Should we bring back extinct animals?

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This is the download of BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

It was first broadcast on the 10th of October 2024.

Hello, this week, how to win a Nobel Prize, and as one company says it will bring back the woolly mammoth by 2028, we ask, even if we can, whether we should.

But first, the weather.

Hurricane Milton has just smashed into the Florida coast, causing destruction and power outages.

It's also delayed the plans to find alien life in our solar system.

NASA's Europa Clipper was on the verge of launching about an hour from now, but it's been grounded due to the hurricane.

When it does launch, Clipper will travel to Europa, one of Jupiter's many moons, often dubbed the ocean beyond the Earth, to assess whether it is habitable.

Can it support life?

NASA astrobiologist Brittany Schmidt was ready to go at Cape Canaveral in Florida, but is instead hiding from the hurricane in Atlanta.

Brittany, lovely to speak to you and very glad that you're safe.

What's the latest on the launch?

Thanks so much.

It's nice to be here.

Well, we've been delayed until after the hurricane passes, so we expect sometime this weekend for the launch to open.

Great.

Now back to Clipper.

The aim of this mission, it's not going to land on this moon, is it?

No, so actually Clipper is kind of an interesting way of doing planetary exploration.

We're going to go out and we're going to orbit Jupiter, but we're going to use Jupiter's gravity and Ganymede's gravity and Callisto's gravity to get in and make about 50 close passes of Europa.

We're kind of taking the next step in exploring this particular ocean world.

So the exploration of Europa goes back, I mean, 415 years ago to Galileo even.

But from there, we sent the Voyager spacecrafts in the late 70s, followed by Galileo, and we got these closer and closer kind of understanding of what Europa might be like.

But we've always wanted to go back and send a dedicated mission to understanding what's happening inside of its ice shell and try to detect what's really going on in the ocean below.

And so that's what Europa Clipper is going to do.

And so as soon as we launch, then we've got about six years to wait on it to get to Jupiter and start its tour down to Europa.

That's a long wait.

Just a little bit.

And once it gets there, what kind of science will you be using to answer the question of habitability?

Yeah, one of the greatest things about this mission is that it's designed with kind of synergistic measurements made by a bunch of different instruments.

So we'll have cameras, spectrometers, radar instruments for the first time.

We'll have ways of studying the magnetic field.

And so, all of these instruments together give us kind of a picture of how Europa works holistically, which will help us understand: does it have the right ingredients for life, but also does it have the energy we'd expect to be able to support a biosphere?

Okay, at this point, I think we should dig a little into the environment on and maybe in Europa.

So it's cold, right?

Absolutely.

So Europa is about the size of the Earth's moon, but on the outside is about 10 to 30 kilometer ice shell and a hundred kilometer ocean.

So imagine our moon, but with super Antarctica on top.

We also know that because of gravity between Jupiter and its moons, Europa has what we call tidal energy.

So as it moves around Jupiter, it's being stretched and compressed, and that heats up its interior and gives it energy to keep going.

And that's kept it having geology and active processes that we can see on its surface, probably for the history of the solar system, just like the Earth.

So that means that underneath this icy crust, you think it's not ice all the way through.

There's possibly liquid under there, and that might be a habitat for life.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so with the Galileo spacecraft in the late 90s, 90s, we detected the ocean for the very first time.

This is the first ocean we detected beyond the Earth.

And so when we go back with Clipper, we're going to study that in detail.

And we're going to use things like our ice penetrating radar to be able to see how the ice shell is changing over time and looking for water inside the ice shell as well.

And these are places that we are considering as potential habitats for life.

And when we say life,

what kind of life?

Well, we don't really know.

We're probably talking about, you know, much smaller forms of life, but really it's an open question.

So Clipper itself isn't going to go detect life, but what it's looking for is, does Europa work the way we might expect it would.

So is there the right kind of chemistry that might be able to support such life?

So the other really important thing is that Clipper will kind of lay the groundwork for maybe going back with a lander and looking for life deep inside the ice.

And with each next stage, that's another decade of research at least, right?

I mean, you've been working on this mission for years.

Yes, exactly.

You don't get involved in space exploration for an instant answer.

So I started with the mission when I was a graduate student, and it's been through, you know, kind of a couple of reorganizations that this is the right mission.

And so that's the one we're sending.

And that should hopefully, you know, launch a thousand ships, perhaps, if we get the right information when we get out to Europa.

So this mission must be quite personal for you.

I mean, you even helped give it a name, right?

Yes, indeed.

It's one of those kind of life and career-defining things to be a part of a mission of this scale.

Yeah, we worked on an orbiter concept and then, you know, we needed a name.

And so Europa Clipper came to the top.

So NASA was excited about it and it kind of gave us our ocean theme and we're on our way.

Can I ask why Europa's held such a fascination for you, Brittany?

I mean it's the first ocean beyond the Earth and when you think about how our planet has evolved over time.

You know, we've had four billion years of an ocean here on the Earth.

We think life either emerged from the ocean or in pockets of water.

And so that's been evolving over time.

And when you think about europa the same has been true and this place is is very familiar to me i do a lot of work in antarctica and that has kind of allowed me to think about a planet that's covered in ice even though it's kind of a strange part of our own planet and so it feels very personal in that way The other thing is I mentioned earlier Galileo, the person.

So Galileo built the first telescope and one of the things he did was to point it at the Jupiter system.

And what he saw were the moons moving around Jupiter and it told us literally that we're not the center of the universe.

And so you think if we were to find the first evidence of life beyond Earth in the Jupiter system, I just feel like it would be poetic justice.

I think it would just be amazing.

Well, thank you, NASA astrobiologist Brittany Schmidt, and good luck for the launch.

Thanks very much.

Now, for at least half a million years, woolly mammoths roamed the Earth until they vanished for goods nearly 4,000 years ago.

But what if we could bring them back?

That may sound a bit Jurassic Park, but one US-based company, Colossal Biosciences, claims to be working on doing just that, and within the next few years.

CEO of the company, Ben Lam, and Dr.

Tori Herridge, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Sheffield, joined me earlier to discuss the hows, the whys, and the shouldwees.

So Ben, what exactly are you doing?

Colossal is the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.

So, what we're doing is we're leveraging synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and computational biology to bring species back from the past, to inspire the public, to build technologies that can help conservation and even human healthcare, as well as rewild them and help replenish lost ecosystems and degraded ecosystems.

Tori, as a paleontologist or mammoth expert, how do you feel about this project?

Well, complex emotions.

So, Ben and I go way back to before the start to Colossal.

He actually invited me to be part of the team, the Scientific Advisory Board.

Eventually I said no, not because I particularly have any problems with the company per se, but because I think we need to talk about it a lot more before we make any big decisions.

And I guess my sticking points come down to the how it's done maybe rather than the why it's done.

So let's do that now.

Ben, when we say bringing back the woolly mammoth, that's not strictly what you're doing, right?

How do you actually do this?

Yeah, so the way the world defines the extinction is just broken.

It's not possible to clone from a dead cell currently.

I don't like to use the word impossible, but what it is possible is to identify lost genes in biodiversity that drive physical attributes that have been lost to times that are in that elephant lineage, bring them back, build Arctic-adapted elephants that can then actually survive in a much colder climate and can survive in a place without human-elephant conflict.

So for us, the first thing you had to do is actually take ancient DNA to actually build a reference genome for the mammoth.

And then once you understand what genes really made a mammoth a mammoth, you start to engineer those into actually Asian elephant cells.

And then you actually get to a point that you have a mammoth cell or a mammoth-like cell, if you will.

And then you engineer that into a host egg cell.

And there's a myriad of ways you can do that.

Our first animals will be actually leveraging actual surrogate animals.

But then long term, we actually have a 17-person team that's working right now on artificial wombs.

I mean, I think this is all really great, right?

It's lovely to chat about it.

Every single single step in that process is fascinating.

I'm sensing a butt.

Yeah, what strikes me is that there's like every step in that process, it's presented as though it's almost there.

And we don't know which genes do what for which aspect of elephant biology.

That's actually not true.

You're certain you know exactly which section of DNA will code for, say, a woolly coat.

And it will work.

I think we wouldn't say it for humans.

So let me answer your question.

I can tell you definitively that we have identified the core genes that drive different phenotypes in mammoths, including conferring cold tolerance.

So things like how nerve endings work in extreme colds, how hemoglobin is produced at negative 40, and how we can produce both a subcutaneous fat layer and the shaggy coat that the mammoths all know and love.

How did you know that?

I mean, Tori's making a valid point.

How do you know that?

So what we've done is we've been able to create what's called induced pluripotent stem cells.

So these are cells that you can then differentiate into different types of lineages.

We've then been able to take those stem cells and program them into specific types of tissue types and test those outside of an animal, just in cells in a lab.

We've also said very clearly that we do not have a mammoth.

Just to be clear, there's no secret mammoth.

Like Colossal does not have a secret mammoth.

But I do believe that we are on track for our 2028 goal.

So Bane, you've got your genome sorted.

You're absolutely convinced, you know, based on just the activity of DNA in cells in dishes in labs, that that definitely means that's exactly how those genes are going to manifest themselves in the physical appearance of an embryo and then a fetus and then a fully grown thing, which is we don't know.

I'm amazed you can say that.

I just want to reiterate this idea that the mammoth hasn't physically been alive for 4,000 years.

So I'm not clear when you say you've got your stem cells, which aren't the same thing as full animals, how you can know.

I mean, it's what Tori was saying, how can you know that bits of the gene that you've picked will actually code for the bits that you want?

You're correct.

You cannot tell that from a stem cell.

But what you can do is you can do a series of different tests on those stem cells.

You can differentiate those stem cells into different tissue types that will then confer what you're looking for if you are able to test those.

And we've been able to test out our models to ensure that we believe that the core gene pathways that drive things like, you know, hair, let's just focus on hair for a second, are able to produce hair in lab.

Okay, so you're saying, Ben, by 2028, you're going to have, if not a woolly mammoth, then a live, quite hairy elephant.

And Tori, you're saying not realistic.

Well, we'll see.

I mean, if it's happening, I guess you'll be implanting the embryo, I guess, around February 2026.

elephant's got a 20 to 22 month pregnancy.

So let's say you want something born by December 31st, 2027, to have it ready for 28.

We may miss it.

I mean, I think we're on track.

We feel like we're on track.

What I will tell you is the mammoth will not be the first species that is the extinct and I will definitively tell you that.

What do you mean?

We are working on the dodo, and then we're also working on the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine.

I think it's highly likely one of those could come first.

The critical thing for me is that please, you will not implant an embryo into a surrogate dam, one or more of, without really, really, really thinking very carefully about whether or not this is in the interest of those surrogates.

It's fascinating, but I think it isn't worth it.

Don't do it.

So we work with American Humane.

They've certified our facilities.

They've certified how we are treating animals.

They've certified everything.

Ethics and animal welfare is absolutely critical to what we're doing.

We absolutely want these technologies to be applied to conservation and to help elephants.

If we go talk to actual elephant conservationists, they will tell you that the technologies that Colossal is investing in and inventing and giving to the world are critical to saving endangered species.

It's more about that kind of idea of checks and processes because we know, we know that elephant reproduction is not straightforward.

I'm glad you're helping fund the biorescue stuff.

But I mean, it's well known that the problem with elephant reproductive systems is that they have very long vaginas, it's hard to get things in.

And if you're going to be transferring an embryo into it, that's the sort of tricky bit that will require probably some kind of device.

Possibly surgical.

and the monitoring from that point onwards becomes

risky.

All captive elephant pregnancies are risky.

So, you're saying, Tori, is this a risk that we don't want to take with an already endangered species?

I mean, I think it's a risk that is worth putting on an elephant to produce more elephants.

Now, whether or not it's worthwhile or the ethics are balanced enough to put that pressure, that risk on an elephant dam for something which, one, will not be its own species, it will be something new, a genetically modified species two will presumably given the end point is if everything you say is what you actually intend to do Ben rewilding of the mammoth may even mean their baby is removed from we've done everything that we've said on on schedule that we've said it so that's all I mean I can't talk about the future I can only talk about what we've delivered right because Ben

I want you I want you to talk about the future because I want to know well I want to know why you're doing this why bring back the mammoth apart from the fact it might be cool there's kind of three core reasons that we always talk about, right?

So, one, we want to build technology for conservation.

Two, we think that these big, audacious projects like bringing back the mammoth or the dodo, they inspire people, right?

Like, we have hundreds of billions of media views.

It starts a dialogue, right?

If you go talk to all of the leading elephant conservation groups, they will tell you we've brought more awareness to elephant conservation and EEHV and some of these terrible things that are plaguing elephants than the last 50 years of elephant conservation marketing.

The third is actually there's applications to human healthcare.

We will make a lot of money off of the technologies that we make.

We've spun out two technology companies.

One was a human healthcare company.

The second was plastic degradation.

We have two more in the pipe that'll come out that we think will be massively transformative.

We think those will be multi-billion dollar companies.

And then lastly is that we do want to put all these animals back into the wild in a non-managed care facility in collaboration with local partners, indigenous people groups, conservation groups, and ecologists around the world.

Tori, what's wrong with that?

Conservation?

Sounds brilliant.

I mean I think that's probably the strongest argument of all for Colossal's work which is using a poster child that gets people excited to squeeze money out of people who wouldn't normally pay for conservation.

I think for me the issue is that I think we should be talking and asking people to ask themselves why they are more excited by mammoth de-extinction than they are by elephant conservation.

And by circumventing that, maybe it works, but maybe by circumventing that, we aren't really fixing the big problem, and that's the big problem that's going to continue to plague us.

The biggest problems, really, for elephants right now, are human-elephant conflict, and by not fixing that problem, I don't think we're really going to end up in the situation that we want to be in the future because that's the big issue.

The big issue is really, I think, how we live alongside the nature that we have right now.

But Turi, wouldn't you be really excited if Ben's group did manage to make a mammoth?

Of course, I would.

I mean, this is the thing, right?

The emotional pull of it is so strong, right?

So you want Santa Ri?

Yeah, no, of course it does.

It's tempting because it would be nice to be in the mix, right?

But it's also that realization that that kind of draw, that emotional feeling, maybe isn't the right way to make a decision.

And to sit back and sort of weigh up the costs, the risks, the potential benefits at the end, I'm not convinced that the benefits outweigh the risks.

And my risks are very mundane ones.

They're very much about animal welfare and the use of elephant surrogates.

And that's why we work with American Humane and all the elephant conservation groups in the world.

But what I do want to make sure that Colossal gets the fair credit on is that we agree with her.

I'd like to comment on two things that I agree with Tori.

Number one, I really, really do believe we will hit our 2028 date.

I do.

But to Tori's point, if we don't, and it takes a little bit longer because we do it right, then that's not a bad thing.

The second thing is I completely, violently agree with Tori that there's not enough interest and not enough money going into conservation.

When we get asked, how can you help Colossal?

You know what we say?

Donate to our conservation partners.

People should be saving species now, but we do believe that it's better to have a de-extinction toolkit and not need it than not have a de-extinction toolkit and need it.

I think violent agreement might be an excellent point on which to end this discussion.

I would like to say for the record that if

that Arctic elephant ever is born, I would like it to be known known for the record that it should be called a lammoth.

And if we get any major developments on making an Elemoth, a cold-tolerant hairy elephant, a reality, then we'll let you know.

Thank you to Tori Heridge and Ben Lam.

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It's Nobel Prizes Week, and the awards have been handed out for important breakthroughs in medicinal physiology, chemistry, and physics.

These announcements have sparked many opinions about the demographics of the winners.

There were no women this year.

And there's been a bit of a social media storm after the Nobel Committee put out a tweet which said, Congratulations to our 2024 laureate, Victor Ambros.

This morning he celebrated the news of his prize with his colleague and wife, Rosalind Candy Lee, who was also the first author on the 1993 cell paper cited by the Nobel Committee.

Some angry people felt she had been snubbed in some way.

Here's Rosalind herself.

Scientists just care that their work means something.

You know,

a true scientist.

But we just want to be known that we did that 1993 paper and it really made an impact and it opened up so much for other people.

That's what the satisfaction is and the two of us, you know, did it together.

On Inside Science, this got us thinking who wins Nobel Prizes, why, and what's my best chance of gaming the system?

Well, Kerry Smith, an editor at Nature, has crunched the data on all 646 science winners and joins me now.

Kerry, hello.

Hi, pleasure to be here.

So, what are my chances?

Well, let's put to one side, shall we, the minor inconvenience that you're not a working scientist right now?

Details, details.

So if we hadn't fallen at that first hurdle, I'm afraid it's still a bit of a long shot based on the past data.

So the vast majority of prize winners have been men.

The average age is about 58, so I suppose there's still time for us both.

And on average winners do wait a long time for their prize, about two decades from doing their noble worthy work to actually winning the prize.

Neither of us are quite living in the right place, although we are in the sort of second runner-up location.

Most prize winners,

you should probably be born in North America basically and do your work there or if you weren't born there you should move.

And low and lower and middle income countries have yielded very few prize winners.

Ten of the science prizes to date have gone to residents of those countries.

Oh and by the way do you know any previous Nobel winners?

I mean I've interviewed a bunch of them.

Does that count?

Could help.

But I haven't worked with them.

Oh that's a shame.

I think it's probably being in their lab that really counts.

Oh that's a shame.

So let's talk about how people are nominated.

So, the committees don't give all of this away, but basically, the prizes are decided by several Swedish academic bodies.

The main criterion is: you know, have you conferred the greatest benefit to humankind?

They do rely on nominations to gather a pool of potentials.

You can't nominate yourself, but you can nominate other people if you've won a prize before, if you're a professor at some Scandinavian universities, a member of some of the awarding bodies.

And scientists from several hundred other universities around the world are invited to nominate on sort of a rolling basis.

Okay, so previous winners get to nominate.

That explains one of the fascinating stats, which is most of the winners are connected to one of the previous winners.

Yeah, so this was based on an analysis by an academic at Sussex University, and it looks at kind of Nobel laureates' family trees, if you like, not their actual families in most cases, but their

scientific family.

Yeah, their genealogies.

And it is an open question how much the nomination process affects who gets a prize.

But one thing that's really strongly conveyed by this analysis, which was published earlier this year, they looked at how closely these Nobel laureates cluster together in the same institutions, or they had the same supervisor, or they shared a supervisor, or a mentor, or a student.

And there's really strong clustering.

So they looked at over 700 researchers who'd won prizes, and 702 of them were connected into this big sprawling family tree.

And only 32 of the laureates had literally no connection to this big network, which, you know, could happen if Nobel laureates historically have been more likely to nominate people they know.

Or I guess more optimistically, it could just happen if excellence begets excellence and they choose great people to work with.

And then down the line, those people also produce Nobel-worthy work.

Yes.

So this year's winners, thoughts?

Well, based on the previous data, they fit the pattern shockingly closely in a lot of cases.

As you mentioned, there are no women here.

That's unfortunately a trend that we have come to expect.

For the medicinal physiology prize, two US men in their 70s.

They discovered tiny segments of RNA that control gene expression.

They are a little older than the average winner, but they did have to wait kind of a long time.

They've been waiting like three decades for the prize since they did their work in the 90s two men for the physics prize that was for machine learning one born in the uk and working in canada and one who was born and stayed in the us so that's a very typical pattern and three men two in the uk and one in the us for the chemistry prize for protein structure design and prediction although two of them it has to be said are below the average age by you know a pretty decent margin and i just want to say kerry that the nobel prize committee told you and i quote that they work continuously to improve the nomination process and to broaden nominations with respect to gender, nationality, and topics.

But what does all of this tell us about the shape of science and research?

Well, I suppose the Nobels often tell us what big discoveries decades ago have had a big impact on science or on humanity.

So they can be a bit of a time capsule.

Although, as we've seen from the chemistry prize this year that went to Alpha Fold and to David Baker for his work on protein design, and last year's prize to the originators of mRNA vaccines.

You know, they do sometimes react pretty quickly if the implications have become clear quickly.

But there is often a delay.

That could be one reason that they just are failing to capture the current diversity in terms of who is doing really good science around the world.

And I suppose what they also don't reflect very well is that so much of science today is collaborative and Nobels can only be awarded to a maximum of three people.

I think it used to be one actually when they started dishing these prizes out.

Well, exactly.

So a paper coming out of CERN is going to have about 3,000 names on it.

So who gets to pick, I guess?

I mean, is there a serious point here about either changing the Nobels or

instituting something different that accepts how science actually works?

Yeah, it would be something that a lot of people could get behind.

And there have been calls for the Nobel committees to tweak or change the way they do things.

I mean it occurs to me that there's some important topics to us right now that don't really fit these quite clearly delineated boundaries very easily.

So people working in climate change or renewable energy or loads of medical sub-disciplines that have made huge differences to people's lives.

It's maybe quite hard to scoop a metal if you work in some of these areas.

Maybe somebody else could set up a prize.

That's the kind of thing that's been done in the past to recognise areas where

they don't really get a look in in a Nobel world.

And I mean I think it's quite useful that it allows all of us to have a week where we even talk about things like microRNA at all or protein folding.

Kerry Smith, thank you so much for coming on to Inside Science.

Thanks for having me.

And you can find Kerry's very scroll-worthy data crunching at nature.com.

And if you want to hear a fuller interview with Nobel Prize winner Victor Ambros and Rosalind Lee, you can do so on our sister programme, Science in Action, on the BBC World Service, at 8.30pm this evening.

Until next week, bye from me.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston, and Gerry Holt.

Technical production was by Gareth Tyrrell.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West in partnership with the Open University.

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