[applause] >>NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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. [laughter] >>TYSON: 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. [laughter] >>TYSON: 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. [applause] >>TYSON: 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. [applause] >>GEORGE CHURCH: Great seeing you. >>TYSON: Thanks, man. Up in Boston, Massachusetts. Next, Greg Kaebnick. Greg, welcome. Alright. [applause] >>TYSON: 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. [applause] >>TYSON: 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: 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. [applause] >>TYSON: So, Hank is a Professor of Law at Stanford University. [laughter] >>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. >>GREELY: 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. >>HANK GREELY: A positive. [laughter] >>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: 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: 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... [applause] >>TYSON: 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— >>NEIL DEGRASSE 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. >>NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. >>ROSS 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. >>HANK 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. >>BETH 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? >> GREG: Yes. >>TYSON: OK. Absolutely. I mean, it's... Morality is culture. >> NEIL: It’s culture. >> GREG: Yes. >> NEIL: 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. [applause] >>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. [applause] >>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? [applause] >>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: No, no, I know, [inaudible] wasn’t
my issue. >>SHAPIRO: [You have] clean floorboards. >>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— >>TYOSN: 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] >> HANK: 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. >> BETH: 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] [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 been
engineered requires approval from 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. [applause] >>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. [applause] 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 dependent on the natural world
and more on our own inventiveness. >>TYSON: Ross, thanks for those concluding notes. [applause] Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking
our panel. [applause] 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: Hello. >>TYSON: Go ahead, right here. >> AUDIENCE: Yes. >>TYSON: Can you see where my hand is pointing? Right here, yes, go. >> AUDIENCE: 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? [laughter] [applause] >>KAEBNICK: I pers- >>TYSON: Good question. [applause] >>TYSON: Greg, why don't you take that. [laughter] >>AUDIENCE: 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: Homo ignoramus. >> NEIL: Homo ignoramus, yeah. [laughter] 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. [snapping] [laughter] >>TYSON: Are you there, Greg? [laughter] >>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: 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. >>CHRUCH: I don't know if I deserve it. [laughter] >>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: 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: 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. >> NEIL: At the expense of others. And how about the environmental memory
that is embedded in a species? >>BETH: 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: 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. >> BETH: 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] >> NEIL: 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: 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: 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: You’re missing my point. [laughter] My point is not the suit. My point is— >>TYSON: Sorry, I got distracted. You're right. >> AUDIENCE: you're creating a situation
that is contrary to what a population generally agrees with. >> NEIL: It’s an unintended consequence,
right? Ross? >>MACPHEE: Yeah, I’m not entirely clearly,
sir. You mean using microorganisms to produce our
food? >> AUDIENCE: Right, right, and all of that,
yeah. >>MACPHEE: As opposed to agribusiness
like we have in this country now? >> AUDIENCE: 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. [applause] >>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 online, could you just
come forward? Just come forward. Yeah, no,
to the microphone here. [laughter] >>TYSON: Oh you can, yeah, [inaudible] come here,
come here, come here. Here. How are you doing? How old are you? >> KID: Nine. >>TYSON: You're nine? You're nine? >> KID: 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. [laughter] 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. >> KID: 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 protect and care about 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? [laughter] >>CHURCH: I don’t think— >>KID: Yes. >>TYSON: Yes. Okay, thank you. [applause] >>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 online, but I’m only going
to take two more questions just because we’re running
long here. Right over there, yes, go ahead. >> AUDIENCE: 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. >> GREG: You can get a kit for 150 bucks. >> NEIL: Yeah. Okay. [laughter] >>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: 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. [laughter] It was—yeah, well, no. Yeah, it was—
I’ll be over at the 92nd Street Y, doing the book talk there. >> AUDIENCE: Okay, now for the panel. >>TYSON: Yeah. Okay. [laughter] >> AUDIENCE: 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. [applause] >>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? [laughter] >>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. [laughter] 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. [applause] And thanks again for our brilliant panel. [applause]
