Back to the future: Genetically modified wildlife

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Big splashy statements about bringing an ancient wolf species back from the dead. 13,000 years after the last dire wolf walked the earth, scientists say they've now brought them back. That animal looks like a direwolf, it will behave like a direwolf, and it is a direwolf. The direwolf, huge stocky canids from the last Ice Age and Game of Thrones, of course. Massive jaws, sharp teeth, ancestors of the grey wolf, brought back from extinction using genetic modification. Now, seven months old, direwolves Romulus and Remus eating well and getting bigger every day. Could it be a real-life Jurassic Park? Are direwolves really back from the dead? Yeah, they're not back. They're really, really not back. Dr. Helen Pilcher is a neuroscientist and author, and she joins me today to make sense of this controversial idea of editing the genes of animals. It's a heated conversation in the scientific community, because it's not just about bringing animals back from the dead, it's changing the genetic makeup of animals that still exist. It's called genetically modified wildlife, or sometimes genetically engineered wildlife, and it's a field of science that's, haha, evolving rapidly. Just a few months ago, scientists from all over the world met at the IUCN conference, a bit like the United Nations for Wildlife Conservation, and they made a groundbreaking decision about the future of genetically modified wildlife. Even though a lot of people were dead against it, this organisation basically gave permission for researchers to proceed cautiously. It's the game changer, but it's also the thing that both really excites people and really worries people. Because on the one hand, you could use it to wipe out invasive species. You could use it to make species resistant to disease, to make species resistant to climate change. But on the other hand, you could wipe out entire species. Sounds like a genetically modified can of worms to me. But what if you never had to say goodbye to your favourite endangered species just by tweaking a few genes here and there? Today, we'll dive into the pros and cons of modifying wildlife and the ethics behind changing the very DNA of a wild animal. From KORW in Seattle and Chris Morgan Wildlife, welcome to the wild. On the latest Sound Politics, some lawmakers in D.C. got a chance to look at the unredacted Epstein files. But how do you decide what to search for when you're given limited time? Representative Pramila Jayapal joins us to talk about how to make sense of what's in the millions of pages, her contentious exchange with Attorney General Pam Bondi, and what it all means for the future. We'll talk about that and Epstein's connections to Seattle on the latest Sound Politics wherever you get your podcasts. Dr. Helen Pilcher is an author, science communicator, and an expert on genetically modified wildlife. She's written multiple books and lots of articles on the sometimes controversial topic of wildlife genetics, including pieces for major news outlets like The Guardian, Apple News, Science Focus, and BBC Wildlife. She calls herself a recovering neuroscientist and lapsed stand-up comedian. Helen, thank you for being here. Oh, my absolute pleasure. I'm very excited to talk about all of this captivating topic with you because I honestly don't know much about it and it's very muddled in my mind, so I'm hoping you can straighten some things out for me. So one of the books that you wrote about 10 years ago, I think it was now, was called Bring Back the King, The New Science of De-extinction. De-extinction is such a catchy and interesting word to me. So you've been tracking this topic for a while and I want to talk about this de-extinction. How do you define de-extinction? well so if you listen to the mainstream media they will say this is about bringing extinct species back to life and that's kind of an exciting concept but it's not quite true what it is de-extinction is about making new versions of extinct animals that hopefully are as close to the originals as they possibly can be so this is things like there are projects out there looking at de-extincting the woolly mammoth uh the passenger pigeon the dodo and of course recently in the news uh there was a lot of fanfare about the the direwolf i don't know if you're a game of thrones fan familiar with the direwolves big time and tracked the whole direwolf thing which became a bit confusing it's like are they back or are they not back are these real direwolves so sounds like there's some gray area area in there is what you're saying yeah they're not back they're really, really not back. Let me tell you what happened. So basically, there is a company in the States, you may have heard of called Colossal Biosciences. And they're a company looking into de-extinction and generally using genetic techniques for conservation. So they're a really, really interesting company, but a lot of their fanfare and publicity surrounds their de-extinction projects. So the dire wolf is one of these. And last year, they announced with many social media clips and catchy videos that they had de-extincted the dire wolf. Now, this is kind of interesting, because if I explain what they actually did, then you can work out what you think. So basically, what they did, and this gets to the heart of what GM is, what genetic modification is. So what they did is they took cells from grey wolves, which are related to dire wolves. So grey wolves are the animals that we have alive with us today. And they edited the DNA inside some of those cells to make them more dire wolf-like. So when we talk about editing DNA, we're talking about using these really sort of precise techniques to make changes in precise genes. So genes are the bits of our DNA that code for really meaningful things. So in this case, they altered the DNA inside some genes that coded for coat colour. So these walls are white. They changed genes to do with musculature and size. So these beasts are going to be really, really big. And they made these edits inside a single cell that came from a grey wolf. and they used that cell to create an embryo, which they then nurtured inside a surrogate dog. There's a red flag for me right there. And then the dog gave birth to these genetically modified grey wolves. Now, the reason why I'm choosing my words really, really carefully and calling them genetically modified wolves and not dire wolves is because that's exactly what they are. Meaning they are genetically modified grey wolves. That's exactly what they are. Nothing really close to dire wolves. There's a little bit of dire wolf in them, but they're really grey wolves. Yeah, so superficially, they look the same. They created three individuals, two males, one female, and superficially, they look a bit dire wolf-y. Only the problem is we don't really know what dire wolves looked like because a lot of the dire wolf remains that we've got come from tar pits and they're very discoloured. And some of the DNA analysis we've done suggests that they didn't actually have white fur. They had like more agouti fur or brown fur. And we don't really know how similar or different they are in terms of their behavior, because nobody was around to study the direwolf behavior when this thing was alive. They're certainly not the same at the genetic level, which if you want to consider them the same thing, they would absolutely have to be. And to give you an idea of that, they made 20 changes in 14 genes. but we're talking an animal that would have had ballpark 40,000 genes and some of that kind of would have been quite similar to the gray wolf but but they they basically they've skimmed the surface and I think that my problem with this is it's certainly not a direwolf and if you look at all the people that kind of have a scientific background we're all in agreement not a direwolf what it feels like to me is a publicity stunt and my concern is that there are some really interesting de-extinction projects out there and that this is a bit of a red herring. We're missing the point of something a bit more genuine and something a bit more deep and something a bit more relevant to wildlife and conservation that's actually going on. And are they actually doing that work that you said is more important than this sort of marketing story of the direwolf? Is this same company doing it or do you mean just more generally the science is doing things that people should be paying attention to. Yeah, but both of those things. So what was really interesting was when the direwolf story broke. So there was quite a de-celled press release that came out, the information that was given to the world's journalists. And within that, they also mentioned that they'd done some work on an animal called the red wolf. So the red wolf is a species in America, still alive. I believe there's roughly less than 20 in the wild. I think there are a number in captivity. But the problem is that all of these red wolves are descended from just 14 founder members. So when you have a population of animals descended from a very small group, you get problems with inbreeding, they become less successful, less viable, more likely to die over time. And what the same company did, buried at the bottom of the press release, is some really clever science where they actually cloned two new, I think it was two, possibly three new founders from cells that they had frozen away. So what they've done is create an additional three red wolves. So that boosts the founding population. And instead of this species being in a genetic tailspin because of inbreeding, it's now got a shot at taking off. Talking of wolves, if you can hear flapping, I have my genetically modified wolf, my own genetically modified wolf. I can see the top of his head there. is it on my lap it is a he and and let me just explain why this is relevant as well definitely not the top of a wolf's head yes but maybe something distantly related okay i'm telling you a direwolf is a genetically modified wolf and i tell you what else is a genetically modified wolf all dogs right so what i have sitting next to me is a dog dogs are basically wolves that over time through the process of domestication and selected breeding we changed over time humans this wolf into dogs right so dogs are genetically modified wolves and so is the supposed dire wolf basically what an interesting parallel just one happened overnight and the other one took 10 000 years exactly right yeah is it 10 000 years i don't know how long is it how old is the domestic dog 30 000 years ago dogs started to be domesticated but really and and so they would have been changing genetically. There would have been changes at the genetic level during that time, but they're occurring very, very slowly. And then the last couple of hundred years through the process of selective breeding, where people went, well, okay, I want a big dog for a guard dog, or I want a small thing that fits in a handbag with a cute short face. We started selectively choosing certain features that we liked and breeding these animals together. And again, the genetic underpinnings of those, the mutations, the changes to the DNA sequence that were behind those characteristics, they piggybacked along for the ride. So although we didn't use these kind of like high-tech molecular methods that we're talking about for de-extinction, just through the process of domestication and selective breeding, we genetically modified wolves and the domestic dogs that we have today are the end result of that product. So the bit of sound you might be able to hear in the background is my genetically modified wolf higgs i do have to ask you while we're on the topic of bringing species back from the dead i read that you asked a bunch of people what they would bring back from the dead years ago this was i think when you were first embarking upon maybe it was around your book was it your first book that came out um what did people say when they said oh i want i want to see this or that come back from the dead what were some of the ideas do you remember no i do because some of them were incredibly funny so i did an event and and I put out a thing on Twitter asking people if you could bring one species back from extinction what would it be And I got really interesting answers So somebody said I like a pet velociraptor which was great So I went back to them and I said, why? And they said, I just fancy a pet with retractable claws. And then I went back to them and I said, have you thought about a cat? And they went, I'm not a cat person. more of a velociraptor person than a cat person good answer have a velociraptor but you know dodos come up because I think dodos is the sort of the icon of extinction and when I first started looking into this 10 years ago dodos were off the table because the technology wasn't there and now that is possibly something that could happen and also people are fascinated by dinosaurs you know Jurassic Park cast this rather long and wonderful colorful shadow and everybody wants to know if you can bring dinosaurs back and the answer i hate to break it to you is is no because to de-extinct anything you need two ingredients you need a source of its dna and you need a living relative that you can borrow bits of biology from so for dinosaurs we have a living relative in the form of birds. So birds are descended directly from a certain group of dinosaurs. But the other ingredient was DNA. And although you can sometimes get DNA from fossils, it has a half-life like radioactivity, which means there's a cutoff point. And that's roughly, I mean, we're getting better with the technology, but roughly a million to two million years ago. If a fossil is older than that, you can't get DNA from it. So dinosaurs went extinct. And dinosaurs were 65 million years. Bang on the money, yeah. So no dinosaur DNA, no dinosaurs. Okay, well it's disappointing, Jurassic Park fans, but it's good to put that argument to bed, isn't it? Have you seen how Jurassic Park turned out? I mean, I think probably we're better off without it. I think, probably. All right, well, Helen, that was question number one. I should probably move on now. No, this is so great. This is absolutely perfect. You've actually touched upon so many things that I want to bring up with specific questions. So this is great foundational stuff. I really enjoy it. It seems like you've been on this journey as well. A lot's happened since your first book, Bring Back the King, about de-extinction came out. And that's a whole journey, I'm sure. But I think fast forward into some other stuff that's going on now, I think it's really important that we can understand this area of wildlife genetics that we're talking about. And, you know, the dire wolf got our attention. But how is that different to some of the other stuff that's being talked about now? What does genetically modified wildlife really mean in today's world? Yeah, I mean, people have different terms for it and different ways of describing it. One of the terms that I like the most, which is used by an organisation called Revive and Restore, who are a fantastic not-for-profit organisation who are behind a lot of this work in the conservation space, they call it genetic rescue. You know, we're going through this period of mass extinction. we're losing species up to 150 200 species going extinct every day like you know falling through our fingers like like sand um if we do nothing if we continue with the conservation techniques that we have we will have some successes right we already are so you know traditional strategies like um land management or anti-poaching or rewilding obviously there's a lot of buzz about that But what if we think a little bit more technically about this and we go, right, okay, so we know that when species are going extinct, generally it's because they can't adapt and keep up with the environment. The pace of the environment, environmental change is happening so quickly they can't keep up with it. Well, what about if we throw technology at the problem to help them do that? At face value, genetic modification is about taking an animal and very specifically and in a targeted way, changing its DNA to give it characteristics that we think we like better. So in the case of conservation, things that would help the animal to survive, to reproduce better, to be better to disease, be able to withstand disease. So when you think about it, some of the examples that I chuck about are things like, you know, we know coral are dying off, they're bleaching. What if we could genetically just change their DNA just a tiny bit so they're better at surviving warming waters? What about we've got a massive problem with pollution? What about if we could tweak the DNA of fish so that they become more resistant to the pollution in the rivers that they swim in? I'm not saying we shouldn't solve the root cause problems, but it's not happening quickly enough. And if you left animals in time, maybe they would evolve to keep pace with climate change and pollution. But it's now happening so rapidly because of the pace of human-induced change that animals can't keep up. How does it work? Can you just get into a little bit of the mechanics a little bit on how do you edit a gene in the first place? Well, there are different methods, but the one that everybody's talking about at the moment is something called CRISPR-Cas9. And that's like an acronym for something very long and hard to remember. So I won't trouble you with it. It's called, you can look it up. It's called CRISPR-Cas9. And if you can imagine what it looks like in a laboratory is somebody holding a test tube with like a bit of clear liquid at the bottom and squirting something into it. That's what it looks like. But actually what it is, is far more sophisticated than that. So this is a technique from molecular biology that lets you go in and if you imagine the genetic code of a grey wolf, and I'm plucking the figure out of the air, but it will be roughly in this ballpark. It will be roughly, what would it be, like three billion genetic letters long. So what CRISPR does is it enables a scientist to go in and say, right, where there is that one letter that I want to change amongst three billion, say it is the letter A, I can go in and I can change it and make it into one of the other chemical letters that makes up DNA. that particular one at that particular point out of three billion i can go in and i can change that one it's that precise so you've got the changes inside a single cell in a dish and then you need to use that cell to kick start life so from a single cell you need to create an embryo and from that embryo you create you know a living growing being and i've been quite vague there because the methods are different if you're talking about fish, if you're talking about birds, if you're talking about mammals, if you're talking about marsupials. But in mammals, they involve things like cloning, which most people have heard of Dolly the sheep. So they've genetically modified certain livestock, for example. People have made cattle that are potentially more heat tolerant they've made sheep that are woolier or more muscly or more meaty and that involves a combination of two things so one is making the genetic edits in the first place using crisper and then cloning or something like cloning to create an animal so it's happening in the agricultural world before our very eyes all the time kind of standard procedure is it yeah it's kind of interesting the gm thing making the genetic edits is kind of at the testing stage now but cloning is uh routinely and regularly used in the agricultural business which i think a lot of people don't realize because so if you're thinking about um beef cattle you know they can only pump out so much semen in their lifetime but if you clone that individual you've got an exhaustive supply because you can make clones of these like incredibly elite breeding animals the other place where you see and this is really interesting and again not well known is on the polo field so in argentina in south america polo is this amazing sport where these incredible athletes go like charging down the field uh whacking balls with a mallet off the back of their polo ponies and they switch polo ponies in different chuckers so they might get through about um i don't know like six to twelve ponies in a game when one gets tired they swap it out and they bring another one on and so what some of the really elite wealthy players have done is they've cloned their best polo ponies so in a single game they will ride the same pony and you know different copies of the same pony in the same game wow wow now then coming back then to the crisper technology and genetically modified or genetically engineered wildlife what's happening now with that can you give us a couple of examples of that because that's different to what you're saying cloning is right am i getting that right this is i know it's really really confusing so let me i'll just let me see if i can split it into a couple of different areas for you there are examples where people have used cloning to make populations of wild animals more healthy by basically bringing back dead individuals to life i'm putting that last bit in inverted commas because it's not it's not quite that but like for ease of understanding there's that yeah they're cells you make you're making a clone so there's that there's people talking about deliberately precisely altering the dna of wild animals to give them a better chance of surviving and that's very much the okay we need to talk about this stage and then there is well okay if we alter the dna of wildlife how do we get it out there it's one thing changing the dna of one wild animal but suppose if you're thinking um i don't know about the honey creepers in hawaii who are becoming extinct because of avian malaria it's no good just releasing one wild bird how do you make all of the birds resistant so there's there's a number of different technologies here we've talked about cloning we've talked about crisper which is changing the DNA very precisely. And then just to spin your head even more, but it's the last piece of technology I'll chuck at you. There's another piece of technology called gene drive. And gene drive is a way, if you alter the DNA of one wild animal, how can you get it so that when that animal breeds, you can try and make as many of the offspring as possible also have that beneficial change so this isn't about just changing the dna at the level of a single animal it's about changing the dna at the level of entire populations of animals and that's what's the game changer if it works and right is it working or are we about to find out that this is possible where are we in that journey yeah well it's the game changer but it's also the thing that both really excites people and really worries people. Because on the one hand, you could use it to wipe out invasive species. You could use it to make species resistant to disease, to make species resistant to climate change. But on the other hand, you could wipe out entire species. You could have unintended consequences for ecosystems. This could create ripples throughout ecosystems that we haven't even thought about yet so this is something that needs to be thought about really carefully and the only place that this has happened so far is with mosquitoes so let me unpack that a bit so so mosquitoes we know okay, they can be really irritating, but by and large they harm us. We've got thousands of species, but there's one species, Anopheles, that carries malaria. And that's really bad news because it's still a massive killer around the globe. So here's a thought experiment for you. What if you could genetically modify that particular mosquito so that it can no longer transmit malaria. That seems intuitively like a good idea, but what if by doing that, you also wipe out that species of mosquito? Okay, people are less sure about that because we don't know about the intended consequences. There are a number of projects out there where they've taken the mosquitoes that cause malaria and altered their DNA using CRISPR so they then can't pass on malaria and then they've done the gene drive bit which means actually if you release these things into the wild they will pass this genetic change onto their offspring they will if they breed it will get passed on normally there's only like a 50 chance of you inheriting a particular gene from your mum or your dad because that's the way genetics works but they have a hundred percent chance of passing on the gene that says you know you cannot transmit malaria and so they've done that's a breakthrough that that's very recent is it uh in the last sort of five years and they ran a test where they released um i think it was about a thousand of these genetically modified mosquitoes into an enclosed environment um so laboratory controlled And what you see is that so mosquitoes have got a breeding cycle of about three weeks What you see is that very quickly in, I think it was like a couple of months, the whole population crashes because they can't reproduce anymore. So when we talk about this genetically modified wildlife, it's only so far happening in this particular way with mosquitoes, nothing else yet. Well, you could say that this has happened with a dire wolf. They've genetically modified grey wolves, right? And I think the thing with de-extinction is that as people are developing the science for de-extinction, some of the methods that they're creating are directly applicable to people in the conservation field. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll find out how scientists are using genetic modification to try and save the northern white rhino, now that only two of them are left on Earth. And we'll dig into the unintended consequences of genetically engineering the zebrafish that's coming up. Or is it zebrafish? Zebrafish? Zebrafish? Seattle is a boomtown. From manufacturing to tech, some of the world's biggest companies have brought jobs and wealth to the region. But that comes with real growing pains. I'm Joshua McNichols. And I'm Monica Nicholsberg. We host Booming, a podcast that helps you make sense of the economic forces shaping our lives here in the Pacific Northwest. From the big budget projects on Seattle's to-do list. To the artificial intelligence age. We get into the stories that hit your wallet and our region. Listen now on the KUOW app or wherever you get podcasts. What an interesting conversation with Helen Pilcher. I look forward to hearing what you think about it. Our patrons have been weighing in on future episode topics, different ideas that they've been sharing with us, and it's so great to hear them. I'd like to give a quick thank you to some of our patrons now. Anna O, Sean L, Peter J, Ilana Sophia, Erica S, and Jessica K. Thanks for your valuable feedback. If you want to join our wonderful Patreon community, you can visit the link in the show notes. Okay, let's get back to my chat with Helen Pilcher. Welcome back. I'm talking with author and science communicator, Dr. Helen Pilcher, about the controversial field of genetically modified wildlife. We left off talking about how the methods used in de-extinction can be used in the conservation of today's species. So let me tell you about two separate projects, first of all. One is a de-extinction project and one is a conservation project. So there is a de-extinction project ongoing now to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. So woolly mammoths went extinct at the end of the last ice age. Their closest living relative is the Asian elephant. So if you want to bring back the woolly mammoth, you have to work out how to alter DNA in an Asian elephant cell and then use it to create life. so that's one project okay to bring back the woolly mammoth now another project another project which is conservation is the northern white rhino and i'm sure you probably know about the northern white rhino it's this beautiful animal of which there are only two left there are two left they're both females they're a mother and a daughter and they're called naeen and fatu and they live in a wildlife park in Olpieta in Kenya. And you can call this conservation or you can call it de-extinction because with only two females left, they are extinct, right? If we do nothing else, these species are extinct. Now, some of the things that are being developed to bring back the northern white rhino are actually applicable to the woolly mammoth project. And some the things from the Woolly Mammoth Project are applicable to the Northern White Rhino Project. And there is crosstalk between the two groups of scientists who are doing this. So let me give you one example. So Colossal Biosciences, they're the Woolly Mammoth guys, one of the things they're very, very good at doing is taking museum specimens of animals, in this case, Northern white rhinos, and taking cells from those museum specimens and then working out the genetic sequence of the animal it came from. So Colossal have been doing this for the Northern white rhino. And meanwhile, the guys in the Northern white rhino project have been creating test tube rhinos, IVF rhinos, using eggs from the last two living females. and sperm frozen away from the last males before they died sorry i know this is a lot to take a lot it's fascinating i'm in so there are about that this is in germany the scientists are in germany here doing well actually they're collaborating with a bigger greek but the guy who's sort of behind this project he's an amazing scientist he's a vet called thomas hildebrandt and he's the one who's orchestrating this whole northern white rhino project they have about 30 test tube rhinos all frozen away ready to be implanted in a surrogate rhino and boost the northern white rhino population but how do you implant a test tube rhino back into a surrogate rhino it's never been done before right so how do you work out how to do that when you go to the elephant people and the elephant people are working on the woolly mammoth project and they've got an idea about how to do this so you can borrow some of that technology and then in the meantime right when they do this when you then implant them back into a surrogate rhino species and you create new northern white rhinos because this is the goal you can boost this population hopefully there will be new northern white rhinos males and females before the last two females die but we come back to this founder population right that they're descended from a really small population of founders because they've only got eggs from one mother. So where there's cross-fertilization again, do you remember I told you that colossal biosciences had been busy decoding the DNA of all these northern white rhinos from different places? They've got the genetic sequences that go, well, okay, we could now use CRISPR to engineer some of this genetic diversity back into some of these test tube rhinos that are being otherwise created so instead of creating a population of northern white rhinos that are very inbred because they've only got one mum and a handful of dads you can use CRISPR to overcome that problem by editing in genetic diversity and I know that's like loads to take in it is one of the questions I have where does that extra stuff come from where or what what is the DNA that you're slotting into those cells of the white rhino? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So what happens is that when Colossal are decoding the genomes of these northern white rhinos from tissue samples or tusks or things that they found, it's all digital at this point. It's all computer information, right? And then what you do is you then take that computer information, that digital sequence, and you line it up next to the sequence of the living rhino that you've got, and you look for differences and where you spot differences those are the things that are going to change so you could say right there's a cluster of genes here that seem to be very different they seem to be really really important so using crisper you can then change those sequences specifically inside a living cell so you use the digital information as a source of information as a library and then you go in using the molecular methods to tweak the dna inside the cells have i completely you haven't i'm so in no i look it's it's it's no you this is exactly what i was hoping to try and understand yeah it seems like there's two camps that you're describing that are sort of learning from de-extinction in a way that can be applied to what you're calling conservation meaning helping species that are still alive and need our help desperately and there's a lot of squishy stuff in the middle that they can all sort of collaborate and learn from each other on right i mean that's exactly it yeah that does help to understand that it's like bringing back the direwolf is actually very useful for making sure that white rhinos don't go extinct all of this technology all information about how to do this is useful information that might find a use somewhere and i do believe that even if i think some of the de-extinction projects are a bit questionable i do think the knowledge that comes out of it so long as it's publicly accessible and shared through peer-reviewed science which they're not very good at doing it potentially could be really really helpful and i understand why people were worried about it i really yes i saw one headline and it said it said something um with like 90 conservation organizations signed on to push for a moratorium on genetically engineering species in the wild and i the the title was pretty catchy it said there's no undo button you know you can't you can't undo this stuff once it's done and 90 organizations and i thought well they must have a must have a point humans make mistakes all the time what's the example of the of the zebrafish zebrafish right you've already got me talking english again the zebrafish zebrafish we can call it let's call the whole thing off you say zebra i yeah no okay but just as an example yeah tell us that really good example of where something is maybe going a bit wrong so the other thing about genetic modification you can use it to make the sorts of genetic changes that would crop up naturally given enough time so like becoming disease resistant or better at surviving climate change or you can use it to do something really really really different that would never normally happen in nature like put a gene from one species into the cell of another species, right? Because DNA is this common language. And that's actually something that's happened quite a lot in the research environment. And about 20 years ago, a researcher in Singapore took genes from coral and jellyfish that make them these really vibrant colours and put them into zebrafish, the little tropical fish that lots of people have in their fish tanks. And these zebrafish are also used as a model in biological research. So this was meant to be a research tool, right? So the idea was he'd make these really brightly coloured zebrafish because they're normally sort of black and white, all these different colours of the rainbow. And then the next thing he was going to do was change them so that if these fish swam somewhere where there was pollution, they would change colour. So there would be like a canary in the coal mine for pollution. Right. That was the idea. This was 20 years ago. Anyway, what happened was the first part of the thing where he just put the genes from coral and jellyfish into the zebrafish. The fish was so brilliantly coloured, he recognised that there was an opportunity here that he could commercialise these. And so these fish, they're called glowfish, you can look them up on the internet, G-L-O fish. These little fish started to get mass-produced commercially and sold as pets. and in certain countries that's legal. I think in the States you can buy them. I think over here in the UK you can't. So all well and good. People have got really fancy, jazzy tropical fish in their tanks. But there was a place in Brazil where these fish were being bred in a manufacturing facility to supply the pet trade and some got out. and they got into like the there's lots of sort of ponds in this area and the ponds feed into streams and the streams feed into rivers and the atlantic forest which is this spectacular um forest that covers you know a vast area of brazil like a mini amazon if you like the fish swam their way in there wow and as of the last i heard 2022 there were they're called transgenic fish which means they have the genes from different species there were some of these fish swimming in the streams of the amazon so you've got normal zebra fish there i believe and then you've got the brightly colored one so where this has got people really worried is well what does that mean this is basically an invasive species now that is right because it's so different from its original yeah right so on the one hand maybe it dies out maybe it's so bright and obvious predators like see that and they eat it and it disappears but on the other hand we know these fish breed slightly more quickly than the traditional zebrafish and we know they're feeding and they're surviving and they're breeding so we know some of them are still alive so we don't know if what we've got there is a little fish that will just settle into the Atlantic forest and live its life and not really disturb the ecosystem. We don't know if it will outcompete the native fish and drive some of them to extinction. Or we don't know if it will interbreed with some of the native fish and create something new altogether. We just don't know. But you know what should never have happened? They should never have escaped, right? So there's a lesson to be learned there about biosecurity. A massive lesson. Yes, it reminds me of our... We did an episode on Burmese pythons in Florida and just the devastation of that, a parallel story where they escaped from captivity and now they taken over the Everglades and you hard to find any small mammal there anymore because they all been eaten by these pythons How would you feel if we genetically modified burmese pythons and put in a gene drive so that the ones that exist they live their lives they produce offspring but those offspring are infertile and i don't know how long burmese pythons live for a couple of decades but basically these things just die out they just disappear and cease to be a problem how would you ask me because yeah i i that sounds like a good idea to me and i'm surprised that i'm saying it but yeah you know in those circumstances i think it would be justified right because you'd be saving entire ecosystems and so many other species just by quietly disappearing the burmese python i mean right now they're killing them they're putting a gun to the head of these these snakes so it almost seems like a a fairer more pleasant way to get rid of them slowly genetically and making them unable to breed that's that's what would happen is it yeah exactly that they just die out in a generation or two because that any offspring would be infertile now i'm saying i'm saying that i don't know that anybody has looked at doing this in reptiles right that's a whole nother like yes yes subgenre of biology that needs exploring but that's the kind of thing we're talking about here and i think it's really interesting i think we have this knee-jerk reaction against genetically modifying wildlife because it somehow feels unnatural but again circling back to the top of the conversation where i was saying well actually we've been changing the dna of wildlife ever since we started domestication and selective breeding we're just using different methods now and just because something's new and unfamiliar doesn't mean automatically we should discount it and the thing that i come back to when i bring up this for discussion is if you go back to where the 1970s when the first test tube human baby was born louise Brown in Sheffield, was it? I think in the UK anyway. And people were outside the hospital with placards saying, you're going to create a monster. This must never be allowed. You're playing God. This is a line you must never cross. And then IVF was shown to be safe and beneficial and has helped millions of people that would otherwise not have been able to have kids have kids and now we don't think IVF is scary anymore we found a place for it because people showed it was safe and beneficial and I think that's what we need to do with GM Wildlife on a case-by-case basis is to show that it's safe very very carefully though yeah right exactly that are there current laws around genetically modified wildlife in the states or UK or European Union that you know about do they exist yet or is that is it too early to have laws around this stuff Yeah, it's a very, very grey area. So at the moment in the US, it's the FDA who are in charge of regulating genetically modified organisms. And GM wildlife falls under that banner because there isn't anything else in its part. So a lot of the regulatory framework that we have around this comes from human medical research and from agriculture and food. So it's not really fit for purpose. This is new technology and it leads a new regulatory framework. This brings up a whole thing. You know, I'm a wildlife conservationist, so one of the things for me is bringing up this, is there a divide? Is there a choice between putting money and time into conservation in the wild, like stopping habitat loss and other ways of keeping species alive right now and resilient, versus relying on some of these sort of technological fixes in the lab? Is it dangerous? Because people might start getting complacent, thinking, oh, you know, who cares? so we can lose a species or habitat and just bring them back with help from this technology. Is it dangerous? Is there that divide? Two things to consider there. First of all, you hint at how this works financially. And the first thing I would say is that currently, at present, you are not seeing money being stolen from the big conservation charities to put towards this kind of technology development. That's not happening. So, you know, the World Wildlife Fund is still doing what it does. And where you see things like de-extinction, the company like Colossal, that's basically funded through philanthropy. And the amazing guy doing the work on the Northern White Rhino, this is through very meagre grants from the German government. So we're not seeing the two forces competing with each other financially. And then the argument that you bring about how we're on a dangerous, slippery slope, because if we start, if it becomes easy to bring back extinct species or save ones that are on the way out, it becomes, you know, easier to let them go, that we're on this slippery slope. The thing that I would say is none of this is easy. This will not be an easy thing to do. So I don't think that argument works. And the other thing is you could see it going the other way. Instead of making us care less about the natural world and finding it easier to let species go, maybe this could be like our moonshot moment, putting a man on the moon. maybe when we start to do these amazing things with technology we motivate people and they go wow isn't science absolutely brilliant isn't the way it interacts with the natural world brilliant we can do this if we chuck all of these techniques in together we can actually pull this mass extinction back from the brink it could go one way it could go the other it could sit somewhere in the middle but i don't think any of these arguments are black and white and wherever there is an argument there's always a counter argument very nice i would love to see that you know where people rally because they can see the possibilities as opposed to throw their hands up and say oh no we're all screwed there's nothing can be done i suppose giving people the chance to feel like there is something that can be done even if it's highly technological and very in some ways artificial because we're playing this role as humans maybe it could be maybe it could be a good thing um there is this ethical line isn't there i think between helping wildlife and playing god and it's almost like why are scientists taking all these risks and presenting us with such a complex ethical dilemma why is it all worth it why is it well let me just address the point about playing god i think people don't like uh you know this is something people say to me we shouldn't be playing god this this is unnatural and i've already made the point about how unnatural technology can become accepted uh when it's proven to be safe i've made that point But the other thing I was going to say was that don't we also play God when we warm the entire planet so much that we change climate around the world, that island nations are disappearing, that species are going extinct. Don't we also play God when we pollute our rivers, when we cut down forests, when we shove the oceans full of microclimate? For me, the playing God argument does not work. It's a fairly meaningful phrase for humans have this enormous power. And we do. And we've clearly... I suppose that's true. Although those things seem to come about passively. people aren't thinking about oh we're going to cut down a forest and it's going to be detrimental to our health and the ecosystems of the world it's almost like that's just what we need to do i suppose it is playing god isn't it in some ways but it feels more passive than actually sticking a a test tube of white rhinos together and manipulating the very basis of genetics in nature well it shouldn't be it shouldn't be like that we should be thinking like this you know we we must be aware that our individual actions you know uh contribute to to a bigger collective pool of actions that are altering the planet we we can't forget this and i think this is something that the next generation are far more on than we are that feel far more like peeved at the world that they're inheriting because we've screwed this one up so badly very true so i think we we are playing god And you can, you know, it's been applied to this sort of deliberate modification of cells and DNA. But I see no reason why we can't apply the same term to this wider level global change. What was the second point that you were asking me? Just why is it all worth it? You know, why is it worth it to go through these massive ethical dilemmas and all of these question marks around what we should be doing? Why is it worth it? Let me tell you why I think it's worth it, right? So, there are two northern white rhinos left. They're our ballpark. I haven't got the figures in front of me. 20,000 southern white rhinos left. 40 Javan rhinos. A couple of other species. They're on the way out, okay? If we do nothing, they're on the way out. So, here's my answer to your question. I don't want my grandkids to be asking me what a rhino was. I don't want that. I don't want a world where my grandkids say, did elephants really exist? I do not want that world. And we are ridiculously short-sighted if we think we can continue to lose the species that we share our planet with. And at some point, let's not create a catastrophe for our own species. So that's why we do this. We do it because the traditional conservation methods that we have are fantastic and people do amazing work. But if these new methods, these genetic techniques can tip the odds in favour of species survival even slightly, surely that's worth exploring. Well, thank you for everything that you're doing to bring all of this to light. And I just love the way that you sort of explain what is going on. And I don't know, you're presenting all sides of it in a very compelling way. And it's great to have it in people's minds, this topic. So thank you for being here as well, Helen. I've really enjoyed my conversation with you. I really appreciate it. Well, I have too. And thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. My guest today has been Dr. Helen Pilcher. She's written many articles on the topic of genetically modified wildlife and books, including Bring Back the King, the New Science of De-Extinction, and more recently, Life Changing, How Humans Are Altering Life on Earth. One last thing. In our conversation, Helen mentioned how things have progressed with bringing back the dodo. And I didn't get a chance to ask her more about that. So I emailed her afterwards and she replied, over the past 10 years, scientists have gotten better at retrieving DNA from old battered dodo specimens. And they've now managed to retrieve the complete dodo genome. Little side note, the genome is all of the DNA of a species, which is the starting point for de-extinction. Thanks, Helen. Wow. So it's not happening tomorrow, but researchers are working on it. I can't wait to see what evolves. The Wild is a production of KUOW in Seattle and Chris Morgan Wildlife with support from Wildlife Media. Lucy Suchek produced this episode. Jim Gates is our editor. Fact-checking by April Craig. Our theme music is by Michael Parker. Additional music from Musicbed and Blue Dot Sessions. The Wild is hosted, produced, and written by me, Chris Morgan. A very special thank you for their kind financial support to Jill and Scott Walker, Rose Letwin, Ellen Ferguson, the Isdell family, Anna Kimball, Barbara Stallman, John Taylor, Paul Lister, Bob Yellowlees, and John and Julie Hanson. Thanks for listening. I hope you get to step into nature today, some non-genetically modified nature. See you next time. Everything is expensive in Seattle. But when it comes to restaurants, I got a lot of tricks and tips up my sleeve to help diners eat well in the city. I'm Ton Venn, host of Seattle Eats, a food podcast from the Seattle Times and KUOW, part of the NPR Network. I'll share about the latest buzz in the Seattle food scene, like the hottest openings and the best bites that are worth your money. 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