Think about the idea
it's incredible but it does appear to be possible
to create individuals that have very
high genetic similarity
to species that have gone extinct
One of the big challenges in environmental ethics right now is is the fact that
and for the world the fact that
extinction rates are so high there about
10,000 times
what the normal background rates are and
so people are thinking of lots of new
ways to try to prevent species from
going extinct
and now maybe even bring back some
species that were extinct
so it's an extension of my work on environment ethics and it's a pretty exciting
new idea
How many people here have heard of de-extinction?
The question we were looking at last night is how good a new idea is
definitely exciting but
the question is is it good?
I mean think about this - we don't have any
existing models for what these species do
What does a mammoth do?
We have some ideas, right
but it's going to be much harder than if we're breeding elephants or something like that
which we have a pretty good idea about
There are a lot of animals that have been extinct so long that the DNA information doesn't
exist so that we can't even begin to try
to reassemble the code and
bring back so sadly no dinosaurs
But woolly mammoths would be great I
think that would be really exciting
and interesting and wonderous
For my own part I like birds so it
would be nice to see an ivory-billed woodpecker
Everything I'm about to say I learned
from Professor Vogel
(laughter)
on the conservation perspective it's
really not that important
it's much more important to prevent
species from going extinct it's much
more important to
address the causes of extinction like
habitat destruction and climate change
and to be able to bring back one or two
species that we find particularly compelling
from a conservation perspective it is not anything to get too excited about
but from a techno-science perspective as
a technological achievement
as a statement about human ingenuity
it's a pretty amazing thing
it would be a wonderous thing
to be able to go see
a passenger pigeon or a Tasmanian tiger
or a wolly mammoth or something like
this
this would be
the very idea that we even have
people actively working on trying to
resequence genomes of extinct species
and clone them
and bring back living organisms that
have highly similar genetic material
I mean that's just
that's just quite incredible really
It's a philosophical issue
it's not a technical issue
It was exciting, it was great, it
was nice to be able to see
the faculty again to be able to hear
what's been going on at the school
to hear what's been going on in their lives, to hear what the students are up to
and share a little bit about what I've been
working on, what I've been doing
What if we mess up and do something that's catastrophic?
It just seems to me to be a different question
I was really struck yesterday about
how the high quality of the student
questions and
the ways in which they were thinking
about how these things mattered in
the real world
to the real problems that we're trying to
address
That's it, thank you
(applause)
