Instant Genius - Bringing back the Tasmanian tiger from extinction, with Helen Pilcher

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

When we bring back a species after it’s gone extinct, are we bringing back the real thing? Would we create a woolly mammoth or a hairy elephant? Biologist Helen Pilcher explains whether we can really bring back species from the dead, and how the research could help us protect species under threat of extinction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editing. and today we're talking about the extinction, and in particular, a plan to bring back the Tasmanian tiger, otherwise known as the thylacine, an incredible marsupial predator that went extinct nearly a hundred years ago. Last week, a company called colossal biosciences, who were also working on bringing back the mammoth,

announced that they were partnering with the University of Melbourne in their efforts to reintroduce the Tasmanian tiger to Australia. Australia. One team will work out the genetics, while the other will figure out how to bring the baby tiger into the world without a mother. This new group says that the partnership will mean that we may see a thylacine born within the next decade. So to find out how legitimate these plans are, I talked to Helen Pilcher, a biologist and author whose brilliant book Bring Back the King, explores the science of de-extinction across a number of global projects around the world. Here's Helen explaining why the Tasmanian tiger was so special.

So the thylacine, which is also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was this amazing wolf-like marsupial that used to live in Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania a long time ago, quite recently in Tasmania as it turns out. And it was this incredible animal. So it looked like a cross between a wolf and a tiger. So if you imagine kind of like a large dog-sized animal with a really thick head and jaw, stripes down its back, really stocky animal. They had this tail that seemed to stick out horizontally from the back.

They're marsupials that had pouches. They're really unique in that both sexes had pouch, you know, with kangaroos and wallabies and stuff. It's only the females that have to pouch. And the reason for that is obviously because the females would keep the babies in their... pouches and these pouches were backwards facing. So if you imagine a dog with a pouch underneath its belly facing backwards, the reason they were facing backwards is because these animals lived in this kind of like really thick scrub. So you didn't want a baby pointing forward because it would get all scratched. The reason the males had a pouch is because they were described as having

a pendulous scrotum, which they kept inside their pouch for similar reasons because they didn't want it to get damaged as they were running through the bush. So it's incredible... Can see how a pouch would be useful. Yeah, a little furry backwards-facing pouch is what you want, if you don't want things to get tangled. And they were these really amazing animals that were, you know, quite unique. We don't have anything like them today. And they were an apex predator. So they were like the top of the food chain. They used to feed on things like

Tasmanian devils and wallabies and birds and all of the sort of local fauna that was there. And they went extinct from Australia and New Guinea, sort of over 3,000 years ago, and that was to do with people arriving and then being out-competed. And then their last stronghold was Tasmania. And they were doing really well in Tasmania until the Europeans turned up. And the Europeans basically constructed this folklore around the animal, that it was this really terrifying beast to be very, very afraid of. would snatch your children in their sleep and would kill all of your livestock. So it became this kind of myth grew up around it as being this incredibly dangerous thing. And actually in hindsight,

looking at the historical records, wasn't a child killer. Very, very rarely took sheep. Basically, it seems like it was used as a scapegoat for farmers whose farms were failing for other reasons. But this kind of Chinese rumor went around that this animal was a killer. And there was a bounty put on its head. So sort of in the early 19-year-old. There were maybe 5,000 of these animals living in Tasmania, but people went out with their shotguns. They got paid for killing them. Fast forward to 1936 and there was just one thylacine alive. And this was in the zoo, in Hobart, in Tasmania. And it was a lone male called Benjamin and it was awfully neglected. And it died of hypothermia and its body was thrown out with the trash.

And that was the end of the thylosine. So this ink. incredible animal, basically hunted to extinction for no reason at all. These were actually, you know, animals like, I don't know, like a link sort of in Europe that were secretive. They kept themselves to themselves. They might have taken the odd sheep, but they certainly didn't deserve the level of persecution that they had. And in sort of like the, you know, the time that's passed, the sort of 80 years or so that's passed, there's now this kind of mourning for this lost species that we drove to extinction. It was our fault that it's gone. And it's become iconic. in Tasmania, certainly, in Australia to a degree as well.

You know, people miss it. You see it on stamps, on beer bottles, on t-shirts. You see statues of it. And there is this real kind of yearning to have this creature back, if such a thing were possible, which kind of leads us to this idea of de-extincting it. So there's a company at the heart of this colossal biosciences. And so they want to bring one back from extinction.

So how, how, How do they plan to go about bringing back the thylacine? So this is the same company. It has a Harvard geneticist, as one of its co-founder, George Church, who is one of the people behind the plan to bring back the woolly mammoth, which is another de-extinction project. And the sort of science that is behind it is very, very similar. So the way you go about bringing back a thylacine is, first of all,

you need the thylacine's genome. So that means you need to understand all of the genetic code that there was inside of itself. And to do that, first of all, you need to get hold of some thylacine DNA. And as luck would have it, we shot so many of them. There are tons and tons of museum specimens. And in 2017, a biologist from the University of Melbourne, Andrew Pasque, managed to decode the thylacine genome using museum specimens. So we have that.

That's number one in the puzzle. But I should say at this point, it's not perfect because it's not 100% complete this recipe. It's about 95% complete. There are some parts of the genome that are really quite difficult to decode. So right, that's number one. Number two, you get the genome of a closely related species. And in this case, they're using something called the fat-tailed dunut, which is a tiny little marsupial mouse. And although, you know, inherently, obviously, this seems very different, this great.

big wolf-sized creature. They are, I mean, they're still separated by over 10 million years of evolutionary history, but that's its closest living relative. So what you can do is you can line up the two genomes, the two DNA sequences, and you can look for differences between the two. And you can look for the differences that were specific to the thylacine, and then using gene editing technology, so this is things that people will have heard about like CRISPR Cas9,

using a souped-up version of CRISPR Cas9, they will then edit the thylacine-specific DNA sequences into a living cell that belongs to this little mouse. So you're basically like sprinkling the genetic essence of thylacine into this marsupial mouse cell. But you're doing it in a very, very controlled way, right? Moving really, really specific sequences, editing it so that this mouse cell becomes thylacine-like.

that to in all intents and purposes, instead of a mouse cell, you now have a thylacine cell. Right. And I'm saying, almost. There are some bits that will never quite get right. And you'll always have this kind of backbone of mouse DNA there. So this will never be a genetically identical animal to the one that went extinct. It will be something a bit different. But the people who are making it would argue, well, these differences don't actually matter

because there are lots of bits of our DNA that are fairly redundant, that don't do a great deal. And if they're just kind of background, it won't really matter. What we should end up with is an animal that looks like a thylacine and acts like a thylacine. There might be the odd genetic difference, but that's okay. Right, so we've got to the point where we've got this cell, and it has thylacine-like DNA inside it.

You then need to create that cell into a living animal. And there's a couple of ways you can do that. you can use cloning technology. So the same kind of process that was used to create Dolly the sheep back in 1996. Or you can use some kind of quite clever stem cell technology where you convert that original cell into a stem cell, use that cell to create sperm and eggs and then do IVF. So now, I'm making it sound quite straightforward, maybe.

Now you've got like a thylasean embryo. You've got this tiny bundle of dividing cells inside a dish that is a thylacine, in inverted commas, embryo. So the next question is, how do you turn that into an animal? And the answer is, well, a clever bit of sort of like bathing in chemicals in vitro. So the very first part of its life would be in a culture dish in a lab. But very quickly, you would need to give it much more complex nutrition. So it either needs to go into a surrogate.

animal at that point. So you would implant it into this tiny little mouse. And although that sounds crazy like the embryo from a wolf-sized creature going into a mouse, you have to remember that marsupials like kangaroos give birth to babies that are the size of a grain of rice. So at this point, we're talking a fraction of that size. So that's kind of possible. That's one route. Or another route is that you put this tiny embryo into an artificial womb. And this is something I've been interested in for a while, because they're saying like with a woolly mammoth, they might use artificial wounds, because you don't want to transplant an embryonic mammoth into a living elephant because they're an endangered species. And this is a technology that is quite a long way off, but a couple of years ago,

George Church, in fact, has nurtured embryonic mice, partway through gestation in artificial wounds, and the same has been done for lamb. So again, this technology is kind of like in creation. So you then get to this point where you've got this, embryonic thylacine that is growing in a womb or in a surrogate animal. And then at some point, we know that we can, say, with kangaroos, take little joys out of the pouch and we know we can hand rear them. So at some point, we would hope to be able to do that with a de-extincted thylacine. But there's this kind of grey area in the middle between having this embryonic animal and then this immature pre-birth animal that you can feed. There's this kind of grey area.

in the middle, that no one's really sure about how we'd manage it in that point. So then the idea is that you get to the point of a live birth, and then we can kind of come on to everything that follows that in a minute. But it's basically this whole technology that I've spoken you through, bits of it are there, bits of it exist, and they have been used successfully on different species. But what we don't have, what we're not close to at the moment, is somebody to bring all these different bits of technology together into one species. into the thylacine, into a marsupial to make this happen. So it's not pie in the sky,

but there is quite a lot of science and basic research that needs to be done. And that's what this company, colossal biosciences, is hoping to move towards. So that brings me really nicely to my, I mean, lots of questions, but the first one. So they're piecing together lots of different technologies out there, each of which, you know, we hear about whether it's the sort of CRISPR gene editing process or, you know, the artificial wounds that you've talked about. Has anyone to date, I just wonder, what's the closest someone's come to this whole process, perhaps not with something that has long been dead,

but has anyone been anywhere near, you know, giving birth to an animal through different steps along this process? Yes, so bits of it have been done And in fact there has been an animal that was briefly de-extincted So there was an animal called the Bucardo or the Pyrenean ibex And this was an animal that used to live in the Pyrenees And much like the thylacine was basically hunted, killed by humans to extinction Before the last individual died, people went and caught her

And took cells from her and froze these cells down And then several years after she died They thawed some of these cells and they used the DNA that was inside them for cloning. They made a little cloned embryo, which they implanted into the uterus of a surrogate goat, a regular goat, and after hundreds of failed attempts,

eventually they managed to produce a de-extinct picardo. So this was back kind of like turn of the millennium time. And the story was largely underreported, and the reason for that is that this tiny little cloned de-extinct goat died just several minutes after it was born. So, you know, they brought it back briefly, and this is a common problem with cloning that cloned animals die shortly after birth. They think there are various genetic problems that are going on that need to be sorted out. The Picardo is really interesting because it's not just the first ever animal to be de-extincted,

it's also the first animal to go extinct twice, which is kind of interesting. So we've done that, right? We have cloned an extinct species, but the thing is there, this species was only extinct very, very, very briefly and we had viable cells that were frozen away. So there's that half of the problem. And then where other people are getting close is George Church and his team at Colossil who are trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. They haven't done that part of the de-extinction process. But what they have done is the whole front half of the process that I've described to you. So they have compared the DNA from a woolly mammoth against the DNA from an Asian elephant.

they've spotted the key differences that are needed, for example, to change the composition of body fat or to change the type of hemoglobin or the shape of the ears that the animal has. And they have already edited more than, probably, since the last time I've spoken to them, way more than a dozen different of these crucial changes into an agent elephant cell. But as far as I know, they haven't got beyond that point to using that cell to create an embryo. So we've kind of got the two halves of this story. The genetic editing has been done partly in one species and the cloning and the creating an embryo

has been done in another. But it's not as yet being knitted successfully together. And this team at Colossal Biosciences they've apparently received a massive financial investment. And so, you know, hopefully that will push the work forwards. So they say that they think they can have a thylosine baby within like 10 years or so. Does that seem realistic? Yeah, well, so first of all, there's timelines that are kind of presented through the lens

of financial investment, right? So we have to take these timelines with a massive pinch of salt because, you know, generally corporate investment comes in sort of five or ten year chunks. And so you will quite often hear people saying, well, we'll be able to do this within five years or we'll be able to do this within 10 years. So take it all with a pinch of salt. The woolly mammoth is going to take longer than the thylacine, even though they started earlier, for the simple reason that the gestation periods in elephants

is about two years and the time to reach sexual maturity, you know, you're adding on another decade or longer on top of that. Now, for thylacines, the whole process happens much more quickly. They were never really studied properly, but it's not unreasonable to presume that you could have a sexually mature or adult created within a timeline of two years if everything happened now and went well. It won't. There's a lot of basic research that needs to be done.

So I'm hearing timelines for the thylacine of five to ten years and I would say it's not impossible but that's optimistic. So with all this kind of genetic bodging or cut and pasting, would a biologist ultimately say that what colossal sciences will create in the end could actually be considered a through and through Tasmanian tiger? Well, if you want to be a purist about it, you won't have a thylacine. You will have a hybrid. You will have an animal that is part fat-tailedunette and part thylacine, right? But it will look and act like a thylacine. So is that a thylacine? You know, we're talking genetic semantics here in a sense. So there will be parts of the thylacine genome that we will never decode,

parts that we will never know. There will be parts of the thylacine genome that we have, that we might decide weren't really that important and we decide not to put in the dunats out. And there will be other bits that are just kind of too tricky to change. So it's not going to be 100% genetically identical thylasein. It's going to be some 21st century proxy. But then the question is, does that matter? I mean, if you look at any living species, there is a wide amount of genetic variation within species, for sure, right? So we're going to see genetic variation, you know, in what we produce. But the other thing is, you know, like I say, does it really matter? You know, if this animal, the argument, and we'll come on to this in a second, I think, but the argument

for bringing it back, for me, the only key argument to even consider the extincting an animal is an ecological one. And the key thing is that it should be able to fulfill the same ecological role. And so that's really what we're looking for. And the other thing is that, you know, how do you define a species? You know, we do define a species increasingly these days by the sequence of its DNA, but it's also how it fits into the environment. how it's raised. You know, we're living things are products of their DNA and of the environment. So although we'll try and get the DNA part as close to perfect as we can, you know, is a thylacine growing up in a world that has moved on, you know, a hundred years, more or less,

down the line? Is that still a thylacine or is that an animal out of time? I don't know. But no, you absolutely won't have an animal that is the same. This will be a proxy. This will be like a 21st century facsimile of the original animal. And to purist, that might be a problem. I'm less concerned about the differences in its DNA and more concerned about how it fits into the environment. So if it looks and acts like a thylose, and then maybe we can forgive some of those small genetic gaps

that might be there. But that brings me on to, I guess, what you were hinting out there. So part of the argument here is that we bring back animals that really occupy a real niche in an ecosystem that is now, you know, there's a missing gap in an ecosystem. So in the example of the thylacine, they're talking about that it was the apex predator, it was eating Tasmanian devils and other little critters there. Does that stand up? Can we expect to drop this thylacine-like creature and it go and just pick up where it left off 100 years ago? Well, the short answer is we don't know.

It's a good argument, right? And there are some premises in the modern world for why that is a reasonable argument. So wolves are another apex predator. And wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in the US after they had been absolutely. from there for some time again, you know, they were kind of like shot at and removed. And then they were reintroduced. And whilst wolves were gone, the ecosystem really, really changed. So some of the deer-like species that they would have predated, they massively increased in number. And they started overgrazing areas with knock-on effects to, you know, the smaller animals

down the food chain, like birds and then insects. And when they brought wolves back, it kind of seemed to counteract these changes. So when wolves came back, you saw the number of the sort of smaller herbivorous mammals that they would once have preyed on. They were more in control, and then that had a knock-on effect for the rest of the ecosystem. So we've got this argument in the modern day, and that seems to me like a reasonable argument to apply to the Tasmanian tiger to the thylacine. because in many ways, you know, walls and thylacines were quite similar. They're a brilliant example of convergent evolution. These are two apex predators who seem to evolve almost identical jaw shapes and aspects of their body

because of this lifestyle that they have because of being these top predators. So the argument for the thylacine is that in the time it's been gone, we see an ecosystem that is out of balance. Now, to the naked eye, it might not look that different. You'd kind of look out on the landscape and go, well, this seems relatively unchanged. But aspects of it have changed quite subtly. So we've seen a lot more invasive species, things like rabbits and ferrets and feral cats, all this kind of thing. And then we also see like the Tasmanian devil that you mentioned.

So this is an animal that evolved with the thylacine. The thylacine would have preyed on the Tasmanian devil. the Tasmanian devil, which is a scavenger, would have been trying to steal scraps that the thylacine left behind. And since the thylacine has been gone, things have got out of kilter with the Tasmanian devil. So changes in their population structure, but most notably they've got this awful infectious facial cancer, which is spread from one Tasmanian devil to the next when they fight with one another. And this has been a real problem. And to the people who want to bring back the thylacine make the point that if we had thylacines, they would help to kind of even out these blips in the ecosystem.

They would help to manage the disease amongst the Tasmanian devils by predating the sick animals, by taking them out. They could start to take out, you know, some of the invasive species as well, that they would kind of slot back in at the top of the food chain. And as a result, there would be these kind of positive ripples lower down the food chain throughout the ecosystem. ecosystem. That's a reasonable argument to make, I think, the caveat, a couple of caveats. One is, will they also take local sheep? Will they predate local farm animals? We see time and time again going back to this conflict with wolves where wolves are predating farm animals in Europe and where they are illegally shot because they're becoming a problem. Will we have this scenario again? So that's one thing to think about.

Yeah, so I don't know really. The other thing is when we were so busy shooting them in the 19th century and so busy persecuting them that nobody actually was able to study their ecology, so we can have a fairly good idea of what we think will happen, but we don't have any detailed records left behind about their behaviour. What we have are eyewitnesses written by people who saw them. So we don't really know as much detailed ecology as, we would like to.

So we don't know. So the plan would be to reintroduce these animals into the wild after you've established like a reasonable size population in captivity with a good smattering of genetic diversity, the plan would be to release them into a large but presumably enclosed area. But you would obviously need, they need to be really carefully monitored and you need the buying of locals. You need a whole population, you need a whole community, a whole island.

to buy in to their return if you want it to be successful. And I understand, to be fair, that colossal bias sciences are sort of beginning these conversations with locals and with indigenous people to try and get them on board. So that begs the question then. You know, if they can manage everything up to birth, what's the thinking on how, they would raise these animals in terms of, you know,

presumably they'd have a number of them. And what teaches them to be a thylene and behave like the sinusine, particularly as you say, our actual knowledge of them and their behaviours and how they might have hunted or is quite thin. Yeah, in a way you could look upon this as a rather sad experiment in the sense that imagine, you know, taking any wild animal as an experiment that is a social creature and just letting it grow up by itself or with other juveniles that have never had access to, you know, a larger family group if it's a social species. It's a real worry, I think.

So when you read the sort of reports from the 19th century of people who were shooting the thylacines, they were calling them. sly, solitary animals. And it implied that they were just that, that they lived on their own. But again, if you dig into the literature, what you begin to find is that people who really saw them, who were aware of them, realized that very often they existed in small family groups. So a mother would give birth to two or sometimes maybe three jerrys, and they would live with her in her pouch for, guessing, probably, you know, the first six to nine months, until they're about three quarters of their, three quarters sort of like three quarters grown, I suppose, at which point they would live with the mother or sometimes with the mother and father,

and they would hunt and live cooperatively as a small family group. They would have a small range that was their own. They would hunt within that territory. And there's some really nice descriptions of them hunting where you would see one animal, for example, going out to startle the prey species and to make it run. And then the other family members, there's coming in and taking it down. You know, a little like you see with some of the, the sort of serengeti species, you know, your big cats and stuff, or with your sort of painted wolves, you know, that kind of thing.

And so how much is that behaviour ingrained in their DNA and how much is that behaviour learnt from trial and error mucking about with your siblings and learning from your parents? And the answer is it's probably a bit of both. But how do we equip, you know, the first and maybe second generations of thylacines with the behavioural skills that they need to be a thylacine? And again, we don't know. It could be that a lot of this is quite genetic and that, you know, they sort of get along

with it and they manage it. But you don't want to go to all this trouble, create a thylacine, put it in the wild, and then have the thylacine sand there and go, well, I don't know what to do next. No one's shown me. So there's a lot of problems. There's a lot of big ifs. I'm not necessarily against the project. I'm certainly in favour of us developing the technology

because there can be spin-off uses for this technology that we can talk about in a minute. But, you know, I am nervous. It's one thing thinking about the welfare of the animals whilst they're being created in a laboratory whilst they're the size of tiny embryos. It's quite another thing to think about the welfare of these animals.

animals five years into their lives, five generations down the line, 50 years down the line. We need this kind of long-term thinking. And I know, I haven't spoken to a loss of about this, but I know talking to other people who are involved in de-extinction, that they are very keen to get this kind of ecological and societal long-term thinking on the go now, that we need to be having these kind of discussions about the ethics and welfare of these animals and the people it will share their landscapes. We need to be having these discussions now because there's no point creating these animals

if there's not going to be buying from people further down the line. We don't want to create thylacines, find out that they're so used to humans and being hand-fed that they do hang around farms and they do cause problems and then they end up getting shot all over again.

Worst case scenario, that would be absolutely dreadful on so many levels. So it's so important to get this right and proceed really slowly and really care. And to be fair, these scientists aren't going, how they are thinking these things through and they're looking at this much broader picture and trying to bring in other people. But yeah, it's a massive, massive thing to think about.

So for your book, Bring Back the King, you know, you covered a whole range of these sort of de-extinction projects and looked at how legitimate they were, looked at, you know, what they were hoping to do. And it's a really great look at the kind of deeper question of, you know, why do we want to bring them back? Should we bring them back? And what else could we be doing? And we'll touch on some of them, no.

But I just wanted to your take on, you know, just, you know, because it's, this is effectively, we're sort of talking about science fiction, right? These are ideas that they're supposed started out in science fiction, so there's an air of fantasy to them in a way, I think to the general public, oh yeah, whatever.

But is it, do you feel that, you know, within this entry, we might see something like a mammoth or a stylusine, you know, perhaps, you know, a lookalike at least, walking around somewhere in Australia

or in, you know, in Siberia? I think, I think, sort of what you're hinting out with this kind of like fantasy element to it. I think the one thing I should say up front is that we're not going to be able to bring back dinosaurs as far as we know. Because the thing that you need to de-extinct anything successfully, right, is you need a source of its DNA and you need a close living relative. And for dinosaurs, you know, things like T-Rex and whatnot, we don't really have either of

those things. So those kind of projects are fantasy. But I think it's purely because, you know, projects to bring back the thylacine and the woolly mammoth sound so fantastic. that they are so interesting to people. And, you know, will we see it happen in our lifetime? It's possible. I'm not holding my breath for a woolly. I'd love to be proved wrong, right? And I don't mean to pour cold water on what the scientists are doing

because there's a lot of really, really brilliant research going on here. I can't see a woolly mammoth anytime soon. I think, you know, and this is a fairly obvious thing to say, I think we're more likely to see the return of an extinct creature with a shorter, faster, life cycle because it's just much quicker to work with. So, for example, one of the projects that was the furthest along was an attempt to bring back an extinct frog called a gastric brooding frog. And this is a frog that went extinct in Australia, discovered in the 70s, went extinct

in the 80s. but some researchers had some body parts frozen away because they've been trying to study it whilst it was still alive and they used some of these cells and they used them for cloning and they managed to get what they called an almost had pole. So they created a little embryo

and the embryo started developing and they could see the beginnings of a backbone developing inside this almost hadpole and that it didn't quite get past that point. Now I haven't spoken to the team involved in that research for a couple of years now and I don't know if it's still ongoing. But at the time when I wrote my book, which was a few years ago now,

they were the people who I had my money on to de-extinct a species first. You can also argue that there are people who are maybe slightly further ahead. There's a whole other kind of swath of techniques that you can use to de-extinct something called backbreeding. So just as we kind of selectively breed domestic species to enhance characteristics that we want, you can do the same with wild animals. And there was an animal called the quagga, which was a type of zebra, which looked like a regular zebra, but like somebody had got bored of painting its stripes on halfway down its body. So it had this kind of bald white bottom and this stripy front half. And there are people who are de-extincting the quagga, not through cloning and not through genetic engineering, but by taking living zebras and breeding together the ones with the most quagga-like features. So you could argue that they're kind of clinging.

but that's not as exciting for people because it, you know, it's, there's something a bit more magical about doing it with a pipette and a petri dish than there is just breeding together animals, which we're actually very, very good at. And also, to be fair, that's quite a slow process. You know, the changes you can engineer, you know, to kind of change rafts of genes, these things can happen quite quickly, whereas the changes that we see-through selected breeding occur much more slowly. So I've rambled there a bit.

basically, I think it is becoming possible. I think all of the technology needs to be honed at all of the different steps along the way. And then we need it all to come together. And what I see at the moment is people working on bits of the technology in different species. And we need it all to come together, which is what the colossal team are hoping to do, I guess. And if we don't get the mammoth at the end of all this, you hinted there. earlier that it isn't a net zero game. There are lots of interesting technologies that are being kind of tested and proven on the path of this. Are there other benefits that we get by going on

this kind of mission to try and de-extinct? Yeah, and I think that's a really, really valuable point, actually. So there are lots of spinoffs from the basic research being used to generate de-extinction. So the first is that by learning how things like stem cell technology, learning about the factors that control embryonic development, learning about the processes that occur when embryonic development goes wrong, they can have important knock-on effects for research into human diseases, is number one. You know, this collective body of knowledge is really important.

But going back to animals, one of the things that interest me the most is how you can use the same suite of technologies, so gene editing and cloning and stem cell technologies and assisted reproduction. You can use them to be. bring back extinct species, but you can also use them to help save endangered species. And I think that's what's really interesting. So conservation is actually quite a young discipline. You know, it's

150 years old. And the things in its toolkit are things that have based on, you know, old, very sensible ideas to do with preserving animals and preserving habitats. But now we've got access to these kind of high-tech fixes. There are a lot of people are very, very wary about using on wild animals. But again, I'm quite interested in this because I think, you know, we shouldn't be gene editing wild animals on a whim. But where there is no other way, and you have a choice, either this species goes extinct, or we use this technology on it and we save it, then I think it's worth having a go. And a great example of that is there's an animal called the Northern White Rhino. And there are currently two Northern White Rhinos.

alive and they're both females. So you can see, they're a mother and a daughter, they live on a wildlife reserve in Kenya and you can see that this will not end well for this species. One of them is too old to reproduce anyway. The other one is younger and has fertility problems. And this is basically, you know, they're ghosts. These are walking dead. So we can do nothing and we can let the northern rhino, rhino go extinct. Or we can use some of the technologies we've been talking about and this is what is happening and try and create more northern white rhinos. And so there is a brilliant group led by a guy called Thomas Hildebrandt in Germany and they have created a little test tube northern white rhinos, little embryos which are

frozen away and they are awaiting the next stage in the technology's development which will be implanting them into a surrogate mother and trying to bring them to term. And so for me, that fills me with a huge amount of hope that, you know, these technologies, if you don't agree with de-extinction, and I can understand why a lot of people don't, I mean, I'm interested in it. I want to see how the technology develops. But if you're not keen on that, let's at least consider using some of these technologies on wild animals. You know, the world is changing so quickly, as we've seen with all of these, you know, incredible weather events that we've been having recently, the changes to sort of precipitation and everything, large slow breeding

animals can't keep up with a change. You know, if they're lucky, they might have some well-time mutation that might give them some characteristic that might mean they can tolerate a change in diet or a change in living conditions or a change in heat. But this isn't likely. What about if we could, and I'm being deliberately provocative here, but what if we could, engineer some of these changes in to help these animals deal with a changing world, not as an excuse to let us carry on polluting and changing the climate, but just to give them a chance at life and not going extinct. And for me, that is where I think the most poignant and promising use of de-extinction technology lies,

you know, not in bringing back the dead, but in helping the living. You know, and I think that's really, really worth exploring. Brilliant. And then I think just lastly then, you talked about there are, you know, there are lots of arguments against de-extinction from, you know, some of the some people's, oh, you're not even bringing about the right thing. We don't know whether it will fit into the ecosystem. But I wondered, one of the kind of common ones you hear is that by putting all this energy and money and time into, um, de-extinction we're sort of maybe doing an injustice to the animals that are on the brink of extinction or we are potentially putting them, we could even put other animals under threat by bringing these creatures back. Is that the case? Is that how conservation works if you do one project or other suffers? Yeah, I think there's two slightly separate arguments here. One is that if it becomes easy to bring animals back from extinction, it will become easier to let them

go extinct in the first place. It'll go, oh, it doesn't it really matter if the Northern White Rano goes, because 10 years down the line, we'll bring it back. You know, not a biggie. Now, I like to think that that is not a realistic argument, that we don't care so little for what we have around us, that we would ever trivialise the life of a species like that. And I hope I'm right, but we don't know.

And the second slightly different argument that's sort of along a similar theme is this idea that by poor, money into de-extinction, we're somehow lessening the pot that is available for the conservation of endangered species. And I haven't seen the figures on this, but when I was talking to people, by and large in the past, most of the work that has been done on de-extinction has been done on a bit of a financial wing and a prayer. I don't see the majority of these projects being deeply funded. you know, with these sort of, you know, limitless funds and, you know, like a scene from Jurassic Park where, you know, there's money to spare and they're just doing it

because they can. I don't see that at all. You know, what I see in this news from the last week is a substantial investment in this Thylacium project, but how far that gets it? I don't know. Is that taking money away from conservation, you'd have to ask the people who gave that money, the people who are involved in the project to bring that the thylacine are very, very, very aware of the spin-off applications that this has for conservation. You know, they're aware that in Australia, a lot of their marsupials are in real problems and that we need more technology to do this. And so if along the line, as the team at Colossil are developing techniques to make marsupials

stem cells to make a thylacine. If you can make a marsupial stem cell from a thylacine, it's a much shorter step then to try and make stem cells from other marsupials. You know, we've done it for mammals, but it's a whole new suite of technologies to do it with marsupials. And so this could have real spin-offs. So it's not, I think, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it's either or, that either we do this and de-extinct animals, or we conserve the living. And there is so much of a grey area. between them. You know, you have the northern white rhino who is alive but is dead. You have technologies that could be used to de-extinct animals that are already gone, but could equally

be applied to animals that are alive. And at the point we're out now with the research, this pool of knowledge that has been created can be used in all these directions. So I think, you know, whether or not you agree with de-extinction in itself and worry about these later stages of reintroducing de-extinct species back into the natural world. The point we're at now really is about getting the technology to work. And personally, I'm very much in favour of putting the research in, doing the spade work, and working out how to solve all these problems of, you know, gene editing on the scale that is going to have to be done, embryonic development.

I think all of these things are really important biological problems that we need to be looking at anyway. Then we decide how we want to apply them. So I think it's exciting times, I really do. That was Helen Pilcher there, explaining how bringing back extinct animals might actually help us protect species that are under threat now. If you'd like to find out more about de-extinction,

do you check out Helen's book. Bring Back the Key, The New Science of De-Extinction, which is also now published by Bloomsbury. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store.

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