Little bit of research and there are other insects that might eat them. Maybe cockroaches and maybe annes. The cockroach one is i think a study where they kind of put them in battle or something and the baby cockroach ate the baby bed bug. I dont know how often that happens in their homes. Usually cockroaches are not in the bedroom. They are usually in the kitchen or in the bathroom. The worst method of eradication ive ever heard. Thats the other thing. So great, and see bed bugs but centipedes are ants, who wants to go that will work alex but i dont know if they are a big source of food for other insects. I dont know if it would matter to take them out. Theres some species that you could and some that are obviously important so i dont know. A couple of years ago they started using the heating and freezing methods. I was wondering at this point is that more efficient than some of the chemicals they have been using . The heating is really efficient. Its just really expensive and for People Living in apartments its not ideal. Say i have bed bugs and i wanted to pay thousands of dollars for heating treatment and my neighbors didnt but they still have bed bugs innocent as they are done they can still come back over and sometimes they do treat big apartment buildings with heating that how it works depends. The freezing stuff from my understanding doesnt work as well. Its not as good as the heat. You guys have a lot of questions. I guess thats it so thanks for coming. [applause] thank you guys for coming. We have copies of the book at the register. If you would like your book signed maybe can lineup in the center aisle. Lets have one more round of applause. [applause] beth shapiro is next on booktv. Her book how to clone a mammoth looks at Climate Change in migration patterns in the role both played in the extension of mammoths. You may or may not be able to hear me. [laughter] hello everyone everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight. My name is serena and on behalf of harper bookstore im delighted to welcome you to this evenings event with beth shapiro discussing her new book how to clone a mammoth. This evenings talk is just one of the many great events harper bookstore is hosting this spring. David robert will join us with his new book the lost world of the old ones discoveries in the ancient southwest and tickets are Still Available and David Mcauliffe featuring the wright brothers. For more Upcoming Events visit us on line at harvard. Com or pick up a copy of our flyer on the way out this evening. Tonights talk will conclude with time for questions. Afterwards we will have a book signing at the table. We have copies of how to clone a mammoth at the register next room. As always tonights book is 20 off this evening. Its part of how we say thanks for buying your books here at Harvard Bookstore. Your purchases ensure the future and intended to explore so thank you and finally a quick reminder to silence your cell phones. We are very pleased to have cspans booktv here taping this evenings event. When asking questions in a q a just please know that you will be recorded and maybe wait a moment for the microphone to come over to you before you ask your question. So now i am very pleased to introduce tonights author. Sub date is a professor at the university of california santa cruz and 2009 the macarthur were. Your scientific articles have appeared in many publications. Tonight she will be presenting her new book how to clone a mammoth. National geographic. Com calls it a sharp witty and impeccably argued book in Scientific American rights in this lucid roadmap for the nations discipline of deextinction shapiro examines not only how we can resurrect long vanished species but also when we cannot and should not. We are pleased to host her at Harvard Bookstore tonight. Please join me in welcoming beth shapiro. [applause] thank you. Thanks for inviting me and thanks you guys for coming. Its a Beautiful Day out there and i understand one of the first in what is going to be a wonderful spring and summer. Thank you for spending an hour or so in here said about there we probably should be because its probably more entertaining to be outside and listening to me. Anyway one of the many hats i wear is as a National Geographic emerging explorer which is a silly thing. Im not sure how i am emerging or what i meant emerging from but in that context id like to start with the little video that describes the work that i do in the field work i do not arctic to give you a taste of where we are so far. You can see one, two, three four pieces of mammoths. You can see how big this is. The neat thing about this is these are the small pieces that has washed downstream. These pieces of our still frozen in the permafrost. You cant get them out at all. You just heard that big splash of water out there. Here comes the water. We better get out of here. That last part is a little bit silly that in my defense that water is really gross. So what it is is this is in canadas Yukon Territory. Its a type of gold mining where when the snow melts the water collects big Holding Ponds and its pumped up using highpressure water hoses that the miners wash away the permit boxed permafrost is thought away. They wait a little bit when they get to the frozen stuff and the sun heats it up and melted a few more inches and they wash those down. Their goal is to get rid of all the frozen dirt to get to the gold bearing gravels underneath the while they are doing hundreds if not thousands of these impeccably preserved frozen bones arent covered. We come along and collect them. Im a biologist, an evolutionary biologist or a paleontologist and a molecular paleontologist, geneticists. Ive been called lots of other things i want is a biologist wants with frozen mammoth bones recovered from the permafrost . My researches about Climate Change in how species and communities adapt and respond to Climate Change. When we hear about Climate Change we often hear about things like changes in precipitation patterns these largescale changes in the distribution of plants and animals changes and storm patterns that lead some people in dire straits in different parts of the world and of course species that are potentially at the brink of extinction. We read about this in the popular press and often will begin our doomsday scenarios. As a biologist one might wonder what can we do to actually stop this tax i got ahead of myself a little bit. If you are comfortable at all and you heard the Climate Change literature one of the plots you are accustomed to seeing you this. This is a hockey stick plot because it looks a little bit like a hockey stick. This is the end that comes up right here. But this is is the big line across the middle is the average global temperature of 1960 and Everything Else is relative to that. Over the last thousand years the temperature was stable may be declining a little bit and in the last couple hundred years it increased by 1. 5 degrees. Of course this of course his plot can be extended in time and people are predicting rapid and Extensive Global climate. This is not the first time in earths history that we have seen a very rapid and largescale change in global temperatures. If we extend the scale back to 50,000 years ago moving forward to 1000 years ago we see this one period right here. This. 000 years ago this was the last ice age last ice age in here 12,000 years ago was the transition into the interval that we are in today. This particular transition right here around this last bit right here, thats four degrees. The research we are doing in dawson city suggests that this rapid increase happened over a century are less. This is actually equally rapid potentially tumultuous Climate Change. Should have affected plants and animals everywhere so my researches tries to go back in time and sample dna sequences over space and time and ask how did species and communities respond to these pass. To Climate Change with the hope of learning things that we can apply to make a more informed decisions about what we do is limited energy and the resources we have to deal with Climate Change. The field i work in is called ancient dna. Selfexplanatory. Means dna gets old. Dna from stuff that is all black mammoth bones preserved in the permafrost. I work amber and shia. Branch is the part of the world spanning from canadas Yukon Territory across alaska and into siberia. Thats shallower seas and during ice ages when much of the water on the planet making glaciers on the continent the sea level was lower than it is today in the white areas were exposed. They were exposed an incredibly rich grasslands has supported an enormous ecosystem of diverse species. It was also important corridor for movement between continents. Camels and horses move from north america to asia and bison and humans moved from asia into north america. Today this part of the world looks like this. Im actually in that helicopter taking this picture and i will show you an image of that helicopter in just a moment but in the ice age at look more like this where we had things like mammoths and mastodons and camels and giant bears listed 16 feet tall two different species of the regular course and is still a good horse. Lots of different species of cats and a fivefoot tall. Anyway this is the helicopter we used to fly off. This was a particular expedition we went on through the northcentral part of the peninsula. There are some windows missing in this helicopter here. That was particularly useful because after we got off into the air on the third or fourth attempt the french and russian people who are in charge of the expedition decided we should celebrate this success by lighting up a cigarette while sitting on the gas tanks. Those things that are on the side our gas tanks. We fly out there and these incredible machines and stay in fivestar accommodations. I took this picture walking backwards im focusing my camera so you can see the depth of mosquitoes that we have to deal with while we are in the field. We wander along places where the permafrost is melting. This is back in the Yukon Territory near dawson city and you can see their washing down the permafrost with water hoses and people are standing around wandering around picking up the bones as they wash out. On a typical day in dawson city we will pick up somewhere between five and maybe two dozen bags like this full of loans that we have collected. Most of the bones are bison and there are lots of horses and mammoth in caribou. If we get lucky carnivores are more rare we find wolves and bears and maybe giant ayers and different types of lions. We take a chunk out of these bones. Thats a regular tool with a cutting disc. We take it back to the lap lab grind it up into a fine powder and extract dna. In what we do is to correlate the amount of diversity we see genetic diversity we see at any one point in time with how big the population is. Lots of diversities, big populations. Not much diversity in small populations. We can use this to see when populations were growing or shrinking blooming across space. When the local population went extinct things like this that you cant necessarily see by counting and looking at the fossils themselves. We have learned a lot over the course of the last couple of decades were my group and other groups work in gathering this information. We have seen bison and horses and mammoth seemed seem to peak in population size around 40000 years ago and then start to decline after that. This is interesting because the two main hypotheses about what caused things like mammoths to go extinct they didnt like the peak of the ice age were that humans turned up and kill them all. It lets us off for the early stages of the decline of mast mammoth. We watched carnivores increase and decrease in population and move across the landscape responding to her before so we started to learn why things like caribou have survived to the present day. They like to live where people dont and why cave lions went extinct and we get a lot of attention and stuff gets published in nice highprofile generals. Im super excited to tell them what we have learned and how it can apply to present conservation problems. Hoekel uses information the present day but they only ever asked me one thing. Its kind of annoying to be honest. Since there is no sound bite response to that i decided to write this book. The phrase that is being used to describe this type of work right now is deextinction. Its not a great word that we are stuck with that at this point as it is taken over. We are familiar with deextinction because we were there the last time we did it and ray ray bramborough how that went. Life didnt find ways to a set of jeff goldblum. We all know that we cant be get dna from dinosaurs. Dinosaur bones are all rock. Dont believe what you hear they are all rock so we will never be able to clone a dinosaur. Im really sorry but we are going to talk about the mammoth. Why the mammoth im asked. People kept asking me about the mammoth and i think the reason people ask me about the mammoth is because we cant clone dinosaurs so that is where we are. Now lets get down to it. How are we going to bring the mammoth back to life . The first way that people think about is to clone a mammoth. The problem here is that cloning isnt an ambiguous thing as much as it is a very specific scientific technique. Its called Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer. This is the science word for cloning. You basically have two cells germ cells and somatic cells which are Everything Else. Normally what happens when a new organism is formed a and egg come together fertilized get a zygote and a zygote is a special cell that can become every type of cell in the body. A somatic cell has a specific job and thats the only job that knows how to do so the trick to Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer is to convince the somatic cell to forget all of the instructions necessary to be the type of cell is programmed to be and to go back to some earlystage word has the capacity to become every type of cell in the body and create a whole organism. The first example of Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer in the most famous example is the experiment done by the Roslyn Institute in scotland where they produce dolly the sheep. Anybody remember dolly the sheep . It took a particular till you you and it took a memory tissue cell and put it into a dish. The same time they got an egg cell from a different breed of u and they remove the Nuclear Material including genetic material from that egg cell. They had a empty egg cell with starves somatic cells. They put these things together zap them with electricity in the membranes break open and the Nuclear Material dumps into the egg. The proteins in that egg cell can do a little bit of magic and caused a somatic cell to regress and go back to the earlystage word has the capacity to become every type of cell in the body. Dolly was a genetic clone of the memory cell and not of a egg cell. This technology does work. Its not efficient. Dolly was one of nearly 300 different eggs that they attempted to use in this process process. It does work but it has been shown to work in a bunch of different species since then. So how would it work with we go out into the field and find the well preserved mammoth removed the somatic cell and inserted into an egg cell. It does its magical thing and we implanted in a surrogate host. We release it into the environment. Straightforward. Pretty easy, right . So here we have run into a stumbling block. We find some incredibly well preserved things in the arctic. This is a horse jolly sound near dawson city. Something like 50 or 60,000 years old and here we have nicely reserved mummies from siberia and a couple of summers ago this mummy was found in the New Siberian Islands and announce having a substance with it and was very similar to blood. They suggested that it was. I dont think that has been proven that it was blood but despite how well preserved these are none of them have any cells and no one is ever going to find mammoth remains that have living cells. When an organism dies the cells of dna within them begins to decay right away. First the action of enzymes from within the body itself and then if its a mummy lots of microbes go throughout the bloodstream and that breaks down the dna. Solar dna hammers the dna like it does when they are alive. Things like water and oxygen hydraulics are all chemical bombardments of the dna that writes it down into smaller and smaller pieces until eventually there is nothing left. They will never find a mammoth that has a living cell. We never find a living cell of a mammoth we will never be able to clone a mammoth. Thank you for coming. [laughter] im just kidding. Last week a team of international researchers, think leaders from the National Museum of sweden they announced that they had sequenced the complete genome of two different mammoths. Plan b should be sequencing the genome. But sequenced the mammoth and start there. We have a whole list of the letters that make up dna. 4 billion of them. Thats a big a mammoth genome isnt this provides an instruction manual or making the jeans and making the proteins that make a mammoth look and act like a mammoth. Lets go into the lab and synthesize long strands of dna get these into chromosomes and put the chromosomes into the cell so we can do this whole thing, we go around here and we have a mammoth. Done straightforward. The problem, several problems. They reported they had a complete genome sequence and thats okay. Thats kind of true. We kind of have a complete genome but is not complete in the way that we can synthesize it in the lab. In fact there isnt any vertebrae to carry out an organism that we have a complete genome sequence for including humans. We do have most of human genome sequence and we certainly have a majority of genome sequence that contains genes. There are parts of the human genome and every other genome made of these really tightly condensed repeat regions mostly near the center and near the ends of the chromosomes called heterochromatin and there is no technology that allows us to get to that so we couldnt go into the lab and sequence from one end of a chromosome to the other even if we wanted to because we dont know the whole sequence. We dont know how important it is to know do the sequence. We dont know what it does. We do think it has important Regulatory Information utility etc. But we dont know so there you go. Complete genome sequence is not a complete genome for humans and its even worse for mammoths. There are a couple of reasons why its really hard to generate complete genome sequences for something that has been extinct for a long time like the mammoth. The first goes back to something i talked about. The sequences themselves are very short and very fragmented because of all of that on bardem and of uv light and enzymes breaking down the microbes that get into these bones and chop it up into smaller pieces. If i were to extract dna from something modern iq get along lovely strand like a party streamer. We are talking about ancient dna so its more like confetti. I couldnt find any images of confetti the day after the parade after it rained overnight and mammoths were walking down the street and Passenger Pigeons flying. This is not a good way. Dna is a terrible vision. The samples are full of stuff and not just mammoth dna. If i were to take a piece of my hair or if cheek swab pretty much all of the dna sequences would be my own dna because i modern. There is not much contamination in my hair whatever so i was involved with one of the teams that first use what we call next Generation Sequencing technology the ability to extract dna and sequence everything in the extract rather than target a specific sequence of dna. We extracted dna from a mammoth bone that was 40,000 years old. We did this approach called shotgun sequencing and what we ended up blood was 50 of what we were covered with mammoth dna. The rest of it was stuff like soil microbial dna environmental dna. This unknown stuff is probably soil microbes that hadnt been sequenced yet so we didnt know what it was. You see human and dog in there. We often get human dog domestic cat all sorts of stuff gets in our sequences from a component that will use despite trying hard to keep them clean. We were at the time pretty bummed. How were we ever going to sequence a complete genome if all we are getting is 50 mammoth. It turns out knowing more about this this is a well preserved samples. The majority of samples have Something Like five or 10 in dodge and his dna and that is in one good places. You solve the neanderthal genome that was assembled simple for a couple of different bones and none of those bonds have more than 1 neanderthal dna. The rest of it was environmental contaminants that had to be thrown away. Imagine that we have this confetti mix of horrible dna grade where we want to do is find the purple one. How do we go about doing that . Fortunately we do have several complete genome sequences from living species and to use these basically as a scaffold to map onto which we can take these broken fragments and figure out where they go along this genome sequence. If we want to map broken fragments we use the asian elephant genome and if we want to map neanderthal dna we use the human genome. What we end up with is a partial genome is still going to have some holes that we just cant fill in. Another slight problem with this is that there has been some big genomic change like a duplication of part of a chromosome or something thats different between an asian elephant and that mammoth what it is going to be like is having a look with folded pages. If we have these sequences and we map them against the asian elephant genome but they are from our part of the mammoth genome that doesnt match the genome we will assume they are microbial dna. One might think that if we are interested in finding the part of the genome that are different between mammoth and asian elephant these might be an important place to look. Another problem is having a sequence even if we could generate that long sequence is not the same thing as having a living cell. We are Getting Better at stringing together sequences to make long fragments that we dont not have turned them into chromosomes. We dont know how to stick those chromosomes in cells so plan b sequencing ourselves a mammoth and where we will go im afraid we are stuck on a that first step so thats not going to work work. Fortunately there is another way and this is the way probably is going to be the path of people follow if we are going to do Something Like bring in species or extends extinct traits and that is to engineer ourselves a mammoth. And mean something that is simple conceptually like finding a place in a genome that we want to change and cutting the genome and pasting in the bit that we want to change it to. Pretty straightforward and we have the genome sequence of an asian elephant and now we have a couple of different genomes of mammoths that we can look through these genomes and find out where asian elephant look like one thing and mammoth look like Something Else and they are different. Those are potential targets if we want to use that element elephant to create a mammoth. Imagine we have a machine we can program to identify a specific place in the genome we want to change and we could get that machine a package in that package is just a synthesized bit of mammoth dna artificially created synthesized string of mammoth dna that matches that genome that we want to swap out. We can insert this machine in this package into a cell that will go around and find a place you are going to do it chop it out and stick the mammoth version in that place. This machine is called craft cast mine and his something youre probably her. Theres a chinese team that use the system to the edit human embryos and has caused a bit of a stir. This is an incredibly powerful easytouse technology and will be used. Its being developed for human genome engineering and curing of human genetic diseases. Not for deextinction but it isnt the type of technology that we would use. This molecule is her Little Machine and is part of it the blue thing is the part that recognizes part of the mammoth dna that they want to change. They elephant dna that we want to change, we stick in the mammoth dna dna. 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 stick that elephant version, that mammoth version in a place where the elephant version was and we will end up with an elephant that is part of mammoth. So what do we change . We know that mammoth and Asian Development elephant their genomes are 99 identical about the same similarity between us and chimpanzees. There are probably 1 million differences between them. Probably what we will do is hone in on a few things we think are important. One of the first genes that anybody found to be different between elephants and mammoth was the hemoglobin gene part of her red blood cell responsible for caring oxygen out of the body. This was work done and Kevin Campbells lab in manitoba and he found comparing the sequence between asian elephants and mammoth there are only three differences between the mammoth and the asian elephant. He took cells and made those changes to measure what the purpose of those differences were. What was different about the protein that had the mammoth version versus the one that had the elephant version and they found that the mammoth version was much better at caring oxygen around the body at low temperatures. This is a pretty good target for something to change if we want to take an elephant tropically adapted and turned into a more arctic or temperate adapted mammoth. Theres a team around the corner working on this question and compiling a list of genes that are different between elephants and mammoth and they have so far attempted to make 14 different swaps and swap out 14 elephant genes and they have been successful in doing all of that. They have actually created an elephant so that is 0. 001 mammoth which is pretty cool. It is a far cry from having a living breathing mammoth elephant hybrid but its a step in the right direction. We see that we do have the complete genome sequence and we do have the technology we need to add it to swap out these genes for things we want to replace them with them what we would have next is an elephant cell which would be alive which means we can go ahead and use Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer to create a living breathing animal. Of course that next step is actually pretty hard. In fact this next step which i like to call phase two of deextinction may be harder than phase one. When we hear about extinction what we hear about is the excitement generating the end of phase one without venturing into the challenges will be once we move into phase two. The first thing we would have to do is find an appropriate surrogate host. For some species that have close living relatives this might be straightforward. A species being worked on trying to be resurrected in the northern part of spain. There are many living ipaqs. They couldnt get them down from a high ledges. They were able to hybridize and use that hybrid is as surrogate mom to carry the developing embryos. They had living cells because they took the tissue sample before it died so they are further ahead with the cloning project. As the evolutionary distance between the thing you are trying to bring back in the thing that is the potential surrogate host increases we dont know how much distance will be tolerated and probably its going to be different depending on what age we are talking about. Another potential problem is there are instances where the size difference between the thing you are bringing back in the thing that is alive might be prohibitive. I say here that i dont want to include a picture but i did include one. Here we go. This is a stellar seek out and there is a scale on the bottom. Stellar seek out lived in the aleutian islands. They went extinct a couple hundred years ago. They were hunted to death. One of these guys could feed a crew of 30 people for more than a couple of weeks and you can see why they might have been a source of food for travelers around that time. The closest living relative to the stellar seek out our manatees. These are much smaller animals and if you think about what the ratio is between a newborn and a mom and assume it has the same ratio as sea cows a newborn stellar seek out is bigger. It probably means the extinction is not going to happen outside of the body of a distant relative. Another potential complication is we know that we are more than cells that make up our dna. In fact we are a combination of her genome sequence and the environment to which we are exposed. We know this is true by looking at identical twins. Identical twins have the same genomes in an airborne they look similar but as they get older they diverge from each other physically and the differences accumulate over time. By the time you have identical twins that are in her old age its hard to know they are identical twins are related and that is because of the differences and the environment and the differences begin in the womb. Its exposed to the elephants hormones and how do we know thats not going to ruin whatever changes we have made and not allow them to be expressed. Elephants eat the dawn of their mom to establish the microbes that live in their debt paid this newborn elephant mammoth hybrid establishes and elephant microbial community. It will consume an elephants diet and live in an Elephant Community and it would eat whatever it is that elephants are fitting captivity. Speaking of elephant and captivity that brings us to what i think is potentially the most serious challenge for mammoth extinction but a fundamental problem for all the deextinction projects. There are sir serious complications. We no elephants did not fare well in captivity. They often fail to reproduce and captivity. If they do get pregnant they sometimes injure or kill their young. Until we know more about how to meet the physical and psychological needs of elephants in captivity we shouldnt have elephants in captivity much less be using them in crazy experiments to bring back hybrids. The ethical challenges like the technical challenges will be different depending on which species we are thinking about bringing back. Of course they would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that the world has changed a lot since many of the species went extinct. In many cases there may be nowhere to put them without having a significant terrible effect on the ecosystem and populations of species that are there are. This picture for example is the east coast. This was the range of the Passenger Pigeon that went extinct 100 years ago. What would we do with them if we with them up about them back . Where would they go given how different their habitat is today than it was 100 or two years ago ago 200 years ago when it arrived in enormous flocks. Deextinction, we do it . Not yet. Someone who has written a book about this has a concrete opinion out whether we should and i do have a concrete opinion and if i dont know. I think it depends on what species we are talking about. There are a bunch of different species that have been proposed being worked on by various groups for deextinction as a very chicken and mammoth a Passenger Pigeon a stellar sea cow and the brooding frog the american chestnut tree that the cargo all sorts of different species and each one of them has a separate list of technical and ecological challenges associated with bringing them back. If we are going to use this technology to bring Something Back the most fundamental question to answer is why. Why do we want to bring a species thats 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 is not a compelling reason. There has to be good reason to go to the trouble of doing all of this work. I will end by returning to the mammoth and i will skip over the fact that its technically not possible to bring a mammoth back to life and 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. By reestablishing it you can restore interactions between species that used to exist but that are gone and that has an overwhelmingly good positive effect on the entire community not just the species you are bringing back. Theres a place in northeastern siberia called pleistocene park established by russian scientist in the 1990s when he started buying up land near his house. He is preparing a place for the return of the ice age animals including mammoth. So far he has bison forces in five different species of deer and hes waiting for the mammoth to come back. While these animals have been there he has been performing experiments to measure their effects on the ecosystem. Here is a picture that sergei took an early spring last or the year before. On one side of the fence he doesnt have grazing carnivores. On the other side of the fence he does. On the site without grazing herbivores what you see is a fairly undiverse grassland. They cant support a large number of herbivores. On the other side of the fence there are lots of different species the grass and topped with green all over the place. This is the ford the grass makes a comeback and yet there are is still green. By standing on the landscape and distributing seeds these animals have created their own habitat and transform these barren tundra into the rich grassland of the ice age is making their own habitat. Not only are they doing well and thriving that sergei has noticed others in plasticine park have come to visit the park because of their rich habitat for them. In this case he argues bringing back the mammoth which is clearly the top herbivore might spit out the recovery of the ecosystem much like elephants play an Important Role in maintaining their old habitats. The second reason is more sentimental. Few of us can imagine a World Without elephants and asian elephants are in endangered. Theyre habitats are declining. We are having trouble keeping them from being poached. What if we could use this technology not to bring back mammoth but to create an elephant that was capable of living somewhere cooler may be in europe or north america was in siberia where there is lots of space and people who want them. Could we use this technology to save elephants . Dont have to think about elephants. What if we could use this technology as a tool in bio diverse conservation . What if we could use this technology for blackfooted ferrets. They went through a bottleneck. There are blackfooted ferrets in Museum Collections that are tens of thousands of years old. We can go to these museum and find lack footed ferret genes that increase the amount of diversity in these genomes. And uses technology to swap out the identical versions from some of these existing ferrets for ferret genes that evolution shaped by the accidents and decrease in population size and is there extermination by humans made them go away. We could use this technology not to bring back species but as a potentially powerful weapon in our arsenal against the crisis we are experiencing today. I think that is the most compelling of this deextinction technology. Thank you. [applause] i am happy to answer any questions that you might have about how crazy i am. Or this stuff is. Its a great idea and i wondered if because i was going to ask is that more important to save the pigeons that are piercing quickly now. My first example was the polar bear and their habitat is dissolving so the question is the habitat produces but where would you put them in their habitat is gone and part of that is kenya engineer a change in their genome to make them adapt to a different thing when they really want ice . This is a good question the polar bear and you europe as 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 but theres a genome sequence and the polar bear that is 100,000 years old and up polar bear also has no genetic diversity and the same amount of no genetic diversity as polar bears today. They are the top predator that is precisely adapted to their particular habitat and youve are absolutely right when the habitat disappears they dont have any diversity that would allow them to adapt to different habitats that are around the polar bears have an interesting strategy dealing with this that we discovered recently. We discovered not only its happening right now with Climate Change but every time the climate has changed rapidly in the past the same thing as is happening. They breed with brown bears. They breed with brown bears and produce offspring that lived with the brown bears so the genes and polar bears survive as brown bear genes but polar hares are this discrete white hair that is precisely adapted to the arctic that would disappear and the idea of engineering traits that allow them to survive and other ironmans would be necessary in the case of polar bears because they will breed with brown bears but we still wont have polar bears in this particular case. The idea for other species might need we have species devoid of diversity in some way. Can we increase the amount of diversity and give them a genetic booster shot to give them adaptive flexibility in case maybe theres a way to expand. I think that is where this technology is the most powerful. Its exactly what i was talking about in the case of the blackfooted ferrets and what i think is exceptional about using this as a new tool in biodiversity conservation. I just walked in. I apologize. In terms of preserving our diversity and an orchard to preserve our eye what specific rubric would you define which species to bring back or retained and which species to let go . You either live or you die and even though we are changing the earth perhaps these are species that should perish because they barman is changing. Its a tough question. How do you decide how much diversity is a good amount of diversity lacks if we were going to go out and decide which species of the great ape to preserve based on how much diversity there is a not all that different great apes and the answer would be clear they would have to save humans. They have almost no genetic diversity so genetic diversity by itself is not a perfect measure of the health of the population. To answer your question the species that might benefit the most from this technology are species that have recently been through human induced population decline where they have purged diversity overall. As far as what diversity to introduce we dont know. We are 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 but the early stages yet another technical challenge standing in the way of applying this to your question. Its something that we should think about. Your comments make me want to ask if honeybees and thats in the recent issues they have been having wouldbe candidates for the things youre talking about . It would be great if we could find genes some bats that are persistent and figure out part part what part of the genome makes them resistant to. That would be fantastic and the kind of good application of this technology. Im not saying we know how to do this. Im just
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