so most of the work that I do is in
fields that I’m not qualified for I am I
do however have a degree in zoology I
don’t practice it very much but you’ll
see if I’ll give you a few examples of
projects that we’re doing that involve
animals I think very appropriate for the
setting here so the title of this is a
zoologist and I’ll start with a typical
food this is an Oreo cookie and on their
website they they they make sure that
you understand that even though it is
technically vegan it does has doesn’t
have any animal products in it it is
done in a facility where milk might
contaminate it slightly so so it’s kind
of up to you whether this is a problem
or not if and but but this is true for
almost every vegan option that you know
for example kale lettuce every every
vegetable has trace contamination it’s
not due to the factory but due the fact
that life is complicated and they’re
they’re caterpillars and worms
everywhere if you removed everything on
the planet except for worms you’d still
be able to see pretty much everything so
they’re worms everywhere this is my my
daughter and myself with a little uh
silk worms on us this is showing our
intimate connection to at least a
certain small number of animals and so
what is the effort what is the kind of
the scientific cutting-edge effort to to
make it possible for everybody to be
vegan so there’s two there’s two camps
here basically one is to make
plant-based foods that are as similar as
possible to to what you normally you
think of as meat and the other is to
take is make actual
meet but not involving animals in any
way something that that was derived a
long time ago possibly non-invasively
from an animal and it and then it takes
on a life of its own in a in a factory
setting I’m I am vegan myself and you’ll
see in a moment why and why everybody’s
putting so much effort into this and and
and and what’s happened is it started
about 2013 was the first example of a of
a burger that was made by manufacturing
from cell lines from cultured cells it
cost about three hundred thirty thousand
dollars as uh you’ll see that one of my
traits is I want to bring down prices
radically so this struck me as something
that was kind of interesting it’s now
coming down into the range of prices
where it’s competitive with regular meat
and and in principle it could be quite
so and it’s sometimes called clean meat
because if you streak out even the very
best meat in a supermarket on a petri
plate you’ll get lots of colonies some
of which are pathological pathogenic
bacteria and this doesn’t happen with
clean meat because it’s grown under
sterile conditions it has to be because
they they they won’t otherwise they
won’t good good yield so why vegan there
you might know one or two vegans or you
might be one yourself you might know one
or two reasons there’s a set of reasons
that happen to do a medical so for
example I’m genetically have high
cholesterol my father more or less died
of it had a triple bypass and then died
there are there are some of us that are
intolerant to lactose so so like you
find in dairy products some of us Intel
and tolerant to a a different sugar that
looks a bit like lactose is present on
almost all animal cells almost all meats
except for primates so if your eat
primates then you’re okay but many
people are have this intolerance there
is the issue of the energy that it takes
to produce
a certain amount of food typically
there’s a five to one ratio
especially for animals like beef the
amount of energy you put in the amount
of energy that you can go into your body
compared to plants and about a five to
one ratio for water consumption it takes
a lot of water to grow animal products
there are issues of cruelty that bring
up and even in some cases faith-based
communities have particular opinions
about the animals or rules they’re
zoonosis these are these are infectious
diseases that originate or are
propagated by animals and these include
things like bird flu swine flu HIV Ebola
Salmonella mad cow disease you probably
heard of these and these are a risk the
closer contact you are with animals now
nobody here is in contact with animals
I’m sure but you get my point
and then finally antibiotic resistance
very often in farms you use a lot of
antibiotics sometimes not even the cure
diseases just to to increase the growth
rate in this and it’s a phenomenon that
you can increase growth rate
considerably just by antibiotics whether
they’re sick or not so so it’s a it’s a
pity if we if we can’t take advantage of
some of these opportunities just because
we lack recipes so all of you should be
creative about new recipes now I
mentioned that some of us are allergic
to meat because of the sugar on their
surface and that also makes it very hard
to transplant from an animal to a human
this is an idea that’s been around for
20 years but it was very difficult to
achieve be partly because the sugars on
their surface partly because other
immunological functions and partly
because the pigs which is the preferred
animal has makes viruses we have now
solved almost all of these problems
individually and now we’re putting the
other a combined species combined type
of pig strain which will have
all of them solved at once it’s on the
order of several dozen genetic changes
all at once and this is due to new
genetic editing tools that that my group
and others have developed worldwide it’s
at sync fingers talons CRISPR and the
pigs are really an eye I deal in it you
can make miniature versions of them
large versions you can get any sized
organ they’re the right shape and
physiology and and they will be human
compatible there’s another opportunity
with organs however which is that we if
you’re trying to transplant you don’t
want them to succumb to the same disease
that that required a transplant the
first place so if you have a viral
infection that’s causing your liver to
go you don’t want to bring in a fresh
limiter to have it get the same disease
so you’d like the organs to be resistant
to it’s lovely you want them to be
resistant to pathogens as much as
possible and it turns out that pigs tend
to be resistant to most of the many of
the human specific all of the human
specific pathogens and there many of
them and so that’s that’s that’s a plus
you’d also like them to be resistant to
cancer in senescence may be resistant to
cryopreservation so you can Bank them in
in cold storage and and here are their 3
3 animals of many that are so cold
resistant that they can actually be
frozen every year and these include the
tardigrade the the certain frogs and and
squirrels so we use these as inspiration
for developing better and better organs
now the I mentioned you don’t want them
to senesce early so if you’re taking the
organ from an animal that normally
doesn’t live as long as a human you’d
like to enhance the senescence and this
has been done successfully with mice you
can make them live twice as long so I
mean that that humans could live 160
years if that were linear the longest
lived vertebrate one of the longest
lived vertebrates is is this koi fish
that lived 226 years
this is our koi pond in my backyard and
this is me hanging out with a koi in the
middle of winter when it’s when the pond
is normally frozen it’s not clear that
they’re gonna make it to 226 years
especially the people jumping in in the
winter
now you can plot the how long and very
‘san a’mma live as a function of their
size because there is a relation small
animals tend to live less but but but
there’s some outliers when there’s some
very interesting outliers and we’ve done
some research like sequencing their
genome and their RNA and these include
the capuchin monkey the bowhead whale
which is the record among mammals which
is lives about over 200 years and then
the naked mole-rat which is closely
related to other rodents but lives about
10 times as long so instead of 2 years
more like 20 years and we’re inspired by
these or these species and many other
experiments that are done on Aging
there’s now a collection of about 300
genes that are that where we understand
them deeply enough we understand how
aging works how to make mice live longer
or even in some cases reverse aging and
so we’re working on ways of reversing
aging in dogs like this dog here which
is my my colleague who works on this
named Noah Davidson this is his his dog
he’s raised from a puppy the pup the
dog’s name is bear which I know it’s
confusing because it’s not a bear it’s a
dog but anyway we’re trying to take the
lessons that we got from all these other
animals especially mice and move them so
we can make dogs rejuvenate essentially
and that’s looking very promising and if
it works in dogs we might try it in
humans soon thereafter another thing we
are increasingly capable of doing and we
have to have a discussion and as to
whether we want to do it or not whether
just because we can should we which is
we can engineer wild animals we can
engineer salmon
it’s just semi wild we can
near wild animals become resistant to
diseases that are plagues on humanity
where we’re not hurting the animals
we’re just making resistant to these
diseases and at the same time saving
humans so for example malaria kills
600,000 people a year
Lyme disease probably many of you know
somebody who has had a tragic reaction
to Lyme disease this can be a chronic
disease there’s no vaccine for it and
many of the many of the worst cases are
people who have been treated with
antibiotics and it has not succeeded so
we can spread this these resistance
through the wild but we have to think
very carefully about ways to contain it
by I’ll contain it and to make it
reversible the way this is done is that
you can the same kind of technology we
use to engineer the the pigs and the
dogs we can use to move through say the
white-footed Mouse or the mosquito that
Carol I’m disease or malaria so that
will spread 100% to all the offspring
and will spread very rapidly through
these rapidly reproducing animals that
sometimes can reproduce in two months or
so elephants this is this is my last
story and and what we’re trying to do to
save this endangered species or to
contribute consciousness-raising if
nothing else there are only 40,000 Asian
elephants left worldwide both in
captivity and the wild 40,000 of them
that means we have 20,000 female and
even a smaller number of those female
which are a breeding age this is this is
me hanging out with Asian elephants Ruth
and Emily over the years over many years
this is a more recently when we’re
working with one of the largest elephant
breeding centers in Florida and it’s
part of a organization called revive and
restore and nonprofit this it’s aiming
to to change the economic forces to make
it possible for animals to avoid
extinction not just by you know forcing
governments to do this but by figuring
out how to get the economics right this
could be things like the black-footed
ferret it can be Asian elephants and one
of the things we’re trying to do is
extend the range so they can inhabit
ranges that they used to inhabit but
something happened maybe for example ten
15 thousand years ago we started killing
off almost all the large herbivores in
the tundra and this has huge impact both
on the species but also on on our planet
and we’ll come to that in just a moment
so this is these are some of the team
that that have initiated this including
Ryan Phelan and Stuart Brandt and Bobby
Dodd Warren and others on this team now
one of the experiments in returning
herbivores trying to return them to
their natural environment in the tundra
which it is about 19 million square
kilometers throughout Siberia Russia
Canada and Alaska this huge amount of
space that used to have many more
herbivores than it has now
and and the hunters and the trees have
displaced these animals but they could
easily return in particular the
elephants have are very good at knocking
down trees they can knock down a tree in
about 15 seconds so there is a park
there it’s that’s that’s growing in
influence it’s called police de’cine
Park it’s a play on Jurassic Park for
those of you seen that
and please desime park they’ve already
returned a number of cold-adapted
animals horses musk ox the the Bison now
bison is a very interesting story
worldwide it was almost completely
extinct maybe a couple of hundred of
them in the in the world and now they’re
now their numbers are back up to half a
million worldwide and part of this is
working on the economics where you can
get a sustainable model for harvesting a
subset of the other bison for in this
case low cholesterol meat
anyway police Essene Park is the work of
these these this family the Zima
families Sergei and Nikita’s em off
they’ve been kind enough to visit us and
I’ll be visiting them in in Siberia
later this summer and what they have
there is these are two of the species
that they’ve already introduced into
this land that was had almost no large
mega fanos herbivores and and they
claimed that these the this particular
breed of horses is scary enough that it
can scare away these these bison so they
cohabit that the their ecological models
and experiments that they’re doing that
show the impact of these animals on
enriching the environment creating a
home for more species lots of smaller
species lots of plant species and
importantly keeping the temperature of
the ground very low so they these
animals will stomp on the snow in the
winter so the 20 degrees centigrade
summer temperatures can equilibrate the
minus 40 degree temperature in the wind
in the winter but not if you have a big
thick insulating layer of snow so these
herbivores will do that but they’re
impeded they can’t really do their job
they can’t do their job because they
have these nearly impenetrable forests
around their their grasslands it used to
be there was a much higher ratio of
grass to forests the grass has the not
only the advantage that it encourages
herbivores to to stomp down the snow but
also to the grass is much more
reflective in the summer it will reflect
the the it will efficiently capture the
carbon but yet reflect a lot of the heat
causing sun so it’s s its albedo is
about two times what the plants that are
currently there so the grass was a very
was a was a much better ecosystem for
our human purposes because it allowed us
to get to to lower temperature and why
do we want lower temperature in the
tundra and
reason we want lower temperature in the
tundra is that there are 1,400 billion
tonnes gigatonnes of carbon locked up
not too far from the surface in the in
the in the icy soil and it’s it is
melting very quickly now this isn’t
something where we have to point fingers
and say this particular SUV or this
particular factory is responsible
because a lot of this is the
responsibility of our ancestors 15,000
years ago that killed off all the
herbivores or at least that’s one strong
possibility and we’ve got a positive
feedback loop where the more methane and
carbon dioxide that we released from the
frozen tundra the the more global
warming more global warming and where
we’re going to melt the the tundra and
so just even humans completely left the
planet there still would be this crisis
where the global warming could go to
really big extremes and to give you an
idea how big that is I said there’s
1,400 gigatonnes of carbon at risk put
that in perspective there’s only a
hundred gigatonnes that’s the whole
amount of carbon that we’re worrying
about in the atmosphere in the
atmosphere there’s about a 850 Giga tons
total but the hundred has increased
during on you know during the recent
human history and and we only produce
about nine Giga tons of carbon
each year from from worldwide use of
fossil fuels nine Giga tons a year but
there’s 1,400 at risk if we don’t stop
the cycle of warming and release of
carbon from the from the soil so I just
want to end by putting us in perspective
we’re not trying to spend money we’re
trying to save money we’re and and it’s
evidence I’ll give you this is a little
the evidence the way that we are
sequencing these ancient samples like to
get ideas for genes that could make
these elephants more cold resistant that
method of sequencing mammoths for
example is part of a larger effort to
sequence your
DNA and we’ve brought down that price
ten million fold so from three billion
dollars for on not a very good genome to
six hundred dollars for for a genome
which represents both your mother and
your father in you and we’re trying to
bring it down even more we hope that
within a year we should we will be it’ll
be low enough that we can actually pay
you to get your genome sequence they’ll
be less less than free you can if
anybody’s interested you can ask me how
we’re going to do that but the point is
there are many ways that technology can
bring down the cost of engineering both
reading and writing DNA and ecosystems
radically and so I’m gonna leave you
with that thought and thank you very much
fields that I’m not qualified for I am I
do however have a degree in zoology I
don’t practice it very much but you’ll
see if I’ll give you a few examples of
projects that we’re doing that involve
animals I think very appropriate for the
setting here so the title of this is a
zoologist and I’ll start with a typical
food this is an Oreo cookie and on their
website they they they make sure that
you understand that even though it is
technically vegan it does has doesn’t
have any animal products in it it is
done in a facility where milk might
contaminate it slightly so so it’s kind
of up to you whether this is a problem
or not if and but but this is true for
almost every vegan option that you know
for example kale lettuce every every
vegetable has trace contamination it’s
not due to the factory but due the fact
that life is complicated and they’re
they’re caterpillars and worms
everywhere if you removed everything on
the planet except for worms you’d still
be able to see pretty much everything so
they’re worms everywhere this is my my
daughter and myself with a little uh
silk worms on us this is showing our
intimate connection to at least a
certain small number of animals and so
what is the effort what is the kind of
the scientific cutting-edge effort to to
make it possible for everybody to be
vegan so there’s two there’s two camps
here basically one is to make
plant-based foods that are as similar as
possible to to what you normally you
think of as meat and the other is to
take is make actual
meet but not involving animals in any
way something that that was derived a
long time ago possibly non-invasively
from an animal and it and then it takes
on a life of its own in a in a factory
setting I’m I am vegan myself and you’ll
see in a moment why and why everybody’s
putting so much effort into this and and
and and what’s happened is it started
about 2013 was the first example of a of
a burger that was made by manufacturing
from cell lines from cultured cells it
cost about three hundred thirty thousand
dollars as uh you’ll see that one of my
traits is I want to bring down prices
radically so this struck me as something
that was kind of interesting it’s now
coming down into the range of prices
where it’s competitive with regular meat
and and in principle it could be quite
so and it’s sometimes called clean meat
because if you streak out even the very
best meat in a supermarket on a petri
plate you’ll get lots of colonies some
of which are pathological pathogenic
bacteria and this doesn’t happen with
clean meat because it’s grown under
sterile conditions it has to be because
they they they won’t otherwise they
won’t good good yield so why vegan there
you might know one or two vegans or you
might be one yourself you might know one
or two reasons there’s a set of reasons
that happen to do a medical so for
example I’m genetically have high
cholesterol my father more or less died
of it had a triple bypass and then died
there are there are some of us that are
intolerant to lactose so so like you
find in dairy products some of us Intel
and tolerant to a a different sugar that
looks a bit like lactose is present on
almost all animal cells almost all meats
except for primates so if your eat
primates then you’re okay but many
people are have this intolerance there
is the issue of the energy that it takes
to produce
a certain amount of food typically
there’s a five to one ratio
especially for animals like beef the
amount of energy you put in the amount
of energy that you can go into your body
compared to plants and about a five to
one ratio for water consumption it takes
a lot of water to grow animal products
there are issues of cruelty that bring
up and even in some cases faith-based
communities have particular opinions
about the animals or rules they’re
zoonosis these are these are infectious
diseases that originate or are
propagated by animals and these include
things like bird flu swine flu HIV Ebola
Salmonella mad cow disease you probably
heard of these and these are a risk the
closer contact you are with animals now
nobody here is in contact with animals
I’m sure but you get my point
and then finally antibiotic resistance
very often in farms you use a lot of
antibiotics sometimes not even the cure
diseases just to to increase the growth
rate in this and it’s a phenomenon that
you can increase growth rate
considerably just by antibiotics whether
they’re sick or not so so it’s a it’s a
pity if we if we can’t take advantage of
some of these opportunities just because
we lack recipes so all of you should be
creative about new recipes now I
mentioned that some of us are allergic
to meat because of the sugar on their
surface and that also makes it very hard
to transplant from an animal to a human
this is an idea that’s been around for
20 years but it was very difficult to
achieve be partly because the sugars on
their surface partly because other
immunological functions and partly
because the pigs which is the preferred
animal has makes viruses we have now
solved almost all of these problems
individually and now we’re putting the
other a combined species combined type
of pig strain which will have
all of them solved at once it’s on the
order of several dozen genetic changes
all at once and this is due to new
genetic editing tools that that my group
and others have developed worldwide it’s
at sync fingers talons CRISPR and the
pigs are really an eye I deal in it you
can make miniature versions of them
large versions you can get any sized
organ they’re the right shape and
physiology and and they will be human
compatible there’s another opportunity
with organs however which is that we if
you’re trying to transplant you don’t
want them to succumb to the same disease
that that required a transplant the
first place so if you have a viral
infection that’s causing your liver to
go you don’t want to bring in a fresh
limiter to have it get the same disease
so you’d like the organs to be resistant
to it’s lovely you want them to be
resistant to pathogens as much as
possible and it turns out that pigs tend
to be resistant to most of the many of
the human specific all of the human
specific pathogens and there many of
them and so that’s that’s that’s a plus
you’d also like them to be resistant to
cancer in senescence may be resistant to
cryopreservation so you can Bank them in
in cold storage and and here are their 3
3 animals of many that are so cold
resistant that they can actually be
frozen every year and these include the
tardigrade the the certain frogs and and
squirrels so we use these as inspiration
for developing better and better organs
now the I mentioned you don’t want them
to senesce early so if you’re taking the
organ from an animal that normally
doesn’t live as long as a human you’d
like to enhance the senescence and this
has been done successfully with mice you
can make them live twice as long so I
mean that that humans could live 160
years if that were linear the longest
lived vertebrate one of the longest
lived vertebrates is is this koi fish
that lived 226 years
this is our koi pond in my backyard and
this is me hanging out with a koi in the
middle of winter when it’s when the pond
is normally frozen it’s not clear that
they’re gonna make it to 226 years
especially the people jumping in in the
winter
now you can plot the how long and very
‘san a’mma live as a function of their
size because there is a relation small
animals tend to live less but but but
there’s some outliers when there’s some
very interesting outliers and we’ve done
some research like sequencing their
genome and their RNA and these include
the capuchin monkey the bowhead whale
which is the record among mammals which
is lives about over 200 years and then
the naked mole-rat which is closely
related to other rodents but lives about
10 times as long so instead of 2 years
more like 20 years and we’re inspired by
these or these species and many other
experiments that are done on Aging
there’s now a collection of about 300
genes that are that where we understand
them deeply enough we understand how
aging works how to make mice live longer
or even in some cases reverse aging and
so we’re working on ways of reversing
aging in dogs like this dog here which
is my my colleague who works on this
named Noah Davidson this is his his dog
he’s raised from a puppy the pup the
dog’s name is bear which I know it’s
confusing because it’s not a bear it’s a
dog but anyway we’re trying to take the
lessons that we got from all these other
animals especially mice and move them so
we can make dogs rejuvenate essentially
and that’s looking very promising and if
it works in dogs we might try it in
humans soon thereafter another thing we
are increasingly capable of doing and we
have to have a discussion and as to
whether we want to do it or not whether
just because we can should we which is
we can engineer wild animals we can
engineer salmon
it’s just semi wild we can
near wild animals become resistant to
diseases that are plagues on humanity
where we’re not hurting the animals
we’re just making resistant to these
diseases and at the same time saving
humans so for example malaria kills
600,000 people a year
Lyme disease probably many of you know
somebody who has had a tragic reaction
to Lyme disease this can be a chronic
disease there’s no vaccine for it and
many of the many of the worst cases are
people who have been treated with
antibiotics and it has not succeeded so
we can spread this these resistance
through the wild but we have to think
very carefully about ways to contain it
by I’ll contain it and to make it
reversible the way this is done is that
you can the same kind of technology we
use to engineer the the pigs and the
dogs we can use to move through say the
white-footed Mouse or the mosquito that
Carol I’m disease or malaria so that
will spread 100% to all the offspring
and will spread very rapidly through
these rapidly reproducing animals that
sometimes can reproduce in two months or
so elephants this is this is my last
story and and what we’re trying to do to
save this endangered species or to
contribute consciousness-raising if
nothing else there are only 40,000 Asian
elephants left worldwide both in
captivity and the wild 40,000 of them
that means we have 20,000 female and
even a smaller number of those female
which are a breeding age this is this is
me hanging out with Asian elephants Ruth
and Emily over the years over many years
this is a more recently when we’re
working with one of the largest elephant
breeding centers in Florida and it’s
part of a organization called revive and
restore and nonprofit this it’s aiming
to to change the economic forces to make
it possible for animals to avoid
extinction not just by you know forcing
governments to do this but by figuring
out how to get the economics right this
could be things like the black-footed
ferret it can be Asian elephants and one
of the things we’re trying to do is
extend the range so they can inhabit
ranges that they used to inhabit but
something happened maybe for example ten
15 thousand years ago we started killing
off almost all the large herbivores in
the tundra and this has huge impact both
on the species but also on on our planet
and we’ll come to that in just a moment
so this is these are some of the team
that that have initiated this including
Ryan Phelan and Stuart Brandt and Bobby
Dodd Warren and others on this team now
one of the experiments in returning
herbivores trying to return them to
their natural environment in the tundra
which it is about 19 million square
kilometers throughout Siberia Russia
Canada and Alaska this huge amount of
space that used to have many more
herbivores than it has now
and and the hunters and the trees have
displaced these animals but they could
easily return in particular the
elephants have are very good at knocking
down trees they can knock down a tree in
about 15 seconds so there is a park
there it’s that’s that’s growing in
influence it’s called police de’cine
Park it’s a play on Jurassic Park for
those of you seen that
and please desime park they’ve already
returned a number of cold-adapted
animals horses musk ox the the Bison now
bison is a very interesting story
worldwide it was almost completely
extinct maybe a couple of hundred of
them in the in the world and now they’re
now their numbers are back up to half a
million worldwide and part of this is
working on the economics where you can
get a sustainable model for harvesting a
subset of the other bison for in this
case low cholesterol meat
anyway police Essene Park is the work of
these these this family the Zima
families Sergei and Nikita’s em off
they’ve been kind enough to visit us and
I’ll be visiting them in in Siberia
later this summer and what they have
there is these are two of the species
that they’ve already introduced into
this land that was had almost no large
mega fanos herbivores and and they
claimed that these the this particular
breed of horses is scary enough that it
can scare away these these bison so they
cohabit that the their ecological models
and experiments that they’re doing that
show the impact of these animals on
enriching the environment creating a
home for more species lots of smaller
species lots of plant species and
importantly keeping the temperature of
the ground very low so they these
animals will stomp on the snow in the
winter so the 20 degrees centigrade
summer temperatures can equilibrate the
minus 40 degree temperature in the wind
in the winter but not if you have a big
thick insulating layer of snow so these
herbivores will do that but they’re
impeded they can’t really do their job
they can’t do their job because they
have these nearly impenetrable forests
around their their grasslands it used to
be there was a much higher ratio of
grass to forests the grass has the not
only the advantage that it encourages
herbivores to to stomp down the snow but
also to the grass is much more
reflective in the summer it will reflect
the the it will efficiently capture the
carbon but yet reflect a lot of the heat
causing sun so it’s s its albedo is
about two times what the plants that are
currently there so the grass was a very
was a was a much better ecosystem for
our human purposes because it allowed us
to get to to lower temperature and why
do we want lower temperature in the
tundra and
reason we want lower temperature in the
tundra is that there are 1,400 billion
tonnes gigatonnes of carbon locked up
not too far from the surface in the in
the in the icy soil and it’s it is
melting very quickly now this isn’t
something where we have to point fingers
and say this particular SUV or this
particular factory is responsible
because a lot of this is the
responsibility of our ancestors 15,000
years ago that killed off all the
herbivores or at least that’s one strong
possibility and we’ve got a positive
feedback loop where the more methane and
carbon dioxide that we released from the
frozen tundra the the more global
warming more global warming and where
we’re going to melt the the tundra and
so just even humans completely left the
planet there still would be this crisis
where the global warming could go to
really big extremes and to give you an
idea how big that is I said there’s
1,400 gigatonnes of carbon at risk put
that in perspective there’s only a
hundred gigatonnes that’s the whole
amount of carbon that we’re worrying
about in the atmosphere in the
atmosphere there’s about a 850 Giga tons
total but the hundred has increased
during on you know during the recent
human history and and we only produce
about nine Giga tons of carbon
each year from from worldwide use of
fossil fuels nine Giga tons a year but
there’s 1,400 at risk if we don’t stop
the cycle of warming and release of
carbon from the from the soil so I just
want to end by putting us in perspective
we’re not trying to spend money we’re
trying to save money we’re and and it’s
evidence I’ll give you this is a little
the evidence the way that we are
sequencing these ancient samples like to
get ideas for genes that could make
these elephants more cold resistant that
method of sequencing mammoths for
example is part of a larger effort to
sequence your
DNA and we’ve brought down that price
ten million fold so from three billion
dollars for on not a very good genome to
six hundred dollars for for a genome
which represents both your mother and
your father in you and we’re trying to
bring it down even more we hope that
within a year we should we will be it’ll
be low enough that we can actually pay
you to get your genome sequence they’ll
be less less than free you can if
anybody’s interested you can ask me how
we’re going to do that but the point is
there are many ways that technology can
bring down the cost of engineering both
reading and writing DNA and ecosystems
radically and so I’m gonna leave you
with that thought and thank you very much
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