2017 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: De-Extinction

2017 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: De-Extinction — Transcript
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON (Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium):
Thank you all for coming to our— Is it our 17th or 18th Annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate? For all previous years we have been doing this, we have focused on the universe. Astrophysics. My particular specialty. This will be the first year where we break that mold. And it's a mold that really shouldn't have been there in the first place, because, in memory of Isaac Asimov who wrote on practically every possible science there was, even branches of science that were not yet invented like robotics. And so this year, our topic will be biologically based. A topic for which this institution is uniquely qualified to not only have experts, but find experts across the land. Tonight's topic is de-extinction.
Oh my gosh. De-extinction.
I'll bring you up to speed on a few things. This event was founded back when we opened The Rose Center for Earth and Space, and it was on monies generated by friends and family of Isaac Asimov in his memory. He had died in the early 1990s. I had not known that much of the research that went into his 600 books that he had written was conducted in our research libraries here at this institution. So, he was a friend of the institution, we were a friend of his, and this is the living memorial to him.
Not only that, I just thought I'd give you just a couple of astrophysics updates just while I have you.
Later this summer in August, specifically August 21st, there will be a total solar eclipse. These are not as rare as any press would have you believe, because practically every total solar eclipse there's a newspaper article that begins, "Rare eclipse occurs." Total solar eclipses are about every two-and-a-half years somewhere on Earth. No one says, "Rare Olympics coming up." "Rare presidential election." So if you see someone say rare eclipse, just... They haven't taken Astronomy 101.

So the reason why I'm mentioning this eclipse is that the moon's shadow landfalls in Oregon will cross the entire continental United States, leave the United States, enter the Atlantic Ocean, and the only land it would have touched would have been America. So it's America's eclipse and nobody else's. And we live in an era where people can travel. The last time the United States had a good eclipse travel was much less common either by car or by plane. So we expect no fewer than 100 million people to bear witness to this.
If you want to get hotel rooms in the eclipse path, it's too late. So just letting you know.
So let us begin. This is a debate, but not in any formal sense. We're just going to have a conversation as though you are eavesdropping on a discussion that we are having at a bar. That's how we have constructed the Isaac Asimov panel debates. We have a mixture of expertise that has strong overlap and strong diversity of world view on this subject.
So let me first bring out for you a friend and colleague from here at the museum, Ross MacPhee. Ross, come on out.
Ross is Curator of Mammalogy here at the Museum. Of course, that makes him an expert in mammals.
Next, we will go to George Church. George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. George.
George Church (Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard University and MIT):

Great seeing you.
TYSON:
Thanks, man. Up in Boston, Massachusetts. Next, Greg Kaebnick. Greg, welcome. Alright.
He's a Research Scholar at The Hastings Center. His background is in moral philosophy. So we're going to hit that a little later. Yeah, okay. Moral philosophy. It's not whether you can do it. It's whether you should do it. Yes.
[laughter]
Next, we have Beth Shapiro. Beth, come on out.
Beth is Professor of Paleogenomics at University of Santa Cruz. University of California, Santa Cruz. And she actually wrote a book on how to... Yeah, how to...
BETH SHAPIRO (Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz):
Clone.
TYSON:
Clone. Yeah, okay. Yeah, how to clone a mammoth. We'll get more on that a little later. We'll ask her if she's already done that—
SHAPIRO:
Right.
TYSON:
—in her basement.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Just checking. And last, we have Hank Greely.
Hank, come on out.
TYSON:
So, Hank is a Professor of Law at Stanford University.
TYSON:
Oh, you can keep... just keep going. Yeah. A Professor of Law at Stanford University, and he directs the Center for Law and Bioethics.
HANK GREELY (Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford University):
Sciences.
TYSON:
Biosciences. Thank you. Thank you for correcting me. So, we will first give, like, a one-minute opening remark from each one of them, and then we'll go straight into the debate. So Hank, tell us just why you're here.
GREELY:
You invited me.
TYSON:
Okay, good. Thank you. Thank you.
GREELY:
I'm a law professor at Stanford. For the last 25 years I've worked on ethical, legal, and social implications arising from advances in the biosciences. Mainly genetics, but also neuroscience, assisted reproduction, stem cell research, and any other thing that strikes my fancy. And about four years ago I got invited to have my fancy struck by de-extinction, which I found a fascinating topic.
TYSON:
So how did you pick up the science along the way if you're fundamentally a law person?
GREELY:
A lot of reading, but mainly it was through the kindness of friends. It turns out that scientists will talk to you for a long time—
[laughter]
GREELY:
—about what they love to do, as long as you seem to nod at the right spots so they don't think you're wasting their time.
TYSON:
But it's promising that we don't need to think of getting a degree as the end of what you continue to learn. Exactly.
GREELY:
Yeah. My last bio class was in 10th grade, which was at least 15 years ago.
TYSON:
And what grade did you get?
GREELY:
I got an A, thank you.
TYSON:
Nice, very nice.
GREELY:
A positive.
TYSON:
Beth.
SHAPIRO:
Yes. So, my background is in ancient DNA, paleogenomics. So, for the last 20 years or so, I've been wandering around picking up bones and figuring out how to extract DNA from them. So as far as de-extinction is concerned, I'm kind of the logistics person. Like, can it actually happen, and what technologies do we need?
TYSON:
So you go back to the Ice Age and a little before, or do you go really deep in time?
SHAPIRO:
With genetics, with DNA, the oldest DNA that's been recovered is 700,000 years old, around that old, and that's from a horse bone that we actually found frozen in the Arctic permafrost.
TYSON:
Okay. So that's... So your professional relationship to extinct animas goes as far back as you have data.
SHAPIRO:
That's right.
TYSON:
Okay.
SHAPIRO:
We can reconstruct data further back in time computationally, but the oldest that we've been able to recover from bones themselves is about 700.
TYSON:
Okay. All right, thank you. Greg?
GREGORY KAEBNICK (Scholar, The Hastings Center; Editor, Hastings Center Report):
All right. So I'm the moral philosopher.
TYSON:
Uh-huh.
KAEBNICK:
I'm here to think about how the value questions raised by biotechnology square with various concerns that we might have. So I've done work over the last 15 years
or so on questions ranging from, you know, sort of at the simple end of things benefits and costs, risk and uncertainty, and how you make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Precaution and what that means. But the questions that have always most interested me, I think because they're hardest to articulate, hardest to get at, but also, I think that they sort of underlie a lot of the public's reactions to this stuff are questions about the human relationship to nature. And what that means, how we understand that, and how we want to stand in relation to the world as we find it.
TYSON:
We just want to control nature. That's the answer. Yeah. We got the answer to that question long ago. George.
CHURCH:
Yeah. So, I mostly develop technologies for reading and writing and interpreting your genomes, mostly medical, but occasionally they can— those same technologies can be applied to ancient DNA and endangered species. So when we read the genome, you can learn what your risks are, what actionable things you can do about your genome—
TYSON:
By risk you mean health risks?
CHURCH:
Health risks, yes. And when we write it we can use it for gene therapy or we can use it for making new agricultural species and so forth. We have a project called the Personal Genome Project where you can participate in medical research, so—
TYSON:
Are you coming to solicit New Yorkers' genes, here?
CHURCH:
Yeah. All of you should join it.
TYSON:
Yeah. Okay.
CHURCH:
Yeah. We have— One of the centers is here in New York.
TYSON:
Mm-hmm. All right, Ross.
Ross MacPhee (Curator, Division of Vertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History):
I'm what's called a Pleistocene paleontologist, and that means that I work on things like what you see in front of you: some bones and tusks of the mammoth. And, in undertaking that over the last 30 years, I've worked in many parts of the world. I've always been fascinated by extinction. We'll get to de-extinction, about which I have very mixed feelings. But the idea that species have been lost over
time, the idea that humans, to some degree or other have been complicit in many of these losses, makes it the sort of subject matter that really is important to talk about especially going forward into our future with, in mind, that perhaps tens of thousands of species are going to be lost in future. So, what a paleontological perspective brings to this is a notion of what the world was like in
the past, what we've lost, and maybe through de-extinction what we might gain again.
TYSON:
Good. Very clean.
MACPHEE:
You're welcome.
TYSON:
Thank you. That's our panel, yes. So for the next hour you'll be eavesdropping on our conversation that we're having at a bar. At the end, we'll make time for questions and there'll be a microphone in each aisle for you. So Ross, what do we have here? This, obviously the dodo bird, right?
MACPHEE:
That is a dodo.
TYSON:
Okay. And this is a... That's a jaw...
MACPHEE:
Jaw, arm bone, and some tusks of— these are casts— of a mammoth—
TYSON:
A mammoth and...
MACPHEE:
—from North America. And then down at the end, everybody thinks this is a dog, right? Say yes. Good, good. It's a thylacine. It's a marsupial.
TYSON:
I was going to say that, yeah.
MACPHEE:
He was going to say that.
[laughter]
MACPHEE:
That became extinct finally in the 1930s.
TYSON:
And dodo went extinct when?
MACPHEE:
Last... Well, we've had an argument, Beth and I, about this, but we would say the last quarter or so of the 17th century.
TYSON:
And the mammoth went extinct when?
MACPHEE:
About 10,000 years ago on the mainlands, both Eurasia and in North America, and lasted up until 3,000-plus years ago in some islands north of Siberia.
TYSON:
Did we render these three species extinct?
MACPHEE:
Well, this is a question. We certainly—
TYSON:
Yeah, I know it's a question. That's why I asked you. That's why I'm standing on your left shoulder, okay?
MACPHEE:
There was an idea about human involv—
TYSON:
Because I first heard you use the phrase "sixth extinction," and then I read all about it. And so, is this part of that? What's going on?
MACPHEE:
Well, it is, because what people hear when they hear the word sixth ext—or the words "sixth extinction," it's sort of all prospective. This is what's going to happen in future. It's predictions. But there is a past tense to extinction, again going back to the point whether humans were complicit or not, that goes back 50,000 years easily. And it has to do with the spread of people across the planet. And in case after case, where humans are newly arrived in an environment where they haven't been previously resident, you find evidence of loss. And you find evidence of mega loss in many places, particularly islands. So what I want you to grasp from all of this
is that the sixth extinction has a background—
TYSON:
Wait, just a sec. You said lost particularly on islands, so that's an isolated niche. So presumably then it's more sensitive to changes that are brought to it. Is that why?
MACPHEE:
Well, perhaps so, but the real point is that it's when people come, the animals
go.
TYSON:
Okay.
MACPHEE:
And that's a repeating phenomenon. Now, with regard to the dodo, it's up in the air whether humans actually hunted it. It's more likely that the dogs and the pigs and whatnot that people brought with them to this tiny island in the southwestern part of the Indian Ocean were eating their eggs. And for that reason, they died out. For mammoths, we don't know. Human hunting, of course, is a leading theory. But there was also climate change and possibly other arguments. With thylacines we have something really interesting, because there was a bounty on these animals that the Australian government instituted in the middle part of the 19th century. But the numbers didn't collapse until right at the start of the 20th century. And the question has always been, was it because of human persecution, or was there something else going on? A cofactor— perhaps one that humans were responsible for as well— but it's not just as easy as saying humans did it.
TYSON:
So George, you— you're in the business of the genetic— of understanding the genetic identity of life. Is that a fair way to characterize what you
do?
CHURCH:
Well, that's... yeah, that's part of it.
TYSON:
Yeah. So you look at the genetic code and you say, "Well, this is responsible for that property and this property and the other property." Might you one day be able to adjust genetic code to make it resistant to what might render it extinct in that moment? Will you have that much power in your lab? Will you admit to having that much power—
[laughter]
TYSON:
—in your lab?
CHURCH:
So, this is already happening in agricultural settings where you'll make, say, plant species that are drought resistant, salt resistant for— you know, to adapt to climate change, and to make pest resistance a natural component of the plants.
TYSON:
Wait. So you're telling me that the future of the world is not stopping climate change. It's making climate change resistant animals?
CHURCH:
That would be a nice story, when they do that, yeah. No, I think we need a little of each, maybe, yeah.
TYSON:
Okay. So, you are there. So, Greg, you think about this and the consequences
of it, and why. Everything I've heard thus far, there's a problem, we may have solutions to it, so then, why do we need you?
[laughter]
KAEBNICK:
Um, well...
TYSON:
I mean that with love.
[laughter]
KAEBNICK:
Well, love is actually really the key thing, here. So, when I think about the human relationship to nature, you know, that we have a variety of different ways that we can be— that we can think of ourselves as standing in relationship to nature. We can be consumers of it. That's, you know, a kind of ideal. We can be protectors, we can be reinventors. We can reinvent nature with synthetic biology. I tend to plug for the protector ideal, but then we have to think about what that means. For me, at the bottom of it— and this is going to sound incredibly unscientific and unphilosophical and I... kind of dopey. But I think that it's really, it's about... It's about love of place and, you know, community you belong to, love of the world as we find it, you know? This place, it's love of inheritance. Love of things given. And so the question is, what does that mean? How do we go forward with that?
I'm actually not a naysayer about this technology. I think the technology is very exciting, and my example for how it can be used in a simple way to protect things that are on the verge of going extinct has to do with the American chestnut. Which is sort of functionally extinct out there, but you can tweak it. There are people in SUNY campuses that are figuring out how to render it capable of overcoming the blight that wiped it out. But I'm kind of worried about... Well, I think that some of the examples of de-extinction are going to kind of take us off track if we're trying to protect this thing we love. And I worry about where it could eventually
lead. There are cases of it that I'm kind of... I'm totally fine with. I'm not against the technology, but I kind of worry about where it could eventually go.
TYSON:
So Beth has already thought this through, and she wrote a book—
[laughter]
TYSON:
—that is... You can buy it in the back.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Beth, does it teach all of us how to clone a mammoth?
SHAPIRO:
Yes.
TYSON:
Okay.
SHAPIRO:
It's a step-by-step manual, yes.
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
If you buy the book, you can have a mammoth in your...
TYSON:
You can have a mammoth in your back yard. So...
SHAPIRO:
Garage. Keep it inside.
TYSON:
In your garage, yeah. This is New York. We don't have garages. So...
KAEBNICK:
Big garage.
SHAPIRO:
Rooftop.
TYSON:
Rooftop mammoths. That'll work.
[laughter]
TYSON:
So, how is this idea received by your colleagues? Or your more skeptical colleagues? First, is it really possible to clone a mammoth? You've got the good DNA to do this, and do you really want to do this? And why?
SHAPIRO:
Okay, so that's about seven questions. I'm just going to back up a bit.
TYSON:
Wait, let me add an eighth one.
SHAPIRO:
Okay.
TYSON:
The mammoth, we all associate it with the Ice Age, right?
SHAPIRO:
Right.
TYSON:
So you want to clone a mammoth and bring it back just in time for global warming. That's cruel. That's just cruel.
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
All right.
TYSON:
Okay.
SHAPIRO:
So one of the arguments about why one might consider bringing a mammoth back to life is so that we can protect the world from rapid global warming. And I can get to that in a little bit, but I thought I would back up first and first say, can you clone a mammoth? Because the answer to that is no.
TYSON:
And you wrote a whole book on this?
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
It's a very short book.
TYSON:
Okay.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Okay. If we have the genome... Is it we don't know how to yet?
SHAPIRO:
No.
TYSON:
George has not given us the toolkit yet?
SHAPIRO:
George is not cloning a mammoth in these particular—
TYSON:
No, but he's making tools that do this.
SHAPIRO:
—scientific words. So, in order to clone something, the way that we think about cloning, and when we think about cloning, the thing that comes to mind—the animal that comes to mind— is Dolly the sheep, right? This is the first cloned animal. But we have Dolly the sheep because we had, to begin with, a living cell that we were able to take and turn into an embryonic stem cell. The kind of cell that can go on and become a whole animal, right? We can't do that with a mammoth, because there are no remaining living cells. When we go out into the field and we collect
mammoths, we end up with bones that we can extract DNA from. But that DNA is in terrible condition. The fragments of DNA are chopped up into base pairs. Little base pairs of like 30 to 40 bases long. If I extracted DNA from a hair or from a cheek swab from the inside of my mouth I could get millions of bases-long strands of DNA. That's not what we get.
TYSON:
So we can clone you...
SHAPIRO:
We can clone me.
TYSON:
Okay.
SHAPIRO:
We might not want to, but we could.
[laughter]
TYSON:
But I've seen shows— so it must have been real— where a mammoth came out of the glacier.
SHAPIRO:
Right.
TYSON:
Dead mammoth in the Ice Age fell into some crevasse. The crevasse filled up and everybody forgot about it, and then this glacier—during global warming—melts. And out pops a mammoth which I would think would have intact DNA. You're telling me no.
SHAPIRO:
Right. Key word: dead mammoth. If it's dead, it's not going to have any
intact DNA. As soon as an organism dies, any organism, the DNA in every one of those cells starts getting chopped up. First, because we have enzymes in our own bodies that are going to chop up that DNA, and then because of bacteria and plant DNA and fungal DNA—
TYSON:
Oh...
SHAPIRO:
—that get into that and just catabolize it. Break it down into tinier and tinier fragments.
TYSON:
What you're telling me is that Jurassic Park was just B.S. That's what you're saying.
SHAPIRO:
For many more reasons than just...
[laughter]
TYSON:
Okay.
SHAPIRO:
Yes.
TYSON:
Okay, Hank. Is this... You're the lawyer here.
GREELY:
I'm not licensed in this jurisdiction.
[laughter]
TYSON:
All the better. Now you can say anything you want.
GREELY:
I can't help you.
TYSON:
Is there... What are the legal ramifications of this at all? Because when I think de-extinction, I'm not thinking law. I'm thinking philosophy and purpose and meaning. And you're making a whole career of this,so how is that plugging in?
GREELY:
Well, a very small part of maybe a very small career is being made out of this
part. But there are legal issues everywhere. So, for example, I think one of the toughest moral issues about de-extinction is animal welfare. How many maimed, deformed, stillborn, quasi-mammoth, quasi-elephants is it worth to bring back a sort-of mammoth? There are actually laws in this country, the Animal Welfare Act, that deal with some of those issues. If you actually brought a mammoth back would it be an endangered species? That may seem like a dumb question but the law is full of dumb questions.
TYSON:
Wait, if you brought back one mammoth, yeah, I would say that it would be an endangered species.
GREELY:
Well...
SHAPIRO:
Would it be a species?
KAEBNICK:
Would it be a species?
TYSON:
Oh, it wouldn't be a species?
GREELY:
And also—
TYSON:
Wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean? I have an animal standing in front of me is
not a species?
KAEBNICK:
Well, it would be... It might not be a mammoth at this point.
SHAPIRO:
It's part elephant, right?
KAEBNICK:
Yeah.
SHAPIRO:
So we can't clone it, so we're going to have to cut and paste our way from an elephant to a mammoth.
TYSON:
But, so if you use some elephant DNA, add some mammoth DNA, and then you have something that's some... mammolophant...
GREELY:
Mammophant, I think, is the current term.
TYSON:
Mammophant, excuse me. We got terminology already.
GREELY:
Yep.
TYSON:
Okay.
GREELY:
We're on it.
TYSON:
If you're going to get a mammophant, so, why isn't that its own species?
SHAPIRO:
We got problems defining species in biology.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah.
TYSON:
Okay.
GREELY:
And we have even bigger problems with defining species in law. In part because the biologists and the philosophers don't give us very good, clear answers.
[laughter]
GREELY:
So, not only do you have to decide whether this mammophant—
KAEBNICK:
Blame it on us.
GREELY:
—is a species. You also, under the Endangered Species Act, have to determine what its natural range is. And whether it's—
TYSON:
So we even know how to protect that.
GREELY:
—endangered in its natural range. So, then you have to ask the Department of Interior and various other governmental bodies to call it endangered. The ranchers will probably be opposed.
TYSON:
Do we still have a Department of Interior?
GREELY:
For several—
[laughter]
TYSON:
I haven't checked today's list.
GREELY:
For several more weeks.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Several more weeks. All right. Ross.
MACPHEE:
Yeah.
TYSON:
You specialize in understanding extinction in a way that you want to prevent it. That's noble. Meanwhile, you have other people trying to bring species back. So, where is your moral compass on this in terms... Because there's a lot of brainpower here thinking about species that have already been extinct when perhaps they could be thinking about how to protect species that are already at risk and we know we're going to lose because we're in the house.
MACPHEE:
Right, but those are separate questions in my view. I'm going to start with what Hank just said about animal welfare, because, for me, that is the outstanding question. It has nothing to do whether this first mammophant is its own species or what have you. It's an individual. And we have an obligation, the way I look
at it, especially if we have created it in some fashion, to take care of that animal. And when does that responsibility end? By virtue of trying to bring back mammoths or mimics, at least, of mammoths, have we taken on a responsibility that has no endpoint to it? I would say yes, because what we're doing is playing god, and in that event, we have to look at it in the same way that we would look at obligations to any living thing. Now, do I object to what is being done by George, for example, who's trying very hard to find a way to create these hybrids? I don't in principle, because I think it's a fascinating sort of thing that we're going to learn a lot from. What I want to hear, however, at the end of the day, is that anything we do create has some expectation. That we have some expectation for it. That it will be kept in a way that we would want for any other natural species or a set of natural organisms.
TYSON:
But, Greg, there's talk about a zoo. I've heard about a zoo. So if you're going to make a whole new set of species, either resurrected from extinction or it's something out of George's lab and now you create a habitat for it— because that's gotta be part and parcel to its survival— maybe that habitat doesn't really exist in any comfortable way in any geographic spot on Earth, so you create a zoo. Morally, what does it mean to create an animal out of extinction, create an animal out of thin air, and then make it a zoo creature?
KAEBNICK:
Well, I mean, to me, that doesn't count as de-extinction. Now, it might... it might, um...
TYSON:
Because you'd want it to roam free and be part of the environment?
KAEBNICK:
Yeah. No, if you've just created it as a sort of tourist attraction you haven't really accomplished what de-extinction, you know, purportedly would accomplish. Now, you might wanna create a zoo for the mammoth— this is one of the projects that George has been working on— because it might be part of some larger effort to actually change the environment. So there was actually an article that came out just a week or two ago in The Atlantic, I think, about Pleistocene Park playing off Jurassic Park.
TYSON:
Pleistocene Park. So this would be Ice Age.
KAEBNICK:
Pleistocene—
CHURCH:
It's not really a classic zoo. It's much more like—
SHAPIRO:
Right.
KAEBNICK:
It's really, yeah...
CHURCH:
It's much closer to the wild, yeah.
KAEBNICK:
Well, yeah. It's closer to the wild.
GREELY:
Large animal park.
MACPHEE:
It's quixotic is what it is.
CHURCH:
Yeah. It's fenced in, yeah.
MACPHEE:
Quixotic, yes. Pleistocene Park is—
KAEBNICK:
So the idea here... George can walk through this, but the idea is that—
TYSON:
Just remind me. Pleistocene contained which kinds of animals?
KAEBNICK:
Well...
SHAPIRO:
All of these big animals that you're thinking about. Mammoths and—
KAEBNICK:
Yeah. The big Ice Age mammals.
SHAPIRO:
—bison and—
KAEBNICK:
Mammophant.
TYSON:
So all the ones that were in the Ice Age movie, all of those.
KAEBNICK:
Yes.
SHAPIRO:
Except the dodo, which was somehow in the Ice Age movie, although they...
TYSON:
Yeah, there was a dodo in the Ice Age movie. Yeah.
SHAPIRO:
Yeah. That was... that was bad.
GREELY:
There was a weasel also.
TYSON:
Yeah, there was...
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
What was his name again?
GREELY:
Gosh, it was a funny name.
TYSON:
I had a cameo.
GREELY:
Neil deSomething Weasel?
TYSON:
I had a cameo in Ice Age 5.
GREELY:
Which he's now regretting having told us about.
TYSON:
Yes. There were four other Ice Age movies first before that.
[laughter]
TYSON:
So, to Pleistocene. So Pleistocene Park. So these are the most recent sort of wave of extinct mammals.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah.
TYSON:
You put them in the park—
SHAPIRO:
But also things that are still alive.
GREGORY:
Right.
SHAPIRO:
They're horses and bison and lots of species of deer—
TYSON:
That were around in what we call the Pleistocene, and are still here today.
SHAPIRO:
The Pleistocene was over 10,000 years ago. You're talking about the most recent ice ages. There are lots of animals that were alive then that we know of today.
KAEBNICK:
Right.
SHAPIRO:
Muskox and—
TYSON:
Including humans.
GREELY:
Yes.
SHAPIRO:
Including humans.
TYSON:
Yeah.
KAEBNICK:
I mean, really what's happening here is de-extinction and a kind of geoengineering are sort of getting mixed up together here. Pleistocene Park is... the real rational for it, as I understand it, is to try to figure out a way of bringing back grasslands in the north so that the... You'd have these mega-herbivores knocking the snow down and allowing the winter freeze to really freeze deeply and you could then lock in methane that is abundant in the subarctic.
TYSON:
Is this simply because they're stomping around?
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, they're stomping around and pushing the snow aside to get at the grass and...
GREELY:
Lots of manure.
SHAPIRO:
But it's the snow that's important, because snow is a very efficient insulator. And the temperature of that Arctic permafrost is an average of the annual ambient temperature. And if you have the snow, it traps that summer heat. Whereas if you get rid of it, with animals digging through it looking for something to eat, then that cold winter air can hit that soil and bring down the temperature.
TYSON:
Wow.
MACPHEE:
Can I say a few words on Pleistocene Park in this regard?
CHURCH:
And this has been done experimentally.
TYSON:
Yeah.
MACPHEE:
—because I don't think it's been well enough defined here for the audience unless you read The Atlantic. This is the idea that you can, to some degree, not prevent global warming, but tamp it down. Because it's actually the northern part— Northern Hemisphere— at the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere which incarcerates something like 1,600 billion tons of carbon whether as carbon dioxide or in other forms like methane. And the idea is that, as the planet warms, this material is going to be released and sort of work along with what humans are doing to really make the greenhouse gas problem a run-away event.
TYSON:
And just to remind people, because carbon dioxide as a gas, its name has the word carbon in it. But methane, though carbon isn't in its name, it also has carbon.
KAEBNICK:
And it's a much— It's a much worse, much more potent greenhouse gas.
TYSON:
A much more potent greenhouse gas.
CHURCH:
Twenty-eight times more potent.
TYSON:
Right.
MACPHEE:
But here is the issue. It is a wonderful idea, but I called it quixotic
because it relies on the interpretation that we can somehow turn the cycle backward. That we can go back to something that we lost. And what did we lose? We lost this idea of the mammoth steppe: this grassland that stretched all the way from Western Europe across the northern part of Eurasia down into Alaska and Yukon and North America. A huge, huge biome. But what happened at the end of the Pleistocene, 10,000 years ago, was a very marked change in the climate of the far north such that the dominant plants at the time, which were not grasses, but forbs, which are non-graminoid— not grass species, herbaceous plants— started to go into decline. And what replaced them was not anything that these animals can eat.
What you've got in the far north now is wet tundra. It is largely dominated by mosses like sphagnum moss, and you've got these forests that are made up of birch and alder and larch and so forth which are toxic to most herbivores, especially large herbivores of the sort that we're talking about. So, in order to institute this plan, that we're going to terraform the northern part of Eurasia— which is where the Pleistocene Park is at the moment— we have to visualize that we've got these animals that we've somehow adapted, which is something that George and Beth have both written about, to introduce genes that will permit them to live under these very cold conditions.
But what's left out of the equation, as far as I'm concerned, is that there's nothing for them to eat at this point, and it will take centuries— if not millennia— before there's been enough terraforming so that the kinds of plants they can eat are there in abundance. Up until that time, they have to be provisioned.
TYSON:
Wait, wait. But Ross, I—
MACPHEE:
So that makes Pleistocene Park a very large zoo.
TYSON:
But Ross, you're not thinking big enough, here. Because George, in his lab, can just create some digestive enzyme for your new mammophants that can eat the plants that the previous ones didn't eat. So what? He can do that in his lab in the future.
MACPHEE:
Is that so, George?
[laughter]
CHURCH:
Yeah. I don't want to make any promises, here. There certainly are animals that eat some of these things, and you can detoxify them in a variety of
ways. It wouldn't be out of the question. You can also accelerate...I mean, I think that terraforming is... needs a great deal more study before we even have a chance at it. But there are components that could accelerate it.
TYSON:
So let me ask both of you this: There's what, in the public, people generally think of as the law of unintended consequences. Of course it's not a law. It's just recognizing what is common when people don't think things through as much as they should.
[laughter]
TYSON:
And that's kind of what Ross is saying here. So, when you're creating new species and at some point you want to release them, have you really thought it through? Have you thought through its effect on the environment? The effect of the environment on it? What its effect would be on bacteria, on parasites, on climate? Everything in what seems to me to be a very complex equation? Because if you haven't, then you're dangerous.
CHURCH:
I'm definitely dangerous.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Okay. You got that. Okay. That answers that.
GREELY:
But you know—
TYSON:
Hank, what's—
GREELY:
So let me jump in on this. Because this is where thinking about what kind of policies we should have is important, but also thinking about how this would really play out. And I think of de-extinction as at least a three-part process. One part is making a few individuals, then turning them into a captive breeding population of some sort, and then perhaps releasing them into a properly prepared environment. The advantage of thinking about it in three phases is you can use the first and second phase to do some of the research you need to figure out the questions that you properly raise. Are these going to be an environmental pest? Are they going to be kudzu? Are they going to be starlings which started in Central Park? A Shakespeare enthusiast brought some starlings to North America where they had never existed, released them in Central Park, and there are millions of the pest birds now all over.
SHAPIRO:
He probably hadn't thought through all those consequences—
GREELY:
Yeah.
SHAPIRO:
—before.
TYSON:
Starlings?
GREELY:
Starlings. Little black birds.
TYSON:
Why do I... I only see pigeons, so what...
[laughter]
GREELY:
They left Central Park. They went to the suburbs.
TYSON:
That's what I was wondering. Yeah, yeah. They moved into Scarsdale.
GREELY:
But you need a framework for thinking about what the consequences are, but if you phase out the process, do the process in phases, you could have that framework. We don't have that framework now, but I think before anybody gets very serious about this we should. You shouldn't be able to release a de-extinct species into the wild unless somebody's looked at it and said, yeah, on balance. This doesn't look very dangerous. And one last point on that, that includes, if it does go wrong, how do we clean up the mess? You know, I'm not very worried about— It would make me sad, but locating and killing off rampaging mammoths— probably not that hard. If passenger pigeons got out in North America again, there were three billion of them, they live in the forest, figuring out which is a passenger pigeon and which is a regular pigeon from a distance is going to be difficult.
TYSON:
To a New Yorker they're all just pigeons. Yeah.
GREELY:
Right.
>>DEGRASSE TYSON:
Yeah.
GREELY:
And should be extinct, right?
[laughter]
GREELY:
But–
CHURCH:
Well, we had no trouble killing the passenger pigeons the first time around.
SHAPIRO:
Yeah.
GREELY:
Yeah.
CHURCH:
That was pretty easy.
GREELY:
Yeah, that's true.
TYSON:
Yeah. Apparently.
SHAPIRO:
We're pretty good at that.
GREELY:
But, so thinking through what kind of structure— what kind of regulatory structure you want before you allow this is really important and it hasn't happened at—
TYSON:
Well, wait. Since when does regulatory structure precede the act? Isn't it always after the fact once you know what it is you actually have to regulate?
GREELY:
Not always. Often.
SHAPIRO:
But it kind of is now, anyway. I mean, this question—
TYSON:
In practice.
SHAPIRO:
—these questions are not unique to de-extinction.
GREELY:
Yes.
SHAPIRO:
If we think about translocations of organisms or introducing species into different habitats, we've introduced plenty of species— invasive species— into new habitats.
TYSON:
On purpose and by accident.
SHAPIRO:
Both ways. And without thinking beforehand about how we're going to regulate them or how we're going to control them.
GREELY:
Though sometimes we actually have, and so the most interesting recent de-extinction, I think, a local/regional de-extinction, is wolves in Yellowstone. Wolves weren't extinct all over the world or all over North America, but they were sure as heck extinct in Yellowstone. And after lots of debate and discussion, wolves were brought back to Yellowstone. They have changed the ecosystem there... Or at least their reappearance has correlated with significant changes in the ecosystem there.
[laughter]
GREELY:
That's for Ross.
MACPHEE:
Well said.
GREELY:
In ways that many people think are good. But every time you do a reintroduction— bringing the California condor back to California, when it was reduced to captive populations— that required thought. And it's really not... I don't think it's different. We just don't have a good regulatory structure for dealing with de-extinction just as we don't for exotics.
TYSON:
Where did the California condor go?
GREELY:
It went to a bunch of pens. It went to a captive breeding facility.
SHAPIRO:
Yeah. I don't remember exactly when it was, but there was a decision that was made at some point to go and get the remaining individuals—
GREELY:
Yep.
SHAPIRO:
—from the wild and bring them into this captive facility so that they could try to make as many outbred individuals as possible.
TYSON:
Okay. So Beth, I have a question. There's this talk of you need enough of
these de-extinctified individuals to—
SHAPIRO:
I hate that word.
TYSON:
Actually, I was... This is all new vocabulary to me. My apologies.
SHAPIRO:
Yeah.
TYSON:
You need enough of them to have what you call a breeding colony.
SHAPIRO:
Right.
TYSON:
But if you can just create them, why do they have to bring them?
SHAPIRO:
[laughs]
TYSON:
If George in the future can just pump them out... Oh, you need another? A mammoth? A female mam... Here! And then three weeks later, out walks a mammoth. They don't even have to breed. You just manufacture them.
SHAPIRO:
Well, despite what you might hear in the news—
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
—it takes longer than three weeks to... to make an elephant.
[laughter]
GREELY:
Gestation period of 22 months.
SHAPIRO:
Yeah. To start with—
GREELY:
Think about that.
SHAPIRO:
—there's that.
TYSON:
George can fix that.
SHAPIRO:
But I think—
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
Just tweak a few genes, yeah.
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
You have a new solution for everything.
CHURCH:
Poison-resistant instant elephant.
TYSON:
In the Sistine Chapel— In the Sistine Chapel?
[laughter and applause]
SHAPIRO:
As a serous answer to that question, whoa.
TYSON:
Yes, thank you, sorry.
SHAPIRO:
As a serious answer, I think the motivation of this is not to create a population that's somehow going to be sustained just by continued lab work and spending money but to create a population that's capable of surviving on its own in a native and natural habitat. And this is part of why it's so hard. I mean, we can't think that we're just going to make this one— one elephant/mammoth hybrid and release it and it's going to save the world, but we need decades of making multiple individuals. Fortunately, we're not talking about creating an identical individual, because George's work, for example, has just been... has just... just... has been to swap out I think 50 genes or so so far. I don't know how many you've done.
CHURCH:
Yes.
SHAPIRO:
And... but the rest of the genome is still variable. It's still the elephant genome that you started with. So there will be natural diversity in these
populations except for where it matters, which is where mammoths and elephants are distinct from each other.
TYSON:
Ross, you're trying to put in a plan to protect species that might be at risk. But suppose we decide as a culture there's certain species we would just as soon have extinct simply because—
MACPHEE:
Flies.
TYSON:
Well... I think we've—
MACPHEE:
Mosquitos.
TYSON:
—tamped down flies compared with a hundred years ago. What I'm thinking specifically is, consider the Guinea worm, which President Carter is working to completely remove from the human population, and humans are their only host. So therefore... It's a terrible scourge where it still is in the few cases that remain. The point is, this is an act of purposely rendering a lifeform on Earth extinct. Should we, can we, is this the right thing in this moving frontier of... There are animals that go extinct because we did not plan it that way, but if we know we don't want something because it's hurting us, is that so wrong? And take it down to the smallpox virus, to the H1N1.
GREELY:
That's a flu. That's influenza.
TYSON:
The flu virus. The flu virus that makes—
GREELY:
But smallpox is a great example.
TYSON:
Yeah.
MACPHEE:
Well, you know, the flu virus is a great example. Because just this week, it was announced that you could take a particular flu called H7N9, which is a bird flu, and change one letter in its genetic code and it becomes infective in humans. So when you're thinking about what you want to suppress and get rid of, a very important part of the new synthetic biology is to what degree are those governments or individuals who have malevolent interests going to mess around with this kind of technology so that you weaponized it?
TYSON:
And the weaponization of moving frontier of science and technology has been what humans have been doing ever since we've been warring tribes. Which, I guess, we still are.
MACPHEE:
And we've learned very little in the interim, yes.
TYSON:
Yeah. What, Hank?
GREELY:
So weaponization: nice example. Nobody's going to build a whole bunch of mammoths and use them as war elephants.
[laughter]
GREELY:
But...
TYSON:
Wait, wait. In Star Wars there was something that looked like—
GREELY:
Yeah, yeah.
TYSON:
I thought I remember...
GREELY:
We could resurrect Han Solo while we're at it, yeah.
SHAPIRO:
It would be hard to keep secret.
MACPHEE:
But why do we ask the question why we're talking about mammoths and other very large beasts? You know, if you take a look at the mammals that have disappeared in the last 500 years, over 50% of them were rodents. Another 20% were bats. How many of those would you like to have de-extincted, and why aren't we working on those? Because they're not... They don't have the charisma, they don't have the automatic interest that some–
TYSON:
They don't have a movie about that.
MACPHEE:
Nor do they have that.
GREELY:
But to go back to the biowarfare side for a second—
[laughter]
GREELY:
—I mean... And I really do think this may be the most important thing I'm going to say— de-extinction, in a way, is a bit of a sideshow. It's a fascinating sideshow, but synthetic biology, genetic engineering, particularly through a new process that you've probably heard of called CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat, so now you know why it's called CRISPR, allows us to modify the genomes of almost anything in ways that are ten times faster, cheaper, more accurate, easier, et cetera. So if you wanna change the world, you're not necessarily going to make mammoths. You're going to make smallpox. You're going to take horse pox or dog pox or monkey pox, turn it into smallpox, and let it loose. If you're a gardener— I assume some of you this audience who I can't see because of the lights are gardeners. Anybody—
TYSON:
This is New York City. Just be...
GREELY:
Okay.
SHAPIRO:
Rooftop.
GREELY:
Blue roses. There are no true blue roses. Somebody's going to use CRISPR to make blue roses.
TYSON:
I want more blue food.
GREELY:
Somebody is going to use CRISPR to make blue food.
TYSON:
After blueberries and blue corn there's no blue...
GREELY:
Somebody's going to use CRISPR to make a unicorn. People are going...
De-extinction is only one small piece of what the new power over biology is going to do.
TYSON:
Can you use CRISPR to make sheep that have wool in different colors? Then you don't have to dye the wool.
GREELY:
Probably. One thing that's already been done in China is to use CRISPR to make goats that have both more meat and longer hair for, is it mohair, angora? Whatever it is that you get out of goats. Goat hair. So they modified the goats to make them more useful. And we're going to keep doing that. They modified pigs to get little tiny pigs they intended to— They're not that tiny. When they're adults they're about the size of a Doberman. But they were intended as lab animals, they made too many of them, so they sold them as pets. This is do-able today. It doesn't take millions of dollars. It doesn't take 10 post-docs. It takes a couple of people with bio backgrounds and a few thousand dollars and a lab.
TYSON:
So, Greg, synthetic biology has powers that are being... The public, the press, perhaps, is focusing on her clone mammoth and not on—
SHAPIRO:
George's clone mammoth.
[laughter]
TYSON:
George's...
GREELY:
Inter-fighting fighting over custody.
[laughter]
TYSON:
But not on the general power this gives us to solve problems. And you talk about weaponization. Of course, in the tradition of what they used to call tank/antitank warfare, you could make the tank more valuable. Then you invent something that can defeat what you just invented in case the enemy did that, and you just keep doing this. So if you have the power to create a smallpox virus with this tool, then presumably you have the power to create an antidote.
GREELY:
A vaccine.
TYSON:
A vaccine with the same tool.
GREELY:
Mm-hmm.
TYSON:
And isn't that how that would work?
GREELY:
Yes.
TYSON:
Okay.
GREELY:
But you'd hold the antidote, you'd hold the vaccine for your own side and not let the other side get it.
TYSON:
Sounds like you've already thought this through.
GREELY:
And I'm... I came sort of late to this biosecurity game. The Director of National Intelligence under the last administration announced back in I think November, December that he thought genome editing was one of the four most important security issues facing the United States.
TYSON:
So, Greg, is there a morality to rendering species that we don't like extinct? And is there something kind of messed up— getting back to, was it George or Ross's point— that we kind of only want to bring back cute, fuzzy animals that look nice to us? Certainly not a bat, and certainly not a rodent.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah. Well, I mean, if I had to pick... If I had to pick an animal to try this with, true de-extinction, it would probably be the gastric brooding frog. The only problem with that is— or one problem with that is that it would almost immediately go extinct again, because it was wiped out I think by chytrid fungus, and—
TYSON:
Wait, wait. This is the gastric breeding frog
KAEBNICK:
Brooding.
TYSON:
Oh, brooding frog.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, it's a very...
TYSON:
Why?
[laughter]
KAEBNICK:
No one knows why, but it—
TYSON:
No, no, no. Why do you want to bring that back?
KAEBNICK:
Oh, because... It's not so much that I want to bring it back, but I can see—
SHAPIRO:
Because it broods its babies in its mouth.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah. The stomach—
SHAPIRO:
It's cool.
KAEBNICK:
—turns into a uterus in the middle of its life. It's the only animal that changes one organ into another organ, I believe. And so it's this fascinating case—
TYSON:
This is just creepy. This is...
[laughter]
GREELY:
You should see the photos of the mother frog smiling and all the little baby frogs in her mouth.
KAEBNICK:
Burping out babies.
GREELY:
Yep.
KAEBNICK:
So, you know, it's a—
TYSON:
So you would do this for entertainment.
[laughter]
TYSON:
That's why you want... You're a moral philosopher, and you would do this just 'cause it's kinda cool?
KAEBNICK:
Uh, no. Absolutely not. I– Most of the things that get talked about as de-extinction I think flatly don't count. And the phrase "bring back" sends the hairs on the back of my neck on end. That cannot happen. It just logically cannot happen. A species is somehow a set of things, and once the set is depopulated, the set just doesn't exist anymore. And you can't sort of... The language of "bring back" implies that it's down in some netherworld and can be kind of walked back by George or another biotechnological–
CHURCH:
So did we bring back the bison or not?
KAEBNICK:
Well, the bison, we brought back from the brink.
CHURCH:
From the brink.
KAEBNICK:
From the brink.
>>DEGRASSE TYSON:
So, what's the difference?
CHURCH:
So if you've got—
KAEBNICK:
Well, the lineage...
CHURCH:
—thousands of frozen mammoths that are a little over the brink, and you bring those back...
KAEBNICK:
Well, I mean, if you could actually really, really recreate the species. But I don't think you can for all the reasons that Beth has walked through.
CHURCH:
Yeah, I haven't accepted Beth's comments, by the way.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah. Well, the two of you can have it out.
CHURCH:
Yeah.
SHAPIRO:
I think we're arguing over semantics, though. I mean, I do think that once a species is gone, you can't bring that back. What we—any organism is a mixture of what our DNA codes and the environment in which we live. And we can't recreate that environment, so we're not going to be able to... Even if we could change every single one of the million-and-a-half differences between Asian elephants and mammoths and make something that is genetically identical to a mammoth, the thing that is born to an Asian elephant mom or inside a massive piece of cool—
TYSON:
Lab.
CHURCH:
Lab equipment.
SHAPIRO:
Yeah. That is very cool technology.
[laughs]
CHURCH:
But the next generation would be born from mammoths.
SHAPIRO:
Right, but it still won't be the same thing. But my argument is that it doesn't matter, because we're not doing this—as you say—because it's cool or doing it because we have this fetishized vision of a world that has mammoths in it again. Those—people like George who genuinely thing that this is something that we should do— are motivated by solving ecological problems.
KAEBNICK:
Is that true?
SHAPIRO:
By restoring interactions in a habitat that are no longer there. Maybe that's not true. I'm speaking for you, here.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, what drew you to it?
CHURCH:
What?
KAEBNICK:
What drew you to the project in the first place? Was it the geoengineering issue, or was it—
CHURCH:
No. I think the—
TYSON:
We're asking you if you have any moral code at all, George. If I may summarize their question.
CHURCH:
Actually, I think I'm being painted into a funny corner. I actually have published many papers on bioethics, so—
KAEBNICK:
Oh, I don't mean...
CHURCH:
I'm in Greg's camp.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, I don't mean to paint you into a corner.
CHURCH:
Yeah. But the— you know, I think that the thing that drew me to it probably— aside from youthful enthusiasm for large, extinct mammals— was the Asian elephant. I think it's going extinct, and it's a little less quixotic than trying to terraform, which I think is... Even anything in the right direction is a good thing. But the Asian elephants are going extinct for two reasons. One is there is a herpes virus that's killing them off on weaning. And they're in close proximity and conflict with humans. So if you could extend their range even a little bit to one of the largest ecosystems in the world with the fewest number of people in it, that would be good for the Asian elephant. And the wooly mammoth is so close to the Asian
elephant they probably could breed successfully. Whether you have a mammophant or you have a— fully recreate the mammoth genome, they're probably very close. Because the Asian elephant and the African elephant— which are much further apart—have bread to produce babies. So the two closer ones could.
TYSON:
So, George, I didn't know that. You're saying the Asian elephant, which we find in India typically, and the African elephant are farther apart genetically than the Asian elephant is from the mammoth?
CHURCH:
That's correct. Even though you might say they look more alike, but... Because the mammoth is radically changed to adapt to the cold, but it did it in presumably in a fairly small number of mutational steps.
TYSON:
So let me ask a question that's a little heretical, alright. What brings me to this question is having been a parent, you — there's a time where you are, if you're a first parent, you're sterilizing everything, the bottles they drink from. And then while you're sterilizing all the bottles, you look over your shoulder and your kid is licking the baseboards of the floor.
[laughter]
CHURCH:
Yeah. Very clean floor at this point, yeah.
TYSON:
So what are you doing, right? And you realize—so without humans, Earth has rendered, what's the number, high-90% of all species that have ever lived, have gone—
MACPHEE:
Ninety-nine percent.
TYSON:
Ninety-nine percent of species that have ever lived have gone extinct.
MACPHEE:
Which means it's a natural phenomenon.
TYSON:
Natural phenomenon. And if extinction is natural, why are we becoming all boo-hoo over species that are— I said I'm being heretical here— that are on the brink of extinction, even if we caused it? Isn't that just our place on Earth, that we are going to survive and that'll be at the cost of some other species, and that is nature? Why isn't—is that a philosophical argument that anyone puts forth?
KAEBNICK:
Well, sure, absolutely, yes. I mean, Aldo Leopold said something like when the passenger pigeon went extinct, we mourned it, we humans mourned it. And that was the first, that was the first time that had ever happened in the Earth. So yeah, extinction is a natural process. A species that goes extinct through natural processes, I don't think that we have any reason to feel bad about.
TYSON:
[No obligation.]
KAEBNICK:
But if we're the agents of it, if we're doing it, then you have this question of the degree of interference in the natural world.
GREELY:
There are a lot of things—natural does not equal good.
KAEBNICK:
Right.
GREELY:
So it's a natural process.
TYSON:
It is in many people's minds. They think, oh, if nature is good—
CHURCH:
Not smallpox.
GREELY:
It is a natural process for our children to get sick, and sometimes die.
TYSON:
Yes.
GREELY:
And it is a natural process we should fight and do fight. Just because something that's natural doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's unnatural doesn't mean it's bad. We need to pick our fights, and I do think there are really good, important questions about what we should fight about and what we should pick them on.
TYSON:
So Greg, something I— I've got to get to this is, if we look through history, we find out that things that were once considered the morally right thing to do, and later generations would say, what the hell were you thinking. So where's the moral compass here? Does it evolve along with our technology or our sensibilities?
KAEBNICK:
Yes.
TYSON:
OK. Absolutely. I mean, it's... Morality is culture.
TYSON:
It's culture.
KAEBNICK:
Yes.
TYSON:
So where is it now? What is that compass pointing to now? Who on this panel is it pointing to or not?
[laughter]
TYSON:
No, I'm sorry.
KAEBNICK:
I don't get the question. Who's right?
TYSON:
Who will we—
MACPHEE:
The question is to what do we have an obligation? That is the question.
SHAPIRO:
Do we have a moral obligation to bring extinct species back?
TYSON:
Yes. Is there moral obligation to bring species that we rendered extinct, back?
KAEBNICK:
No.
TYSON:
Is there a moral obligation to our health to render things extinct that would otherwise subtract from our health?
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, probably, to the second question.
CHURCH:
I think we're choosing a very pragmatic and economic ways. We brought back the bison from the brink because people could make arguments that they would make better burgers and steaks, low cholesterol.
TYSON:
So if you're going to bring back animals, make sure they're tasty, and that will assure [laughter] their survival forever. Cows will never go extinct.
CHURCH:
And so, with rodents and goats and so forth, they're not popular in places like Galapagos because they're making other species extinct that we happen to like better. They're more beautiful or they're tourist attractions, what have you. And Ecuador is intentionally removing them from the islands, maybe not making them extinct worldwide, but this is part of the reason they're not popular for de-extinction.
KAEBNICK:
It's a case-by-case thing.
TYSON:
Greg, do you factor in the economic dimension of this? I just had a conversation yesterday about the cork trees. Because the cork has some variability from bottle to bottle of wine that they use, and so that's bad. So they say, let's find something to replace the cork, and in so doing, for every bottle that you drink that did not have a cork, that is fewer cork trees that will be harvested for their cork. And the cork trees are otherwise on land, they would want to use for something else. So in fact, the demand for cork is sustaining the lives of cork trees. So in terms of bringing back a mammoth, if mammoth makes really juicy steak, that assures its success going forward, doesn't it?
SHAPIRO:
Well, we did kill them in the first place, probably.
[laughter]
GREELY:
For juicy steaks.
SHAPIRO:
For juicy steaks.
TYSON:
So the cavemen said, this would make some good eating.
SHAPIRO:
Or at least we killed some of them. There's evidence of that.
CHURCH:
Big ribs. They were desperate.
TYSON:
Ross, did we kill all three of these animals here?
MACPHEE:
[Sighs] Yes and no.
TYSON:
Ross, that is not an answer.
MACPHEE:
I have a question about this, which I want to ask my fellow panelists. It's about the day after, and by that, I mean you bring back a mammoth mimic or you make enough of them so that they can have some sort of expectation of being able to breed and continue their kind. How long does the interest stay there? At what point do you say, well, it's just like bison. It's just another kind of steak that we can get if we want. I want to point out that in this country, in North America, there has been a de-extinction experiment going on for the past 500 years. Do you know about it?
AUDIENCE:
Horses.
MACPHEE:
Horses, exactly. Horses used to live here, horses very closely related to the living domestic horse before it got into Asia. How do we treat horses now, horses that were responsible for making the Western part of this country? They're excluded to Bureau of Land Management land. Each year, it seems that the amount of range that they're able to utilize goes down because the ranches don't like them, they interfere with the cows, the energy companies don't like them because they interfere with exploration.
And my point in saying this is that the mammophant is going to be, in all probability, another nine-days wonder. So we've gone to all of this hand wringing and work in labs in order to recreate or to create these animals that, in effect, never existed before, but then they just become part of the landscape. And that's my problem with all of this. It is that obligation that we're just ending up renouncing every time that we do this sort of thing. It's the same thing with introducing species into places that they ought not to be at, the goats in the Galapagos, the rodents and the cats and so forth all over the world on the world's islands. They shouldn't be there. We're responsible for having done it. It has an effect on the flora and the fauna of these places. My feeling is that we have a continuing obligation to correct that to the degree possible, and that does not include [cough] making new things.
TYSON:
Correct, it means restore it to what it was, even though what it was was very different from what it was 5,000 years ago.
MACPHEE:
Restoration in that sense is impossible, but make it easier at least for what's still there to persist. I think that's the point.
TYSON:
Hank, if there are members of Congress who are not sure that humans have anything to do with climate change, what hope do you have [cough] to introduce legislation that would need to be scientifically informed on all the matters that have been presented here today?
GREELY:
Introducing's easy. Getting passed is hard. Takes one to introduce, it takes a lot to pass. I think, actually, it is the broader framework that's going to do it, but it may be driven in large part by our security fears, but also by environmentalist fears and agricultural fears. I don't see it happening in the next, shall we say, two to four years.
[laughter]
GREELY:
Unless—Congress basically responds to two sorts of things. There's a disaster, and then Congress immediately runs around saying, don't just stand there, do something. And so a disaster involving this could get some Congressional legislation. And for that, it's useful to have something well thought out, prepared in advance so when the moment strikes, you can put it in. And the other is a long, negotiated period where the interest groups come together, and over five or 10 years, they cut deals. Either of those could happen with this. I think the national security and agricultural and environmental implications will push it, and de-extinction will be part of it, but only a small part of it.
TYSON:
Like you said, it's really kind of a sideshow.
GREELY:
Yeah. It's a really fascinating sideshow and a cool sideshow.
TYSON:
Okay, Hank just called your life's work a sideshow, just to be clear.
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
Right. Except—
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
What I argue or tend to argue about this is that this technology that one would need to develop to bring an extinct species back to life is the same technology that one needs to do, what George has pointed out, which is to take a species that is alive today, but in danger of becoming extinct, and manipulate its genome to give it a better chance at staying alive. And this is the same. It's the same thing. This is a spectrum much like species are, which is where we started with it.
TYSON:
So ways to apply the power that you have over life.
SHAPIRO:
Ways to apply the power that we're trying to develop, the technology that doesn't really exist yet that we would like to be able to develop as a way of manipulating the trajectory of life, much like we've been doing for at least the last 30,000 years when we first took a gray wolf and tried to make it into a dog that would warn us that our neighbors were coming.
TYSON:
Warn us that wolves would come. That's like, got to be the most cruel thing we've ever done to an animal, turn a wolf into something that warns us that wolves were coming.
[laughter]
GREELY:
Turn a wolf into a Chihuahua. That's cruel.
TYSON:
That's—yeah. That's just—
SHAPIRO:
There are many dogs that are doing very well [laughter].
KAEBNICK:
What Beth is getting at is really an important moment, I think, in the debate about genetic modification. We've been concerned about, well, you called it the power over life. And genetic engineering has looked particularly frightening and upsetting to people because it has looked like we have this idea that the genes are the book of life. It is the essence of the thing. And when you fiddle with that, you're getting into the organism at this almost sort of metaphysical level. You're really tweaking it.
TYSON:
Yeah, but we've been doing that ever since there's been agriculture.
KAEBNICK:
And so now we're beginning to think, and the whole conversation here, has sort of operated under the assumption that, oh, the genetic engineering is okay. But it's this large—the larger concerns that Ross is putting out on the table, and Beth just now, about systems and patterns. It's more holistic rather than this kind of concern about the—
TYSON:
Because maybe the future is not not even about de-extinction or extinction, it's about just creating life that we want, right. You look at a wolf and say, "I want a version of that that fits on my lap [TALKOVER]."
KAEBNICK:
[inaudible] already.
TYSON:
And we just did that. And there are no herds of wild milk cows terrorizing the countryside. We invented the milk cow, right?
SHAPIRO:
Right.
TYSON:
So we're already doing this. Why wouldn't the future of this exercise simply be more of that?
MACPHEE:
Because there's too many of us. That is the fundamental problem.
MACPHEE:
I want to say something about conservation–
TYSON:
You brought your family here tonight.
[laughter]
MACPHEE:
Yes, that's why the clapping was so [inaudible].
CHURCH:
But there are so many of us, you don't want to do nothing as well.
MACPHEE:
Here's what you want to do from a conservation point of view, which is not to play God, once again, with genetic endowments of species that you regard as endangered. What you want to do is have large portions of the Earth's surface dedicated to what lives there now. You want to keep the people out. You want to keep exploitation out. Because that's the only way of going forward.
SHAPIRO:
And how is that not quixotic when Pleistocene Park is? That just seems to me to be incredibly naïve. How are you going to keep people out?
MACPHEE:
You're calling me quixotic when you want to turn Pleistocene Park into—
TYSON:
She didn't call you quixotic.
GREELY:
She is.
TYSON:
She called you naïve.
MACPHEE:
Oh, okay.
[laughter]
GREELY:
But quixotic is a good word for it.
MACPHEE:
A distinction without a difference.
SHAPIRO:
It is. And I said, how is that not quixotic when Pleistocene Park is, so I think that—
MACPHEE:
Do you think it's out of the question to have more of the Earth's surface and the oceans, for that matter, dedicated to preserving what's there now?
SHAPIRO:
I do. I think that there's no way that we can do that. I think that there's very little—
MACPHEE:
And what is the fundamental reason for that?
SHAPIRO:
Because we interact with every portion of this planet in some way, whether, even if it's not by touching the surfaces.
MACPHEE:
Yeah, in simple, it's because there's too many of us.
SHAPIRO:
But we're not going to stop that.
MACPHEE:
I'm 68 years old. When I was born, there was 2.5 billion people on the planet. In 2020, it's going to be somewhere on the order of 7.5 billion. That is three times in a single lifetime, relative increase in the number of the people on the planet.
TYSON:
Colonize Mars. Yes.
[cheers and laughter]
MACPHEE:
Start now, baby. So there has to be fundamentally, in all of this discussion becomes increasingly irrelevant, it seems to me, unless we're paying attention to the fact that people are everywhere exploiting everything.
TYSON:
But to Beth's point, how, in practice, will you make that happen?
SHAPIRO:
I'm not arguing that it's not a great idea. I just think it's—
TYSON:
Right. She's just saying, she's recognizing who and what we are as a species, and saying, it's just not going to happen. Come up with some other idea.
SHAPIRO:
We're going to continue to turn—
MACPHEE:
You just gave us—which is a lot more feasible.
[laughter]
Or provide birth control information all over the planet like we used to do.
TYSON:
George, what?
CHURCH:
In addition to Mars, there is a natural form of birth control, which is called cities. So the fecundity typically drops around 7.5 children per family to 1.2 per family in the cities all over the world.
TYSON:
Seven point five?
CHURCH:
Yeah. Why? On average. I mean, you don't have a half a child.
TYSON:
I just don't—it's been a while since I met a family that had eight kids, that's all.
CHURCH:
That's because I'm talking about not city kids, rural families where you need to have a certain number of children in order to sustain the farm.
TYSON:
That was back when the kids died and they needed to get through the—
CHURCH:
They still die, actually.
TYSON:
Oh really?
CHURCH:
Sadly, yes.
TYSON:
Okay.
CHURCH:
So vitamin A deficiency kills about a million per year. Malaria kills about a million per year. And I could list a few more. In any case, when they move to the city, as soon as they move there, they don't wait until they're wealthy, they immediately change their expectations of family size. So that's one thing, and also, in the city, they're denser. You still need the farmland. You could have more efficient farmland. That would be—
TYSON:
If people live vertically, then you leave room for farm.
CHURCH:
You could just have more efficient farmland in general. And then you could free up some land for natural processes. You can use things that—beef uses up 20 times as much farmland as vegetables do. There are all kinds of things you can do to free up land.
TYSON:
So Ross, you're complaining that we will soon have nearly eight billion people, but as a biologist, I though you would celebrate the fact that we're so successful as a species.
[laughter]
MACPHEE:
You did, did you? Okay.
[laughter]
CHURCH:
Let's toast to nine billion, right.
[laughter]
We need more people.
TYSON:
We've got to land this plane. Hank, you had a point before we try to bring closure here.
GREELY:
Yeah. I think we've reached maybe what's going to be one of the most fundamental issues in environmental policy and environmental ethics. And that is, do we have to become gardeners of the world? Or can we be park rangers? Can we be stewards and preservers of what is here? Or do we actually have to be farmers who plant and reap and weed and do all those other things?
SHAPIRO:
Edit genes.
GREELY:
Yes. And in a world where what's here today is so vastly different from what was here 10,000, 20,000, 30 years ago. And some significant part, although Ross and I can argue about how much, is due to human intervention, the world is, I think, out of balance because of what we've done. It is not a stable ecosystem. Can we just let it alone and hope that it returns to something stable and good? Or do we need to be gardeners?
TYSON:
Right. Biologists on the panel, correct me if I'm wrong, the ecosystem is hardly ever actually stable.
SHAPIRO:
Right.
TYSON:
There's always something out of whack. Why do you have locusts and frogs and—
GREELY:
But sometimes it's more out of whack than others.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Okay.
CHURCH:
The locusts don't think they're out of whack when they're having a population explosion. They're—
SHAPIRO:
Right.
CHURCH:
They're loving it.
TYSON:
So I've got to land this plane. So Ross, what—you want to create huge areas of reserve. We kind of do that, we have national parks. There's Kruger Park in South Africa. There are places that we know we want to keep the way they are. So it's not completely out of the question as a goal, but can you be—what's the most realistic you can be as a hope for the future? Don't be utopian on me, just be realistic.
MACPHEE:
Okay, I'll just be naïve.
[laughter]
MACPHEE:
Well you know—
SHAPIRO:
I'm going to pay for that.
[laughter]
MACPHEE:
Let's look at what happened in Chile just two weeks ago. Something like two million acres given over to the Chilean people, to the government by the former owner of Patagonia, I mean, the store.
[laughter]
Now, there was a person, sorry, I'm not recollecting the name, but he and his wife Tompkins, right—very committed to preserving natural space on the planet to the extent that they bought up a very large part of Chilean Patagonia, relatively speaking, and it's now been deeded back to the country, but as a park. That's what it's going to be.
You can make the argument, well, is it really going to be preserved in the proper kind of way? I can't answer that, but you must have some expectation that there's right-thinking people in all parts of the planet. And if there is the kind of capital and the kind of interest in doing this sort of thing, then why can't it happen on many kinds of scales all over the planet? Maybe that's our obligation, that it's not to individual species, it's to ecosystems, it's to areas, where diversity lives.
TYSON:
In fact, there's a movement now where they're trying to do that with regions of the ocean that'd be protected from fishing.
MACPHEE:
Precisely, and that is not a thought— and this is my real point here. That is not a thought, I would argue, that existed even 10 years ago, maybe among conservation biologists it did, but it was not part of the conversation. Now, we hear about it and we think, what a good idea. If it can be done, why not do it?
TYSON:
Alright, George, first, before I get you to make some kind of summative remark, what's the next creature that's going to crawl out of your lab?
CHURCH:
One that's already crawling out are—
TYSON:
I was just joking.
[laughter]
So you have a real answer to that question.
CHURCH:
[cough] confession out of me anyway.
[laughter]
So pigs that are potential organ donors. So there's—you can make—you can engineer them so that they are immune-compatible and that they are virus-free, which is one of the reasons the FDA shut down this idea in 1997. We've now made them virus-free and hopefully immune-compatible. They seem to be developing normally, so—
TYSON:
And pigs' organs are approximately the same size—
CHURCH:
Same size.
TYSON:
And definitely the same function as human organs.
CHURCH:
Yes, and certain parts like the valves are already used but they're not alive. These would be alive and complex organs: kidneys, liver, heart.
TYSON:
And to anyone who'd say, well, what about the pig, and I'm saying, we eat pigs, right, so.
CHURCH:
Yes, we eat billions of pigs, and this would only be a million per year.
[laughter]
TYSON:
You've thought this through, wow. So Greg, so does George suffer from moral turpitude?
[laughter]
KAEBNICK:
Actually, George and a number of other synthetic biologists are to be commended for being very open about the work that they're doing and encouraging public thinking about it, appearing on panels like this and writing. There was—a paper came out of George's lab just a week ago about "SHEEFs", synthetic human entities with embryo-like features which you describe as a kind of synthetic biology, interestingly. But they published this, I think, in order to launch discussion about it.
TYSON:
Conversations.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, so that's what we need. Unfortunately, no one really quite knows how to have a society-wide public discussion about these things that can converge on some kind of conclusion But we need to have the kind of thinking, and George, and Drew Endy, and Kevin Esvelt, and a bunch of others in the field associated with your lab, have been pretty good about that.
TYSON:
So is it possible that your moral compass can adjust depending on what you've learned and what happens in labs over the years? I mean, will you—what's your flexibility here?
KAEBNICK:
Well, probably too flexible. I tend to—I feel very strongly that the technology is exciting and frightening, and we need to—
TYSON:
As any frontier technology is.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah. Right. We need to work it through as a case-by-case. This isn't a sort of an all-or-nothing. Whenever we begin to talk about these things, we tend to make these sort of all-or-nothing. Nature's all over here, it's all humanized, it's all— any kind of genetic engineering is bad. That's not where I am on this, and so yeah,
I think we need to consider these technologies in classes, and then within the classes, often particular cases like gene drives to eliminate Malaria-carrying mosquitos and stuff like—have to go into the weeds and think about it.
TYSON:
Beth, is your next book to how to clone some other animal?
[laughter]
TYSON:
Is this—do you have a ranking of—
SHAPIRO:
Most important to least important.
TYSON:
Most important to least important creatures you want to clone?
SHAPIRO:
No, it's not, no. And the How to Clone a Mammoth book isn't really about cloning mammoth. It is, it is a step-by-step manual, but really, it outlines the technical and ethical and ecological challenges associated with bringing anything back to life, but no one's really interested in anything except dinosaurs. And then, when they find out you can't do dinosaurs, it's mammoths.
But my next book is thinking about how we as a species have been interacting with the world around us since we evolved from our ancestor hominins and how the present technology kind of fits into that. This is, is it a logical extension of what we've been doing from domestication in agriculture and building cities and dams? Or is it something that is new and different? And that's what I explore.
TYSON:
Hank, you—we didn't flesh out the idea earlier, but I was kind of thinking that legislation typically follows what people then recognize as a problem that needs to be contained rather than coming at ahead of time. The future of this, where does it land, legally, do you see? Will they have freedoms, or is it all going to be constrained because people are scared and half the people who are scared because they don't actually understand what's going on?
GREELY:
It depends.
SHAPIRO:
Lawyer.
[laughter]
GREELY:
As a law professor, I tell my students that every question, every legal question you answer, that your answer should start with, "It depends," because it always does.
TYSON:
Okay, thank you, okay.
[laughter]
GREELY:
And I actually thought that was what Greg was saying earlier about de-extinction. It depends on the circumstance. But in terms of your political question, it depends on how well the stage is set. It depends on what brings it to a head. It depends on how many people have some idea of the pluses and minuses of this and the sophistication of it. And you've just added 900 people to that list. For which I thank you.
TYSON:
I would bet your biggest challenge will be the bio-literacy of people who are voting on what those laws should be.
GREELY:
Interestingly, it will both be the people who are most opposed tend to know the least biology, but also, a fair number who know a fair amount of biology are significantly opposed. You can't do pro-science, anti-science based solely on science knowledge, which is a little frustrating to me, but that's what the polls show.
TYSON:
So my last question and then we're going to go to your questions from the audience. So this is 2017, let's say 2050, what does the world look like from your—2050, what does it look like? Is it going to be a mammoth park?
GREELY:
Well, I'll probably be dead.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Okay, next.
[laughter]
GREELY:
But I am pretty confident that some things will have been created that will be claimed to be the revivals of extinct species. I'm even more confident that there'll be more synthetic biology out there walking around. Some of it will be in farms, some of it'll be in forests, some of it'll be in our houses as pets, and we will have moved—we will have muddled through. We're pretty good at muddling through.
TYSON:
Beth, you going to make a zoo?
SHAPIRO:
No. I don't think the intention of any of this is to make a zoo.
TYSON:
So, in 2050, what does the world look like?
SHAPIRO:
There will either be a lot more of us or a lot fewer of us.
TYSON:
Oh.
[laughter]
TYSON:
Whoa.
GREELY:
Going out on a limb there.
SHAPIRO:
I don't think it's likely to be the same as it is today.
TYSON:
That's completely spooky, actually.
SHAPIRO:
I don't know. I tend to be hopeful. I think that we have a lot of people who genuinely care about the problems that we're facing in the world, and a lot of people who don't, and your question about the biggest hurdle, to Hank, I think the answer really is that the biggest hurdle is going to be getting people to care. I think that extinction, in as much as extinction doesn't affect people personally, most people just don't care. The idea that we're going to bring species back to life isn't going to make people care more or less about causing extinctions because most people don't care. But hopefully, we will get ourselves, find ourselves, in a world where maybe because of—
TYSON:
On a panel that reaches 1,000 people, yeah.
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
These people obviously care or they wouldn't be here. This is not the right audience then.
TYSON:
Right, right.
SHAPIRO:
But hopefully, we'll find ourselves, perhaps because of some disaster, in a world where people are forced to and end up caring more.
TYSON:
So Greg, do you—is there a bit of moral philosophy that you think is absent in the population that you carry that you would then have to lead so that we're ready for what comes out of George's lab?
[laughter]
KAEBNICK:
A bit of moral philosophy that's absent in the population.
TYSON:
You have to study it professionally.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah.
TYSON:
Academically. That means it's not what the rest of us have.
KAEBNICK:
Oh, ah, no, no, I don't think that at all, no. One of the weird, one of the sort of unsettling things about being an ethicist or a bioethicist is that you sometimes seem to be putting yourself forward as having sort of like inside knowledge about what's right and wrong or some sort of inside track on how to figure it out, and that's not the case. If you think of morality as coming out of the culture, we're all ethicists here, we're all charged with thinking about it and working through these things.
TYSON:
So you went to school for no reason?
[laughter]
TYSON:
[inaudible] George, what's down the pike in 2050? You'll either be a hero, or you'll be in jail is what I'm thinking.
[laughter]
CHURCH:
I think I try to be very responsive and hopefully, stay ahead of, help have discussions like this so that we know what is needed, what is possible well in advance. It's not like it's—
TYSON:
And as an astrophysicist, I just simply didn't know, thanks for calling it to my attention, that you know you're into some frontier activities that could be received in multiple ways, and you're very open about that. And that's a model for all scientists who are working on things that you know would require, and you would expect, public participation in how that should go in the future. So, I was very pleased to learn that about you.
CHURCH:
Yeah, and I think large subsets of many different professions and citizens can be engaged, and it's not as if there aren't, it's not like there's some giant loophole here. To introduce a wild species that's beenengineered requires approval f rom three agencies: the FDA, the EPA, and the USDA, and animal welfare is one of the top priorities for at least two of those. So we're going to see many more engineered organisms, microbes, plants, and animals. Many of them now will probably be classified as fairly close to natural, but not transgenics where you're moving it from one species to another, which is really kind of the dividing line for organic foods, say. They will be cisgenic, that is to say there are very subtle changes where you just knock out a gene or reregulate it. So I think we're going to be seeing a lot of that. There's 30 different foods already that are classified as unregulated by the USDA because they're so close to natural, but they are heavily engineered, much more clearly engineered than just irradiating them and hoping for the best.
TYSON:
So Ross, I just give you the last thought here because you've been most contemplative of us this evening.
MACPHEE:
Indeed.
TYSON:
Yes.
MACPHEE:
Okay. Oh, you're not going to give me a lead-up.
TYSON:
No, no, no, okay.
[laughter]
MACPHEE:
So we've been talking about mega mammals, and we've been talking about passenger pigeons and all of these sorts of things, right. These are all vertebrates. But in any ecosystem, the organisms that have all the tough jobs are microorganisms, as George was just implying. And what I would like to see, if I'm still here in 2050, which is unlikely, but nevertheless, you'll tell me, that all
of the effort, or a lot of the effort, ought to go into things like doctoring microorganisms so that they do the jobs that are really, really important. So for example, bacteria that produced something that amounts to a combustible type of material, of fuel, so we don't have to frack, so we don't have to drill, so we don't have to do all of these kinds of things.
TYSON:
And there are huge economic consequences, good incentive to go there.
MACPHEE:
Let me finish.
TYSON:
Alright.
MACPHEE:
Microorganisms that produce food. I'm not talking Soylent Green.
[laughter]
What I'm talking about are alternatives to meat, as a great example.

It was mentioned in here earlier, I think by George, in fact.
TYSON:
There are six vegetarians in the audience, in this section.
[laughter]
MACPHEE:
For good reason. The amount of land that goes into housing cattle, and the amount of methane that they're burping out, right. These are not things we need on the planet anymore. So if there is a future to synthetic biology, there certainly is, I would think that for economic reasons, for social reasons, for all the important reasons, that it moves in that kind of direction, to make lives better by making it less on the natural world and more on our own inventiveness.
TYSON:
Ross, thanks for those concluding notes. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking our panel.
If you could hang for like, five or 10 minutes, I count this Q&A session as a fundamental part of our time together, and we've got a microphone set up right here and right here. And I haven't forgotten about you guys upstairs, so I'll find one of you in the middle of this. Let's start right here, yes, go ahead.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Hello.
TYSON:
Go ahead, right here.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Yes.
TYSON:
Can you see where my hand is pointing? Right here, yes, go.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
So during this entire speech about de-extinction, we talk a lot about the technologies used. So imagine if like, every human right now dies and then a new species comes to become the dominant technological species on Earth here. Do you think we deserve to be de-extincted if they ever found out about us?
KAEBNICK:
I pers-
TYSON:
Good question. Greg, why don't you take that.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Because, like...
TYSON:
We got it, we got it. We understand the full implications of that.
CHURCH:
I would love to be de-extincted, yes. But there's the bit about the memories.
TYSON:
Yeah, so should humans be de-extincted by a future civilization who may be intrigued by us? And they'll de-extinct us and then put us in a zoo, won't they.
SHAPIRO:
Holocene Park.
CHURCH:
Pleistocene Park, please.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Homo ignoramus.
TYSON:
Homo ignoramus, yeah.
TYSON:
Should we be de-extincted?
KAEBNICK:
Should we be de-extincted? Oh my goodness.
TYSON:
You stumped a philosopher.
KAEBNICK:
I don't know what to say. I, uh–
SHAPIRO:
Do you think we should bring back Neanderthals?
TYSON:
Ooh, Neanderthal, should we bring back Neanderthal? We've got Neanderthal DNA, right?
SHAPIRO:
We do.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah.
TYSON:
Are you there, Greg?
KAEBNICK:
The problem with de-extincting a sentient creature like us or Neanderthals is that you'd be—they would be stuck in the zoo. And it would be almost certainly extremely frightening and scary and lonely. The animal welfare concerns just get overwhelming, so I'm going to—when I first heard your question, I was envisioning bringing the population, bringing an entire population back through some, I don't know, vast powers that this species has 150 years from now when you have a whole human population just like that living in cities.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
But do we deserve it?
KAEBNICK:
Do we deserve it? Do we deserve to be brought back?
TYSON:
George wants to be brought back, so he thinks he deserves it, yes.
CHURCH:
I don't know if I deserve it.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, I don't know about deserve.
TYSON:
I would say that in your comment, you valued primates above some threshold as being sentient and then no other animals with that criterion. But people own pigs, which certainly say they're sentient.
KAEBNICK:
Yeah, you're right.
TYSON:
You own a pig? Did someone—
[laughter]
This is Manhattan.
[laughter]
But let's keep the questions going. Yes, what do you have here?
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Yeah, actually, I think your last question pretty much bordered on what I was going to ask. But I was going to say, imagine being the last human being on Earth or being abducted by aliens, and then you would see, for the sake of perspective, the eyes through the world of an animal brought back from extinction, unique and special, but alone in the world. So what kind of life would this innocent animal lead without peers to look back upon it or without nature or even nurture, and what kind of useful information would they even add to the world without that, or would they even gain from it, without having friends?
TYSON:
Yeah, so that would make an interesting movie plot, I would think. You just got brought back from extinction. What does the world look like to you? It's got to be pretty weird. Or maybe you don't even care, it's just the world, and you try to adapt to it. Is that—Beth.
SHAPIRO:
I don't think there's anyone who's really seriously thinking about this who believes that they should bring one thing back and have it there. I mean, I think the goal, as George has said and as I've said, is to create populations of things that can survive and sustain themselves in the world.
TYSON:
They would want to mate, I think is what she's saying.
SHAPIRO:
Or the idea to use genetic engineering technology to tweak [cough] species that are still alive, to allow them to be able to survive and increase their diversity. I think yes, the animal welfare issue is paramount. I mean, obviously, we don't— I don't think there's anybody sitting on this panel who would want to bring something back just to make it suffer, and I think that's probably a fair thing to say about everyone, so.
TYSON:
Let's go here, yeah. Hi, how you doing?
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
I was hearing you talk about two things. You talk about parks and preserving parks and pockets of parks, but you didn't talk a little bit about migration corridors and how ecosystems in these parks could actually disappear if these aren't interconnected. And the second thing, if a species that are on the brink of extinction, you create them, breed them, or whatever, has there been any thought given to, if there's a reintroduction, the institutional knowledge that these animals have to have? Are they actually the same species? The elephant that knows where the
watering hole is when there's a drought, where she hasn't been there in 50 years, how is that going to be the same animal?
TYSON:
I love that question. Beth, why don't you take that?
[laughter]
SHAPIRO:
The corridors question, the first part of the question, I think, is really important. What we see when we study these populations of animals as they were going extinct so we can get DNA from these animals starting 50,000 years ago and move toward the present day is that as the populations decline, they become geographically isolated from each other. You start seeing a loss of diversity, and then these tiny little populations that are then threatened. And probably, this is because of the loss of a corridor. Animals need to be able to move. This is one of the things that we have done, people have done, to the world, that's been, I think, the most damning for these animals, is create dams, build cities, make highways, block these animals from being able to move across these corridors and interact with each other, and absolutely.
TYSON:
So we made the Earth our corridor.
SHAPIRO:
We made it our corridor at the expense of everything else that was there.
TYSON:
At the expense of others. And how about the environmental memory that is embedded in a species?
SHAPIRO:
Yeah, this is–
TYSON:
So if you know where the watering hole— what other species to avoid because they might eat you, if you bring a species back from extinction, are those memories part of what you have just de-extincted?
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Or a saved species, either one.
CHURCH:
You can create memories. For example, in salmon, if you put them, if you put them in a particular location, then they will learn that that's the new route to get to from the ocean back up to their breeding grounds.
SHAPIRO:
But you're right.
CHURCH:
That has been done.
SHAPIRO:
When there are captive-breeding project that have happened, there are some species, and within some species, there are some memories that are genetically encoded that you see that they can do. And there are other things that they can't do, and these are things that will be lost. But as George says, they might be taught, and if they can't be taught, then they'll be learned. I mean, species have an overwhelming desire to stay alive and reproduce. This is why we exist.
TYSON:
To not die.
SHAPIRO:
Exactly.
TYSON:
Yes. That's life.
SHAPIRO:
Yes, to not die.
GREELY:
A true, cool example of this, I think it was Sandhill Cranes, but it was a crane population that had been moved, and they actually used humans and ultralight planes guiding the cranes to their appropriate migration.
TYSON:
The cranes thought that the ultralight planes were other cranes?
GREELY:
Yeah. Maybe they weren't the brightest cranes.
[laughter]
TYSON:
I just—you know. Makes you wonder if we get de-extincted how they're going to, what are they going to use to fool us? Let's try over here, yes. Sir.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Ross, your comments at the end triggered a thought. I don't know how many of you in the panel remember a film, early film of Alec Guinness called The Man in the White Suit. In The Man in the White Suit, he was a chemist who came up with an indestructible fabric, and made suits out of it. And for a while, he was a hero, but then, he became a pariah because people started losing jobs, and it's sort of very much against the nature of the population. And you know, greed takes over also. We're living in an era of anti-science, so I'm going back to your comment and I'm thinking about it from a practical point of view, not that I don't agree with you. I think it'd be a wonderful thing.
TYSON:
Just a quick point, an indestructible suit. Does that mean it's bulletproof, or does that mean it never wears out?
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Never wore out, couldn't get dirty, nothing.
TYSON:
So that's why—no, we've got that problem solved. It's called fashion.
[laughter]
So that indestructible suit will go out of style and then you put it away, and you buy another suit, and that keeps people employed.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
You're missing my point.
[laughter]
My point is not the suit. My point is—
TYSON:
Sorry, I got distracted. You're right.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
You're creating a situation that is contrary to what a population generally agrees with.
TYSON:
It's an unintended consequence, right? Ross?
MACPHEE:
Yeah, I'm not entirely clearly, sir. You mean using microorganisms to produce our food?
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Right, right, and all of that, yeah.
MACPHEE:
As opposed to agribusiness like we have in this country now?
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Think about what'll happen to farms, to farming, or if you use it to create fuel, what will happen to petroleum and the other industries? You'll get enormous blowback. I guess that's what I'm driving at.
TYSON:
Unless that creates such a huge industry that it can employ everyone who would otherwise lose their job if they're properly trained for it. So, you're—
MACPHEE:
This is like coal in America. Coal ain't coming back.
MACPHEE:
The only way coal is ever going to be important constituent of our fossil fuel sources if somebody really learns how to make it clean. You may have heard the recent announcement that we're going to have very clean coal.
SHAPIRO:
Very clean.
MACPHEE:
We're not.
SHAPIRO:
Very clean.
MACPHEE:
Not with any existing technology. It is just simply a bad idea. But what happens with technology is, and I think we're going to agree on this, you see a need, you put brainpower against it, and one hopes, over time, that you develop something that really does make a difference, that propels the new technology. And my view is that we really are at that point when it comes to food technology, at this point in human existence. You do not need to put very large parts of
the planet under tillage or supporting animals in the way that we're doing right now.
It's really the only way forward if populations are, human populations that is, are going to continue to burgeon.
So The Man in the White Suit analogy is true for his white suit. I'm assuming it was a white suit, but it doesn't mean that the technology is just going to stop there. One hopes that with further insights and obviously, experimentation and trying to do the absolute best one can with the materials at hand, that it's going to be an upward trajectory like technology's been for the past several centuries.
TYSON:
I would also say that something that surprised me when I looked at the numbers, we had horses as a fundamental part of our civilization for thousands of years. And then, over a 20-year period, from like, 1900 to 1920, horses in the civilized world basically went out of business. The buggy whip, you couldn't sell it, the horse-drawn carriage becomes a novelty rather than a fundamental part of your life, cars took over, and that happened basically in the snap of a finger on a historical timeline. So such changes can happen, putting whole industries out of business, embracing new ones, if the value of the new one is clear and present. So I see there may be a mixture of where there'll be blowback and where people will just completely embrace the change. We have time for just a couple, just a few more. We've got a kid on line, could you just come forward? Just come forward.
TYSON:
Oh you can, yeah, [inaudible] come here, come here, come here. Here. How are you doing? How old are you?
YOUNG AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Nine.
TYSON:
You're nine? You're nine?
YOUNG AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes.
TYSON:
So I was nine years old when I first came to this museum, and I, my parents took me into the planetarium. And I was star-struck.
Yeah, yeah, that actually happened to me. So you have a question. Why don't you face everyone and say the question into your mic. Turn around.
YOUNG AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Beth talked about bringing back mammals, so if we did that, wouldn't we care less about them? She said caring about them more, so if we brought them back, wouldn't we care less?
TYSON:
I like that question because what would happen is they're kind of intriguing now because they're rare, or in fact, they don't exist. But now, you bring them back, and then they're just another animal in nature. And then their novelty wears off. So what's up with that?
SHAPIRO:
I think this actually goes to what Ross was talking about where he said that one thing that we really do have to remember is that if we do, do this, if we do eventually have the technology to do this and we've thought through the ethics, and we've thought through the ecological implications of doing it, and we bring them back, that we really then have a responsibility to make sure that we protectand care a bout and preserve the species that we have. And Ross brought this up.
TYSON:
Yeah, but without the novelty, where does the caring come from?
SHAPIRO:
Well, it has to come from us, which is why I think it's fundamentally important that we somehow convince people that extinction is bad, that things other than humans are valuable, that having a diverse society, a biologically diverse society, meaning many different species of many different organisms living in ecosystems that are healthy and robust, is the fundamental value that adds to our lives. And this is hard, so you're going to help us right?
CHURCH:
I don't think—
YOUNG AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes.
TYSON:
Yes. Okay, thank you.
CHURCH:
I don't think novelty wears off, I mean, necessarily, like dogs. We still love dogs, and they're not novel anymore. But we like the ancient breeds just as much as we like the new ones.
TYSON:
The wolves are still pissed off with what we did with their DNA, I've asked them.
CHURCH:
That's fair enough.
TYSON:
Alright, I want to take—excuse me for everyone on line, but I'm only going to take two more questions just because we're running long here. Right over there, yes, go ahead.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
I have one. I'm a non-scientist but I was interested in the international questions, going forward, not looking back. But one was about Casper 9 technology, which obviously is already internationally understood and progressing. And I don't see how you can wrap national security around that. And the other is about microbiodiversity in the immunology and human resilience, and we also all share in that going forward, and what you think about those two issues.
TYSON:
Hank, is that you?
GREELY:
Sure. I think the international issues are extraordinarily difficult here. We have tried very hard to keep other countries from getting nuclear weapons. There's a treaty signed by almost every country in the world. Making nuclear weapons is incredibly expensive, difficult, and time-consuming, and countries have done it. Making CRISPR'd organisms is cheap and easy, and getting cheaper and easier. There's no way we're going to be able to do a completely successful international control over this.
TYSON:
Just by contrast, I have to say—
GREELY:
We'll do the best we can.
TYSON:
If you're going to purify plutonium or uranium, it takes huge facilities. But what you're doing, George, is in a lab.
KAEBNICK:
You can get a kit for 150 bucks.
TYSON:
Yeah. Okay.
GREELY:
Basically it takes a, I'm in New York, so forgive me, a garage—
TYSON:
Yeah, a garage.
GREELY:
But a garage-sized space and a couple thousand dollars, and you can start doing this. So the international regulation is going to be really hard, and we're not going to be perfect at it. That's been true for a while with biological warfare, which is a lot easier than nukes. What we've done isn't perfect, but it's better than not doing anything. And I think that's the world we're going to be living in, one where we can't guarantee security either from biological warfare or from mistakes, from accidents that happen because of bioengineering, but one where we're watching out closely to see whether those happen or not, so better diagnosis, better monitoring is crucial. We've got some plans for how we may fix things, and we are, we're staying alert. So that's—I wish I had a better answer, but I think that's the best we can do. I hope we could get that good.
TYSON:
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, this has to be the last question. Yeah, hey.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Is this thing—yeah. Okay, one for you, Doctor Tyson, you've got a new book coming out in about a month. Are you going to be doing a talk here as part of your book tour?
TYSON:
Oh, no, actually.
It was—yeah, well, no. Yeah, it was— I'll be over at the 92nd Street Y, doing the book talk there.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Okay, now for the panel.
TYSON:
Yeah. Okay.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Okay, with the— if it eventually gets easy to bring back an extinct species, wouldn't that cause people to be less concerned about species going extinct because, oh well, we can bring them back whenever we want to?It'll less people— less interested in preserving what we have because they could be brought back later on.
GREELY:
Yes.
CHURCH:
It could, but it could also do the opposite, which is that if you're told by your general that we're fighting a losing battle every few months, another species goes, let's just hang in there, it's a very different conversation than if you say, "Oh, we can win on occasion." I think that's a different conversation that can really mobilize and motivate whole new sources of—whole new resources. But we shouldn't neglect the argument that you just mentioned, which is if we show how expensive it is to bring back a species, then that might be an economic argument against letting them go extinct in the first place.
GREELY:
I'm waiting for senators from Oklahoma to make this very argument the next time the Endangered Species Act comes up, but one potential saving grace to de-extinction research, the worst thing in the world would be they think we can bring things back, and so therefore, we can go ahead and let them go extinct, but we can't. And there's been enough talk and enough hype about biotechnology in general that I think people believe we can do things that right now, we can't. The worst situation would be to do that and not being able to bring them back. Being able to bring them back provides at least some safety valve, but we should always stress the importance of keeping things from going extinct first. That's a heck of a lot easier than trying to bring them back is going to be.
TYSON:
If I can offer some summative remarks, and I don't mean to sound like Ross in some of these comments, but I think I will.
MACPHEE:
Is that a bad thing?
TYSON:
So I do a lot of reading on, so, the history of science and its relationship to countries, nations, and civilization.And one of the things people do first is
weaponize it. This has been with us from the beginning. In 1940, a new element was discovered that fit on the periodic table right after Neptunium, and this was 10 years after the object, cosmic object known as Pluto was discovered.
TYSON:
So this element was named in honor of that cosmic object, plutonium. Within five years, we had weaponized it, and plutonium was the bomb that was tested in Almogordo, was not the uranium bomb, the plutonium bomb. This is what countries do, and the United States did not invent war, it goes back as long as we've had history. So my concern, my hope, because I'm not in this, you guys are, is that we as a species, as nations, as a civilization, that we have the wisdom of how to harness this for good, for the good, for the greater good, for longevity, for health, for happiness, for food, whatever it is, that the urge to do good with it will be greater than the urge to do bad with it. And I worry on occasion that we don't have
the wisdom to do that, and in which case, in the future, there'll either be very many more of us or very many fewer of us, but it certainly won't be the same. All of you, thank you for coming to this.

And thanks again for our brilliant panel.