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) »

What is DNA barcoding, you ask? It’s a far more precise way of identifying plant species. In this video, Ellen Jorgensen — who gave today’s TED Talk “Biohacking, you can do it too”  – heads to a remote region of Alaska to collect the fragile plants found there and bring them back to her DIY biotech lab for a crowd-sourced science project.

This video was created by TED’s own Kari Mulholland. Stay tuned to the TED Blog for more videos of cool projects happening at Genspace.

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, introduces the session with a 3-minutes talk on how America perceives the rest of the world and how the news shape the way the US sees the world. She pulls up a map of the number of minutes that American TV networks dedicated to news in January: there is basically only the US, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and China. "The news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by
half.  Covering Britney Spears is cheaper. We can do better, and we
cannot afford not to do so".

Inventor-collector Jay Walker presents some of the items displayed on stage from his private library: one of the remaining original seven Sputnik satellites; a Gutenberg Bible (picture right); a small flag that was carried to the Moon and back by the Apollo astronauts; etc. Needless to say, he’s been asked by hundreds of TEDsters yesterday

Craig Venter, the scientist who first sequenced the human genome in
2001, announced recently that with his team they have created the first
synthetic bacterium — "the largest man-made DNA structure" (photo below) — along
the way to create microorganisms that can produce alternative sources
of enegy. Needless to say, his research is controversial.
"We’ve been digitizing biology, and now we’re trying to go from that code to designing biology. We’ve tried various approaches, paring it down to basic components, digitizing it, now we’re trying to ask: can we regenerate life or create new life out of this digital universe? The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially. Our ability to write genetic code has been growing more slowly. Turns out synthesizing DNA is difficult. In a biological system the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate. How do we boot-up a synthetic chromosome? We can do a transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there is massive new speciation (the formation of new and distinct species) based on this digital design. We have now a database with about 20 million genes, and we like to think of them as the design component of the life of the future. We now have techniques to do combinatorial genomics, to build a robot that can make a million chromosomes a day.

We’re now focusing on fourth-generation designer fuels. Curent biofuels aren’t the solution. The only way that biology can have an impact on fuel without incrising the price of food, it’s to start with CO2 as the feed stock — create new energy out of CO2, and we think we will have something within the next 18 months. Future uses of this technology: increase the basic understanding of life; replace the petro-chemical industry; become a major source of energy; enhance bioremediation. We’re changing the evolutionary tree with new bacteria and species."
Follows a Q&A with Chris Anderson and with the audience:

Question: With all the biodiversity out there, can’t you use existing organisms rather than create new ones?
Craig Venter: We’re indeed finding a lot of biodiversity. For example we found organisms in the environment that produce octane. But not on the scale that we need to cover our energy needs.
Q: Right now, is it possible on a computer to say what a
CV: We are using software to design pathways, metabolic mechanisms, so it’s real biological design. We’re trying to do it not only by trianl and error, but by direct design. Alot of people like to think in terms of Genesis and we’re creating life from scratch. But we’re really using the 3 million years of evolution, trying to take it over and take it to the next stage. We will see an increasing pace in the sophistication of the organisms.
Q: I could make the case that you and your company are the most dangerous humans on Earth. What do you do for security?
CV: It’s a question that has been raised from the very beginning. Fortunately there aren’t many people wanting to do harm with these tools. Very few biological agents that we work with could be weaponized.
Q: One of your slides says "suicide gene", what’s that?
CV: It means that if it got out of the lab we could trigger the destruction of that organism.
Q: Can you talk about the intellectual property rights and how you fund your work?
CV: Institute has about 100 million dollars budget a year. About 70% from the government, the rest from private donation.
Q: How efficient can the photosynthesis of CO2 be?
CV: CO2 is a source of carbon. The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient. We can engineer those to capture CO2 and instead of sequestrate it we think we can convert it back into energy.
Q: When you were asked if you were playing God, you said "we are not playing".
CV: I got very depressed being at Davos this year, it was clear that most of business executives there, buying into the CO2 issue is a pain for them, I had the impression that nothing’s gonna change in the next 40 years because of entrenched interests. We’re running a hell of an experiment on this planet, we need real solutions, I hope that some of these developments yield results in time, the urgency is not really there.

Paul Rothemund presented some of his work at TED last year, showing nanometer-size artwork created using strands of DNA and folding them into desired shapes.
"People argue about the definition of life. Life involves computation. Take a computer program, boot it up in a cell and it will result in a person; with a small change it will result in another person, etc. There are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs, including a sensitivity to small changes – single mutations — that result in "meaningful" large changes. Biology demonstrates the power of molecular programming. We use DNA and proteins. How small is the smallest organism that will function? How few molecules?"
Paul’s approach, he calls it "DNA origami": folding DNA using long single strands of DNA and combining them with other helixes. He shows how he created smily patterns, the shape of China, all by folding DNA strands. Then he discusses an approach — "tiles" — to make something much bigger.

Preventive medicine advocte Dean Ornish gives a short talk on recent
research that shows how adopting healthy lifestyle and eating habits
can affect a person at a genetic level.
"One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Venter does The other is to change our lifestyle. When you live healthier, eat better, exercise, and love more, your brain cells actually increase. Your skin and heart and sexual organs get better blood flow.  We’re about to release new findings that healthier lifestyle can turn off disease-provoking genes and turn on the good ones. Our genes are not our fate. They are predispositions, but if we make these lifestyle changes we can actually change how genes are expressed."

The work of British psychologist Susan Blackmore focuses on the nature of consciousness and on memes. She took Richard Dawkins intuition about memes (ideas that, like genes, that take a life of their own) and turned it into a fully-fledged theory.
"Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for every species to let loose on this planet. By the time you realize what’s happening, it’s too late to put it back into the box. We humans are the Earth’s Pandoran species. Mimetics is founded on the principles of unversal Darwinism. His idea was so simple, and yet it explains all design in the universe. What Darwin said was something like this: if you have creatures that vary, and if there is a struggle for life such that nearly all of these species die, and if the very few that survive pass on to their offsprings whatever helped them survive, than these offsprings must be better adapted to these circumstances than their parents were. You just need those three principles: variation, selection and heredity. If you have those, you MUST get evolution, or "design out of chaos without the aid of mind". What’s this to do with memes? Darwin didn’t know about genes, but the principle of universal Darwinism is that everything that’s copied with variation and selection will evolve. Information that’s copied from person to person is information copied with variation and selection. That’s a meme. A meme is not an idea, is "that which is imitated", information which is copied from person to person. If you copied an information from someone else, it’s a meme. But why do they spread? They are copied if they can. Some because they’re true, useful, beautiful. Some even if they’re not. Here is a curious meme: you go to your hotel, check into your room, go to the bathroom, and what do you see? A folded end of the toilet paper. It’s a meme that spread all over the world. What is that about? it’s supposed to tell you that somebody cleaned the place. Think of it this way: imagine a world full of brains and memes using them (you and me) to propagate. Why is this important? it gives us a completely new wiew of what it means to be human. All these things that make us unique — language etc — are based on genes. But there are two replicators now on this planet: from the moment our ancestors began imitating, there was a new replicator, the meme, alongside the gene. And you get an arms race between the genes (which want a smaller, efficient brain) and the memes (which want a bigger brain). All other species on this planet are gene machines, we only are meme machines. We need a new word for technological memes, let’s call them temes, because the processes are different. Our brains are becoming like temes, faster, etc. We are at this cusp now to have a third replicator in our planet. But it’s dangerous: temes are selfish replicators, they use us to suck up more resources to produce more computers and more things. Don’t think we created the Internet, that’s how it seems to us. How to pull through? Two ways: one is that the temes turn us into teme-machines, with implants, merging of humans and machines, because we are self-replicators. The other: teme-machines will replicate by themselves. In that case, it woudl not matter if the planet would no longer be liveable for humans."

Christopher de Charms brielfy shows some video of real-time brain imaging. He’s the CEO of Omneuron, which has developed a machine that scans brain activity and allows to watch it in real time — "I’ve seen inside my brain, you will be able to do it soon. When you will, what will you like to do and control? We are the first generation that’s gonna be able to enter into the human mind and brain". 

Documentary filmmaker David Hoffman‘s studio burned down 9 days ago. He lost his archive, 100+ films, most of his work is gone. "But you need to take bad and make some good out of it. I called my friends, come dig, dig it up I said, I want pieces", and turned that into his next project, a life in bits and pieces.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is a US presidential biographer — she
has written books on all the great acronyms that have occupied the Oval
office (JFK, LBJ, FDR) and on Abraham Lincoln. She’s hence an authority
on looking at history through the leses of a single person’s life. Her
speech focuses on Lincoln and Lindon Johnson and on some lessons that we can draw from their
life.
"Lincoln life suggests that ambition is a good thing. Not ambition for power or office, but for making the world a better place. Lincoln was a curious boy. His mother died when he was still young, telling him "am going away and won’t return", which convinced him that when we die our life is swept away; but later he realized that if you accomplish something worthy, that outlives you. During a period of depression, he said "I would die, right now, but I haven’t not yet done anything that would make any human being remember me" — he would go on to sign the emancipated proclamation. Kearns says that when he was about to put his signature on the document, his hand was trembling because he had shaken thousands of hands that morning. So he put down the pen, waiting for his hand to be steadier, because he thought that, had he signed a trembling signature, future generations would think that he had hesitated."
"LBJ: I met him when I was selected as a White House fellow, then worked in the WH. He was a great storyteller, but there was a problem with his stories: half of them weren’t true. … Because he was so sad and vulnerable, he opened up with me. From the surface LBJ should have had everything in the world to feel good: president, money, owned a spacious ranch, boats, and he had a family who loved him deeply. Yet years of concentration solely on work and individual success means that in his retirement LBJ could find no solace. It was as if the hole in his heart was so large that without work he could not fill it. He regretted not having spent more time with his children and grandchildren. He was alone when he died. Even the sphere of love requires some form of commitment. So deep was Lincoln love of Shakespeare for instance that even in the most difficult times I went to the theatre."

A few days ago TED2005 speaker Craig Venter (watch his talk) announced that his lab has finished sequencing a single human’s genome — his own. At his old company, Celera, Venter worked on sequencing his genome and four other genomes all mixed together, creating an anonymous composite. He told Newsweek:

What we got this time was a diploid genome—a genome that includes both sets of chromosomes from both my parents. We were surprised at how much variation between individuals there was.
You mean there’s more genetic difference between one person and the next than we previously thought?
Absolutely. It’s quite comforting to me as an individualist that we’re not very close to being clones of one other. (…)
Why did you choose to decode your own genome?
It goes back to the government’s notion that genetics has to be secret and anonymous. But there’s really nothing anonymous with your genetic sequence—it’s the ultimate identifier. I thought it was showing proper leadership—to show that I don’t think there’s any risk in it. I don’t know if there’s any scientist in this field that wouldn’t want to have his own genome known.
(Read the full interview)

Nobel laureate (for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA), and fellow TED2005 speaker (watch his talk), James Watson couldn’t probably agree more: he also had his genome fully sequenced three months ago. “Project Jim”, as it was called, took 67 days of sequencing time and cost around USD 1 million. (More in this Newsweek story from June.)

The raw sequencing data of both Watson and Venter are publicly available in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Trace Archive.