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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and in this episode I'm joined by Ellie and Laura to talk about resurrecting extinct species why we would do it and what the implications might be so to start off with Ellie this is your area of Interest did you read something that sort of caught your eye and bring this topic to our table yeah definitely I think in the
last few years the extinction in this sort of idea of resurrecting extinct species has definitely come to the Forefront and I think it's a fascinating and be quite scary like this could be a possibility in the next 20 40 50 years of being able to resurrect something that's been dead for potentially millions of years so I think it's a really interesting topic there's definitely a lot of questions around it and a lot of controversy but it's definitely something that we should talk
about and we will we'll explore all there is to it to her as much as we can fit in one podcast episode yeah definitely and we'll try and explain what de-extinction is as well because I imagine it might not be as simple as as we think Laura you come from another background tell us why this topic might be of interest to you and why you wanted to talk about it today sure so I mean Ellie's background is primarily in Zoology so I guess she's going to talk about all the animal related stuff and
all the wildlife always of course and I think I've said before in a few other episodes that I I really like wildlife and nature but my background going back to my undergrad degree was Natural Sciences and I studied some geology modules including paleontology oh wow which is partly about how you see different creatures in the Rock record and various Extinction events and my decision to study those modules is probably inspired by the Jurassic Park film from something 90s yeah it's Gotta
Be and that was all about bringing the dinosaurs back which is what the extinction's about bringing your species back from the dead dead the dead but just like there isn't currently One Alive as well is that how you describe the extinction like what what's the definition between animals just dead and actually extinct I mean any animal can be dead like an elephant dies it doesn't mean that the whole population is extinct what Extinction means is that there are no living animals of that
species able to breed in the world the one we're going to talk about today is the silencing any dinosaur you can think of they're all extinct the dodo another famous One people love to talk about that but also animals go extinct all the time so it's very sad and a lot of it is to do with what people are doing to the planet and the habitats and hunting and human animal conflict and all of that but a species could have gone extinct 65 million years ago or it could have gone
extinct 65 years ago so it's really a big time span that we're talking about which is another thing that we're going to bring into this about how far back could be realistically there's a wrecked an animal I've also heard about species being effectively extinct even though there are still some which are alive of that species can you explain that a little yes so basically if you have a few individuals left you could technically breed them perhaps but you might have all boys so then yes you've
got individuals like species but functionally you're not going to have any more offspring because there's no female to carry a fetus or you know there's no way that you can produce more more of that species so you can have still animals alive it doesn't mean that necessarily all the animals of that species are dead but if there's no way to bring more into the world then that species is going to go extinct even quicker than all the rest of them unfortunately I know there's a
threatened species scale as well so like is it extinct if we have some in captivity and the only reason why they're still alive is it extinct we have some in captivity probably not realistically you can have extinct in the wild which is another category if you go on the iucn they have all as many well not all the animals but a good majority of the animals listed in each animal species will be given a category from least concern or data deficient all the way to critically endangered and
these categories break down how many are left how the environment is impacting the survival of these species what the threats are to these species what can be done as well like conservation strategies to preserve the areas that they live in preserve the habitat preserve the individuals um so yeah if it's in a zoo it could be that there's many animals of that species in the world as well or it could be that the only animals now remain in captivity because that's the safest
place for them to be because their habitat's been destroyed so yeah it can go both ways that scale you were talking about when they're sort of most concerned isn't that when there's been a really rapid decline in populations in the wild I guess and it suggests they may go extinct because there's been some change in the habitat that means they can't Thrive anymore and if something isn't done then they will eventually they're likely to become extinct yeah quite a lot of the ones that end up as
critically endangered are species that will only live in one place so if you've got a population of something like a Bermuda skink it only lives on one island off the coast of Bermuda with I don't know two or three hundred individuals so if there's a huge infestation of rats or if there's a Bermuda skin disease that could wipe out that whole population in one Fell Swoop and then that species would be extinct so there's all different categories within those classifications to work out
like how vulnerable they are to Extinction if you talked about the um the thylacine I find that quite difficult to pronounce Tasmanian tiger yes so that was a species that in about out the 1800s there were about I think about 5 000 roaming around Tasmania off the coast of Australia and basically they were hunted to Extinction they decided to put a bounty I think you've got like a dollar or the equivalent at the time for every thalassine body or carcass that you brought into the
authorities so of course the sooner people realize they can make money as with aware of the lot of things it just became you know sport almost to shoot as many as you could and they had one left in a zoo called Benjamin with one animal you can't really do very much so yeah as when he passed away the species was declared fully extinct which was very recently only in the last hundred years it was 1936 that Benjamin died so not really that long ago no so they were they quite
widespread before the 1930s yeah did they exist in more than just Tasmania I think Tasmania and maybe Southern Australia okay but yeah like fairly common I would say why was there a bounty on there for Tasmanian tigers people semi-mistakenly believe that Tasmanian tigers killed sheep another livestock so that's sort of where it started that they all shot them to protect their livestock so people said they're a threat to our way of life so we'll wipe them out before they wipe us
out it's like wolves in England like why people are so anti-bringing them back because they think there'll be such a threat to sheep and cows and farmers livelihoods and all of that sort of thing so you can see where they were coming from but but I don't think slaughtering all of them was necessarily the best thing they could have done in that situation now I'm thinking about how if they were widespread to begin with and then they became less and less common as their numbers depleted how did
they find the last few what did the last few somehow succumb to something else was there more than just human hunting strategies going on well so this is the thing as well so the thylacine Tasmanian Tiger is one of those things that like crops up like every five or six years there'll be someone that's claimed to have seen one that's still alive today in Tasmania and it's like the sort of I don't know Yeti of the animal world and there's some people that believe that
there still is a small population living in the forests of Tasmania but I do highly doubt that I think they did they were all wiped out but it's the same as I said before if you're wiping out quite a lot and you've only got a few individuals left the chances of them they're meeting and being able to breed and that Offspring survey driving is then so much lower so for the population to recover then it takes a long time so it might be that they wiped out so many
that the population just couldn't manage to bounce back so why is there the conversation about bringing them back how would they do that and then second would be how would they survive would we have changed too much that they wouldn't have the sheep and livestock to keep them alive if that was what was kept them alive well how is the big question because basically this started because people sequenced the Genome of the thylacine so from Benjamin that specimen
that died they had his DNA I believe and they they see because it so they had the entire genome but they don't obviously have any living violations so when you see Prince of genome let's go back another step which is they've got a copy of the DNA and they've basically written it all out yeah and they know exactly what it would look like how did they do that did they have a live sample or a real sample of the DNA I start with or did they sort of predict it with some
deductions and understanding of the species so in 2018 The genome sequence of the thylacine was produced published I suppose and it was using the DNA from a pouch specimen so thalassines and marsupials we should probably mention that and the pouch specimen was stored at Melbourne zoo in alcohol for a hundred years so they're not actually Tigers they're not actually Tigers they're not felids they're not cats they're just stripy they're just stripy marsupials with four legs right a little
bit like cats a little bit like dogs live them up because they're quite cool looking um and they're not that big they're sort of like the size of a coyote like I've seen a coyote in real life before comparing to my dog my dog's like the size of a big cat how does that prepare bigger than your dog okay but it's smaller than a wolf right thank you sorry I interrupted then so they're marsupials so there's an animal that they thought hey this looks like a Tiger but actually it's more like a kangaroo
kangaroos are also but all that means really is that they're sort of mammals and instead of giving birth to live young in the same way like a kangaroo has a pouch and they're like the fetus will crawl from the birth canal into the pouch and then suckle and then when it's developed more you'll see the head of the Joey popping out of the pouch of the kangaroo it's like that sort of thing the the breeding mechanism is slightly different to a traditional live birth of a mammal I
just thought that they went back in there for safe heaping I didn't realize that was how they were born and that was their that was basically their nest yeah essentially it's like a I guess an outer womb is one way to describe it like like a human baby is inside the mother's uterus the whole time until it gets born whereas a kangaroo baby will be very very underdeveloped and will crawl from the birth canal into the pouch and then stay there suckling and drinking milk
for a long time so they still drink milk it's still quite mammalian but then only much much later on will they then emerge into the real world so the idea of a fetus crawling around on the outside sounds really creepy but also sounds like it makes more evolutionary sense because childbirth is really risky in humans so we've still gotta look after it for quite a long time but it's developing out of the womb more than like a human child or an elephant child a child yeah
so they managed to sequence The genome what happens next are they going to find a host or not a host what's what's the right word for this like how how do you get from a genome to actually having a living thing essentially they are still trying to improve the genome by sequencing as many closely related species that are still alive as they can and one of them is a done art which is also a marsupial which is like a little mouse and basically they're like a semi-jurassic parking in a way so
they're altering as much of the genes that they can and they're gonna like develop this using an embryo so they're taking stem cells and they're going to try and persuade them to become palacine stem cells and then they're going to put it into an empty done art egg and then they're going to put the egg in the host and will that be a mouse so they're not going to put the embryo into a done-up because I think that would be too small so but per se they put it into like a
female dog or a female coyote but then because the offspring of a marsupial is so underdeveloped when it's born they would then take that undeveloped creature and they would have to hand rear it um or get it to be fostered by a marsupial so it could go back and forth like there's a lot of factors that where it could all go where they could lose the fetus because it's so complicated because it's never been done and because we don't have any thalassines to be able
to put it into so it's not like like in horse breeding they do all the time where they take the embryo from like a very expensive female racehorse and they'll put it with the semen of a very expensive male racehorse and then they'll put that embryo into a surrogate to like grow their fault so that the racehorses can keep racing but we can't do that in this case because we have no thylacines so we'd have to find the next best option but also we don't have any fallacy and
sperm or any of that so like it's a lot of factors which is why they're trying to grow stem cells into thylacine cells which has never been done before so yeah very complicated procedure so if were you talking about improving the map of the thylacine genome that they currently have by comparing it to other animals yes so how will they know for certain that they've got the correct genome for a thylacine and that what they produce would actually be a thylacine so it
won't be a fallacy that's a thing it will be this approximation of the thylacine so it's not necessarily resurrecting an extinct species it's your best guess of what it was like so it could potentially be just creating a new species well yeah I suppose so because it will be I don't know 98 thylacine and two percent done art so yeah it won't be 100 Palestine DNA but it will be as close as they can get it well that's what they're trying to do anyway how much of a species do you have
to have before it starts becoming a new species you know because what if some of that that two percent was a really insignificant two percent and doesn't actually present outwardly and it's instead just kind of some background stuff that all the marsupials share so it's nothing major maybe it could still be effectively a thylacine well you think like how much DNA like chimps and humans share like it's so high but then obviously we look and behave and act incredibly differently so I have no idea
is the answer really but they this is the best sort of chance that they've got to to make it happen say they managed to make one then it successfully gestates and comes to term and grows up to being adult then what are they going to keep doing this until they've created a million thylacines and got a whole new population or what well so that's the other thing so let's say that they could do it let's say that they could bring back the thylacine to us closer version as they could manage
then you've got the issue of well what happens then what are we going to do with it are we going to release it back into the wild are we going to keep it in a lab and study it forever or as long as it lives and this is where a lot of these ethical and moral questions come in like should we even attempt to do this is all we're going to do is bring back one individual that's then going to be you know kept in a cage for its whole life and die you know not really having achieved very much
only having achieved being itself and what kind of quality of life is that for an individual and if we truly wanted the extinct species should we not bring back the entire population or as many as we can so that in theory they could be released into the wild and former self-sustaining population the problem with that is the animals have gone extinct so why did they go extinct what were those threats that led them to that point and if it was loss of habitat have
we even got the habitat to release them back into well if it was hunting are people still going to hunt them once they come back are they going to attack the Sheep are they going to upset the farmers there's all these factors to consider and the habitat has changed like I don't know that much about Tasmania but I'm pretty sure it doesn't look the same as it looked in the 1800s than it does in 2022 so have there is there even the space for a fallacy to roam around and hunt
and are the species that it hunted still around will it have anything to eat what are they going to feed it but there's all these questions so yeah we don't we don't know this is sort of the sort of um opposing views like there's lots of people that believe that we should be trying to do extinct species and to see what could come of it and there's lots of people saying No this is a waste of resources and all this money that you're investing in these genetic Technologies
is better spent conserving the species that are still going and protecting the areas and the habitat that we have for those so there's there's a lot of chewing and throwing and a lot of flip lines flip slides to each argument but in the meantime they are still at least sequencing genomes yeah so there's this lab it's called you're like this the silasine integrated genomic restoration research lab at the University of Melbourne and the acronym is Tiger which I think is good no e double r so they
really thought about that even though it's not actually a tiger even though it's not actually a Target yet so where is the thylacine in in the sort of food chain as well if if we did bring it back how would it impact other species would it cause other species to go extinct and then we'd kind of be in this in this cycle like you know what if it affects biodiversity in another way yes it was a carnivore and it was one of Australia's only apex predators when it was alive so yeah it would definitely
impact the habitat there's no doubt about it it would eat species it would it would cause a lot of um repercussions if it were reintroduced into Australia which you said in a previous episode it has a problem with rabbits as an invasive species maybe it would balance out similar in the UK right we had wolves and all the walls made extinct for the same reasons because they predated on sheep too often apparently so if the walls were still here maybe there wouldn't be so many rabbits which
wouldn't be a problem for crops maybe the same would be true in Australia bringing back the thylacine is a form of invasive species control I like it humans haven't managed it maybe the thylacine will but in theory why did we say that the rabbits were brought to Australia that was like Victorian era wasn't it there may be potentially there was no overlap right so the silosine went extinct oh that was much later there so there would potentially have seen a rabbit like would it have known
to hunt that it probably would have I think so what is the main benefit of de-extinction is it just righting a wrong that they were hunted to Extinction or could there be wider benefits what if it was a different species that actually yeah could have this kind of benefit of solving another ecological issue that we have well also people are saying it's sort of not necessarily even doing it to bring back the thylacine it's doing it to prove that we can use this genetic technology
and methods to edit the DNA of stem cells and then turn those stem cells back into an animal so the process of bringing back a thylacine will have these offshoots of huge advances in genetic technology that then could be used to bring back animals but also used to gene therapy for mutations in health and cancer and all of those sorts of things so in theory we don't know what will come of it but if you're going to spend a lot of money researching the manipulation of these
stem cells and this genetic idea then you could you know find out a lot of different things in the process so if I put my academics hat on to me this sounds like someone really wanted to do some genetics research was struggling to find funding so came up with what sounded like a really cool applications they could actually just get some funding and all they really want to know is more about genetics and they don't necessarily have much of an interest in writing a wrong of humans eradicating a
species I don't know if that sounds really cynical I mean you could well be right people can only do the research if they've got the money so if you've got a you know a sexy title and a snazzy idea let's bring back something that's extinct of course people are going to be on board and I think there was a grant or someone there's like a company behind it that are getting lots of funding from people that want to see this species but whether that's their main goal or
whether they want to explore what they can do with stem cells it's maybe a bit ambiguous I don't know but I think yeah you can only do what you've got money for can't you in the academic world but what makes the stylus scene a good candidate it's not as exciting so maybe this is why I've answered my own question but wasn't the uh the messenger pigeon also around from around the same time though went extinct why are we not bringing that back is that a lot a little bit more similar to carrier
pigeons carrier pigeon why aren't we bringing those ones back because they're quite similar to species still alive so wouldn't that be easier if we just wanted to prove this kind of technology I imagine probably yes in the theory in fact that pigeons like there's an approximation of a pigeon of a carrier pigeon still going right so you've got probably what's more likely as a host you've probably got more similar DNA that you could work with but I think yeah there's there's something
about it that's got to be like Mass Appeal or maths like public interest and this is why like conservation groups struggle people like cute and cuddly pandas get billions of pounds of conservation money but if you're trying to conserve like one small snail that lives in a muddy puddle in you know the outer Hebrides like it's not it's not sexy in the same way so I think there's definitely an argument that people will care less about things that are still going or is less important to them maybe
whereas a silocene is a snazzy looking creature people have sort of heard of it it comes back into pop culture every now and then because people claim they've seen it it's got a bit more mystery and a bit more I don't know a bit more wow factor perhaps yeah I'm going to play the cynical academic again and say they'd started off pitching we'll bring back pigeons no one was interested and everyone was like we've got loads yeah we'll try something else then but I mean pandas
how much effort should you put into conserving something that doesn't really seem like it fits in the world ever it doesn't put much effort into conserving its own like species yeah that's true I mean pandas breed like epically slowly which is part of the reason they were in such trouble in the first place but it's so hard to know what's valid like if we could do it if we could bring something back you know I know people are trying but if it was possible how would you
pick how would you decide and even should you in the first place when you know a lot of the habitat is being lost shouldn't you put the money into conserving that those spaces actually that's much much more important and keeping the species that we have that there's so many critically endangered species and it's only getting worse with the more that I mean the world population is now 8 billion and like people have to live and work and farm and we need food for all these people
you know that comes at a cost and the cost is land and space and Industry there was a fact that it came from the ipcc about climate change causing Extinction and about how many thousands of species we've lost since you know we started recording it compared to other years and it's just rapidly increased and I didn't even know there were that many species to begin with I guess a lot of that is stuff like insects and invertebrates and things you probably don't really think about that
are going extinct but I mean to pick up on what Ellie was saying about conserving habitat if no one seems that interested in actually making an effort to solve climate change which seems to be what's happening with the outcome of cop26 then is it really worth expending that effort to try and conserve environments now or is it better to put that effort into making a better future like 20 30 40 years down the line once we've figured out how we stabilize the climate or not our human population
growth stabilized maybe it's better to develop that technology Playing devil's advocate here because I would rather see environments protected now I completely agree I would much rather see people putting a concerted effort in governments you know actually doing something about climate change and habitat loss and all of these things now rather than invest all this money and bringing back species that have been gone I mean the thalassine is 100 years so maybe maybe that's worth it perhaps
but bringing back a mammoth or a Dodo like what benefit does that have other than sort of a vanity project and there's nowhere for it to live you know it's only gonna it's only gonna go extinct again whereas we could protect huge swains of natural environment which would then in turn protect thousands of species and the conservation would be so much more beneficial and also trees and plants and fungi and everything else it doesn't just have to be the big snazzy
marsupials and the mammals that people are interested in Birds fish no it kind of sounds like we're saying things are picked based on how cute and fuzzy or how sexy they are and maybe the criteria should be on how does this actually help the environment it should be a more more scientific way of looking at it I mean climate change is making species go extinct there is that is the truth there is no hiding there and without remedying something we're just going to
lose more and more species it's just the way that the the world is going so yeah it seems the extinction seems a bit too far ahead you know if we had lots of stable habitat and you know we'd sorted out climate change to the point where it wasn't so bad or the implications wouldn't be so awful and it the climate wasn't rapidly accelerating and it wasn't 40 degrees in England in August you know you could then think okay maybe I'll I'll give this a try but at the
moment things are in crisis we can't really afford to you know mess around with DNA when everything is is dying as it is hmm but then to character out my own argument about protecting habitats going back to my geology background so there have been mass extinctions in the past and they predated any sort of human activity a lot of them and the world has survived it's been they look different but this wouldn't be the first time lots of things have gone extinct I suppose
it's one of those where did it happen naturally or did it happen because of human activity and that's what I want to wreck on a little about what I said is actually habitat loss and that's from deforestation another habitat loss and so it's not just climate change it's just humans being on the earth and taking up a lot of space I guess it kind of goes back to our space travel conversation whether we should Endeavor into into space and explore it or should we try and solve problems on Earth first
so it's always like are we planning for the future or for vanity or or should we be planning for now and trying to solve problems now have we done anything like this have we have we managed to you know bring a yeah obviously not quite bring in an extinct species back to life and apart from reanimating it in Jurassic Park have we done anything like this in real life so there's examples of species that have undergone severe population crashes that have then had a lot of
human intervention to breed them back to like you know bigger levels higher population numbers so I think um I think it's called like the Mauritius Kestrel I'm trying to remember now but basically there's populations of animals have crashed to you know eight individuals nine individuals and then have been brought back through conservation methods and you know heavily managed processes and programs to bring back those individuals so yeah in theory we have done it for living species but
we've never done it for something that's been like actually extinct all members performance did yeah no I guess a similar thing we were talking about rewilding as well weren't we so bringing beavers back to England is another example of this is the scenario where species a species used to be here not so long ago and that environment still exists for them that evolutionary Niche hasn't yet been filled so we could bring beavers from elsewhere and grow that population but I do Wonder though did
they bring was it like five beavers or something somewhere down south yeah Devon I think Devin Dorset they have fevers now is I enough to ensure genetic diversity or how important is genetic diversity to ensure this the growth and survival of a species in short we don't really know basically when I was a zoology undergrad we got told there's like a spiral so you have you know decreasing population is like the start of the spiral and then it gets all the way down and then the genetic diversity
is only nine or eight or whatever but you can breed them back and in theory they will all be horrifically inbred like their genetics will be so close that it would in theory cause problems in genetic mutations but it doesn't necessarily always happen that way so yeah I don't know so much about it but from what I was told it's bad but it's not so bad that it can't work sometimes if that makes sense I feel like Emma's background Emma's physicist that sometimes appears on this uh
podcast and her interest is in biophysics and she mentioned something about genetics and non-linearity in the Multiverse episode and I think that was something to do with a small change in genetics can have a big change in the animal that is made so you could have a little tiny bit of genetic variation and that would be enough to make the species evolve I think but she can probably explain it better than I can but I did wonder if that played a part in this that was something I was thinking about
was I was reading about how you know purebred dogs and they get pedigrees and they start getting hereditary diseases vets have been advocating for actually trying to mix the breeding a bit to reduce that chance and they've been successful with sort of like golden retrievers and those type of dog oh obviously we have a bigger some simple size or even we have a bigger population but maybe yeah matching genome sequencing with a little bit of Randomness from physics do you think
maybe when you take them enough that they won't be clones of each other it's been done like it is possible there's there's living proof that you can have a small population and breed them so much that you can get a much bigger population and those animals are still breeding and they're living and in theory that they're not suffering from you know genetic mutations or those problems that you see in um like pugs and things like that when their noses are so squished in and they
can't breathe but I think also that is brooding for traits as well so people have bred those dogs to look like that on purpose when in a animal context in a wildlife context you're breathing just to have numbers so you're not trying to select for you know longer antlers or shinier Hooves or any of that sort of thing so maybe that's part of it but yeah I don't know it is an interesting one I can't remember what that spiral is called and it's driving me mad but if there's any zoology
students listening you'll know I want to say death spiral but I'm not a zoology student it's probably not right it might be the extinction spiral I I I'll have to look it up after I feel like that is quite a compelling reason to do the research though to figure out more about genetics on that level yeah absolutely we don't know what we don't know right so and we don't know what we'll learn we can only learn more yeah so we've gone back from saying we shouldn't be extinct
at to going back to yeah might as well try see see what we learn so are we back on the you know we're concerned about whether we can and uh not whether we should it's that Jurassic Park reference I've been waiting for that whole episode what was the name of Jeff goldblum's character because I always think it's Jeff Goldblum but that really makes sense but it was his character that said scientists were so preoccupied whether they whether or not they could if they
didn't stop to think if they should when they created the these dinosaurs that started to breed because they fills in the genetic material with frog DNA that can spontaneously change sex but that's the thing isn't it like that's the that's the that's not quite as uh as far as that but yeah if you're filling in DNA with bits and things how much is it even the species that you're trying to be extinct yeah and if we don't know what we're going to get because we've already said
we don't know exactly we're going to find out should we do it I like how we've just flip flopping back and forth we're not going to come to a conclusion are we well I ended this podcast thinking I'm definitely against bringing about the fantasy and the extinction and I still think I am but I would like to see what comes of it because my opinion is not going to influence the tiger Research Center so give it 50 years and let's see what they've discovered what about you Laura have you have you
settled on a I haven't I I really haven't the research scientist in me says yes do this research because we don't know what we'll learn but then the Practical nature lover in me says don't do it because you should be conserving habitats I guess the question to ask is how much money is being spent on that research and what else could it be used to do and how much of a tangible benefit would that have would that make any more of a difference or is it just like a drop in the ocean should we look at
tangible benefit when it comes to Nature and biodiversity is that something we should measure in that sense of like how much monetary benefit will we get from it or how many species will we get back because what if that one species was actually really valuable yeah again this is this is what I don't you know I guess it's one of those things you'd have to just try and see so that the the conservationists are in pretty much the same boat as the geneticists in that
case we don't have all the answers so keep doing the research if it helps you to put a figure on it the tiger lab was given a 3.6 million dollar donation to start with whether they've since received more donations I'm sure but that was the initial point so it's not really that much in terms of in research budgets no no is that US dollars I guess yeah yeah I'm sure the FBI as well was involved at one point there's like an FBI like subset that invested money in
this oh and that can't have been just to bring back thylacines that must have been something to do with genetic material to solve crimes yeah I think they were mainly interested in how far the technology could go rather than any like investment in bringing back a thylacine or a mammoth or a Dodo or anything like that maybe loads of benefits to society whether or not we agree with them you know we don't know could actually be very good for Crime investigation bring back Tigers
they will solve crime that should be the tagline of the tiger lab -solving tigers that aren't actually Tigers exactly tiger in Disguise or super pill in the sky oh it's not the FBI it's the CIA the CIA are investing in mammal mammoth Resurrection technology so there you go oh and I think we all decided we're against resurrecting The Mamas because there isn't a suitable habitat for them really they existed in like glaciations so it should be really cold for them and that
is not what climate models are predicting yeah but I think yeah there is the same principle they did it not to have a mammoth living but to see see what the technology could be could be achieved I think that sounds like a good place to leave it we've kind of gone all around what is extinction what is de-extinction and what benefits if there are benefits or what do we not know about it I hope everyone enjoyed this conversation it's been fascinating and also very weird
yeah I hope people enjoyed this episode I know it's gone to some weird and wonderful places and I can't wait to have another one night this in a few weeks time so if you also want to get involved and share some strange ideas about whether or not we should do extinct animals if you have a recommendation of a an animal species to bring back then you can find us on Twitter I hate saying actually because now Twitter's gone to Neon musk Camp people can find us other places yeah
we're around if you find something interesting to share with us you can find us somehow somewhere on the internet um and we look forward to hearing from you the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're
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