James Tate, an urban biologist, talks about the public policy of de-extinction and what laws affect bringing back a wooly mammoth and releasing it into the wild. Photo: Chelsey Gabrielson

How amazing would it be to see a wooly mammoth, raised from the dead, walking the permafrost of the North again? Or to look up at the sky and see a flock of passenger pigeons fly by? Or to witness a gastric-brooding frog hiccup tadpoles out the mouth from an embryo located in its stomach? These incredible animals, as well as others beyond our wildest imaginations, existed — walking whales, marsupial lions, carnivorous kangaroos and even crocodiles that climbed trees.Stewart Brand: The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?

TEDxDeExtinction, held on March 15 in Washington, D.C., explored the fascinating possibility of bringing back extinct species. Organized by Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan’s nonprofit Revive & Restore in conjunction with the National Geographic Society, the event was an all-day exploration of the biology, technology and ethics involved in de-extinction.

So what was it like? TEDxDeExtinction felt like stepping into a time machine that whipped me from the past to the future, and then back again, at high speeds. We leapt from the Pleistocene epoch (about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago) to the year 2080, then from1936 (when we killed off the last of the Tasmanian tigers) to tomorrow, when we’ll work towards completing the wooly mammoth genome.

An illustration of wooly mammoths.

As I watched the speakers in this strange bubble of mashed-up time, I became fascinated by the very human themes emerging in the narrative of de-extinction: the nature of wonder, which binds us not only to our ecosystem but to our hubris and hope. Wonder is both the catalyst and the goal of scientific progress, and asking questions about the things that amaze us opens new conversations that lead to innovation. When paleontogist Michael Archer peered at a baby thylacine, pickled in a jar of alcohol, he marveled at its potential. The alcohol was a DNA preservative and could be used to create a viable embryo. Ben Novak, the passenger pigeon expert, admired the passenger pigeon’s beauty and unique social behavior: “No book, no museum can give you the majesty of what this bird was.” And forensic paleontologist Hendrik Poinar’s childhood appreciation of the mammoth became a lifelong quest to figure out how to bring it back.

But asking the questions is the easy part. The most difficult task is answering them. A few of the speakers brought up valid criticisms of de-extinction and the costs it could have, especially on conservation. Stanley Temple described the future of species as a well-balanced three-legged stool; the legs are “protect,” “conserve” and “restore.” Now, we’re adding another leg, “revive,” so the balance needs to shift. David Ehrenfeld, a conservation biologist, believed we need to lose our arrogance and ease up on the hype of de-extinction because, in the end, it’s only “recreational conservation,” that negatively detracts from current conservation efforts. Plus, animal welfare might be an issue — revived species could negatively impact human health or became invasive to other species. And what happens when extinction is not forever?

Hank Greely also touched on the idea of whether this is something God (or even Darwin) would have wanted us messing around with. And Kate Jones, a conservation biologist who spent years creating an evolutionary tree of mammals, lamented the loss of evolutionary history that would occur with the resurrection of extinct species.

The last thylacine; a pickled thylacine pup preserved in alcohol; and the passenger pigeon.

Our role in the story of extinction has not exactly been heroic. We hunted the thylacine to death. The baiji, a freshwater dolphin living in the Yangtze River became extinct as its habitat grew increasingly polluted. Farmers thought Carolina parakeets were ruining their crops, so shot them to death. Would de-extinction be our way of righting a wrong? Or should we learn from our mistakes in trying to intervene and focus our efforts on conserving the endangered species that need our attention now?

One speaker who helped resolve these questions for me: evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, who explained that we still haven’t completed the first step of bringing back a wooly mammoth. We only know 3.8 billion base pairs of the genome, which is about 50% of the entire puzzle. She thinks de-extinction is a pipe dream, but a pipe dream worth pursuing. “This is going to stimulate a lot of research,” she said on-stage. “It’s going to bring together the conservationists, ethicists, molecular biologists, and people, like me, digging up bones in the permafrost to converse at the same table. We’ll learn about cloning, about genomes. We’ll learn about where genes are and how they interact with other genes. We’ll learn about what happens when genes from two different species come together.”

The speakers at TEDxDeExtinction take a bow. Photo: Chelsey Gabrielson

By the end of the day, I found that the question, “Should we de-extinct?” was answered with a resounding: “We have no choice.” The trajectory of scientific innovation, in the end, is unstoppable. But dizzied from my time travels, I worried that it was all happening too fast.

Ryan Phelan, co-host of TEDxDeExtinction, assured me that there will be enough time for discussion. “Things are moving slowly, right now. But, at some point, change is going to be exponential, just like the first computer,” she said. “Now, we have time to think: How do we shape the future that we want? How do we do it in a responsible way? There’s time for citizen participation.”

And that set my feet back down in the present.

Read the TEDx Blog’s five takeaways from TEDxDeExtinction, and hear why you can’t “clone from stone” »

Stewart Brand begins today’s TED Talk with an elegy for Martha of Cincinnati, who died in 1914. No, Martha is not a person. She was the very last passenger pigeon.

Stewart Brand: The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready? “Extinction is a different kind of death — it’s bigger,” says Brand in this talk, given at TED2013. “This had been the most abundant bird in the world. They lived in North America for 6 million years — suddenly it wasn’t here at all.”

But, Brand shares, the passenger pigeon could now be brought back to life. He calls it: de-extinction.

Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the environmental movement in the 1960s, is known for thinking of history differently. At TED2004, he shared his vision for the Clock of the Long Now, which keeps time for 10,000 years. Stewart Brand on the Long NowAt TED@State, he shared 4 environmental ‘heresies,’ coming out in favor of nuclear power and genetically engineered crops. But in this talk, Stewart lays the groundwork for his boldest idea yet: bringing back species like the Carolina parakeet (extinct 1916), the Heath hen (extinct 1932), the Tasmanian tiger (extinct 1936) … even the Woolly Mammoth (extinct about 4,000 years ago).

Brand says this is an extension of current work being done to save endangered species.

Stewart Brand: 4 environmental 'heresies'“Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. We have the ability now and, maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage,” says Brand. “We interfered in a big way by making them these animals extinct. Many of them were keystone species and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in.”

To hear how “ancient DNA” from museum specimens and fossils could be used to bring back some of these species, watch this bold talk. It, of course, will bring to mind many visceral questions. For example: Can we really bring extinct species back to life? Should we? Can these animals be reintroduced into the wild? How would we do that ethically? And are we playing God by even thinking about it? (See the video above for thoughts on that one.)

For the past two years, Brand — along with his wife, biotech expert Ryan Phelan, and genetic engineer George Church — has held private workshops to explore whether de-extinction was possible, and whether biologists were interested in the idea. This is just the beginning of a long conversation — one Brand now wants to take public. To further dive into all the myriad questions involved in de-extinction, he is holding TEDxDeExtinction this coming Friday in Washington, DC. A joint effort between Brand’s non-profit Revive & Restore, TED and National Geographic — TEDxDeExtinction will be the first public exploration of this fascinating topic.

Anyone is welcome to watch through a free livestream of the event on March 15, 2013, from 8:30am to 5pm (EST) »

The event will be divided into the sessions “Who,” “How,” “Why and Why Not,” and “Wild Again.” It will feature greetings from TED’s own Chris Anderson and National Geographic Society chairman John Fahey, as well as talks from Michael Archer on “A second chance for Tasmanian Tigers and Fantastic Frogs,” Robert Lanza on “The Use of Cloning and Stem Cells to Resurrect Life” and  Beth Shapiro, who sequenced the genome of passenger pigeon, on “Ancient DNA.” See the full program here »

But perhaps the most exciting part of the TEDxDeExtinction website is the Frequently Asked Questions page. Below, just a sampling:

Why do it? Why revive extinct species?

For the same reasons we protect endangered species. To preserve biodiveristy and genetic diversity. To undo harm that humans have caused in the past. To restore diminished ecosystems. To advance the science of preventing extinctions.

How soon will some extinct creature live again?

Signs are there will be some impressive milestones in this decade. Technically one extinction has already been partially reversed. The last Pyrenean ibex (also called a bucardo) died in 2000. A Spanish team used frozen tissue to clone a living twin in 2003, birthed by a goat. The baby ibex died of respiratory failure after 10 minutes (a common problem in early cloning efforts). Funding dried up, so no further work has been done on this species as yet. As George Church reminds people, the first airplane flight in 1903 lasted 12 seconds.

How many techniques are there, and how do they work?

There are at least three semi-successful techniques for de-extinction so far.  1) Selective back-breeding of existing descendents to recreate a primordial ancestor is being used for the revival of the European Aurochs, among others.  2) Cloning with cells from cryopreserved tissue of a recently extinct animal can generate viable eggs.  If the eggs are implanted in a closely related surrogate mother, some pregnancies produce living offspring of the extinct species.  3) Allele replacement for precisely hybridizing a living species with an extinct species is the new genome-editing technique developed by George Church.  If the technique proves successful (such as with the passenger pigeon), it might be applied to the many other extinct species that have left their “ancient DNA” in museum specimens and fossils up to 200,000 years old.

It all sounds like Jurassic Park. How is this different?

It was a wonderful movie, which introduced the world to the idea of de-extinction back in 1993.  Its science fiction is quite different from current reality, though.  First, no dinosaurs—sorry!  No recoverable DNA has been found in dinosaur fossils (nor in amber-encased mosquitoes).  Robert Lanza observes, “You can’t clone from stone.”

Second, the plot of the movie is driven by protecting the commercial secrecy of an island theme park.  Real-world de-extinction is being conducted with total transparency.  Eventual rewilding of revived species can be no more commercial than the current worldwide protection of endangered species and wildlands.

See lots more FAQs and a suggested reading list »

Watch the free livestream of TEDxDeExtinction on March 15 starting at 8:30 am (EST) »

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Last time we saw Stewart Brand on the TED stage was in 2010, in his debate with Mark Z. Jacobson over whether the world needs nuclear energy. Brand, perhaps surprisingly, gave a passionate pro argument. But today he’s here for a very different — and potentially very controversial — purpose.

Extinction is not just death, but death for everyone you ever knew or anything remotely like anyone you knew. It’s permanent. … Or is it? Brand takes the stage today at TED to present ground-breaking research on bringing back extinct species.

In the past few centuries the Earth has lost dozens and dozens of species to extinction, including the Tasmanian tiger, the auroch and the passenger pigeon, which went from 5 billion to zero in just a few decades. But according to Brand, it’s possible to take tiny bits of old DNA from museum specimens and, using new technology, actually reassemble the entire genome — and maybe even reassemble the organism itself.

A team of people, including legendary geneticist George Church and newcomer Ben Novak, are working on bringing back the passenger pigeon, which was a keystone species that helped save the buffalo. Beth Shapiro has already sequenced the passenger pigeon, and Church believes it can be brought back with synthetic biology technology, which is accelerating at four times the rate of Moore’s Law. Since it’s now possible to make adjustments in DNA down to a single base pair, scientists can replace missing genes with alleles from a close relative. In this case, genes from the band-tailed pigeon could be used to engineer a passenger pigeon, the last of which, Martha, died in 1914.

The first de-extinction happened on the bucardo, a type of wild mountain goat. The last bucardo died out in 2000, but its ear was preserved, and in 2009 DNA from the ear was planted in a mother goat. The engineered bucardo died after 10 minutes due to a defect in its lungs.

Incredible things are possible to save the Earth’s species. Captive breeding in zoos and ecotourism are already helping; in 1981 there were 254 Central African mountain gorillas left, and today there are 880. Currently there are four non-breeding northern white rhinoceros left, and with cloning, says Brand, we can get them back.

But the critical question to ask is: Do we want extinct species back? Are we humans taking technology to its limits, and interfering unnecessarily in nature? Well, as Brand says, it’s our job to fix what we’ve already broken. In the past 10,000 years, we’ve made a huge hole in nature. It’s our fault that some of these crucial species have been completely wiped out, so we should dedicate our energy to bringing them back.

While talking on stage to Chris, Brand ends by saying firmly, “It may take generations but we will get the wooly mammoth back.” An amazing dream? Stay tuned and see — and watch the free livestream of TEDxDeExtinction on March 15.