Ideas - The 2024 Beatty Lecture Pairs Two Great Minds That Don’t Think Alike

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

A Danish geneticist who found camels in Greenland meets the Irish author excavating a thousand tales from the streets of Cork, Ireland. This year’s Beatty Lecture is a double-act. Both Eske Willerslev and Cònal Creedon draw from their contrasting expertise and share their personal tales of discovery. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad.

And welcome to a packed theatre on the campus of McGill University in Montreal. I mean, it's inconceivable for any Western democracy to persist even for ten years more if we didn't have, through progressive taxation, a steady transfer of resources from rich people to poor. And now I can say, I can stand here and say to you, everything is possible. And I mean it. Good evening. Bienvenue. My name is Nala Ayed. I'm the host of Ideas on CBC Radio 1. And I'm really honoured to be your emcee tonight for this special event, the 70th Annual Beattie Lecture at McGill University.

The Beattie Lecture has a long history in Montreal. Past lecturers include Mikhail Gorbachev, Jane Goodall, and Alanis Obomsawin. It's an annual series with a simple remit to bring the world's best thinkers in any discipline to address the public on a topic of their choice. 2024's event was exceptional for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it marked an anniversary. This series is 70 years old. And secondly, because it featured two lecturers instead of one. An artist and a scientist.

Winners of this year's World Cultural Council's awards. The annual award event travels the world, and on this occasion it came to Montreal. The Council's Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts went to Conal Creedon. I never wrote for publication. I just wrote because I wanted to write. He's a storyteller and a playwright and filmmaker. His work focuses on the Irish town of Cork,

where he lives. Everything I write is about my little street, and it came about, I think, because I opened a laundrette. The Albert Einstein World Award of Science was given to Eske Villerslev from Denmark. I always am working best in the pioneer phase. Among Eske's claims to fame, the discovery of environmental DNA, which we're going to hear about shortly. These two speakers shared the role of BD lecturer. Both chose to tell a personal tale relating to their careers. Let's head to the stage now at the Tana Schulich Hall in Montreal. Pono Klebe is taking the podium. My glasses. Just to say bonjour.

Bonjour. Je suis revé d'être ici. My French is not as fluent as my own mother tongue, the Irish language, so maybe I should say a few words in that. And basically, gentle people, welcome. I arrived to Montreal on Sunday night, and I didn't know anybody, obviously. It was my first time in Montreal and I start to feel I'm in a room full of friends and that's very special. The people from the World Cultural Council, we just connected really intensely and very friendly and very special.

So thank you. So I'm going to say a few words. very special so thank you um so I'm going to say a few words basically um I'm a storyteller and in fact that storytelling often manifests itself as writing and um I was chatting yesterday two people from the world cultural council we were just chatting in general and we were talking about the whole nature of um success and you know what quantifies success and I was thinking that like for me anyway that success is never measured as you know book sales it's not measured by five-star reviews it's not measured by seats sold at a theatre like for me I genuinely measure my my success as the ability to have to sit down and do what I love doing um and that is an amazing luxury because very few people have that that freedom I

suppose is the word and to be able to do it without compromise the thing is life in general is a compromise and and like everything we do involves compromise, I guess, of some sort. And there's no doubt, but the very act of writing creates a duality in itself, in that the privacy and the isolation that's required to indulge creativity is sort of counterbalanced by that need that I have to socialise and it sort of balances itself out sometimes but sometimes not

the very practice of writing in a funny way which means being in a room, my favourite place actually, I often describe it as being similar to being somebody who loves fishing and waking up every morning by a beautiful river with a fishing rod and be told go fish away because with writing you need no resources all you need is a pen and a piece of paper and I often that

whole nature of people saying you know an aspiring writer I think you either write or you don't because there's nothing to stop you doing it it's it's it's a very simple thing to do and if you need to do it it becomes obsessive but the reality is there are compromises and the compromises are the social side of it things like book launches um lectures obviously uh reading tours and I was thinking today if I can go down a sidetrack I remember the first reading that I ever gave it was about 30 years ago and I had a book out I had actually maybe two books out and I was a few reading events but I wouldn't read at my own readings I guess I was shy I suppose or something but I used to get actor friends of mine to read my work and eventually I got a phone call from a library in a small village in County Cork to ask me would I come and do a reading and I said I will and it was sort of a bit of a big thing for me so I went

there and I won't mention the name of the village but it was a Tuesday morning half past 10 and I arrived and it basically was a shop front it was like a shop unit with books it's a library obviously and I came in and the first thing I suppose on the way there I assumed you know you're thinking of things like Carnegie Hall and you're thinking of the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. And this is the truth. And so I arrive in, and there's nobody there. And I sort of think, okay, what am I going to do here? And two things. I couldn't very well leave because I had been asked to do it,

and then it would look like I didn't turn up. But I didn't want to compromise the librarian by making her say, sorry, I couldn't get anybody. And I didn't want to compromise myself either her say sorry couldn't get anybody and i didn't want to compromise myself either by saying i couldn't get anybody so i arrived in and i was so lucky the books like a for aardvark and i was working my way around to like i suppose z for zoology and uh the the librarian was obviously saying who is this guy? Because she would know the locals, obviously. And she said, are you okay there? And I said, I'm fine. Fine, fine, fine, absolutely fine.

And she said, you know, can I help you? I said, I'm just wondering, was there supposed to be a reading here this morning, right? And she said, no. And I said, oh, good. So that was me off the hook. And I thought, I'm out of here, right? And then just as I turned, she said, no and I said, oh good, so that was me off the hook and I thought I'm out of here right and then just as I turned she said, actually

now that you mention it there was talk of something about something right and I said, you just said there wasn't and she said, yeah but there wasn't I said, I was trying to get out and she came outside the counter and when we got to the door the library, the front door opened out and there was a small elderly man there with a flat cap and he was

smoking a cigarette and he said so I was standing between him and the librarian and he was sort of trying to reach beyond me and he was saying Mary her name was Mary and that's not given too much away because most Irish people are called Mary anyway even the men but she Mary, is there supposed to be a reading here today? And I said, no, there's not. I said, I just asked her, right? And she said, God, you're getting very uppity. And I said, no, but I just asked you and you said there wasn't, right? And she said to him, so Gerry, why did you think there was a reading? And he said, well, it was down in the post office and somebody in the post office said there was a reading.

And I was saying, Jesus, what did the post office know about anything I said in fairness I said they'd be better off like delivering the letters to me down there telling people this and she was saying you're getting very odd and I said I'm sorry I said but I asked you and you said there wasn't and it went down this way and as it happened then he stood in and as he did there was an inside door and an outside door the inside door he closed it and on the back of the door was the poster and they said ah there it is right and the poster was there and it was like reading the library I won't mention

where because we all get sued the library my name and the date right and she said ah there I knew but the problem was there was a photograph of me in the middle of it you know and she goes she said show us she said that? And she goes, she said, show us. She said, that's, that's you, she said.

And I said, no, it's not. Like, what do you do, like? You have to lie sometimes. And then he said, that's you, all right, he said. And I said, show us. And I said, oh, actually, maybe it is, right? And she said, are you here for the reading? And I said, yeah.

And now this was my first reading? And I said, yeah. And now this was my first reading, and I realised it was her first reading too. And then she said, so what do you want? What do you need? And I said, an audience would be a great thing, right? And then she said, jury, will you be the audience? And he said, should I have nothing better to do?

I may as well. And so she gave us these two seats. They were like mushroom like um toadstools it was in the kids department right and the department kids corner right and so we were sitting down and I then I realized it was Jerry's first reading too because he kept saying what what and I was saying can you hear me he said this year is banjax and I said how's your other ear and he said the other year is fine I said well come over this side so he came over here and I was reading and I was it was my first reading I was very nervous and it was very much a case of the cat sat on the and he was saying do you know what's going to happen next he was sort of second guessing the story and I was saying I do I said I

wrote the bloody thing I know exactly how this is going to end, right? I said, there's no ambiguity in this thing. It ends. And at the end, I was thinking, maybe he's right. I don't know how readings are supposed to be. Maybe he's right and I'm wrong. And she kept coming over saying, so, lads, how's the reading going? And I was saying, best reading I was ever given anyway to tell you the truth. And that was the truth, right?

But I suppose the point I'm getting at really, because I'm inclined to go in on curly tails and I shouldn't have went off there, but three things sort of crossed my mind. And I suppose looking out here is what reminded me of that story. The first thing is that it wasn't really about the reading and it wasn't really about literature and it wasn't about the library and it wasn't about... What it was actually about was about me meeting Jerry and Mary, you know? And I realised that everything in life, everything we do,

it's about people engaging with people. We masquerade it as different things like business, commerce, politics, sport, art, whatever, but it's basically all about people meeting people. And that was the first thing that crossed my mind. Well, not the first thing. The first thing was, how do I get out of this village? But after that, the second thing was that.

The next thing that crossed my mind was that, and this is sort of a personal thing, and it said, if ever you're giving a reading, you're really better off if nobody turns up than if one person turns up. Because if one person turns up, you're bunched, like. You know, because they're going to witness it. And then the last, I suppose the last thing,

is probably the one that stays with the longest. And it's that, I suppose, I'm always very, I suppose, very respectful of audiences because it means an awful lot to me that day I realised that without an audience it's a bit you know difficult and so just to say to you people thank you very much

because I know first of all that everybody has busy lives and everybody has stuff going on and everybody has their own issues and to give this much of your time to what myself and Eska are doing today is a huge privilege and thank you very much for that.

So I'm going to get back to that and I'm going to run with this and I'll be very quick. So basically, I suppose with the writing, creativity is a big part of it, obviously. And I think for me for true creativity it's just personal, I mean I don't really know about anybody

else and I really don't know anything but for me creativity comes from embracing ridicule really because I think that otherwise I find myself working sort of within the perceived parameters of the expectations of

others you know and it's it's otherwise you just have to say look maybe people think this is stupid but how bad this is what I'm doing so it means that creative expression is incredibly self-indulgent because you're not writing for anybody else you're writing for yourself and I suppose I had to ask myself why is creativity you know it's so self-indulgent right and yet why is it not only tolerated but it's actually celebrated in our culture as a thing and it occurred to me that humans we as in humans are relatively unique on a lot of fronts but one of the ways we're unique is that we have an amazing need to entertain each other. You know you look at the

birds of the air and the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea. They're not putting on musicals right? And I'm sure they'd love to if they could and you get your gun but the point is that they're not and I'm sure they're entertaining each other in different ways but our need is excessive. Now we have a need to entertain but our need to be entertained is

equaled by our need to entertain and it crossed my mind that that whole thing of entertaining it permeates every aspect of life not just film and the arts and television and all that. It goes right across like for example for example, a very basic need, food and drink, is now entertainment. Like, that was sort of something we used to do to survive, you know, in the past. And then you go on from that, of course, and, you know, you have everything from advertising,

education, politics, sport, business. There's an aspect of performance in every single thing we do, even how we dress ourselves, how we comb our hair, how we brush our teeth. It's all about presenting what I would say is a narrative. And I suppose it comes back to me being a storyteller, ultimately. And because I've met Professor Eske, another friend I've met since Sunday,

and delighted to have met him, but he has inspired me, because you'll hear him speak in a minute. But he has spent a huge amount of his time researching and finding, basically, the oldest traces of DNA. And from talking to him, I realised that many scientists

go through their whole life with a question and never finding an answer. I mean, that's some career path. When does the time come that you rephrase the question and say, OK, we'll do this instead? But it made me think, having us chatting over the last few days, that the origins of storytelling and like could I find the DNA of storytelling the oldest DNA and it defeated me I tell you the truth but

I mean that that's it I'm not at it long enough I started yesterday right it takes a while doesn't it um but um it seems to me here's the thing that humans in our uniqueness um not only do we need to be entertained and entertained but we also have another unique aspect and that is that we're aware of our own mortality and i think that maybe the needs to entertain and awareness of our own mortality could be sort of linked because it's about like creating enough white noise to distract us from take our mind off the inevitability of our own mortality like ever since humans became aware of our own mortality we've become obsessed by the notion of immortality and like most belief systems and I'm not talking about established religions

but you know cultural belief systems uh immortality has a is a keystone in it you look at the warrior culture even in my own Irish culture people who you know it sounds like a cliche but who die for Ireland they reach a level that's higher than just people who just die in general. And there are monuments. And it's a very genuine belief, this sense that you can reach a higher level of, for want of a better word, of death, of mortality. But there is a Celtic belief, and I'm sure it goes across a lot of different cultures really right

but it's that no one truly dies until their name is spoken for the last time and what's interesting about that concept is that you know when you look at or how we etch names onto headstones and in Irish Catholic culture we have All Saints Day which is the 2nd of November where we go and visit the graves of our past generations and it's sort of ritualistic we bring flowers sometimes we bring plants and but the the agenda even though whether you're a believer or not a believer the agenda is that you're actually investing in a resurrection a future of immortality and i i think that's um you know it's very deeply ingrained in how we feel and how we believe there's an ancient gaelic text style of text called om it's called om stones it predominantly on stones but it used to be on more

perishable substance before but what's left is stones they they basically um just for i think about 400 of them standing now at the moment right and they're about eight foot tall and down the edge there are letters the letters are actually parallel lines and every own stone without fail it records a name and I think that's interesting this is from the fourth century and some people say from a hundred years like BC some of these stones even though it's 2,000 years ago in their local townlands people identify exactly who that person is they know what Batley died and where he's buried it may not even be true but there's a collective I suppose memory and I think that what I'm what I'm what I'm actually getting at is that maybe that is why the storyteller the question I posed earlier right that that's why the storyteller is held

with such reverence and such high esteem in our culture because the storyteller and this isn't about me but it sort of is you know but the the storyteller is the keeper of the flame and in a secular sort of way the storyteller can give a level of immortality to not just fictional characters but to an era you know you read about Dickens you read Joyce you read you even read um Filt by Irving Walsh or whatever, like any era can live on in immortality on the strength of the storyteller. And I suppose that's it. It creates an immortality.

And I think it's probably sad, it may seem, but sometimes the storyteller becomes more important than the story they tell. What I'm going to do very briefly, I'm going to read a very short extract and then I will be finished. So basically this is the very last page of my novel called Passion Play. Passion Play is 25 years old, believe it or not, this week. It's just one of those novels that just keeps generating interest in my life, and

people around me continually come back to me about it, and I suppose, but anyway, the point is that it's a tragic story. It's the story of a man who takes his own life on Good Friday. His name is Pluto, Apollo 2, and as you know, Pluto is the god of the underworld, as opposed to Jesus, who's, you know, it's Good Friday. He's facing eviction from a kip of a bed sit. His life has really been terrible. The woman he loved

ditched him years ago. As he says, he got married in a fever and a fiver and his life was just hell. Facing eviction, he takes his life. But before he takes his life,

he is very little in the in the flat it's a kip for bed sit but he happens to have two hits of LSD so he takes them as well and even though his body is dead on the floor his mind takes off on a journey of redemption back through his life it's a kaleidoscopic journey it's a hallucinogenic journey but it brings him back and I suppose to point if there is a thesis in this book the thesis is that heaven and hell good and bad happy and sad they're actually just two sides of the same coin and it's all about perception and perspective and this is it he he he doesn't realize he's dead everybody in the book knows he's dead because they're all dead but um he he he meets

this woman and he can't believe they're getting on so well so they walk past my house because everything right is based on my street he walks past my house and then he turns left up Patrick's Hill and this is where he is I take Yvette by the hand and on and on we make our way to the brow of Patrick's Hill. There we stop. We look back down into the goldfish bowl. We don't turn to salt. Yvette, she takes my hand and leads the way.

We climb the wall at Bell's Field. There before us is a world framed by the salt and pepper cellars, the belfries of St Anne's and the North Cathedral. My eyes embraced the beautiful Northside laid out before us like a kitchen table at Christmas time, cram-packed with dainties and delights, stretching as far as the eye can see, vanishing over the hill at Blarney Street and Knockney Haney. Breathe it in, I say.

We walked through the Kneeheim Meadow, nestled down into a sheltered hollow, we're sprawled there, barefoot on a grassy ridge above the city, saying nothing, bolts of pleasure and pain as my memories travel across Brewery Valley, stopping off along the way at North Monastery, Easton's Hill, Murfrees Stack, Landlocked Powell-Raddy Harbour, past each laneway step and steeple from the Bishop's Palace right over to the Dome of City Hall, then all the way back to Redemption Road and

over the city to the spiked towers of Holy Trinity, St. Fimbars and the green tops of St. Francis. In the distance the County Hall scrapes clouds, picking up the gold of a dying sun I glaze out westward out along the beautiful Lee Valley to the Carragher

Hand Strait, there, there like a last grasp at life, a setting sun sends flames of reds and orange and yellow licking high up into the sky looks like Balanchollach's burning my city is a royal town dressed up in crimson and gold. In the distance, through the mists of time and coal smoke, I hear the cry of an echo boy, the sound

of men walking and whistling their way home from work to the red city of Gronabraha, the chimes of an ice cream van across on Spangle Hill, the bells of some cathedral or other at the yelps of children from roach's buildings playing ball along the road. And as I say goodbye to this city of pain, it occurs to me that there is a harmony of movement and colour and sound. Everything is as one. The aromatic blending of Murphy's Brewery, Linnahan's Sweet Factory, Donnelly's Bakery.

Yvette, she snuggles into me. Jesus, this could be heaven, I whisper. Could be, she smiles. Could be. And that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Could be. And that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Spaghetti Bowl. You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. Camels in a temperate Greenland, roaming its lush meadows and majestic forests. This is planet Earth in a much hotter climate, but not the one we're bracing for today.

It's the world of two million years ago and more. The world before the Ice Age. An ecosystem made visible by the study of so-called environmental DNA. And the scientist largely credited with opening up that field is our next speaker. Eske Villerslev describes himself as a bad student in his early days, finding little of interest in his science lessons. That did change dramatically. Here he is, giving his BD lecture in Montreal on the occasion of receiving the Albert Einstein World Award of Science.

Thank you so much. It's a great honor for me to give this lecture, and of course it's a great honor to receive the Albert Einstein Award. So thank you very much. I want to use this opportunity to also tell you a story. I thought I would give you the story of how we discovered environmental DNA back in the day, and also how that led us to uncover what, at least at this stage, is the oldest DNA recovered so far. So it goes back to really to my young years.

So when I was young, I was a bad student. I was actually doing very poorly in school, and you can say no one thought I didn't think I would ever be a researcher or professor, and my teachers definitely never thought that either. And, well, my passion at that time was to be an adventurer, an explorer, and a fur trapper. And so this is what I did in my late teens and my early 20s. I went to Siberia, northeastern Siberia, the first time at the time when it was still Soviet Union. I actually came in in the Soviet Union and left Russia,

you know, because there was a breakdown while I was out in the wilderness. Hadn't heard about it out there. Finally, you can say I stayed a season as a fur trapper in Siberia, which is, well, the coldest area on earth where humans are living naturally. And when I came back, I came back from this fur trapping experience and I had realized, well, I'm not only a bad student, I'm also a tremendously bad trapper.

So it wasn't really, you can say, the future that I thought it would be. And I was in, you can say, kind of in a life crisis. You know, what should I do with my life? You know, I wasn't good at school and, you know, my dream of becoming an explorer and trapper was falling to the ground. And I started, you know, studying at the university biology because, you know, as your parent says, you have to have an education. You have to have some kind of safety to return on. And I really disliked going to university.

I really disliked going to university, and the reason being that, well, both university but also other schools, because we always learned about what other people have done, right? I don't know if you remember that yourself. You're reading about the achievements of other people. Pretty boring, right? It's not you who's doing it. And then when you do experiments, right? I'm sure most of you here have done it, right? You do experiments that thousands of people have done before you.

I mean, you know the result already, right? I mean, why doing the experiment in the first place? And so I found it tremendously boring. But all this changed when I did my master project, because when you do your master, that's the first time where you're allowed to basically ask a question yourself you want to address, right? And you have to create an experiment trying to address this question. For me, you know, I wanted to do ancient DNA. There was no ancient DNA laboratory in Denmark where I did my master, and the field was in a great crisis at this time. This was the late 90s. It had turned out, you know, people had had all kinds of claims of DNA surviving

tens of millions of years in amber and trumpet insect dinosaur bones and magnolia leaves and it all turned out to be contamination. I mean, false positive results. Super embarrassing, right? I mean, false positive results. Super embarrassing, right? Published in Nature and Science, and it was all wrong. So that was when I entered, and I said, well, I want to do this anyways. And, you know, my supervisor said, well, I mean, definitely, I mean, this is a very, very dodgy path to take, but, well, whatever. But, of course, I wasn't famous, and nobody knew who I was, so I couldn't get bones,

right? People obtained DNA from bones and teeth, and I couldn't get any bones and teeth that was of any value. And I met this old professor, and he said, well, what about looking at ice cores? DNA in ice cores. And it was actually quite a clever idea, because

these ice cores that are drilled from Antarctica quite clever idea because you know these ice cores that are drilled from Antarctica and Greenland, right? What is ice, glacial ice? It's actually snow that has been falling down from the sky over time and then under pressure it turns into ice. And his thought was well maybe, you know, microbes are falling down together with the snow and you can then use the ice cores to reconstruct microbial diversity. So me and my master, I did a master together with another guy called Anders Hansen.

Well, we used two years to try to get DNA out of ice cores. Two years of hard work. And our master project actually became, we showed for two ice core samples that you could get DNA out of fungi and algae that had fallen down right and it got published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which was you know for master project a pretty good journal right to get into and for me this was the moment where I just knew I wanted to become a scientist because I don't I mean those who are scientists, I'm sure you can resonate with this. You make a discovery. It might be quite small, but it's changing the way

we're looking at something. Maybe a little bit, maybe not very much, but a little bit. And it's you who did it, right? It's not somebody else you read about in a book. It's actually you who did it. And, you know, it was the first time anybody had ever obtained DNA from ice cores. And then the problem was at that time in Denmark, there was very little money for science at that point. This has changed now, fortunately, but because of Novo Nordic. But, you know, so I couldn't, even though it was published in this journal, and I got a very fine mark and all that, I couldn't get money for a PhD, right? There was no money for a PhD. So I had to wait one and a half years.

And what happened? Well, groups, there was a group in the U.S., a group in France, a group in Russia. Now your paper is out, right? So they were running with this ice core genetics. And when the money finally came in after one and a half years, well, you had lost the competition. It was gone. So science is also about this, right? It's about getting funding at the right time.

Now we had the money, but the idea was gone. And I was still not famous enough that anybody would give me important bones or teeth, right? So I had to think, I thought, well, I have to come up with something that is material, that there's tons of, that no one cares about. I thought, what could that be? And then one autumn, just like now, really, I'm standing looking out of the window, and I see this woman coming, walking with her dog on the street, and that dog takes a crap on the street. And at the same time, you know, you see the leaves, just like now, right? They're falling down, right from the trees, hitting the

ground. And suddenly, it hit me. Well, we know there's DNA in the dog poop because it has come through the testes. We know there's DNA in the leaf, but we also know after it's rained next time, the dog poop is gone. And after a few years, the leaves are gone. We know that. What I ask myself is, what happens to the DNA? Could the DNA actually be preserved in the sediments somehow? So I went to my supervisor and said, well, what do you think about this idea that we could look for plant and animal DNA directly in sediments? And he said, I never heard anything as stupid in my life. And that because the notion was that DNA is very unstable, and of course it will be degraded. We all knew that there was a lot of bacteria in the soil. That was not a problem, but they are living, right?

But that dead things could survive in the soil without being degraded or chewed up with bacteria was just ridiculous. That was the thought. But luckily, you can say sometimes you should, if you think you have a good idea, well, you have to stick with it, right? So I said, well, okay, maybe it's stupid, but I want to test it off. And then I thought, well, if this should work, where should it work? Well, we know that, well, we have a chemist here, right?

We know, at least that's what I learned in school, that if you have low temperatures, chemical reactions happen slower. So it means if you go to soil which is cold or very frozen, like permafrost, if it's not working there, it shouldn't work anywhere. At least it should work there if there's any reason in this. So I actually contacted, you know, from my days as a fur trapper and explorer, you know, a Russian geologist who was working in those regions. And he came to Copenhagen bringing these permafrost samples with him. And at first I thought, well, you have to, of course, what's the chance of an animal in the past taking a poo exactly here?

20,000 years ago. I thought, well, it's probably quite small, right, after all. So I thought we would need to have a huge amount of soil, right? But all. So I thought we would have to need to have huge amounts of soil, right, but all DNA, when you extract DNA, this is all based on DNA extraction from bacteria and fungi, where you have millions, you know, in a gram of soil. So all extraction methods was based on these tiny amounts of soil. So at first I tried to freeze dry the soil to see if I could reduce the volume and it didn't work at all. And in the end we just took, you know, basically, you know, half a gram of soil, right, of this

permafrost, put it into a tube, extracted it, and I remember, and then we cloned it into bacteria, that's what the way we did it back then, now it's much more sophisticated, but in order to separate it out, but, and then you can compare it, you know, to all known DNA sequences. But this happened, I remember Christmas day, everybody had left for Christmas, the lab. So I was sitting there alone and we got these sequences back, right? And then you take your computer and then you blast them, right? You compare them to all known DNA sequences in the world. And so things just came out. Woolly mammoth, bison, reindeer, lemmings, hare, enormous amount of plants.

I mean, you basically reconstructed major parts of the ecosystem from half a gram of soil, right? And I was like, I mean, this is crazy, right? So what we got was we got samples sent from New Zealand, which is unfrozen, from caves, right, in New Zealand, and did the same thing. And there the DNA came out of the moa birds, the extinct moa birds, the flightless birds that lived in New Zealand before. We knew, well, this is a winner. Then I took soil from, you can surface soil, modern soil, right? Where you could identify, using classical methods, you could identify what plants are living in this fraction of the soil. And you took soil out, sequenced it, and matched it to these plants that were living, right?

And it matched. So it was beautiful. It was incredible. But the crazy thing is, well, now we got these and we published it in Science back in 2003. But scientists are very conservative people. And nobody paid attention to it. I mean, it was an amazing result, right? I mean, you could reconstruct entire ecosystems

from a piece of bloody dirt, right? From the past, what people have used so far at this point in pollen diagrams that you find over here to the plants and then you find maybe if you're lucky a bone over here and then you try to connect the two and say, well, I think that mammoth had something to do with the plants I find 200 kilometers away, right? Here you had the whole ecosystem, though the DNA you found in that soil sample, all those animals are together with those plants, with those microbes, with those whatever, at that time, at that spot in time, which is a

pretty remarkable thing. But it, well, people didn't pay attention. Nevertheless, I could stand here saying how exciting it was. It's quite interesting because I was, I think, more or less the only one working on this for the next 10 years. And then suddenly there was a quite famous ecologist, French ecologist, Pierre Tabellet, who actually kind of took notice of it. And then he named it, he named it environmental DNA, and suddenly it exploded. So science is also about, you know, I guess you can say branding

or whatever you would call it, right? I had never thought about that. Well, science is science, right? Branding names and that kind of stuff. But that's also very important. Anyways, then it took off. And now, of course, people have looked at this environmental DNA and you find it all over the place. If you go and take a water sample from a lake, you can reconstruct not only what is in the lake, a fish, etc. If it's a smaller lake,

you also can reconstruct what is living outside the lake. It's coming, it's flowing in the DNA. It's incredible. Even you can find, if you have like a small lake, you can find the DNA of the deer that either were drinking in this lake or were swimming in it, right? If you go and do it in the ocean as well, you can find out what fish are there. We have done experiments where, you know, we have had divers going into the ocean, right, monitoring what kind of fish are there

after we took the sample. And we find all the same fish as well as some that the divers never saw, right? So it's very powerful. And today it's used for biodiversity monitoring in all kinds of settings, and you can say you find it in ice, even in air, in all kinds of places. But what I want to get to here is, of course, we used it to look at megafauna extinctions, the early peopling of the Americas, what routes did they take and so forth.

But three years after the discovery, in 2006, I went on an expedition up to Piriland in northern Greenland. And the purpose was something very different. It was to find out who were the first peoples settling the Arctic. And Piriland, I mean, next stop is the North Pole. It's a very unpleasant place.

I mean, there's stone and ice, polar bear and muskox, and that's basically it. It's like a barren ground, right? It's what you call an Arctic desert. It's like Sahara, just in the Arctic. So I was running around up there trying to find remains from human sites. You can find them on the surface and there's no people there whatsoever. There's nobody living there. And well, on the expedition was a geologist. His name is Sven Funda. And he had discovered back

in the 70s a site up there called the Copenhagen Formation. And this is a remarkable site. I mean, huge hills of dirt. And these samples of dirt survived the last glaciation. So they're actually dating back to before the last glaciation. So they are between 2 and 2.4 million years old. You know, at this time, the general notion in the ancient DNA community, after all these failures with dinosaur DNA and all that, right, people had actually made calculations based on DNA degradation of DNA molecules in water solutions.

It was worked by Thomas Lindahl, among others. And you could kind of calculate, well, the oldest DNA that you could ever find in Earth would be around 1 million years. That's it, right? No older than this. And we were then landing on this Copenhagen Formation, which is between 2 and 2.4 million, right? And I mean, you're up there, right? You're not getting up there anytime soon, right? So you take whatever you have.

So I took some samples from the Copenhagen formation of dirt and brought back to Copenhagen. And we tried to get DNA out of it. We failed. And it was kind of, okay, well, it fits, at least the theoretical predictions of ancient DNA survival, right? And every time in my lab, when there was a technological innovation of some kind,

we always took the Copenhagen formation samples and tried, and they always failed, and they got the name, the curse of the Copenhagen formation, because everybody who touched it actually left signs afterwards, discouraged. But then but then you know a few years ago we had the breakthrough after many many years of trying and it was a combination of really two things right one was the the invasion of what we call next generation sequencing, where it allows you to get very, very short fragments of DNA.

DNA gets fragmented over time, and it allows you to get a lot of it in a very short time period. And then it also, because we learned that DNA is binding to sediment particles, that DNA is binding to sediment particles. The dirt DNA, the environmental DNA, is actually, when it's free in the soil, it's binding to mineral particles because mineral particles are electrically charged and DNA is also electrically charged.

And some mineral particles are binding DNA way, way better than others. So we could, in our group, there is a woman, Karina, who could do experiments showing if we know the composition of minerals in the Karp-Copenhagen formation, where will the DNA be binding? And then you can go directly and target those places. And then you can go directly and target those places. So that combination really made it possible to retrieve this DNA that is 2, 2.4 million years.

And it was a complete eye-opener. This environment that today is an Arctic desert. There's nothing there. 2, 2.4 million years just before the glaciation formations, the last ice age, right? It's the last warm period on Earth. It was a diverse forest. There was, you know, spruce, pine, larynx trees, tuya,

and there was the only thing you have found in terms of animal remains from this site was a piece of a dung beetle, that's these beetles you know you see in Africa today that are pushing dung around from bigger animals, and then a hair tooth, that was it, and we find of course both the dung beetle, the hair, we find ants, they're not even existing in Greenland at all. Today we find the ancestor of reindeer, goose. And then we found, to our great surprise, mastodons. Mastodons are these huge extinct elephants that are living in, you can say, in the U.S. or lived in the U.S. It's related to the woolly mammoth, right?

or lived in the U.S. It's related to the woolly mammoth, right? And so it was a world completely different to what we know of today. But not only was it different, it has no modern-day analog. So it's a mixture of species that we today associate with the Arctic together with species that is today

associated with the temperate zone in a combination that you don't see anywhere today in the world. So what could we learn from this besides, well, it's exciting, we can go back to the last, before the last ice age for the first time and look at the molecular biology. Well this result together with many other environmental DNA results we have got, tells us that when you have climatic changes, when things were warmer,

back then the temperature was 15 degrees Celsius warmer in northern Greenland, every time you see these shifts where it's getting warmer, nature responds in different ways. It's not like, well, now we are returning as we are facing now, you know, global warming, right? And then we will get the same as what we saw before it was warm the last time. It's the same with the cold. So every time you have these kinds of cycles, climatic changes, you can say there is, of course, a response by nature, right? Nature is responding, but it's actually not the same response.

So what does it tell us? Well, the bad news here is it tells us it's actually super unpredictable what will happen because of global warming. So it's not enough that what people basically have done so far, where they sit looking at the niche of a certain species and then say, well, the temperature is changing like this. Well, we move it up here. It's not how it works. It's way more complicated.

Things are getting together that was not previous together. So that's the bad news about this. And of course, you can say, if you don't know what to expect, well, it's also pretty hard to mitigate it, right? In any timely manner. The good news, however, is, well, we know that nature is responding.

We know that nature has been responding, and we know, of course, because of Charles Darwin, we know, well, species are responding through mutations, you know, adaptive mutations, right? And we know from the environmental DNA work that new organisms and species are getting together in new ways. organisms and species are getting together in new ways. And nothing is as efficient, you can say, as nature in responding to climate change. And the environmental DNA record holds the blueprint for this change. So if we can go back, you just imagine, if you go back in different time periods, right, different time slices and uncover the environmental DNA record, right, you can actually get a toolbox from the DNA of what is adaptive, possible adaptive changes. And those adaptive changes, whether it's organismal compositions or whether it's mutations, genetic adaptive variants,

you can, of course, play, if you want, try to incorporate that into existing species to make them more climate sustainable. And this is what we are trying to do now. So we are facing a food crisis in the world because of climate change. So we have generated these monocultures of food, of crops, and you can say, well, the problem is we have kind of favored, you can say, output over everything else, right? So we have said, okay, we just give them enough fertilizer and pesticides and water. Well, you know, then it's fine, right? They can grow. The problem is it's not working anymore. It hasn't worked, you can say, in terms of pollution and biodiversity, it hasn't worked for a long time. But even if we take that aside, it's actually not working anymore,

because the crops can't handle these climatic changes that are happening. So the question is, how can we get around this? We need to, I mean, if we don't handle it, people will stop, right? So it's pretty serious. I mean, we will, and well, what our approach, we'll see how it works. We've just started. But it is to say, okay, let's use nature's own solutions through the environmental record from different time points, different types of climates of the past, and then breed these things into the crops

as well as getting the microorganisms that you see in these systems, or also other plants, into the ecosystems around the crops, and try to make more sustainable food sources this way. And I believe in it. Well, we'll see. The reviewers didn't, but we got the money anyways. So I think that's it for me. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you.

Eske Willerslev, winner of the World Cultural Council's Albert Einstein Award of Science. He was giving the Beattie Lecture at McGill University in Montreal. In Canada, your public library might give you access to the online video library called Canopy. If so, you can watch a fascinating documentary about Eske Willerslev's work. It's called Hunt for the Oldest DNA. It's made by the American Public Broadcasting Service. You were listening to Ideas from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This episode was produced by Tom Howell. Thanks to Megan Thurston and Robin Koning at McGill.

Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.