And you can also watch after words online. Go to booktv. Org and click on the book tv series and the topics list on the upper right side of the page. Beth shapiro is next. Her book how to clone a man that looks at Climate Change and migration patterns and the role they play in the extinction of mammoth. You may not be able to hear me. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us tonight. On behalf of the bookstore im delighted to welcome you to this event with beth shapiro and herbert how to clone a mammoth. This is one of the many events this spring. Friday David Roberts will join us in the store to introduced his new book the lost world of the old one discovery is in the ancient southwest and tickets are Still Available with David Mcauliffe presented in the right brothers and the first terrorist Church Leader this month. To learn more, visit us online at harvard. Com or pick up a player on your way out. Can i talk will conclude with some questions after a book signing at the table. We have copies of how to clone a mammoth. Tonight is 20 off, part of part of how we say thanks for buying the book here at harvard book store. Your purchases support the series and assure the independence bookstore. And finally, a quick reminder to silence our cell phones. We are pleased to have cspan book tv here taping this evenings event. During the q a please were members youll be recorded and maybe wait a moment for the microphone to come over to you. And so now im very pleased to introduce tonights author. Shapiro is a professor of psychology at the university of california santa cruz and the 2009 recipient of the macarthur award. The scientific articles have appeared in many publications including nature, science and molecular biology and evolution. Tonight she will be presenting her book how to clone a mammoth National Geographic. Com calls it a sharp and an impeccably argued and scientific america right in this roadmap for the nations discipline of extinction, shapiro examines not only how we can resurrect the long vanished species but also when we cannot and should not. We are pleased to host her here at Harvard Bookstore tonight. Please join me in welcoming beth schapiro. [applause] thank you. Thanks for inviting me you to you guys for coming. Its a beautiful day. I understand one of the first and what is going to be a wonderful spring and summer. Thank you for spending an hour or so in here instead of out there where you should be because it is probably more entertaining to be outside than listening to me. One of the many hats i wear as a National Geographic emerging exporter which is a silly thing. Im not sure how i am emerging. I would like to look for the video that describes the work i do it at the fieldwork i do just to give you the taste of where we are so far. One, two three, four pieces. Backbone. [inaudible] that water back there lets go home we better get out of here. Its the last part is a little silly but in my defense, that water is really gross. [laughter] what it is, this is near both in city and appears in the active class reminding in the gold mining where the snow melts and its left to the stakeholding independents pumped up with highpressure water hoses. It was saul and the exposure. Let me wait a little bit. It melts a few more inches and then they wash those down. The goal is to get rid of all of the frozen dirt to get into the gravel underneath. But while they are doing that, hundreds if not thousands of these impeccably preserved pros endquotes are uncovered uncovered and we come along and collect them. So i am a an evolutionary biologist were paleontologist on a molecular field and just. Ive been called lots of different things. So what does a biologist want a frozen mammoth frozen mammoth bones recovered from the permafrost acts by a research is about Climate Change and how the communities adapt and respond to Climate Change. When we hear about Climate Change, we hear about things like changes in precipitation patterns and changes and storm patterns that we have some people in dire straits in different parts of the world and of course species that are potentially at the brink of extinction. When we read about this in the popular press often what we get our incredible doomsday scenarios. So as a biologist, one might wonder what we can do to actually stop this . I got ahead of myself a little bit. Ive given this talk too many times. This is the hockey stick platts because it looks a little bit like a hockey stick. This is the end and then it comes up over here. What what what does this is the decline across the middle is in average global temperature about 1960 and then Everything Else is kind of wrote to that. So, over the last thousand years for the climate temperature was pretty stable. It may be declining a little bit and then in the last couple hundred years it increased by about 1. 5 degrees. Of course this can be extended and people are predicting much more rapid extensive increases in global climate. Now this is not the first time in the earths history however that we have seen a very rapid and largescale change in the global temperature. If we extend this scale back to about 50,000 years ago moving forward to a thousand bc this right here. This isnt about the peak of the last ice age and he got 12,000 years ago as a transition into the interval that we are in today. And this particular transition right here around the last 4 degrees to the research that we are doing in dawson city is suggesting that this rapid increase probably happened over maybe a century or less. So, this is actually a past era covered equally rapid commit equally tumultuous Climate Change that should have affected plants and animals everywhere. So, my research tries to go back in time become a time can sample the sequences from the animals over space and over time and ask how did the species and communities respond to these past period of Climate Change with the hope of learning some things that we can then apply to make things more informed decisions about what we can do with the limited energy and resources that we have to deal with Climate Change in the present day. So the field i work in is called ancient dna. Pretty selfexplanatory. Not older people be any of the stuff thats older like mammoth bones preserved in the permafrost. Mostly it is a part of the world here that you can see spanning from the Yukon Territory across alaska and into siberia with this far part of siberia. This is just kind of a shallow sea and giving the ice ages when much of the water on the planet was taken up into making glaciers on top of the different continent to sea level was a lot lower than it is today and those white areas were exposed. They were exposed and they were incredibly rich grassland of support for the species. It is also an important corridor for the movement between the continent. Camels and horses, for example moved from north america and asia. And the bison and humans moved from asia into north america. So, today this part of the world works like this. Im actually in a helicopter whose shadow using on the ground taking this picture, and i will share you show you a Beautiful Image from the helicopter in a minute. But in the ice age coming up looks more like this where we have the mammoths and passed it on mastodon and the regular course like we see today and kind of weird things like lots of different species which is the funniest animal. Anyway, this is the helicopter that we use to fly out in the particular expedition that we went on onto the northcentral part of the tiger peninsula. And you can see that there are some windows missing in this helicopter here. That was actually particularly useful because after we got off into the air on about the third or fourth attempt of a french and the russian people who were in charge of the expedition decided that it might be nice to celebrate the success i would in a visitor. Sitting on the site or side or gas tanks. It might have happened. So we fly out there and we stay in fivestar accommodations. Im not sure if you can see this. I took a picture kind of walking backwards and im focusing my camera so that you can see the depth of mosquitoes that we have to deal with what we are up in the hierarchy. We wander along the places where it is building. This is back in the Yukon Territory. You can see the water hoses and people are kind of standing around, picking up the bones as they wash out. So in that typical day it will take around five or maybe two dozen bags like this for bones that weve collected. Most refined our bison and horses and care of you. If we get lucky because they are rarely find carnivores like wolves and bears maybe giant bears even in a different kind of lions. We take a chunk out of the bones of a regular thing desk only to get back to the lab, grind it up into a fine powder and extracted dna from it. Than what we do is to correlate to the amount of diversity that we see genetic diversity that we see in the populations at any one point in time with how big the position is. Lots of diversity and big populations. Not very much diversity means small populations. Then we can use this to decide and see when the populations are growing or shrinking, when they are moving across space, when a local population is extinct and replaced by something moving in from somewhere else. Things like this that you cant necessarily see by counting and looking at the fossils themselves. We have learned a lot over the course of the last couple of decades where i group and other groups have been gathering this information and we see them peek around 40,000 years ago and then starts to decline after that and this is interesting because the major hypothesis of things that cause them to grow extinct or that he didnt like the ice age. It is bad for them or humans turned up and killed them all. If the decline began 40 to 45,000 years ago that was like 15,000 years before the peak of the last ice age ice age and 20,000 years before there were large numbers of people in north america which kind of goes through the early stages of the decline. They are increasing in population size and the landscape responding to the herbivore abundance and survived in the present day. They like to live where people dont which is a good trick. And why they went extinct. We get a lot of attention for the stuff that we publish in a nice highprofile journals and a lot of phone calls in the press and im always super excited to tell them what weve learned and how it can apply to the present conservation problems. How can we use this information in the present day but they only ask me one thing. And its kind of annoying to be honest. The phrase that is given to describe this work right now is not extinction that we are stuck with at this point because it seems to have taken over the hash tag world of twitter. And we are kind of familiar because we were all there the last time we did it and we remember how that went. It all went particularly well. Nothing went wrong. Life didnt find a way as it was said. But we are not talking about dinosaurs now because we know we cant get dna from the dinosaurs there is no dna so we will never be able to clone a dinosaur. I am really sorry that we are going to talk about the mammoth. People kept asking me about the mammoth. Now lets get down to it. Firstly people think about is to clone the mammoth. But it isnt an ambiguous thing as a very scientific techniques. Its called a Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer and this is the science word for cloning. We basically have two different types of cells. Normally what happens when a new organism is formed is sperm and egg come together and it is a special kind of it can become every type in the body. Hair cells, lung cells etc. It already has a specific job and that is the only job is knows how to do. So the trick to the Nuclear Transfer is to convince them. Every cell in the body creates a whole organism. The first example of the Nuclear Transfer and the most famous example is the experiment was done by the institute in scotland. Anybody remember this lacks she was cloned using a memory cell, so that took a particular adult view and to be put into the dish. At the same time they get an egg cell from a different type of greed of the view and they believe the Nuclear Material. It sucks out of the nucleus including all of the dna from that exile. So they have an empty cell in some somatic cells and they do these things together and they zap them with a bit of electricity and they break open and vendor material, the Nuclear Material from the stressedout cell dumps into the egg and then the protein can actually do a little bit of magic and cause thats how to do back to the capacity to become every type of cell in the body. Then you have a surrogate mom and eventually the genetic clone of the donor of the mammary cells and not of the egg cell with a surrogate mom. This technology does work. Its not particularly efficient. Its one of nearly 300 different views 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. How would it work . We go to the field of play and well preserved mammoth and remove the style and stress out in the dish. Can we insert it into an egg cell and it it is this magical thing and can be implanted into his very good host and it has a baby and it grows up and we release it into the environment, straightforward. Right. Pretty easy. Securely run into a stumbling block. We find some incredibly well preserved things in the arctic. This we found during dawson city 50 or 60000yearsold and here we have some really nice preserved mummies from siberia and a couple of years ago this individual was found in the new islands and this one was announced as having an even a little substance quit substance that was very similar to blood. They suggested that it was. I dont think its been proven that it was but anyway, despite how well preserved none of them have any living cells and no one is ever going to find any mammoth remains that have any living cells. When an organism dies, the cells and the dna within ten begins to take a break away. First the action of enzymes in the body itself and then if it is a mommy maybe if he thought. Lots of microbes and then it starts going down the dna so the radiation is for the radiation is no good answer cameras out the dna just like when we are alive they cant fix mistakes that are made by solar radiation. But things like water and oxygen hydrolysis. These are all chemical bombardments of the dna that just breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces until eventually, there is nothing left. So youll never find a mammoth that has a living selling and if we never find the living cell of a mammoth, we will never be able to clone a mammoth. [laughter] thank you for coming. [laughter] just kidding. So last week 18 of International Researchers i think the league was from the National Museum of sweden they announced that they had a complete genome of two different mammoths and so can be sure that the sequencing . Shouldnt we sequence and start their . We have a whole list of letters that make up the dna. 4 billion of them intact. Thats how big the genome is. And this provides an instruction manual for making the gene for making the proteins that make the mammoth look and act like a mammoth. So, lets go into the lab and a synthesized and to get these into the promised him somehow and then to the chromosomes into the south and then we can do this whole thing where we put it in and we go around here and then we have a mammoth. Done, straightforward. The problem, several problems, lets just start here. They reported that he had a complete sequence and thats okay. Thats kind of true. They kind of have a complete sequence. But its not really complete in such a way that means that we could actually synthesized it in the lab. In fact, there isnt any vertebrate if you carry onto an organism that we have a complete genome sequence including humans. We do have most of the human genome sequence. We have a majority of the genome sequence that contains genes and that is the important thing we think. But there are perks of the human genome and every other that are made of these really tight we convinced most we bear the center and the end of the chromosome. There is no existing technology that allows us to get through that. So we couldnt actually going to the lab and sequence one end to the other even if we wanted to because they dont actually know the full sequence. We dont know how important it is to note the sequence. We dont believe it has any genes or what it does. We do think it has some important Regulatory Information utilities, etc. , but we dont know. So there you go. The complete genome sequences and complete for humans. And its even worse for mammoths. And there are a couple of reasons why it is really hard to generate the complete genome sequence for something thats been extinct for quite some time. But first this goes back to something i talked about. The sequences themselves are very short and very fragmented. Just because of all of that bombardment and enzymes breaking it down from the microbes and the swale and the cost they chop it up into smaller and smaller pieces. If i were to extract from something modern i could get a very long lovely strands of the Party Streamer but we are talking about the ancient dna it is much more like confetti is not that looks as good as this. I couldnt actually find any images of confetti in the gutter today after the parade were after they were walking down the street. This isnt a good way. Its in terrible condition. Also, the samples are full of all sorts of stuff and thought just mammoth dna. So if i were to take a piece of my here and extract dna. It would be my own dna. Theres not much contamination in my hair or whatever. So i was involved in one of the team is the first used what we call the nextgeneration sequencing technology to extract dna from something and then to sequence anything and extract rather than target the specifics to the dna. We sequenced the dna from the the name of conferencing. That was like 40000yearsold. I can trim and exactly how old it was now. We did this approach called shotgun sequencing. What we ended up with is about 50 of what we recovered in the d