The Resurrection Quest

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Welcome back to Curious Cases.

Now, this is an episode that is

number something in your feed, but it's the first one that Adam and I have done of the new year.

And as a result, there are several moments during this recording where one or both of our brains just ground to an absolute halt.

Yes, you'll see when, with the introduction of a new character, which I think should be made a returning character.

I'm not going to say who it is now, but when it happens, you'll know.

So you'll know.

Yeah, on with the show.

A short but sweet question for today's Curious case.

Can you bring back an extinct species?

This one sent in to us by Miko Campbell to curiouscases at bbc.co.uk.

and I reckon this is going to keep us going for a good half an hour because Adam, this has got genetics, it's got evolution, it's got ancient DNA.

What do you think?

Can you bring back an extinct species?

Yes, well my considered view on this is that projects to bring back extinct species are unethical, unscientific, expensive vanity projects that should be banned or mocked.

Probably both.

Okay, so I'll put you down as don't know, shall I?

Come on, though.

Woolly Mammoths Back from the Dead or T-Rexes.

Are you not a fan of Jurassic Park?

Massive fan of the first Jurassic Park, but you remember the whole point of those films?

Is that it all went terribly wrong for everyone involved?

No, I think the point of the films was that dinosaurs are awesome.

No!

Okay, then.

Okay, fun place.

Let's see if we can shift that dial a little, Dr.

Rutherford, because we have got some expert soothing advice for you.

Because we are joined in the studio by Dr.

Hen Picture, author of a book on the new science of extinction, Bring Back the King.

Now, Helen, this isn't totally science fiction here, is is it?

Haven't they successfully brought animals back from the brink before?

Well, there was an animal called a Bicardo or the Pyrenean ibex, and it was this goat with incredible curved horns that lived on the Pyrenees in between France and Spain.

And it was there for thousands and thousands of years where it was doing really, really well.

And then we spotted its big horns and we thought they'd look amazing on our living room walls.

And people went out and started shooting it.

Numbers declined, kept on going.

The species is in free fall until the year 2000, beginning of the year 2000, there was just one left.

So this is an elderly adult female goat called Celia and the scientists realised they had to do something to try and save the species but they didn't know what.

So they went out and they caught Celia.

She's like on this vertical cliff, so they go out and they catch her, no mean feet.

They put a radio tracking collar around her neck and they take a couple of cells, some biopsy samples.

And then, a short while afterwards, Celia died.

That's the end of this bucado, right?

Extinct.

Game over.

So, that's what we're all taught.

But the scientists who had taken the biopsy sample

realised they could do something different with it.

So, you're aware of the technology that was used to make Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.

So, they took these cells that they had from Celia and they used them for cloning.

So, they made a little clone of the Bucardo.

They implanted it into the uterus of a surrogate goat, so a kind of a regular domestic goat species, and there were quite a few failed attempts.

But eventually, one of these little embryos inside the surrogate goat developed all the way through and was delivered by C-section.

Celia 2.

Celia reborn.

So that is an impressive story.

We are in the age of cloning since...

since Dolly.

What are the ingredients?

What's the recipe where you need to get from cilia to cilia 2?

First of all, what you need is a cell from the extinct species.

So these are better taken whilst that species is still alive, right?

They're in better nick.

So that could be a skin cell, for example, which is what happened with cilia.

And then you take the DNA from inside that cell.

So this is element number one.

Then you need element number two, which is an egg cell from a closely related species.

So in this case, a domestic goat.

So then you take the DNA from cilia, you put it into the empty egg cell which has had its own DNA removed, give it a little jolt of electricity to make this cell start dividing.

This is in a culture dish.

And the cell starts dividing in culture.

You get a little embryo.

And then the next thing you need is a surrogate animal.

So you can borrow their reproductive biology.

So in this case, it was a domestic goat.

The embryo was implanted into the uterus of the domestic goat, who then carried it to term and gave birth to it.

How does a domestic goat feel about carrying an Iberian ibex inside it?

I'm not entirely sure.

So it wasn't a regular domestic goat, it was sort of like a slightly wild, absolutely livid

goat subspecies that was quite

carefully related, closely related to the Bicardo.

I don't know if people ask the goat directly,

but yeah, it was apparently a fairly normal pregnancy.

Well, this will come up later on in the programme, I'm sure, but still that is an impressive impressive story, isn't it?

How's that goat doing now, the Celia Mark II?

Ah, so it sounded like an amazing comeback, and it was for all of seven minutes.

Seven minutes.

Seven.

Seven minutes.

So this little cloned picardo was born by C-section, then it started to develop really severe breathing problems, and there were some really high-tech vets in the room.

They all tried to resuscitate, revive this little animal, but they couldn't.

So this very first de-extinct animal sadly died just seven minutes after it was gone.

I feel bad now for taking the mick out of Celia.

That isn't what I would class as a success story in science, though.

Well, you can look at it in a couple of ways.

You could say, you know, this isn't just the first animal ever to become de-extinct, it was also the first animal ever to go extinct twice.

God, that's so much worse.

Okay, but the thing is, it does prove that it's possible.

Maybe you could end up with a better ending to the story, but it does prove it's possible.

So, if you can do it with a species where you happen to have the tissue while it was still alive, does this mean that

we can make other creatures too, the ones that have been long dead, like dinosaurs, for example?

Could Jurassic Park really happen?

The sad and the rather short answer is no.

Okay, so I concur.

Well, what about mosquitoes trapped in amber, guys?

So, what you need is a source of DNA.

And although scientists have been able to get DNA from some fossils, DNA degrades over time and dinosaurs, you know, what we think of as dinosaurs, T-rex, etc., went extinct 65 million years ago.

That is just too far in the past to be able to get any usable DNA and certainly to get any usable cells.

So dinosaurs are off limits, sorry.

What about woolly mammoths though?

Because it, okay, just go with me for a second.

Woolly mammoth, frozen in time in the tundra, go get in some nice DNA from them.

Surely, surely that will work.

Well, so your people are finding carcasses of woolly mammoths in the Arctic with increasing frequency and sometimes when they find them they are incredibly preserved and they'll hack into them with a knife and they'll see something that looks like a fresh waiter's steak inside but although

they do not look for the lawyers okay

this could be a new advertising campaign though you can go on youtube and see this amazing scientist actually cutting in to a woolly mammoth carcass and he pulls out a piece of frozen fresh meat and has a little nibble on it.

You can see that happening.

So it looks like it's in good shape, this mammoth tissue, this mammoth meat if you like.

But the last woolly mammoths died out four or five thousand years ago.

The ones that we have remains of are having frozen in the permafrost all that time.

If you freeze any sort of cell without some special preservation method, what will happen is the cells will shatter and the DNA will leak away so you can't make a woolly mammoth by cloning okay the cells are not in decent nick you can't do that but there may be another way around it instead there's this whole other technique called gene editing and there is this group called colossal this project called colossal and this is the approach that they're taking well it just so happens that we have dr beth shapiro who's been an advisor to the company Colossal that is involved in trying to resurrect the mammoth.

Beth, thanks for speaking to us from California.

Hello.

What is the overall plan for resurrecting the mammoth?

The overall plan from Colossal's perspective is to identify the genetic changes that make a mammoth look more like a mammoth and less like an elephant, and then engineer an Asian elephant cell to have some or as many of those mutations as possible to create, if you will, an Arctic-adapted elephant.

So not really a mammoth.

We know that we can't do that.

Once something is extinct, it's gone forever, but something that approximates a mammoth.

And

is it just trying to get the genome together so you've got the best version of a mammoth-ish genome, or is the overall plan to take it the whole way?

The plan is to eventually have these Arctic adapted elephants born and raised and hopefully released into some habitat in which they are welcome.

I think personally that this is a long way off, but the technologies that are discovered and developed along the way are going to be useful for lots of different applications in conservation.

I noticed that you keep saying Arctic adapted elephant.

That feels a bit different from woolly mammoth.

Why can't you just get a woolly mammoth?

Once a species is gone, we lose a lot of lot of what it is that made that species.

We don't have the capacity right now to make every single genetic change that is in a woolly mammoth compared to an Asian elephant.

The technology isn't good enough.

But also, living things are more than just the sequence of A's and C's and G's and T's, the DNA letters that make up our genome.

We're a combination of those DNA letters and the environments in which we live.

And the mammoth's environment is gone, but the technology that we have now is getting us closer to being able to create a proxy.

We could perhaps make an Asian elephant hairier or have thicker fat so that it can live in a colder climate than elephants currently live.

This is obviously extremely cool.

I mean, imagine if you were a great emperor and you got to ride into town on your woolly mammoth.

But that's very specific use aside.

What's the big ambition?

Why do we want them to come back?

You know, there's lots of motivations for thinking about bringing back extinct species.

For me, the most compelling arguments are not about species that have been extinct for a long time, but about developing technologies that will help us to help species that are perhaps still alive, but on the edge of becoming extinct.

If we can use these same technologies to engineer traits into these species that help them to keep up, you know, help them to evolve, as it were, as quickly as their habitats are changing, then that I think would be an enormous benefit for conservation.

So then why bother with the woolly mammoth at all then?

Oh, people are excited about things that are big and exciting and different from what we know.

You know, everybody always asks why the mammoth, and my answer is usually because we can't do dinosaurs.

I think if we could bring a T-Rex back to life, that's what people would be focusing on.

But mammoths are big, and there's something exciting about them that reminds us of a time past.

We feel guilty because we understand that humans, our ancestors, played some role in driving them to extinction.

And so, do we have some sort of moral need to bring them back?

Maybe this is where this is coming from.

We know that elephants are highly sophisticated social animals that exist in stratified cultures in specific environments that they've evolved in.

And as you say, that environment for mammoths, which are closely related to Asian elephants, but separated by

five million years of evolutionary distance between mammoths and Asian elephants.

And we're talking about bringing back not a social group, but a couple of individuals that will be not mammoths.

They'll not be Asian elephants.

They'll be born to Asian elephants into an environment that

doesn't exist and susceptible to all of the social and biological problems.

It just seems like a it seems like a Jurassic Park type idea, and that didn't work out very well.

But this is another benefit of saying, admitting, acknowledging that what we would be bringing back is just an Arctic adapted elephant.

We're creating something new.

These Arctic Arctic adapted elephants would live with other elephants.

They would be trained by other elephants.

They would be born into a social group.

I understand that it feels uncomfortable to imagine you've created one hairy elephant.

You're going to drop it off in the middle of Siberia and it's going to live by itself.

But that's not at all the plan.

You know, the plan, which is another reason why this is such a long-term project.

Elephants don't reach reproductive maturity until they're teenagers.

We're talking at least 100 years before there is a family unit, a social group that one might be able to take up into the Arctic and release it somewhere.

But it's a goal.

And having this goal allows the space, the freedom, the opportunity to discover these technologies.

A big problem with this is not the genetics, but the embryology.

How do we get little tiny embryos?

And how do we put them into a surrogate elephant mom?

Do we need

external, not real biological uteruses to make this work?

Do we need other technology that we haven't even imagined yet?

And all of these things, all of these new ideas and creations will have application to protect species that are alive today.

If it takes some excited thought about how we might someday have woolly mammoths to bring a huge amount of investment from technology firms and billionaires who've made their money on the tech market to conservation, then so be it.

I think this is a fantastic opportunity for conservation to learn new things, to grow, to become something new, to get new sources of income, which we desperately need if we want to protect biodiversity.

I mean I think the other thing here as well is that the Woolly Mammoth De-Extinction Project is having an impact on conservation of endangered species now.

So one of the advisors to Colossal, the Woolly Mammoth Project, is a guy called Thomas Hildebrandt from Germany.

He's working with Colossal to develop the methods to implant embryos into Asian elephants.

Now elephants are endangered.

So if some of the money from the Woolly Mammoth Project is going into funding Asian elephant conservation and using some of these new assisted reproductive techniques to benefit the Asian elephant, then even if we don't go all the way with a woolly mammoth, because who knows what will happen, it's having real tangible benefits now for conservation,

you know, in the real world.

Adam?

Well, I think that's a techno-fix to a different problem, which is we should be conserving Asian elephants without trying to genetically engineer them.

I've gone enough about it.

How about just not shooting them in the first place?

Yeah, I completely agree.

You know, we should be conserving what we have.

But if we look at rhinos, one of the other great mega herbivores that are out there, there are 60 ballpark Sumatran rhinos left, 85 of another species.

We wish there weren't so few left, but there are.

Here we are.

So we have a choice.

We let them go if we just use standard conservation methods, or we start refining these techniques and applying them to these species before they're gone.

What I've noticed now, Adam, is that this programme has descended into three women shouting at you.

But it's okay, you can continue to be your cantankerous self in the corner.

I'm used to it.

I mean, that is basically what my home life is like.

The T-Rex killjoy over there, he is

all right.

Let's accept then that we're not going to bring dinosaurs back from the dead.

Let's accept that woolly mammoths are

extremely difficult, if not technically impossible.

But there are surely other uses for these technologies that can help existing species to prevent them from going extinct in the first place.

Help me out here Hillette.

Yeah I mean so there's a couple of stories.

There's one about the black-footed ferret which is

just the most exquisite

little musterlid with like a black sort of mask around its eyes, a little black sooty feet.

And these little ferrets were once common in parts of America.

And then their numbers started to dwindle for all sorts of different reasons, habitat erosion.

There was a disease called Silvatic Plague, which was affecting the prairie dogs that the ferrets ate.

And basically, they went extinct.

Oh, well, now we happen to have spoken to Dr.

Ben Novak, who's the lead scientist at a company called Revive and Restore.

Good name.

And here he is with the story of how the black-footed ferret was rediscovered in Metitsi, Wyoming.

It was actually thought to be extinct completely.

And then in 1981, a ranch dog brought a black-footed ferret and dropped it on its owner's porch.

It had either killed it or found it dead.

The rancher threw it in a pile, like, oh, another dead thing my dog brought me.

And his wife thought,

that animal looks different.

And so she said, let's, She got it out of the pile.

She said, hey, let's take this into town.

They brought it to a local taxidermist who didn't even speak to them.

His eyes were huge.

He gasped and he just went into the back and called up the government.

And biologists from the state game department, you know, came out and

they spotted over 100 black-footed ferrets, the last ones alive for this species.

Over the next few years, they worked to protect those and monitored those, but then in 1985, they got hit by an epidemic and the population started to plummet.

And they immediately started going out and decided they would capture the very last ones, get them into a breeding center to save them.

They managed to catch 24 black-footed ferrets.

The first six died of the disease.

They were already infected when they caught them,

leaving only 18.

Of those 18, 14 of them would go on to successfully breed.

And when they worked out the relationships of those 14, it turned out that they were descended from from just seven.

So, all black-footed ferrets alive today trace their ancestry to seven animals.

Today, every single living black-footed ferret is basically a half-sibling to all other black-footed ferrets.

There's a really significant point in here, which is that species that go through what is known as a bottleneck, a genetic bottleneck, end up with enormously reduced levels of genetic diversity.

And that's really bad.

Well, and that's what we're seeing with a black-footed ferret now.

So, they've managed through captive breeding, they've managed to build up a population approaching a thousand.

But they're beginning to see in the captive members that

sperm motility is being reduced, they're becoming less fertile over time, and they think this is because of the inbreeding, because they are descended from seven founder members.

Is this also where if you have a population of creatures that are all very genetically similar, then they're very susceptible to attack from parasites or sort of external forces.

I'm thinking here, Adam,

do you know about the banana?

Do you know about the banana apocalypse?

Okay.

Oh, vaguely.

Okay, so you know.

The banana apocalypse.

The banana apocalypse, right?

Banana apocalypse.

We're going with that.

We're going with that.

You know how banana flavouring doesn't taste like bananas?

It's because banana flavouring was based on a banana called the Grosse Michel banana, Big Mike banana, which was the tastiest, juiciest banana that ever did exist.

not clear to me whether Hannah's making this up or not.

I will check this afterwards.

It's absolutely true.

Gross Michelle, big mic banana, absolutely delicious.

They cloned it and cloned it and cloned it until the entire world was covered all around with big mic bananas.

They were all identical genetically or very little genetic diversity, at which point some disease appears that is essentially kryptonite to the big mic banana and wipes out the entire global population of big mic bananas and big banana the the big banana corporates didn't

didn't learn their lesson from this because they've essentially done the same thing again now all the bananas around the world are essentially clones of one other tasty banana that they found called the cavendish banana and uh people are genuinely worried about the banana apocalypse and that's the banana apocalypse because bananas are so susceptible to disease because they're all the same there is a serious point there within big mic banana which is that which is the genetic diversity when it's extremely reduced in inbreeding results in extreme susceptibility to disease to infection to parasites and that's what you're describing with the black-footed ferret that's right and we already know that the black-footed ferret was quite vulnerable to a lot of different viruses already it suffers not just from the sylvatic plague which is what they they think caused the reduction in numbers in the first place but other viruses too so if these animals are becoming more and more inbred in a rapidly changing world this is potentially bad news right well ben novak who's involved in the black-footed ferret revival project.

He had something to say about breaking that cycle of inbreeding.

A couple of those animals that didn't successfully breed, someone had taken skin samples of those and they created cell lines from those and put them in the cryo tank.

And so those are two individuals that are unrelated to all living black-footed ferrets.

We sequenced their genomes back in 2014 when the idea of cloning them was proposed.

And on December 10th, 2020, Elizabeth Ann was born who is a genetic twin a clone of Willa

the female ferret that died in 1988 is an incredible first achievement it's the first of more clones on the way and we are hoping this spring that not only we will be producing clones of Willa the female ferret that died in 1988, but also the male ferret that died in December 1985.

You know, once we have a number of good, healthy clones from both the female and male cell line, those animals will be bred with the captive population and eventually their offspring, grandchildren, great-grandchildren will be released to the wild

to get those genetics into the wild populations as well.

I've got a little video of Elizabeth Anne.

She's very cute.

She's gorgeous.

How do you describe it?

I mean, it's sort of like

she would belong quite happily on a greeting card.

You know, on the cover of a greeting card.

Oh, she's quite Sephila Ren, I think.

Oh, she's particular and beautiful.

She'd probably tear your face off, given half a chance, though.

Helen, just so I understand this again, they've reintroduced genetic diversity by resurrecting one that they had on file.

All of the black-footed ferrets that we have today are descendants of these seven founder members.

That's a problem because it's creating inbreeding.

Now, they've potentially got two additional founders.

They haven't haven't got the animals, they've got the cells from them.

They use them, they've cloned one of those animals.

So now the number of founders has gone up from seven to eight.

In the future it can potentially go up to nine.

And that might not sound like a big deal, but it could be like a much needed shot in the arm of genetic diversity that this species of ferret desperately needs.

Well maybe that's the point here, Adam, then, that this isn't about, you know,

reviving dinosaurs just for fun or theme parks or Hollywood movies.

It's something that can actually be used to manage and protect species that are at risk.

I'm a bit on the fence about this, but I think that one of the key ideas that is emerging out of resurrection species and the whole science surrounding it is that we might create biobanks for future conservation projects.

So we spoke to Tullis Mattson, who's the founder of a charity called Nature's Safe, which freezes tissue from endangered species, mostly to help prevent extinction, but also to act as a kind of insurance policy for species that may go extinct in the future.

Here's Talus Matson.

Nature Safe is a charity that's been set up two years ago to cry, preserve, and freeze animal tissue samples down and reproductive tissue as well.

The word safe stands for saving animals from extinction.

Our aim is to freeze as many different species, especially the ones that are critically endangered, to freeze them down.

So, in the future, in 10, 20, 30, or even a thousand years' time, those cells are as good as the day we froze them.

So, we've done sort of southern white rhinos, we've done Asian elephants, we've done the Java green magpie, one of the rarest birds in the world.

So, when we get the phone call from the zoo, it's always a sad call.

Unfortunately, we'll get a call saying this animal's passed away, it's going to be with you in the next 12 hours or in the post the next day.

So, the beauty about these skin samples, we've got up to five days.

So, they literally post post it, arrives with us at five degrees, a sample of its ear, and that's all we need.

It's quite incredible.

That's all we need.

And it's literally

arrives in the post.

I don't know whether the postman knows what he's bringing us, but

yeah, and then we can handle it from there.

Happy with that, Adam, as a solution for the future?

Not sure about getting an ear sent to me in the post.

That's the beginning of a bad horror film.

Yeah,

I think that's a good idea.

I still wonder whether this is a distraction from

actually doing what we should be doing, which is preventing extinction in the first place and devoting all of our resources to preventing habitat loss.

I mean, I'm not arguing with that, but I don't think it's either or.

This is the thing.

The people who are doing these de-extinction projects generally it's with funding that is hard to come by and they're they're not taking the regular conservation charities and then turning them upside down and shaking them until all the spare change comes out of their pockets.

They're not doing that.

The funding is separate.

So it's not either or and I think it's really sensible if we've got these techniques at our fingertips that we at least develop the technology to a point where we can assess its worth and see if it's going to be part of the conservation toolkit.

It's only very recently we're starting to use more modern methods, assisted reproduction.

This is an extension of those methods.

So I think we ought to be considering it.

Well, on that note, thank you very much for joining us in the studio, Dr.

Helen Pilcher.

So, Dr.

Rutherford, when it comes to convincing you that resurrecting extinct animals is a good idea, can I say case case solved?

Well, the technical and the scientific problems are still massive.

Yes, and the ethical problems are still unresolved.

But behind the sensational headlines, there is a real story about conservation.

Because the technology developed is already helping us to conserve at-risk species.

And reducing the chances of more species going extinct with biobanks.

The lessons of the Big Mike banana will finally be heard.

Right, stop trying to make big mic banana a thing.

It is a thing.

Gross Michelle Banana.

You're in the pocket of big banana.

There isn't a way of saying that without sounding slightly rude.

You know what, though?

There is these rumours of

the gross Michelle banana, right?

But Big Mike banana.

There are rumours that there are still some big mics floating around.

Did you even say that?

It sounds ridiculous.

The most delicious of all the bananas.

Yeah.

And people have hunted for them for years it's like this grand prize the quest for big mic

i sort of want to taste one now though because i love a i love i love fake banana flavoured fake banana right that's what it takes that's what the crosse michelle the big mic banana tastes like that's a chemical so it's all based on a chemical isn't it it's like it's an ester Iso amyl something.

If you say so.

And, you know, when you have banana-flavoured milkshake, it's never been near a banana.

No, but it is.

But you think Big Mike

tastes like banana milkshake.

All I'm saying is I read something once, probably at 3 a.m.

when I couldn't sleep.

And what you're seeing here is the vague recollections of a chronic insomniac slightly mad woman.

Feed a dream.

No,

there's a really important point somewhere in there.

That's a really serious topic sometimes.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, if you think about crops, for instance,

this is something that farmers have to contend with all all the time because there's a distinct lack of genetic diversity in the crops that are

planted and as a result if one goes down you can lose an entire field's worth of crops or more in an instant same with uh farm animals as well this is why breeding exists because farmers and we as consumers want organisms to be as uniform as possible right so you've got to be you know cows that have big milky adders

or sheep that are woolly and in order to do that you've got to to breed them, you've got to inbreed them to enhance the trait.

But as a result of that, you end up with inbred animals, so you've got to outbreed them as well at the same time.

And the story that I'm getting from you about Big Mike is that the banana farmers of the world didn't do that, and now we are all

in the pocket of big

banana apocalypse.

You know what, though?

Okay, so bananas are clones, right?

So you know, they reproduce asexually, essentially.

So that's you know, that's one thing.

But talking about animal breeding, have I told you yet that I went to a pig farm recently?

No, and I'm slightly surprised because I feel that's the type of thing you might message me with.

I'm at a pig farm.

Okay.

So I was there doing some filming, filming about the emotions of pigs.

Anyway, while I was there, I was in the sow pen, okay?

So there were all of these lovely, beautiful, gorgeous pigs, pregnant pigs, and then there was a boar in the middle of the room, and he was in his own little cage.

And the girls couldn't get to him, but they could see him.

And while I was there they had a guy come round to service the pigs okay service service as in he was from the breeding program he went round and and manually made sure that the the sows had the best chance of being pregnant possible okay

but while they were while I was there and this guy was going around servicing the pigs I was like well hang on a second why aren't you using the bore that you've got sitting right there why isn't the bore why aren't you breeding from the bore

expecting the answer to be something like you're describing about the genetic diversity of the population

Actually, they said, oh, no, no, that bore, that bore is there essentially as an elaborate thirst trap for the girls.

That boar is there to get the girls really hot under the collar so they come on to heat.

But he,

we do not use that bore for the breeding program.

I was like, well, why not?

You've got this perfectly good boar there.

Why wouldn't you, like, why would you pay someone else to come in?

It doesn't make any sense to me.

And then they told me that this is standard across pig farming: is that

you have a boar in with the sows, okay, and that boar is nice and good and well behaved until it ever gets its trotters on a sow, at which point it becomes such a jerk

that they can no longer keep it on the farm.

Basically, only virgin boars are able to be controlled enough to stay on a farm.

sort of don't know what to do with any of that information and I I feel like it might have replaced something really important in my head look

I consider it a great skill to take you from chatting about genetic diversity into virgin boars so

and this was this was how you spent your new year was it

Shall we um do you anything else to say?

Anything else to add?

Actually, I do.

I've got it.

So this is an area that I've sort of dabbled in for a while, because it's genetics and it's evolution and it's genetic engineering.

So it's right, you know, it's right up my strata.

And back in, I think it was 2010 from memory was when the mammoth genome was

sequenced for the first time from a mammoth, a baby mammoth that had been dug out of the permafrost.

I've talked about this before because in the interview that I was doing with the lead author, I asked him if he'd been digging around in the tundra and he said, no, I've never been to the tundra.

We got it off eBay.

got the sample off eBay but that's not the story the story I wrote it up I wrote an article I think it was in the Times about this

because people were talking about cloning and the stuff we were talking about in the programme and I got called up and asked to go on a short discussion a sort of 10-minute discussion with an Irish radio show based in Dublin and there was the host there was me talking about the science and then the third guest was a cardinal so an Irish Catholic cardinal.

And I found myself having this discussion about the sort of ethics of cloning.

And

this was the point where I found myself describing the vaginal tract of an Asian elephant on national radio in Ireland to a priest.

And

after I'd finished, my granny phoned me up.

And she just said,

she's a Catholic, and she's a sort of three times a week Catholic.

And she said, I don't know what you were talking about, but I will pray for you.

I mean, I just know too much about the reproductive tracts of Asian elephants as a result of this.

Should you cure the week?

I think we should.

Okay, Curia of the Week this week comes in from Catherine Cox, who wants to nominate her 10-year-old son, Philip, as Curie of the Week.

I didn't know we were doing nominations, but I mean...

Well, since we stopped giving badges out.

No, we still give our badges out.

Oh, do we?

Yes.

I never had one.

I know, because you never submitted a Cure of the Week.

You've got one because you're absolutely right, because I did.

You did.

Brilliant.

Okay, her son, Philip, has learned pie to 56 decimal places and has demonstrated admirable willingness to suffer in the cause of public education as he's devised a skit for his school talent show in which he recited pie before having custard pies thrown at him.

I mean, that's commitment.

That's what I was saying.

But the thing is, is that I do wonder, 56 decimal places, if you were

measuring a circle that was the size of the observable universe, I strongly suspect that 56 decimal places might get you to the sort of circumference of an atom.

Oh, really?

Is it that?

Is it?

I mean, it's, I'm making it up, but it's going to be, you know, more than more than you would ever reasonably need.

56 is, I mean, I can't remember 56 words days like this.

I think it's really impressive.

Would you like to hear the clip of Philip?

Yes.

Okay.

Hello, and welcome to the Comedy Math Show.

Today I'll be talking about pie.

It is 3.141592653589793238462643384994994994.

Tell me pie ain't nothing but a heartache Tell me pie ain't nothing but a mistake Tell me pie I never wanna hear you say

I want pie that way

Tell me why that's amazing and Philip that is astonishing and I think we really have to congratulate Mother Catherine Cox for introducing a 10-year-old who was born presumably in the second decade of the 21st century to a Backstreet Boys song.

I agree.

Also, Cassiana, I just want you to save that cliff and just play it back to him.

It is wedding.

Wedding.

That was amazing.

Of course, Philip, you're our current of the week.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much for sending that in.

Anyway, that's the end of this show.

Next week, we don't know what we're doing.

You'll find out as soon as we do.

So see you then.

Bye.

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