How Close Are We to Resurrecting Extinct Species?

Key Takeaways

[Music] the passenger pigeon the gastric brooding frog a woolly mammoth they all have one thing in common they're extinct dead is a dodo if you will in fact scientists estimate that five billion species have come and gone off this planet but what if we could bring them back what if extinction didn't have to be a permanent thing right now scientists are using revolutionary new genetic techniques to try and bring back some of these species for example the woolly mammoth could again roam the northern Tundra it sounds like science fiction but it could happen so how close are we to be extinction [Laughter] [Music] the woolly mammoth is an impressive specimen it was the king of the tundra for millions of years then it rather suspiciously disappears most scientists think it's likely that they were hunted to extinction most of the species that have gone extinct in recent years is because we've destroyed the habitat we've introduced species or we've killed them outright like the passenger pigeons and it was hard to imagine at the time that this bird species that's so abundant could actually be hunted to extinction but we managed to do that while it's normal for species to die out over time because of evolution or cataclysmic events some scientists think that the earth is now going through a new age of mass extinction called the Anthropocene or Holocene extinction caused by you guessed it us animals plants and insects are dying out at a rate of a thousand to ten thousand times faster than ever before with dozens of species going extinct every single day some scientists estimate that as many as 30 to 50% of all species could be headed towards extinction by the end of the century but again what if extinction didn't have to be a thing what if we could bring species back and will to do that we'd need DNA an egg cell and a birthing mom which is why Jurassic Park will never be a thing never the dinosaurs are so old that all those chemicals have been turned to rock there's no source of DNA that we have right now for dinosaurs so there's no way that we could create a dinosaur because we don't know what its genome look like can't get dinosaur DNA so no Jurassic Park on the bench but we can get DNA dating from tissue and fossils from organisms from 10,000 years ago to a hundred thousand years ago so the woolly mammoth is an active project that's right the woolly mammoth could be a thing again mammoths are very different than dinosaurs because scientists are able to go up to the Arctic and find falling chunks of earth that still have frozen mammoths in them and those have DNA and that's where scientists are going to get the DNA from the mammoths in order to reconstruct its genome and that's why mammoths are different than dinosaurs because we have that DNA and they're closer than you think to bringing them back so right now there are cells dividing and living in a little petri dish at Harvard that have mammoth mutations we have a mammoth genome we have mammoth habitat we have a good motivation for doing it we just need the filler in between who's making the mammoth whoa whoa whoa Ben we're not quite there yet we've got the DNA but it's not exactly perfect DNA degrades over time and has a half-life of about five hundred and twenty-one years meaning we need to fix any mammoth DNA before we can clone it cloning is the closest thing we have to reviving extinct animals right now and we're not bad at it remember Dolly the sheep now we regularly clone cattle pigs camels frogs Lab Rats we could even clone your pet dog now even with perfect DNA though cloning is really hard but they can make DNA more perfect by editing it the revolutionary technology that may considering the extinction possible which also opens up all those new genetic rescue capabilities is what's known as precise genome editing so it's using things like CRISPR cast nine or talons or mega towels in case you haven't heard of it CRISPR cast nine is an editing tool for DNA it's able to go through millions of strands of DNA locate a specific genome and then remove or add to it indy extinct ting the mammoth scientists are using the DNA of an Asian elephant and replacing parts of it with mammoth DNA to make a mammoth and a name I hate so we have cloning technology we've got elephant and mammoth DNA that we can edit together and the plan is to try to artificially inseminate an Asian elephant mom to carry the baby but just because you bring back one mammoth that doesn't mean de-extinction de-extinction by definition is bringing back a whole species and just because we can bring a woolly mammoth back I think sometimes people think about the extinction like Oh wouldn't it be cool to have a passenger pigeon or a California grizzly or you know some other species but it's not just about that species and it being cool it's sometimes it's about those species have a role in the ecosystem which is now empty so a great example that a lot of people are aware of is wolves in Yellowstone so recently wolves have returned to Yellowstone and we've seen huge changes in the ecosystem in Yellowstone that people are attributing to the Wolves so if we do put a mammoth back into the world what would happen where would it go what would it eat if mammoths ate up all the grass what would happen to the other herbivores on the tundra if the Wolves of Yellowstone can change the course of a river what could a herd of mammoths do I'm not sure I'm comfortable with releasing weird hairy Asian elephants into the tundra once you have your animals you breed them up in captivity condition them for the wild put them back into the wild and that's where you start getting into all of your ethical questions of whether or not we should or should not be doing this wooly mammoths have been extinct and one question is has that ecosystem already become something different and when you put woolly mammoths back are you going to end up having detrimental impacts on things that are living there now there are other animals that we might bring back first like the humble passenger pigeon we hunted it to extinction and changed the forests of North America oak trees need the pigeon for regeneration as well as for controlling the underbrush which is a major fire hazard if we D extinct the passenger pigeon we fill a hole in the ecosystem a hole that we put there there's a portfolio of extinct animals that you could potentially bring back the challenge is trying to figure out which of those are going to have the biggest positive impacts and then working on those first so in less than 10 years we could de extinct the passenger pigeon and maybe someday we'll have woolly mammoths roaming the tundra or even sea dodo birds waddling around how close are we to de-extinction really really close but just because we can doesn't mean we should you can keep how close early from going extinct to by subscribing just tap that seeker symbol extinction doesn't have to be forever but that doesn't mean we should encourage him did you know the border wall between Mexico and the US is causing extinction - yeah find out more here and thanks a lot for watching seeker