 Good evening, everyone, and welcome to this evening's British Science Week event. Can we bring animals back from extinction? The event tonight explores the exciting world of genetics and ancient DNA, looking at whether it's possible to bring animals back from extinction, and perhaps the more important question, should we? We've got an excellent panel joining us for tonight's discussion, and I'm so excited to hear what they have to say. If you'd like to get involved this evening, please go to slido.com and use code hashtag B163. You can also follow the Slido link in the video description throughout the event. We will be using this to hear from you. You can also submit questions to the panel here and upvote your favorite questions. We'll be trying to answer as many questions as possible over the course of the discussion, but we may not be able to answer everything that is submitted. We also have live captioning available for this evening. If you'd like to see these, please click the subtitles closed caption button in the bottom bar. If you'd like to tweet during the event, please tag at Royal Society and use the hashtag British Science Week. Well, first of all, I'll kick off by introducing myself. I'm Lucy Cook, and I studied zoology many moons ago. These days, I'm more often found writing. I've got a book out at the moment called Bitch, a revolutionary guide to sex, evolution, and the female animal. There were no extinct animals in my book, but I'm looking forward to finding out more about how those could be brought back to life from the guests this evening. And they are, first of all, if you'd like to introduce yourself, Mike Benton. Good evening. My name is Mike Benton. I'm a paleontologist at the University of Bristol. I'm interested in dinosaurs and particularly bringing dinosaurs back to life in a different context, not in the sense of DNA, but working out what they looked like. And I will show my book, which was published recently, and this is Visions of Dinosaurs, What They Look Like. And in particular, our discovery a number of years ago that you can reconstruct color. And you can use data from the fossils often to learn extraordinary things about what they looked like that people would have thought was impossible at one time. Fabulous. Thank you so much, Mike. And now Beth, would you like to introduce yourself? Beth Shapiro. Sure. My name is Beth Shapiro. I am a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where it's morning time right now. So if any of my students walk in that door, I apologize in advance. I also have some books. I didn't know we were going to do show itself, but I'm going to do it anyway. I have one that just came out in October. This is the British version of it. I don't know if you'd like a little fingerprint piggies. Life as we made it, but probably more pertinent to this conversation. My first book is called How to Clone a Mammoth. So if you want to do it, there's the instruction manual right there. So yeah, quite straightforward, really. Looking forward to the discussion. And yeah, that's it for now. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Beth. Great to meet you and George Church. Finally, please introduce yourself. Yeah, I feel like I'm the person that maybe forgot to bring to my duck, but here is, here's my book at Regenesis. It does have a mammoth like creature on the front. And I'm a professor at Harvard and MIT. I work mainly on technology for reading and writing DNA and, and then any of the marvelous organisms ranging from dogs and pigs to elephants. So that we engineer in various ways. Fantastic. Well, to get started. I hope everybody's got their Slido on the go because we'd like to hear back from you on the question. If you could bring back any animal from extinction, what would it be? So we're going to have a poll on that. So if you could all answer that question and let us know that would be fantastic. But to kick off the discussion. I'm going to start with you, George. In fact, you're, I mean, one of the pioneers of genetics and gene editing. Could you give us a quick introduction to what this field of science is and why you find it so exciting? Right. So gene editing is part of being able to, to write change, make changes in the genome and how it plays out in microbes and plants, animals and human. It's something like gene editing can be considered very broadly where you're introducing DNA, new DNA, or you're changing in a small way or in a large way. I mean, it's really, it's a very broad term. It can be. And we use it in humans. It's usually termed gene therapy. And though, and something very much like gene therapy is involved in the vaccines that we've just, many of us have taken for COVID-19 in an agriculture. It can help plants deal with pests and things like that without using chemical pesticides. And then with animals that's used for veterinary use in very similar ways that we use in humans. And finally, we, we can use, you can, we can make very radical changes in a, in a genome to adapt them to, to transplant for your transplanting organs or to fill a niche that has disappeared as a, as a keystone species or as a endangered or recently extinct species. Fantastic. Thank, thank you, George. So, I mean, the technology has, has multiple uses. So this, this bringing animals back to life is really just sort of one aspect of, of this technology. And Beth, I'd like to turn to you now and just sort of, you know, when we talk about genetics for bringing extinct animals back, we can't just go out and collect DNA as easily as we can from humans or animals that are alive. How, how do we find this ancient DNA and how is it still usable after such a long time? I'm just watching the Slido too. So I like this idea of the people putting in what they want and the dodo is currently winning. Just so everyone knows that. So that's very exciting for me. This is a very exciting time. I'm a very big fan of the dodo. It was the first animal I worked on. So how do we get, how do we get DNA? Well, actually it is pretty straightforward. The, the problem is that once an organism dies, the DNA that's in all of itself starts to break down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until eventually there's not enough left that's going to be useful. But we have all sorts of technologies that allows to go out into the field, mostly in cold places, because you can imagine just like when you stick something in the freezer compared to in the fridge, compared to leaving it on the surface. It's really cold. It stays better preserved for longer. So a lot of early work in the ancient DNA, the field that I work in has been in the cold places, like the Arctic, which is one of the reasons we know so much about mammoths, right? They lived in cold places and so we find their bones. And we can go there and grind up a little piece of that bone and digest it to release all of the DNA. And then we can look at each of those pieces. And we've learned something about these, these fragments. They tend to be really short. Things like UV light can hit the DNA and break it into smaller and smaller pieces, just like happens during life when we go outside and why we wear sunscreen, right? Also freezing and thawing will break the DNA. And then most importantly, microbes, things like fungi and bacteria, they get into those samples and just chew it all up, digesting it to make it turn into something else in the future. But we can go in there and extract this DNA. We get millions or billions of these tiny little short fragments of DNA. A lot of it is that microbes, the bacteria and the fungi, but some of it will be mammoth DNA, maybe as much as 10 or 50% of the DNA that's in there will be mammoth DNA. And then we can take those little tiny fragments and we map them using a computer to the elephant genome, which we've sequenced from living elephants and see where along that genome sequence, each of those little tiny fragments goes. And if we sequence enough of it, we can build up a scaffold where we can see all of the places in the whole DNA code of an elephant and a mammoth, where the two species differ from each other. And that will give us the instructions that we need for doing what George was just talking about, which is going into that elephant cell, growing in addition a lab and gradually tweaking it a little bit at a time using the tools of gene editing to cut out the elephant bit where it's different from what we now know a mammoth looked like and paste in its place the version that was the mammoth genome. So we can go out and get DNA from an extinct species, as long as it's relatively recently extinct dinosaurs, I guess we'll have to talk about in a little bit, but and we can do that relatively straightforwardly. The next steps are harder. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Beth. I'm just going to remind the audience now of the Slido code when you go in, you've got to use hashtag B163. And we're getting some great questions in already. And one of them, Beth, I'm going to follow on, because it follows on from what you were talking about, is RV Lee Willingham has asked, how do you, would you account for the epigenetics of the extinct species? There's a lot of things that we don't really understand about what parts of our genomes make species look and act the way that they do. And one of those is the idea of epigenetics. This is what happens in the environment that makes some genes turn on or turn up or turn down or turn off. We don't really know how to reconstruct these in living species. There are ways that we can use molecular biology to figure out where there are epigenetic markers in genomes. So that's possible. But knowing what of those are actually important to making an animal look and act the way it did is really hard. But I think one of the things that I would say in defense is that we know that the environment is super important to making us all look and act the way we do. If it weren't, then identical twins, which are essentially genetic clones of each other, would be completely identical. And we know that they're not. So obviously environmental influences, which include epigenetic changes that will change gene expression, are going to be important. Are they going to be so important that it means we're not going to create genetic-adapted elephants if we want to use this gene-editing technology? I tend to doubt it, but I would push it over to George. He's probably thought about this a little bit as well. Yeah, I was going to say, what does George think on this? Yeah. I basically agree with Beth that it's, we're getting quite good at manipulating epigenetics and that kind of knowledge and technology is improving exponentially. For example, we have a couple of companies that their whole point is to manipulate epigenetics to make organs for transplants or other things like that. And that's the epigenetics of going from a fertilized egg to an adult. And it is environmentally sensitive, but we also are understanding how to manipulate the environment so that they go where we want them to go. There are certainly gaps in our knowledge, but it's amazing what one can engineer without knowing everything. I think we need to be humble about how little we know, but how little we need to know and have historically known and still sometimes gotten very powerful technologies. So for example, a smallpox vaccine was done at a time when almost nothing was known about viruses or immunology. Nevertheless, it had a very positive impact on a very scary disease. Fantastic. Thank you, George. Let's go over to Mike now with one of the questions that is proving to be very popular on Slido, which is, has anyone ever bought an extinct animal back yet? I don't believe they have, and people have been trying with recently extinct species, but Beth will maybe correct me, Pyrrhenian ibex and various others. People have got close, but it's been quite tricky. And of course, all of this started in a popular way with the film Jurassic Park back in 1993, which was from a very smart novel written by Michael Crichton, who in fact had had a training in biomedical sciences. So he was very aware of what was going on. And if we go back to 1993, I think everybody's either seen the film or are aware of the scenario. And generally people thought at the time, could this just about happen? Now, of course, I think we have a more sophisticated understanding. But back in 1993, the polymerase chain reaction, PCR method had been devised, was coming into wide use. Michael Crichton was aware of this, and it gave the opportunity to take very tiny, tiny samples and clone them and sequence. And that had not been possible before. And then this opens the possibility of looking at ancient DNA. And I remember the series of papers that were happening. And in a way fiction was a head of fact. And people were reporting DNA from ancient insects. You'll remember that the scenario of the film and the book were that blood was inside the stomach of a mosquito that had sucked the blood from a dinosaur. And the scientists were, and the mosquito, the fossil mosquito was preserved in amber, so that every detail could be seen. And hence the assumption was it would be very beautifully well preserved. And somehow the scientists extracted this tiny amount of blood from the stomach of the Cretaceous 100 million year old mosquito using PCR, they were able to clone it, multiply it up to substantial quantities, inject it into a frog or some living animal and that it would somehow take over the DNA within that living animal. So that was the scenario. And there was a series of papers culminating in 1995, 1994 where somebody did say we've got dinosaur DNA. And they said this is dinosaur DNA because it's different from the crocodile. But very quickly it was pointed out the reason it was different was it was human and that they had mistakenly got a little bit of sweat or something that one of the technicians had dropped into the PCR machine it had multiplied it up and technically at that point that showed people they had to be really, really careful about ancient DNA. Yeah, we call those the dark days of ancient DNA where we were still really trying to figure out what was going on. And it turns out that contamination like this is super common. And most people who have ancient DNA labs now they have these specialized facilities where everybody goes in and they wear this full body gear. It's like going into a crazy virus lab except rather than protecting you from the samples you're working with we're protecting the samples from us. Some of all of those really ancient bits of DNA that were published the insects, the dinosaurs it was all proven to be contamination of different types in the early days. And to date the oldest DNA that's been recovered is it was actually published in January of last year it's a mammoth, some mammoth genome sequences from bones that were preserved in permafrost so this is soils that have been frozen since the time of deposition which is probably the only reason they've survived for this long but they're thought to be around 1.2 to maybe 1.5 million years old. This is hugely old until this oldest sample was a horse that we'd found in Canada that dates to around 750,000 years old but that was also exceptional and most ancient DNA samples that we have date to the last couple of tens of thousands of years definitely within the last 100,000 years any older of which then it tends to be really really poorly preserved. I also tried early in my days of ancient DNA while I was at Oxford to try to get DNA out of insects preserved in amber and also out of amber that didn't have any insects in it and I always got something there's always DNA in things but it was never what I thought it was going to be it's clearly a contaminant so even if we try really hard not to get contamination we have to look carefully at all the results we get to make sure that it isn't something that is going to mess up our results so it's not straightforward but it's possible now to have the right sorts of controls and really look carefully at these sequences to make sure that what we get is authentic but we can do it. So it seems to me scientists are feeling pretty punchy about this this is definitely something that's within our power to do is that a resounding yes? Well it depends what you mean by this if this means get DNA out of old remains then yeah we know we can do this and it's really exciting to learn things about how species and populations and entire ecosystems have changed with big environmental changes like the peak of the last ice age and the rapid warming after that or the first introduction of a predator but if this is de-extinction then it starts to get a little bit more hazy and I always say is de-extinction possible? Well it depends on what you're willing to accept as a de-extinct species and I think everybody who's genuinely working on this isn't thinking we're going to bring something back that is 100% identical to a species that was here or a particular organism that was here and is now extinct because we know for reasons like we can't sequence whole genomes, we don't know about epigenetics, we don't know about environmental impacts, we can't really piece together all these differences that this isn't possible but organisms are more than their DNA sequences so we can't reconstruct an environment that no longer exists but can we use these technologies to create an organism that is similar in what it provides to its ecosystem to something that used to be alive and potentially use that as a way of reinvigorating that ecosystem or restoring missing ecological interactions or missing components of ecosystems and helping to make that ecosystem healthier? Yes I think we're getting to a point in different ways with different species we know a lot more about mammals than we do about birds for example but we're certainly pushing toward a point where we can use these technologies to do just that. Fantastic well we've got a great question that sort of really follows on from that that's the most popular question at the moment George I'm going to come to you with it it's from Aula and she asked would it be easier to bring back an extinct plant as opposed to an animal? Probably the easiest thing right now to engineer is a mammal so of the animals a mammal is slightly easier to engineer and plants so I have an agriculture seed company that's engineering plants but there's special issues I mean they have the advantage that almost every part of the plant can produce a new plant rather than just sperm and eggs for typical mammal but you can change it so that you can derive from almost any cell in the mammal a stem cell and then it's just like the plant so I think in general mammals easier but they're all feasible to do and in terms of ancient DNA we have plenty of ancient plant DNA that's quite true it all boils down to what you want so you need somebody to advocate something in an ancient plant that isn't already present in the wide diversity of plants in general some of the enthusiasm for bringing back parts of the ancient world you know we're not talking about specific species but all kinds of specific genes which you can bring back some of the gene functionality from billions of years back even if you can only bring the DNA back from 1.2 million years and those genes can be used in a whole variety of ways so for example restoring diversity to a species we're no longer limited to the herd the last few animals we can go all over and backwards in time to get diversity so that's one key reason that we might want to go back in time and reach for individual parts of the plants or animals I've got a question here that's very popular I'm going to ask Mike this question is the dodo genome fully sequenced is the dodo something that we could bring back popular in the poll as well yes and I can see why it's popular because obviously the dodo is such an amazing bird we know it's related to pigeons and doesn't look much like a pigeon and human beings of course wrote about it illustrated it and saw it alive and then exterminated it the dodo genome is known and has been sequenced not in its entirety but substantial amounts and it's one that you could make a case and say well yes maybe that would be interesting because I think a question that you raised before that we haven't fully got to of course is what do you do if you bring something back to life and if you've seen the Jurassic Park films that raises rather obvious conclusions if you bring T-Rex back to life maybe that wouldn't be the most popular thing because it would run wild and cause havoc whereas people have talked about mammoths and they have a known habitat that is potentially available the dodo has a known habitat that would be potentially available and we could say bringing back something that isn't so ancient would be much more feasible in terms of impact on the environment in terms of actually engineering that dodo I think you would face all the problems that people have faced and that Bethan was talking about and George the reality of generating a whole new species whether you could inject parts of that dodo DNA into a modern pigeon DNA and somehow generate a dodo I've got no idea it would probably look nothing quite like what we expect a dodo to look like Can I also answer this question because yes the dodo genome is entirely sequenced because we sequenced it and it's not been published yet but it does exist and we're working on it right now we have a fantastic specimen I've tried for a long time to get DNA from the specimen that's in Oxford in fact it was the very first ancient DNA project that I worked on we got a tiny little bit of DNA out of it and we're able to show that it's most closely related to a pigeon called the nicobar pigeon which is a gorgeous pigeon that is broadly distributed across the Indian Ocean and that particular sample didn't have sufficiently well preserved DNA I don't really know much about its preservation history to get a whole genome but there is a specimen in Denmark at the Dutch History Museum in Copenhagen that we were able to through collaboration with the curator there get a small piece of it and now we have a very high coverage high quality dodo genome that will soon be published so yes the answer to that is yes for birds though and as far as bringing them back and this is one of the reasons that George said mammals is simpler one of the key steps that everyone is considering when we're thinking about this is if I have a cell and it's living in additional lab and I've edited it so that it used to be a nicobar pigeon cell and now it has a bit of dodo DNA or it was a or is an Asian elephant cell and I've stuck in some mammoth DNA replaced bits of it so it's now it's more mammoth like how do I then transform that cell into a whole living breathing actual animal right and the way that we would do this is to clone it using somatic cell nuclear transfer the same approach that's that was used to create Dolly the most famous clone right we can do that with mammals we can't know how to do that with birds because of the intricacies of their reproductive pathway so there needs to be another approach for birds so this this one really fundamental technological hurdle in de-extinction or reinvigorating new genomes or bringing back individuals and things like that is a technical hurdle that we've yet to cross with birds now there are groups that are working on different approaches for doing this and I have little doubt that we're going to get there but it is an additional hurdle for birds that we don't have for mammals at this point so we're going to have to wait the dodo is probably not going to happen before some kind of rat in fact was in the news today that's being talked about the Christmas island rat yeah the Christmas island rat I feel like it's likely to be some sort of small brown mammal that's likely to be the first creature that comes forward because we know more about them you know we don't know more about their rats we've had in labs as model animals for a long time we know a lot about rat reproduction and how to keep them healthy and happy in a captive breeding environment we know a lot about how to how to make them reproduce so this is helpful when we're doing this these are all different technical hurdles that one would need to overcome to do to do this type of work so yes yeah probably will be something that we understand a lot better I mean I personally I I'd love to see a dodo I mean who wouldn't love to see a dodo maybe maybe less keen on another rat being on this planet but I think that brings us interestingly to the poll that we'd like to I'd like to throw out to the audience on theslido.com results the last poll lots of people like me want to see the dodo the dire wolf which I'm going to have to look up actually because I don't think I know the dire wolf is incredibly popular and the thylacine which of course fantastic marsupial from Tasmania that would be amazing there are people obviously I've met in Tasmania who actually think the thylacine still live so that might be easier to see that again but interesting to see your results a huge range there of species that people are keen to see come back but the next poll that I'd like you to answer on dodo using the hashtag B163 of course is what concerns you most about potentially bringing animals back because you know as we've been saying bringing a bird back bringing the dodo not massive impact but bringing back mammals bringing back dinosaurs what would that mean to the planet so if we could just if you could answer that that would be fantastic I'd like to set that poll going and that brings me to the most popular question actually because from talking about the practicalities of how we do this was sort of moving on to the kind of ethics of this really which is the most popular question currently on Slido is from Alicia Engel which is how would bringing back the animals benefit them and the ecosystem for example if we were to bring back an animal how can we support it with the habitat loss and invasive predators how about Mike do you want to have a go at that I'll have a go and I certainly can't give a complete answer but I think that does relate to the point of it also relates to the technical feasibility because as we've heard from Beth and George it's easier to do this where you have close living species and I think ecologically speaking this would be the same issue that if you bring t-rex back or a giant sauropod dinosaur what on earth do you do with the blasted thing and then how many do you bring back to make a breeding population or what's the point and technically practically ethically it could be potentially a nightmare and of course in the Jurassic Park films they have them living on some mythical island we don't know quite where that island is but of course that's meant to keep them safe but then there's also risk they're going to be flying once get away and all that kind of stuff people have discussed that for the mammoth they've discussed it for the dodo and I think in these cases we can see what the habitats were some of those habitats still exist but there is still a lot of issues who looks after them or who takes responsibility would they be capable of living in the wild without a lot of support or are they just going to be curiosities in a zoo in a way the ethical issues are there the technology may someday confront us with actually solving these Beth I'm sure you've thought about this do you have something to add on this question sorry I was muted about the environmental impact or yeah the question was about you know should we be doing this what would be the benefits to doing this to the environment I think that this is going to be it's different depending on what species that species were thinking about and every species is going to have different technical, ethical and ecological challenges that it has to address but they also have different rationale for wanting to consider it to my mind I think that the most exciting thing about these sorts of technologies as they are being developed and I think everybody loves the idea of de-extinction because it allows them to think outside the box and be creative and really engage with something that's exciting but the same technologies that you would need to create a mammoth or an arctic adapted elephant would be useful for conserving and protecting species that are alive today I saw one of the questions that was posted was about Willa for example this black-footed ferret that was cloned recently these are the same technologies that one would need to develop for de-extinction it didn't involve any gene editing but what happened was a team of researchers at the San Diego Zoo and Fish and Wildlife and a non-profit called Revivator Store worked together to take some cells that have been frozen from black-footed ferrets for almost 40 years and use cloning to create a living breathing animal from those frozen cells and what's critical about this animal she's named Elizabeth Ann and she's adorable and you should look her up because she's just absolutely adorable little black-footed ferret is that all the black-footed ferrets that are alive today are derived from seven founders, seven individuals that are all very closely related this is a highly endangered species that is really on the brink of becoming extinct the only reason they're still alive is because of this successful captive breathing program that's been established about a decade ago DNA is entirely different than the other individuals that are there because she's from a different population so when she reaches breeding age she's going to be reintroduced into this community and provide a super welcome burst of genetic diversity now this is really great for black-footed ferrets but it might not be enough to save them because there is one other thing that they are facing and that is plague that's been introduced into their populations but it goes out and eats a prairie dog which is their favorite prey the prairie dog is often infected with plague the black-footed ferret gets plague and it dies so just introducing genetic diversity might not help them they can be vaccinated but they have to be caught and revaccinated and this is not a really great long-term conservation strategy however there's another solution that comes from the family of technologies that would be needed if we were going to successfully de-extinct a species and that is that domestic ferret which is an evolutionary cousin of the black-footed ferret is naturally immune to plague so this group of researchers are right now trying to figure out what it is in the domestic ferrets genome that makes them naturally immune to plague then once this is discovered they can use these same technologies growing cells and dishes in lab gene editing those cells moving DNA between species in this case from the domestic ferrets or potentially another species that is naturally immune to plague it's the same technologies that one would need for de-extinction but here applied explicitly for the purposes of keeping a species that is currently endangered from becoming extinct and one can imagine other ways that we would use this if we could identify genes that make corals that are able to survive in warmer or more acidic waters we could use these technologies to move those genes between populations and species even the work that's being done to figure out how to create an Arctic adapted elephant could be useful to help protect elephants from becoming extinct so I think there are so many amazing opportunities that will come from development of this suite of resources that come from people's excitement about de-extinction not just limited to bringing these back and there are so many potentially amazing impacts on populations and ecosystems if we have these technologies as yet we could use them as a tool in our conservation tool kit that this is why I'm excited about pushing these approaches forward I like the comment from one of the commentators I'd like to taste some of these extinct animals but then that's another ethical dimension if you're going to create them they could cause havoc in ecosystems if you only create them in order to be able to eat them well that's another matter we're absolutely critical to the early conservation movement that turned the 20th century and I think we really have to think about all the different ways that we might as people we're incredibly good at changing our environment to make it a better place for us and if that means creating new sources of food particularly if we're talking about plants or engineering things that are going to make our lives easier or better then maybe it's easier for us to find the motivation there for developing technologies that will also be useful just for protecting and preserving species and ecosystems so I wouldn't dismiss it just out of hand but there's another interesting question from Aave Lee Willingham here that's got a lot of votes how can we ensure the extinction is a purely ecological process and inhibit it from turning into a commercial one couldn't this process once possible be turned on its head and be used for ecological reasons i.e. private collections and mass farming who wants to go to George? Yeah so there's not that fundamental a difference between a non-profit and a profit in practice there can be either one of them can do very very good things for society if they're if there's sufficient motivation so for example there are carbon credits which is a way that you can reward companies for doing the right thing in terms of global warming and that's a way of aligning incentives for both non-profit and for-profit organizations there's nothing that stops a non-profit from making a lot of money so the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation made billions of dollars on a drug that helps people with Cystic Fibrosis so that's part of it the other part of it is they can do well by doing good by bringing technology that will help in a medical sense in a veterinary sense or in an environmental sense is almost all the technologies that are using that are positive in the environment had a component that was commercial that's how you often how you bring things into the real world as you get and it's sort of up to us as citizens and consumers to vote with our wallet to say this is what we want to spend our money on so if we bring all our money on the domesticated animals that we're going to eat and that now constitutes 60% of mammals are human domesticated mammals and 96% if you include humans themselves so if that's what we want to do then that's what the commercial farms are going to produce but if we decide we want to be vegans and plants that's going to be a different outcome so don't blame it on the companies blame it on the consumers that's a fair comment one of the other questions that's very popular here which is another sort of ethical question which is you know how would would distinction not be detrimental to living species conservation as the view would be to preserve genetic material because it's fine we'll bring it back later conservation is really underfunded as it stands and is there a danger of de-extinction it's a fantastic exciting idea but could it distract away and make people feel like they can just carry on eating meat and driving SUVs and not really caring because science will just sort it out and just bring those animals back from extinction it'll all be okay and we don't have to worry about the habitats is that something we have to be worried about do you think, Beth? I think that this assumes something both beautiful and incorrect kind of separately about people first it assumes that most people care about de-extinction and would suddenly not do so most people care about conservation and would suddenly not do so if this were possible which I just unfortunately think isn't true people don't really care about de-extinction in as much as it doesn't impact them personally maybe that's not true about the people who've come here but the people who've come here to listen to this are probably not your average person out there it also assumes that us the people who are here listening to this who do care about conservation are all of a sudden going to stop doing so because technologically a particularly difficult thing that is not going to bring back an identical copy of something else is now going to save the world which I think it's unfair to imagine that we all believe that that is true right so we understand that there is challenges here and I also think that one of the comments that we often get is that you know these efforts are taking away from resources that would otherwise go to conservation which I also think isn't true I mean the people who are funding traditional conservation are not the same people who are funding this sort of research I mean if you saw the news last week there's company out there called Colossal that I'm consulting for that just raised 75 million dollars these are this is not money that's come from the same people that are out there trying to save the panda or the koala it is it in my mind absolutely fantastic that this sort of crazy technological solution that may not ever work has brought in so much new money and new excitement to a field where it is so hard to get funding I think that quite the opposite to the accusations of taking money away it's actually bringing new money in and it's money that is sorely needed for technology that I think has tremendous potential to help conservation well it's certainly something that concerns the the audience because a lot of these questions that are coming through are exactly you preempted that question Beth and you've been in enough of these discussions to know that that's on the cards and so it's obviously something that concerns people I've got another one here which is will this later become a biohazard risk are you will it be possibly bring back contagious diseases that could impact other species obviously that's something that's very much on our mind in these days so who fancies answering that I'll take that one since my laboratory does work on infectious diseases we worked on diagnostic therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19 for example I think this is a reason for not bringing back an exact copy of of a ancient species blindly just blindly turning ancient DNA into modern DNA I think we should do it selectively we should do it for enriching endangered species in modern ecosystems and we should do it one gene at a time because there are viruses working in the genomes of organisms in effect the only two genomes that have been actually fully brought back from extinction are viruses there's a retrovirus and an influenza virus that have been brought back from extinction for we didn't do it but I think for good reasons other people did it but we don't want to just go in and recreate random viruses just because they happen to be in the mammoth genome or some other genome we want to do it more thoughtfully and say these are the cold resistant genes that would enrich the current elephant species would allow them to extend into vast regions where there aren't human beings we've eliminated we've even gone the other direction the virus viruses from the genome of pigs completely eliminated than proven that and now those pigs are more suitable for providing medical resources like organs so you can do it either way but you just have to be very cautious I think is the point and where would we there's a lot of these concerns around this area and also surviving our ecosystem and how would they affect existing ecosystems is there anybody who wants to tackle any of that I suppose I can just say a very brief word I mean we talked earlier about this people have talked about the mammoth and the dodo and they are in a position I suppose where nothing has replaced them in their former habitats to a certain extent and then in that case you could imagine them and somehow recreating the ecosystem that was already there whether in practice that could ever happen I don't know but the concern of course with more randomly doing this of course bringing species back and planting them here and there on the earth could be catastrophic for all sorts of reasons that we've discussed and we have species at risk today bringing back former species who knows it wouldn't necessarily improve the chances of other species to survive I've got to ask you do you ever see a dinosaur coming obviously we have dinosaurs we have birds but do you think that that's a reality that could happen one day Mike? No I think this is what got people thinking so much because of the Jurassic Park story but all the steps along the way as Beth and George were outlining make it very unlikely that that would happen what has been done is engineering of the genome of living birds to try to recover deep within that genome remembrances of genetic fossils of dinosaurs and very early in genetic engineering people were able to in a sense trick the genome of chickens into generating teeth and there are many experiments of that kind where people can get horses to generate multiple toes and these sort of atavisms or throwbacks and those approaches might work but whether you would call your chicken with teeth a dinosaur I've got no idea yeah I mean and the other thing of course that we haven't discussed is behavior you know I mean how would an animal that's being brought back to life de-extinct how would it behave how would it how would you tackle that George or Beth, Beth you're there I was just going to say the genome is the blueprint for all of this and that in combination with the environment and things that an individual can learn from its parents I see there's a question about how something learns to act like how you bring something back that is born to an elephant and how do you teach it to become a mammoth I think this is these are all things that are different this will what is behavior it's a combination of the genes and the proteins that are made and the environment in which the individual lives and probably it's loads of genes that are interacting with each other in different ways in the environment I guess my the thing that I keep coming back to with this is does it matter we really are trying to target something in particular like we want to create an elephant that's just able to live in the cold so it can wander around and stir up the sediments and move plants around and interact in a way that a mammoth used to does it matter that it's not 100% identical to a mammoth if the goal is to just create something that can fill that niche and replace some of those ecological variables and I would say it doesn't the goal is not to create a community of an animal that used to be alive because we know that we can't do that and so when we're considering these projects we really have to think why we want to do it what the ultimate goal is do these risk assessments about whether the ecosystem is going to be impacted in a way that we can predict by putting these things back back in an environment or putting a proxy for something that used to live there back in the environment and in many cases we don't we're not going to be able to fully understand what the ecosystem is before we do it but we do this all the time because as people we have been moving species between habitats because we wanted to for as long as we've existed as a lineage and sometimes it has terrible devastating consequences and sometimes it doesn't but ecosystems are not stable either we don't have an ecosystem that an extinct species disappeared 10,000 years and it's just in this time frozen and waiting for this thing to come back that doesn't happen either even the dodo's environment is different and Mauritius if we wanted to bring a dodo back we would have to first solve the problem that made them go extinct in the first place which is that there are loads of rats and cats and pigs and dogs that people introduced onto the island that ate the egg that the dodo laid on a nest on the ground and until we can solve that if we were to recreate a bird that laid an egg in a nest on the ground and take it there the egg would just be eaten the way the dodo's eggs were so all of these things are yes they're problems that people in the audience and people elsewhere have correctly identified but does that mean that we shouldn't imagine what these technologies might be able to do are the risks of things that we don't know or can't understand greater than the risk of not allowing ourselves the freedom to explore what these technologies might be able to do to save species and ecosystems that are under threat today I don't think so we take risks as people all the time yes we should have to evaluate them and we should have global conversations like we are right now about what these risks are and what risks we're willing to take as a global international community and it's great that we're doing that before these technologies really exist but I worry that people are so scared of things that they haven't yet thought of that we're going to stop ourselves from really moving down this road from identifying what these technologies can do to help us to protect species and ecosystems today as the people have correctly pointed out who are commenting there are millions of species that are at risk of becoming extinct these tools could be tools that we can use to stop those extinctions from happening and it's a tremendous risk not to allow ourselves to evaluate the tools okay well we're sort of coming towards the end now and I guess to sort of wind up let's start with you George where do you see this field going in the next 10 years and what do you think that scientists will actually be able to achieve well I think it's safe to say that it is where it's going is going there exponentially fast that is to say we have brought down the costs of things both medical and veterinary significance by 10 million fold most of it in the last decade so that's giving you some idea of how fast this is going I think it's also going in a good direction it seems like the people that are donating money or investing money are more and more motivated by climate change and by certain species that are endangered than anything else and so I think that bodes well for the next 5-10 years and I think that we're going to have many of the technologies we've talked about here will be considered routine and available for veterinary and endangered species probably far more than extinction is just the rallying cry it's the way of getting diversity into modern species for the benefit of ecosystems admittedly they will be benefiting ecosystems that humans like if we can make an ecosystem produce less methane into the atmosphere then that's from a human standpoint a good ecosystem it's not good in some kind of global perfect way but their technologies may avert massive extinctions if heaven forbid 1400 gigatons of methane in the Arctic were to go up in the atmosphere that would be a global warming far beyond any of the predictions that have been based purely on anthropogenic sources so that's just an example of both where the technology is going and where the conditions are going well I think that's a good place for us to ask our final poll from the audience which is you've heard the scientists have spoken do you the audience think that we should bring animals back from extinction so please answer that how are we looking at now we've got to say yes and a maybe not many knows and not many I don't know it's yes is you've been very persuasive you've convinced the audience there's not a lot of knows although they are creeping up but no it is people believe in this as an exciting future for our planet I think it would be nice to say do you think we should develop these technologies we don't need to bring species back from extinction to capitalize on these technologies for the purposes of preserving biodiversity and that I think is where I'm most excited about this and that's why we thought yes maybe yes that's a great clarification Beth yes so in the end de-extinction is sort of a kind of a buzz thing but actually that the technologies from what we've heard today have a much more a wider use well I mean it's been completely fascinating to hear from you and we could talk about this for many many more hours but I'm afraid I'm going to have to bring the conversation to a close now but it has been completely fascinating thank you to all of you who have joined us do continue the conversation on social media tweet us at Royal Society and use the hashtag British Science Week please subscribe to the Royal Society's YouTube channel to stay up to date on the latest events alternatively you can find out the latest information on the Royal Society's website or by signing up to their newsletter the link can be found in the YouTube description as well as one of our short evaluation surveys where you can tell us what you thought of the event you can also catch up with this discussion and all of our events on the Royal Society's YouTube channel I'd just like to say huge thank you to Mike Benton, George Church and Bess Shapiro for such a fascinating insight into a really exciting science and that's all for tonight viewers and we hope to see you again soon