 to be here. So about two years ago, I traveled to Yakutsk when I was doing research for my latest book. And even if I were traveling in the summer, and it's quite warm in Yakutsk in the middle of the summer, the ground is always frozen. It's permafrost. And this, of course, has been used by locals for centuries, for thousands of years, because if you dig into the ground, you have your own freezer, so you can store food there and make sure everything stays fresh. But in Yakutsk, they've taken this one step further. So they made a tourist attraction. So they've dug in these long, long tunnels and they filled them with ice sculptures and fairy lights and some tinkly music and you could drink vodka out of ice glass shots and things like that. And they had this amazing mounted mammoth. So while I was there, one of the guides was like, come on, come on, come on, walk with me. And he didn't speak very good English, but he led me away from the lights and down this tunnel to the side with no sort of tinkly music and no other tourists. And then I was a bit like, yeah, what could possibly go wrong here? This is good. And then he opened up a door into a room in the ice and here was this. So this is an actual head of a mammoth. This is the best preserved head of a male mammoth that has ever been found and it was huge. I couldn't reach between the tusks of it, it was huge and you can see there's still some hair on top of the head and you can see the wrinkles and the skin and this room, it sort of smelled like an attic or a cellar, kind of musty and old, but it wasn't unpleasant. It was actually kind of a nice smell, sort of like when you visit relatives who really like to collect old stuff, kind of like that smell. And that smell was actually the only thing telling me that this is an animal that have been dead for 20,000 years. And I think the mammoth and the imagination of the mammoth is one of the reasons why the current attempts to revive mammoths have gained so much attention because when you see something like this, you kind of think that something that is so magnificent, it cannot be completely gone, we cannot have lost this species. And the fact is that using this kind of bodies and especially frozen bones, researchers have been able to analyze the DNA of mammoths almost as well as they've analyzed the DNA of elephants living today. And they've used this data to find the genes that make the mammoth a mammoth. So find the genes for fat, find the genes for the wall, find the genes for the long tusks and so on. And right now, a researcher in the US called George Church is using a technique called CRISPR to take these genes and put them into elephant cells. So he tries to mammothify an elephant, give elephants mammoth traits. So far, these are only cells in Petri dishes, there are no mammoths running around the world. But the fact that we can now have 20,000 year old genes alive and functioning in cells today is really amazing. The mammoth sort of stands on one end of the current attempts to recreate species. But I want to tell you about an animal that is sort of on the other end of things. So in 2015, I also visited Nola in San Diego. When I visited her, Nola was one of the four remaining individuals of the northern white rhino. And she died a few months later in 2015. So now there are only three individuals left of this species. The reason why there's a few of them is poachers, habitat loss and poachers. The other three have armed guards around them at all times and for various reasons, they cannot reproduce. So this is a species that is gone. This is a species that is lost. There will never, ever be a northern white rhino baby born in a natural way again. But in San Diego, when Nola lived, there is also the San Diego frozen zoo. So this is a collection of frozen cells, alive cells from threatened animals around the world. And they have 12 samples of cells from the northern white rhino. 12 samples from 12 individuals who are not very closely related. And this means that perhaps this species can be reborn by cloning. Researchers could take these 12 cells, these 12 individuals and clone them. And there's a closely related species that could act as a surrogate mother. So this is a species that is lost to us when it comes to normal conservation. But new genetic technology might provide another way of saving it. And this, I think, is one of the most exciting parts of the emerging genetic technology and the attempts to revive extinct species is that they provide a completely new toolbox to conservationists who are trying to save the species that we are losing today. These two are actually not the only species that are being recreated as we speak. There are about 10 species around the world being recreated, and this is just a small nod to let you know that, yes, one of those are dinosaurs. It's a very interesting project that I won't have that much time to go into right now. But I would encourage all of you to Google chickenosaurus when you have the time. But there are about 10 species that researchers are trying to recreate. And when you see these projects, you sort of have to ask yourself, what is the reason for doing this? What is the value of a recreated species? Most of these projects, the researchers are trying to create animals that can be let out into nature again, that can be rewilded, and that can have a part in the ecosystem. This is actually from Turkey in eastern Siberia, and this is the area where the mammoth is going to live once it is recreated, if they manage to do it. And this is also an area where researchers are trying to recreate the ecosystem where the mammoth lived. So they're trying to recreate the ecosystem step, which was extremely rich in species, was extremely rich in biodiversity, and also in total number of animals. And I think that one of the really valuable things about trying to recreate extinct species is that it can give us some hope. We live in a time right now where things look really, really bleak when it comes to the environment, and it is very easy to lose hope and to feel that all is lost. And to recreate an extinct species will never be easy. It will never really replace what we have lost, and for most species, it won't even be possible. But at least for some species, it can be a way for us to start correcting at least some of the faults we've done. And the other really big value that I see is kind of like the moon landing. I kind of like to watch this project and think of the moon landing because there wasn't really anything on the moon that we needed. There wasn't a reasonable good reason for going to the moon. It didn't cure the sick. It didn't feed the hungry. It didn't aid the elderly. And it was, from the outset, just looked like money badly spent. Now, we know that the moon landing has more than paid for itself when it comes to all of the applications and research that it has led to. And I think I want to look at these projects in the same way. Whether or not they succeed, whether or not if they succeed, if we as a society decide that we want mammoths again and we want them released in the wild again, I think that we are going to learn so much from these kind of projects. And I think in the same way that as the true value of the moon landing was looking ahead to future unknown, I think the true value in these projects lay in embarking on a scientific journey, in doing scientific projects without knowing if they're going to succeed or not, without knowing if you're going to reach your destination or not. But it is a destination that can give us all some more hope for the future. So thank you so much.