1954 and the entire time they faced resistance from religious leaders, Civic Leaders official leaders and never back down and kept punishing. One of the analogy former force member she said i always felt like we were those guys in sun dance kid at the end when butch and sun dance were followed and lose these guys and the people that are tracking them stay up behind theming and use techniques to lose them and bush cast city say who are these guys . That was the response many people are in omaha who are these guys what do they want and why are they here . That was a great question because if to you look to any state, that wowrve is the response but it wasnt another one of the groups because there wasnt another group like that. One with of of the most pornt parts is it was such a pioneering effort in such an unlikely place. For more information on cities visited by our local content vehicles go to cspan. Org local content. Beth shapiro is next on book tv her book how to clone a mammoth takes look at Climate Change and migration patterns and roll both played in extinction of mammoths. [silence] may or may not be able to hear me. [laughter] adjust the height. But, hello everyone. Thanks for joining us tonight my name is serena on behalf of harbor bookstore delighted discuss her new book how to climb a mammoth. This evening talk is one of the many great efforts harbor book stores is hosting this spring, this friday David Roberts will join us in the store to read from his new book, a lost world of the old ones discoveries from ancient southwest, and tickets are Still Available presenting the brights brothers at the first ferris church. To learn more visit harvard online or pick up a copy next to the door on the way out this evening. Tonights talk will conclude can questions, after which well have a book signing here at this table. We have copies of how to clone a mammoth 20 off this evening. Part of how we say thanks at the harbor bookstore. Purchases support the author series and ensure the future bookstore so thank you. Finally just a quick reminder to silence your cell phones. [laughter] were very pleased to have cspan booktv here taping this evenings events when asking questions and q and a please know that youll be recorded3and maybe wait a moment for the microphone to come over to you before you ask your question. And so now im very pleased to introduce tonights author, beth shapiro is associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the university of california santa cruz. In 2009 recipient of the macarthur record and appeared in public cases including nature, sign f science,c and molecular biology and evolution. Tonight shell be presenting how to clone a mammoth. National geographic. Com calls it a sharp whitty and arguing book and south american writes in the map for the nations discipline of extinction shapiro examines not only how to resurrect long banished species but also when we should not. Please join me in welcoming beth shapiro. [applause] thank you. All right. So thanks for inviting me, and thanks you guys for coming, it is a Beautiful Day out there, and i understand one of the first in what is a wonderful spring and summer right so thank you for spending an hour or so in here instead of out there where you probably should be because its probably more entertaining to be outside instead of listening to me. Anyway one of the many hats that i wear is as a National Geographic emerging explorer which is kind of a silt silly thing im not sure how im emerge but i want to start with a video that describes work that i do and kind of the field work that i do in the art to give you a taste of where we are so far. This is really cool. Oh, just down you can see one two, three four pieces here. This is part [inaudible] that zone. Still frozen. [inaudible] big glass of water back there. Here comes the water. We better get out of here. Okay. So that last part is a little bit silly. But in my defense that water is really gross. [laughter] so what it is is this is near city in canada Yukon Territory with active cold mining where when the snow melts quarter is in big Holding Ponds and then pumped up using High Pressure water hoses quarter is washed away that is lawed away from first couple of layers at exposure and then they wait when they get to the frozen stuff melts and then they wash inches down. Thursday goal is to get rid of all of the frozen dirt to the gold bearing gravel underneath while theyre doing that hundreds of thousands of impeccably frozen bones are uncovered and we come along and collect them. So im a biologist evolutionary biologist, or paleontologist genetic cyst called lofts things so what does a biologist want with frozen mammoth bones recovered it from the permafrost . My research is really about Climate Change an how species and communities adapt and respond to Climate Change. And when we hear about Climate Change, we often hear about changing in precipitation pattern that lead to distribution and abundance of plants and animal and storm patterns that leaves people in dire straights in different parts of the world. Of course o species that are responsibly at the brink of extinction. When we read about this in the popular press often what we get are incredible doomsday scenarios so as a biologist one might wonder what can we do to actually to actually stop this, i got ahead of myself given this talk too many times. If youve heard about this Climate Change literature one of the plots that youre accustom to seeing is this, michaelmans hockey stick plot because 2 looks like a hockey stick and comes up hire. What this is is the big line across the middle is average global temperature of about 1960, and then Everything Else is kind of relative to that. So over the last thousand years the climate, the temperature was pretty stable. Maybe declining a little bit. And then in the last couple hundred years it increased by about one with and a half degrees. This plot can be extended forward in time and people are predicting much more rapid and extensive increases in global climate. This is not the first time in earths history, however that weve seen a very rapid and large scale change in global temperatures. If we extend this scale back of the 50,000 years ago, moving forward to about 1,000 years ago we see this one period right here, this 20,000 years ago thftion the about the peak of the last ice age. Here 12,000 years a transition into the interval that were in today, and this particular transition right right around this last bit 4 degrees. Research that were doing is suggesting that this would be rapid increase probably happened over maybe a century or less. So this is actually a past period of equally rapid equally temperature change that should have affected plants and a animals everywhere. My research tries to go back in time with sample dna sequences from space an time and see how do they respond to past periods of Climate Change with hope of learning some things that welcome then apply to making more informed decisions about what we can do with our limited energy, resource that we have to deal with Climate Change. Excuse me in the present day. So the field that i work is calmed ancient dna it is not old peoples dna but from stuff that is old like mammoth bones. I work in the part of the world that you can see spanning from kind of like a canada territory across alaska into siberia this kind of far part. You see white coloration under here that is kind of shallower seas and during ice ages when much of the water on the planet was taken into making glaciers sea level was lower than it is todays and all of those white areas were exposed they were exposed and incredibly rich graph lands that supported enormous ecosystem of diverse species. It was also an important corridor for movement between the continent moves from north america to asia and bison moved into north america. Today this part of world looks like this. Im in that helicopter shadow taking this picture and ill show you a image of that beautiful helicopter in moments. But in the ice age it looked more like this. Where we had things like mammoth and camel and giant bears that stood 16 feet tall on their hind legislation two different species of horse like a regular one today an also stilt legged horses and weird things like lots of different species of cats and five foot tall beaver which is funniest extinct animal. Anyway, so this is the helicopter that we used to fly out and this was a particular exhibition that we went on into the North Central part of the peninsula. You can see that there are some windows missing in this helicopter here. That was actual particularly useful because after question got off in to the air on about the thished or fourth attempt, the french and russian people thought it might be great to celebrate by lighting off a cigarette while on the gas tank those things on the side are gas tanks. Might have happened it so we throw out incredible machines and stay in five star accommodation not sure if you can see this. I took a picture of my tent walking backward and unfocussing my camera so you can see depth of mosquitoes that we have to deal with when were out in the field up in high arctic. Then we wand wither along places where the permafrost is melting back in yukoner it story near dawson city washing down this permafrost with water hoses, and people are kind of standing around wandering around picking up bones as they wash out. So in the typical day work out near dawson city we pick up somewhere between 5 and maybe two dozen bags like weve collected. Bison also mammoth and caribou we find carnivore like wolves and bear and lions. We take a chunk out of the bones that is a degular tool with a cutting disk we take a chunk out and take it back to the lab, grind it up into a find powder and extract dna from this. And then we correlate amount of diversity that we see medic diversity in populations and any one point and time with how big that population is. Lots of diversity is big populations. Not vooch diversity means small population we can use this to decide to see when populations were growing or shrinking when they were moving across space when a local population went extinct replaced by something moving from somewhere else something that you cant necessarily see by kowcting and looking at the fossils themselves. So we learned it a lot over the course of the last couple of decades my group and other groups working in and chengt dna gathering this information. Seen bison and horses and mammoth peak in population size around 40,000 years ago and decline after that. Had is interesting because the two main hypothesis that caused it to go extinct are that they didnt like ice age it was bad for them or that humans turned up and killed them all. If the decline began 40 to 35,000 years ago, that was somewhere like 15,000 years before the peak of the last ice age and 20,000 years before large number of people in north america that kind of lets us off the hook at least for the early stages of the decline towards extinction of mammoth still not willing to let us off hook for ultimate extinction event. We watch carnivores increase and decrease in population size and move acrossed land scad responding to herbivore abundance and kaish beau survive to the present day. You can do it. Why cave lions went extinct and phone call from the press and im always superexcited to tell them what weve learn and apply to present conservation problems to use this information in the present day. But they only ever ask me one thing and it is kind of aa no no annoying to be honest no byte response so the way to describe this work right now is deextinction not a great word but stuck with it at this point because it has taken over in the hashtag world of twitter. Now were all kind of familiar with deextinction because we were there the last time we did it and we remember how it all went particularly well. It was lovely nothing went possibly wrong. Life didnt find a way as it was said by jeff goldman. Were all knowing that we cant get dna from dinosaurs their all rock dont believe what you read in journal and nature theyre all rock. No dna in rock so we can never clone a dinosaur im really sorry. But we are going to talk about the mammoth and why maam mammoth people were asking me about it. The reason people are asking about the mammoth is because we cant clone dinosaurs so that is where we are really. Okay. Now lets get down to. How are we going to bring a mammoth back to life . First way that people think about is to clone a mammoth right, but the problem hire is that cloning isnt a ambiguous as it is a scientific technique it is called cell nuclear transfer. This is the science word for cloning. We have two different types of cells germ cell, sperm and somatic normally what happens when a new organism is firmed fertilized a zygote that can become hair cell, skin cell, eye cell lung cell, et cetera a somatic cell has a specific job that is only job it knows how to do. So the trick to Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer is to convince this somatic cell to forget all of the instruction necessary to be the cell it is to be and back to earlier state with a capacity to then become every type of cell in a body and create a whole organization. The first example of Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer and the most famous example is the experiment that was done by the rosland institute in scotland mid1990s with dolly. But he remembers dolly the sheep cloned using a mammary cell so it took a particular adult view and they took a somatic cell and stressed it out, starved it of nutrients, at the same time they got an egg cell from a different type, different breed of you and they removed the Nuclear Material. They sucked out nuclear including genetic material and dna from that cell so empty egg cell and starved somatic cell zap them with electricity the membrane in the cells break up and the material Nuclear Material from that stressed out somatic cell dumps into the egg. Protein in that egg cell can actually do a little bit of magic and cause that somatic cell to regress. To go back to that early state where it has then the capacity to become every type of cell in a body. And then of course you have a different type of view used to have the surrogate mom and dolly was born and a genetic clone of the donor of the mammary cell and not of the egg cell or surrogate mom. Now this technology does work. It is not particularly e efficient. Dolly one of nearly 300 different youths that they 300 different eggs that they attempted to use in the process but it does work and it has been shown to work in a bunch of different species since then. Dogs cats rabbits pigs and goats, and cows things like that so how would it work with mammoth out into the field find and removed a somatic cell. Stress is out in a dish and insert into a egg cell it does its magical thing and then you know question implant it into the host with a baby, and then growing up and release it into the environment. Straightforward. Right. Pretty easy, right . So here we run into a stumbling block. We find some incredibly well with preserved things up in the arctic this is a horse jaw that we find near dawson city Something Like 50 or 60,000 years old. Here we have nicely preserved mummies this individual, this mummy was found in knew siberian islands and having a little substance with it. Liquid substance that was similar to blood they suggested that it was not proven that it was blood. But anyway despite how well preserved these are none of them have any living cells and no one is ever going to find any mammoth remains that have any living cells when the organism dies cell and dna decay right away first the action is ins within body itself and then a mummy heats up, guts burst and microbes break down dna and radiation is no good it hammered dna like it does when were live. But dead cells cant fix mistakes made by solar radiation things like water oxygen, these are all chemical bombardment of this dna that break it is down into smaller and smaller pieces until eventually theres nothing left. So youll never find a mammoth that has a living cell and if we never find a living cell we can never clone a mammoth. Thank you for coming. Just kidding. [laughter] all right so last week, last week a team of International Researchers based i think the lead was from the National Museum of sweden. They announced that they had sequenced a complete genome of two different mammoth so shouldnt be that sequencing genome and start there. So we have a whole list of a c, g, p letters that make up dna 4 billion of them, in fact, that is how big mammoth genome is and this provides us with an instruction manual for making the genes and protein to make it look and act like a mammoth lets have long strands of dna into chromosomes somehow and put it into the cell right to do this whole thing we put the cell in the blah blah, around here and then we have a mammoth right done straightforward. The problem problem several problems, lets start here. They reported that they have a complete genome sequence that is kind of true. They kind of have a complete genome sequence but it is not really complete in such a way that means that we could actually synthesize it in the lab. In fact, there isnt any vertebra organism that we have a complete genome sequence is for. Including humans, now, we do have most of the human genome sequence we certainly have majority of the genome sequence that contains genes that is important bit we think. But there are parts of the human genome and every vertebra made of these really tightly condensed repeat regions mostly near center and end of the chromosome called chromosome and theres no existing sequencing technology that allows us to get through that. So we couldnt go into the lab to sequence from one end of the chromosome to the other even if we wanted to because we dont actually know the whole sequence and we dont know how important it is to know the sequence we dont know if it has any genes dont know what it does. We think it has some important regulatory information. Utilities, et cetera. But we dont know. So there you go. The played genome sequence is not a complete genome for humans. And its even worse for mammoths and there are a couple of reasons why it is really bad. Really hard to generate complete genome sequences for something that has been extinct for a long time. Like a mammoth but first it goes back to something that i just talked about sequences themsel