so the way to describe this work right now is deextinction not a great word but stuck with it at this point because it has taken over in the hashtag world of twitter. Now were all kind of familiar with deextinction because we were there the last time we did it and we remember how it all went particularly well. It was lovely nothing went possibly wrong. Life didnt find a way as it was said by jeff goldman. Were all knowing that we cant get dna from dinosaurs their all rock dont believe what you read in journal and nature theyre all rock. No dna in rock so we can never clone a dinosaur im really sorry. But we are going to talk about the mammoth and why maam mammoth people were asking me about it. The reason people are asking about the mammoth is because we cant clone dinosaurs so that is where we are really. Okay. Now lets get down to. How are we going to bring a mammoth back to life . First way that people think about is to clone a mammoth right, but the problem hire is that cloning isnt a ambiguous as it is a scientific technique it is called cell nuclear transfer. This is the science word for cloning. We have two different types of cells germ cell, sperm and somatic normally what happens when a new organism is firmed fertilized a zygote that can become hair cell, skin cell, eye cell lung cell, et cetera a somatic cell has a specific job that is only job it knows how to do. So the trick to Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer is to convince this somatic cell to forget all of the instruction necessary to be the cell it is to be and back to earlier state with a capacity to then become every type of cell in a body and create a whole organization. The first example of Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer and the most famous example is the experiment that was done by the rosland institute in scotland mid1990s with dolly. But he remembers dolly the sheep cloned using a mammary cell so it took a particular adult view and they took a somatic cell and stressed it out, starved it of nutrients, at the same time they got an egg cell from a different type, different breed of you and they removed the Nuclear Material. They sucked out nuclear including genetic material and dna from that cell so empty egg cell and starved somatic cell zap them with electricity the membrane in the cells break up and the material Nuclear Material from that stressed out somatic cell dumps into the egg. Protein in that egg cell can actually do a little bit of magic and cause that somatic cell to regress. To go back to that early state where it has then the capacity to become every type of cell in a body. And then of course you have a different type of view used to have the surrogate mom and dolly was born and a genetic clone of the donor of the mammary cell and not of the egg cell or surrogate mom. Now this technology does work. It is not particularly e efficient. Dolly one of nearly 300 different youths that they 300 different eggs that they attempted to use in the process but it does work and it has been shown to work in a bunch of different species since then. Dogs cats rabbits pigs and goats, and cows things like that so how would it work with mammoth out into the field find and removed a somatic cell. Stress is out in a dish and insert into a egg cell it does its magical thing and then you know question implant it into the host with a baby, and then growing up and release it into the environment. Straightforward. Right. Pretty easy, right . So here we run into a stumbling block. We find some incredibly well with preserved things up in the arctic this is a horse jaw that we find near dawson city Something Like 50 or 60,000 years old. Here we have nicely preserved mummies this individual, this mummy was found in knew siberian islands and having a little substance with it. Liquid substance that was similar to blood they suggested that it was not proven that it was blood. But anyway despite how well preserved these are none of them have any living cells and no one is ever going to find any mammoth remains that have any living cells when the organism dies cell and dna decay right away first the action is ins within body itself and then a mummy heats up, guts burst and microbes break down dna and radiation is no good it hammered dna like it does when were live. But dead cells cant fix mistakes made by solar radiation things like water oxygen, these are all chemical bombardment of this dna that break it is down into smaller and smaller pieces until eventually theres nothing left. So youll never find a mammoth that has a living cell and if we never find a living cell we can never clone a mammoth. Thank you for coming. Just kidding. [laughter] all right so last week, last week a team of International Researchers based i think the lead was from the National Museum of sweden. They announced that they had sequenced a complete genome of two different mammoth so shouldnt be that sequencing genome and start there. So we have a whole list of a c, g, p letters that make up dna 4 billion of them, in fact, that is how big mammoth genome is and this provides us with an instruction manual for making the genes and protein to make it look and act like a mammoth lets have long strands of dna into chromosomes somehow and put it into the cell right to do this whole thing we put the cell in the blah blah, around here and then we have a mammoth right done straightforward. The problem problem several problems, lets start here. They reported that they have a complete genome sequence that is kind of true. They kind of have a complete genome sequence but it is not really complete in such a way that means that we could actually synthesize it in the lab. In fact, there isnt any vertebra organism that we have a complete genome sequence is for. Including humans, now, we do have most of the human genome sequence we certainly have majority of the genome sequence that contains genes that is important bit we think. But there are parts of the human genome and every vertebra made of these really tightly condensed repeat regions mostly near center and end of the chromosome called chromosome and theres no existing sequencing technology that allows us to get through that. So we couldnt go into the lab to sequence from one end of the chromosome to the other even if we wanted to because we dont actually know the whole sequence and we dont know how important it is to know the sequence we dont know if it has any genes dont know what it does. We think it has some important regulatory information. Utilities, et cetera. But we dont know. So there you go. The played genome sequence is not a complete genome for humans. And its even worse for mammoths and there are a couple of reasons why it is really bad. Really hard to generate complete genome sequences for something that has been extinct for a long time. Like a mammoth but first it goes back to something that i just talked about sequences themselves that we can get out of these bones are very short and theyre very fragmented this is because of all of that bombardment of uv light within and ten disciples breaking it down from microbe in soil and microbe and guts into the bones to chop it up into smaller and smaller pieces. So if i were to extract dna from something modern i could get a long lovely strand with Party Streamer but talking about ancient dna more like confetti but not confetti that looks as good as this. I couldnt find m imagine of confetti in gutter the day after the parade after it rained overnight and mammoths were walking down the street and pigeons flying it was a bit bad not a good way. Dna is in terrible condition. Also the samples are full of all a sorts of stuff and not just mammoth dna if i were to take cheek swab and extract dna all a of the dna sequences that i could get out of there would be my own dna because im modern alive not a lot of contamination my hair, whatever. So involved with a team that first use what had we call next Generation Sequencing technology. This is a ability to extract dna and then sequence rather than target a specific sequence of dna, and we sequence and extract a dna from a mammoth bone from siberia 40,000 years old. I cant remember how old it was and we did shotgun sequences and ended up with 50 of what we recovered was mammoth dna rest of it was stuff like soil, microbial dna environmental dna. This unknown stuff that is probably just more soil my croaks that havent been sequenced yet so were in the data base and department know what it was. A little bit of contamination you see human and dog in there. We often get human dog domestic cats, all sorts of stuff gets in our sequences from the components that we use despite that we try really hard to keep them superclean. Anyway 50 was mammoth. We were at the time bummed this is not very good and all were getting 50 mammoth right. What turns out a deck cad later and knowing a lot more about this is a really well preserved sample. The majority of samples that we extract dna from on Something Like 5 or 10 and dodge the dna from good places like i say genome that was assembled with a couple of different bones none of those had more than in it. Rest of it was environmental contaminates that had to be thrown away. So imagine that we have this kind of confetti mix or dirty confetti mix that is horrible dna what we want to do is actually find maybe the purple ones, so how do we actually go about doing that . Fortunately, we do have several complete genome sequences from living species. And we use these basically as a scaffold. A map on to which we can take these broken fragment and figure out where they go along this genome sequence so if we want to map broken damaged mammoth fragments to something we use the age and elephant genome and broken damage sequences it is something we use the human genome. And what we end up with is a partial genome mapped stuff the but still beginning to be some holes that we just cant fill in. And another slight problem challenge with this is that if there have been some big genomic change like a duplication of part of the chromosome or something that is really different between age aing elephant and a mammoth what it is going to be like is having a book with missing pages we have these sequences and our mess of broken growth confetti across the genome but part that doesnt match any part of the genome assume theyre microbial dna and throw them out. One might think if were really interested in finding parts of the genome that are different between mammoth and aging elephants these might be important place to look. Another problem is that having a sequence even if we could generate that whole long sequence is not the same thing as having a living cell. We are Getting Better at stringing together sequences of a, c g t to make long fragment but cant allow them to turn genes on and off something we would want to do and cant stick chromosome into cells. Sequences is where were going to go. Were probably stuck were at sq i u at first step. So that is not going to work. Right fortunately theres another way. And this is the way that probably is beginning to be the one that the path that people follow if we are going to do Something Like bring extinct species or at least extinct traits back to life. Enough to engineer ourselves and mammoth. By engineer i mean something thats kind of simple. Really it is kind of like finding a place in a genome that we want to change and then cutting genome and tasting in the bit that we want to change it to. That matches the part of that genome that we want to swap out. We can then insert this machine and this Little Package into a cell. It will find exactly the place chop it out and stick that mammoth dna in place. Its not a machine. Its an enzyme protein complex that bacteria to combat diseases to stop the cells from getting sick. This machine is called crisper cast nine and its something you have probably heard in the news. A couple of weeks ago there was a chinese team that use this system to edit human embryos and its cost a bit of a stir. This is an incredibly powerful and easytouse technology and will be used. Its being developed for human genome engineering, curing of human genetic diseases not for deextinction basely but it is the type of technology that we would use. This crisper right here this big molecule is our little machine. Its not really a machine of this part of it is the part that recognizes the part of the mammoth dna that we want to change. Im sorry the elephant dna that when he wants to change we stick in the mammoth dna and the crisper makes the cut. The cells dont like it when their dna is broken so there are a couple of mechanisms that cells have evolved to fix that. We want to harness the cells repair machinery to stick that elephant version getting my species confused, stick that mammoth version in place of where the elephant version was and what well end up with is an elephant that is just a little bit mammoth. So what do we change . We know that mammoth elephants have been diverging for 6 million years. Their genomes are nearly 99 identical about the same amount of similarity so there are probably around a million differences between them. We cant right now target all million so probably what well do is hone in on a few things that we think are really important. When the first genes have anybody found to be different between elephants and mammoth was a hemoglobin gene responsible for carrying oxygen around the body. This was work done and Kevin Campbells lab in manitoba a few years ago and he found comparing sequence between asian elephants and mammoth there are only three differences between the mammoth and asian elephant. He took cells and he made this three changes to measure the purpose of this three differences, what was different about the protein that had the mammoth version versus the elephant version that he found the mammoth version was much better at carrying oxygen around the body at low temperatures. So this is a pretty good target for something to change if we want to take an elephant who is tropically adapted and turned it into a more arctic or temperate adapted mammoth. Theres a team around the corner who has been working on this question in compiling a list of genes that are different between elephants and mammoth than they have so far attempted to make 14 different swaps to swap out 14 elephant genes or mammoth versions of those genes and they have been successful in doing all of it. They have actually created an elephant cell that is about 0. 001 mammoth which is pretty cool. It is of course a far cry from having a living breathing mammoth elephant hybrid but it is a step in the right direction. If we think hard about it we see that we do have a complete genome sequence and we do have the technology that we would need to use to add it to swap out these teens for things we want to replace them with and what we would have next is an elephant cell which would be alive which means we could just go ahead and use Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer to create a living breathing animal. Of course that next step in creating a living breathing animal is actually pretty hard. In fact this next step which i like to call phase two of deextinction may even be harder than phase one. When we hear about the extension extension deextinction what we hear is the adventure of ending phase one not thinking of the challenges of moving into phase two. The first thing you have to do is find an appropriate surrogate host. For some species that have close living relatives this might ease straightforward. The species of eye back that is being resurrected in the northern part of spain. This guy, there are many living and although they couldnt use an ibex because they couldnt get them down from the high ledges to do Artificial Insemination they were able to hybridize a wild ibex and use that hybrid as the surrogate to develop embryos. They had living cells because they took a tissue sample from the last individual before she died so there are further ahead in the cloning project than any one is with the mammoth cloning project. As the evolutionary distance between the thing you are trying to bring back and the thing that is the potential surrogate host increases we dont know how much distance will be tolerated and probably is going to be different to depending on what lineage we are talking about. In other potential problem is there are some instances where the size difference between the thing you are bringing back and the thing that is alive might be prohibited and i say here i dont want to include a picture but i did include one. Here we go. You thought it was going to be something gross didnt you . This is a stellar sea cow and theres a scale on the bottom that is a foot. The stellar sea cow lived off the aleutian islands. They went extinct 100 years ago. They were hunted to death. One of these guys could feed a group dirtier so people for more than a couple of weeks so you can see why they might have been a source of food for travelers around that time. The closest living relative of the stellar sea cow r. D. Gain and manatee. These are much smaller animals and in fact if you think about the ratio between a newborn and a mom and assume it has the same ratio a newborn is bigger. Thats not going to work. This is an example of something where theres a technical problem with phase two that rob oakley means the extinction is not going to happen at least not without innovation that allows it to happen outside of the body of a reliving relative. Another potential complication with surrogacy as we know now that we are more than the sum that make up our dna. In fact we are combination of our genome sequence and the environment to which we are exposed. We know this is true by looking at identical twins. They have the same genomes and they look similar to each other but as they get older they diverge from each other both physically and the differences accumulate over time. By the time you have identical twins that are in their old age its often hard to know that they are identical twins and thats because the differences in the apartment to which they are exposed. Those differences begin in the womb. Remember we are talking about a species whose genome is 99 identical. Its developing inside imam elephant exposed to the elephants for months and the elephants diet. How do we know that thats not going to just ruin whatever changes we have made. The same is true. Elephants often need the dawn of their mom to establish the microbes that live in their gut. This newborn mammoth hybrid establishes an elephant Microbial Community and its gut. It would consume and elephants diet and live in an elephants community and it would eat whatever it is that elephants are fed in captivity. And speaking of elephants in captivity that brings us to what i think is potentially the most serious challenge for mammoth deextinction but a fundamental problem for all deextinction projects. That is that there are serious chemical considerations to bring these things that gave me know that elephants do not fare well in captivity. They often fail to reproduce and if they do get pregnant they sometimes injure or kill the young. Until we know more about how to meet the physical and psychological needs in captivity we shouldnt have elephants in captivity at all much less be using them in these crazy experiences experiments to bring back hybrids. The ethical challenge is just like the technical challenges will be different depending on which species we are bringing back that they are nonetheless extremely important to keep in mind. And it would be remiss of me not to knowledge that the world has changed a lot since many of these species went extinct and in many cases there may be nowhere nowhere to put them without having a significant terrible effect on the ecosystem and populations of species that are argued they are. This picture for example is the east coast. This was the range of the Passenger Pigeon the bird i went extinct 100 years ago. This is the candida species but what we would we do with them if we brought them back back . Where would we put them even how different their habitat is today when it tried in these enormous flocks. Can we do at it . Not yet but the technology is advancing at an incredibly rapid pace and i have no doubt the time will come when someone does change sequences from one species to look more like something else. And should we do it . Someone has written a look like this and im expected to have a concrete opinion about whether we should. I dont know and i think it really depends on what species we are talking about. There are a bunch of different species that have been proposed that are being worked on by various routes for deextinction deextinction. The prairie chicken that usip on Marthas Vineyard and the mammoth Passenger Pigeon and the stellar sea cow. Theres also the gastric brooding frog with a cargo all sorts of different species and each one of them has a separate list of technical ethical and ecological challenges associated with bringing them back great a guy honestly think if we really are going to use this technology to bring Something Back the most fundamental question to answer is why do we want to bring a species that has been extinct for a long time back to life . Is there compelling reason to do this and guilt which is the most commonly cited reason to do it to me is not a compelling reason. There has to be a real reason to go through the trouble of doing all of this work. And im going to skip over the fact that its technically not possible to bring a mammoth back to life in ethically a terrible idea to bring a mammoth back to life to talk about why i think it is compelling to think about bringing mammoth back to life. I have two reasons. The first is ecological. One potentially compelling reason to bring Something Back is by reestablishing it in its natural habitat you can restore interactions between species that used to exist but that are gone because of this extinction and that has an overwhelmingly good that positive effect on the entire community not just the species you are bringing back. Theres a place in northeastern siberia that is aptly called plasticine part. He started buying up land near his house and he is preparing a place for the return of the ice age animals including mammoth. So far he has bison horses and five different species of deer and hes waiting for the mammoth not particularly patiently been but waiting for the mammoth to come back. While these animals have been there he has been performing x. Their midst to measure their effects on the ecosystem habitat is. Heres a picture that sergei took in the early spring. On one side of this fence he doesnt have grazing herbivores. That is the site up here with the house amount of the other side of the fence he does. On the side without grazing herbivores what you see is an undiverse grassland not particularly productive and can support a large number of herbivores. On the other side of the fence you cant see it very well but there are lots of species of grass. This is before the grass is able to come back and yet there still is green there. That means by being on that landscape by standing on that landscape recycling nutrients these animals have created their own habitat. They have transformed this kind of barren tundra into that rich grassland of the ice age is making their own habitat and not only are they doing well and thriving during the winter but he has noticed that other species like antelopes that are endangered because they cant find enough t have come because of such a Rich Resource for them. In this case he argues bringing back the mammoth which is clearly a top herbivores might speed their coverage of the ecosystem much like elephants play an Important Role in maintaining their own habitat. The second reason is more sentimental. Few of us can imagine a World Without elephants and yet asian elephants are in danger. Their habitat is declining. We have trouble stopping them from being poached. Elephants could disappear. Every year there are fewer asian elephants recorded. Would have we could use this technology not to bring back mammoth but to create an elephant was capable of living somewhere cooler may be in europe or north america or in siberia where there is lots of space. Could we use this technology not to bring extinct species back to life but to save elephants . Dont have to just think about elephants. Would have we could use this technology as a tool and Biodiversity Conservation today . What if we could use the technology. Blackfooted ferrets are almost extinct right now. They went nearly extinct 20 years ago because of extermination policies and now diseases killing them. There are blackfooted ferrets in a zoo sampled prior and in Museum Collections that are tens of thousands of years old. We could go to these museums and find blackfooted ferret genes that increase the amount of diversity and immunity in these genomes and uses technology to swap out the identical versions of some of these existing ferrets for all blackfooted ferret genes. The decrease in population size extermination by humans may go away. We could use this technology not to do something crazy to bring back the species whose habitat no longer exists but a potentially powerful weapon in our arsenal against the extinction crisis we are experiencing today. I think is the most compelling use of this deextinction technology. Thank you. [applause] i am happy to answer any questions they might have about how crazy i am. Or this stuff is. I was going to ask is it more important to save the things that are perishing the way now so my first example of that was the polar bear and habitat is dissolving so the question is you have a technique but where would you put them in their habitat is gone and part of that is can you engineer a change in their genome to make them adapt to a different thing . This is a good question the polar bear and youll pass the right person about polar bears because this is a major theme of research in my lab. Polar bears are a special case. Polar bears have almost no genetic diversity which is true that there is a genome sequence from a polar bear that is 100,000 years old and that polar bear also has almost no genetic diversity in the same amount of almost no genetic diversity is polar bears today. Not because of recent declines or bottlenecks, they are a top predator that is very precisely adapted to their particular habitat and you are absolutely right when i habitat disappears they dont have any diversity that would allow them to adapt to different habitats that are around. The polar bears have uninteresting strategy of dealing with this. We have discovered recently and we discovered not only its happening right now but every time the climate does change rapidly in the past the same thing is happening. They breed with brown bears. They produce offspring and then go live is brown bears of the genes in polar bears survived as brown bear genes that polar bears this white bear is precisely adapted would disappear and the idea of engineering traits that allow them to live in other environments is necessary in the case of polar bears because they will live in those environments. But we still wont have polar bears in this particular case. But absolutely the idea further species might need to have species that are devoid of diversity in some way. Can we increase the amount of diversity and give them a genetic booster shot and give them a adaptive flexibility in the case of maybe there is awake and expand it. I think that is where the technology is powerful. Its exactly what i was talking about in the case of the blackfooted ferrets and exceptional about potentially using this is a new tool and Biodiversity Conservation. I just walked in on the tail end and so i would like to apologize. In terms of reserving this technology to preserve elephants by what specific rupert would you define which species to bring back or retain and which species to let go. Selective pressure is selective pressure. You either live or you die and even though we are changing perhaps certain species that are perishing should perish exactly. Is a tough question. How do you decide how much diversity is a good amount of diversity. If we were going to go out and try to find which species of great ape to preserve based on how much diversity there is in that population you go out and measure diversity and the great apes and they absolutely dashed the answer would be absolutely clear. We have to save the humans. Genetic diversity by itself is not a perfect measure of the health of the population. To answer your question i think the species that might that the most from this technology are species that have recently been through human induced population declines were they up recently purged diversity overall. As far as what diversity to introduce we dont know. We are still at the stages where we have genomes that we can compare and come up with lists of genes that we dont know what most of these genes do or how they interact with each other. We are really at the early stages of that. Trait is another technical challenge standing in the way of applying it to a real question. Nonetheless i think it does have the potential to be useful in a something we should think about. Your comments made me think i want to ask if honeybees and bats and the recent issues they have been having their populations would be potential candidates for the thing youre talking about . It would be great if we could find genes that made genes that made thats resistance and figure out what genome makes them resistant and plants that that transplant that genome into the back and a good application of this technology. Im not saying we know how to do this. Im just highlighting and i think thats a great one in areas where we should push this. It could be incredibly useful. [inaudible] the question is how do we date the boat so we have but sometimes we get lucky and we find them in the stratus graphic concept where they are frozen and in that case sometimes do we get lucky and they are sitting between volcanic ash layers that have been dated. Often we have to generate dates on every single bone and we use that using carbon. That means we are limited by the resolution of the great ape which is in the last 50,000 years. The oldest dna the oldest genome sequence we have been able to assemble so far is from a horse that we found in the klondike in this location up north but it was founded association with a tie for a a volcanic ash layer