Name: What Happens If We Solve Extinction?
Uploaded: 2021-05-17T02:10:41.000Z
Duration: 11 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The American Chestnut tree was one of the most abundant

in the Eastern United States Appalachian chain.

It is actually the tree that inspired the Christmas song

It was a very heavily used resource by people.

people brought Asian chestnuts to North America

as an ornamental tree, and they carried with them a disease,

Over 99% of the population was obliterated.

was able to actually discover why the blight

And they have produced a strain of Chestnut trees,

that is 100% resistant to this fungal blight.

It really shows that there's no point of no return.

There's potentially no point you can get where you can't

end up recovering and healing the damage that's happened.

The UN is issuing a dire warning on climate change.

Nearly a million species are at risk of extinction

We are doing irreparable harm to Earth's biodiversity.

the planet's biodiversity into an unprecedented decline.

with as many as one million species at risk.

Many scientists say we are in a sixth mass extinction.

The decline in biodiversity is a crucial issue

that is largely overlooked in the public consciousness

Our existence as humans is deeply intertwined

We need to radically rethink our relationship

We need to understand that we are a deeply entrenched

part of it, certainly not separate from it.

This is part of what is killing other species,

are struggling to offset the speed at which

Biotechnologies that have been developing in the wings

are now offering the hope of new, if not controversial,

Genetic rescue traditionally has been the practice

of increasing a population's genetic diversity,

Usually when the population is exhibiting

some type of problem, like inbreeding or whatnot.

We're trying to increase genetic diversity

or increase the viability of the genetics of a population.

Then in that kind of very core definition,

biotechnologies offer a whole host of ways to do that.

Biotechnology offers everything from genetic insight

to aid disease resistance, all the way to that moonshot

of using all those technologies to restore something

like a wooly mammoth or a passenger pigeon.

The process of resurrecting species like this

and controversial applications of this biotechnology.

we can bring back those kinds of animals.

De-extinction is a scientific movement we could say,

who are trying to use a variety of different biotechnologies

close approximate versions of extinct species

that mimic extinct species and can go back out

into the wild spaces where extinct species used to roam,

and carry out important ecological roles there

that have disappeared since a certain species went extinct.

which is a Pyrenean Ibex or kind of a mountain goat.

The last bucardo died in Spain, it was a single animal,

but they took some cells from its ear and preserved those.

to clone a bucardo using a domestic goat as the surrogate.

So they could create cells, implant an embryo in the goat

and the goat gave birth to a live Bucardo.

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What Happens If We Solve Extinction?

crucial

controversial

thrive

combination