Extinction Dara O Briain's Science Club

Let me tell you about the most unlucky animal in the world.

It's called the Pyrenean ibex.

Due to over-hunting in 1973 it got put on the endangered species list.

But the last one didn't die until the year 2000,

when a tree fell on it.

But luckily they'd extracted some DNA and they were able to clone it.

And then the clone died.

The Pyrenean ibex is the only animal in history

that's gone extinct twice.

Tonight we're talking about extinction.

I'm Dara O Briain, welcome to Science Club.

APPLAUSE

Good evening, everyone. Great to have you here.

This is the show that takes apart all kinds of subjects

and looks at them from many different angles.

To help us do that we've got our curious sciencey audience

and some fantastic guests.

Palaeontologist, Richard Fortey,

zoologist, Lucy Cooke,

our resident supporters Dr Helen Czerski and Dr Tali Sharot,

science supporter, Alok Jha,

and special guest, Mark Steel. How are you, Mark? Are you well?

-Very well.

-Lovely to have you here.

Of course, we also have Professor Mark Miodownik

who'll be conducting some exciting experiments, ladies and gentlemen,

featuring, as ever, strong Eastern European vodka.

Tonight on the show we'll be looking at extinction

and asking how species come and go from our planet,

what we should do about it,

and if indeed we should do something about it at all.

But don't be depressed,

it won't all be tearful goodbyes and guilt trips for humanity.

This being Science Club,

Dr Tali Sharot explores the ultimate fast food

and visits the first-ever taste test of man-made beef.

Are you anxious?

Oh yes, I am, definitely.

Comedian Mark Steel attempts to save the planet and goes on a quest

to find out how we should deal with any incoming asteroid.

One that has been discovered is a thing called Apophis.

Great names, by the way.

Is it people who were put out of work when Star Trek was finished?

And science journalist Alok Jha asks the unaskable,

should we just let the pandas die out?

For extra info while the show is on, you can follow us on Twitter

or visit the website.

Details at the bottom of your screen.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Right, tonight we have the pleasure of two esteemed science gurus on our sofa,

palaeontologist, fellow of the Royal Society,

doyen of the Natural History Museum in London, Richard Fortey,

and zoologist, TV presenter and amphibian expert, Lucy Cooke.

APPLAUSE

How are you, Richard, Lucy? Pleasure to have you both here.

Welcome to Science Club.

We don't normally expect people to arrive in with

a show-and-tell type gift, what have you brought us in?

I've brought you in a trilobite.

A proper...how old?

This is a 400 million-year-old animal,

and if we're talking about extinction, these are extinct.

But they had a good innings. How long were they around?

They were around for 250 million years,

that's a great deal longer than we've been around.

Lucy, speaking of presents,

at the moment you are dealing with amphibians, frogs, predominantly.

I love frogs, yes.

LAUGHTER

Why is that funny?!

Frogs just are funny.

I don't see why it is funny. I think they are amazing creatures,

and I think they should get more attention.

-Yay, frogs.

-Yay frogs, exactly, that's what I'll be doing all through the show,

repeatedly, until you all agree with me.

Tell me about this thing.

We tend to presume this is a model of extinction,

which is the dodo, the mortal enemy of the Portuguese sailor.

But this is a perfectly natural process,

it's not just us dabbling or asteroids crashing,

it is what has been going on on this planet.

That's a very important point. Extinction is a natural process.

It happens at a regular, slow pace.

If it didn't, we wouldn't be here.

We're going to cover a number of these things,

including what kind of catastrophes there are,

the manner in which man-made disasters can occur.

Just a quick historical view.

It is only relatively recently that we've actually understood the idea of extinction at all.

Even a couple of hundred years ago

we had no idea that species emerged and disappeared.

So let's have a look at how previous generations have thought about species loss.

Although the dodo is THE poster boy of extinction,

it took 100 years before anyone realised

that the dodo had in fact gone extinct.

Extinction as a concept made no sense to anyone. The reasons are twofold.

First, it didn't make sense that

God would let all his hard work go to waste and let creatures die out,

and second, nobody imagined the earth was very old.

In the 1650s an Irish bishop, James Ussher,

looked at who begat whom in the Bible.

Using this he announced that the earth was less than 6,000 years old.

Even more precisely, it was created on Sunday, 23 October, 4004 BC,

even though, technically, Sunday should have been his day off.

The first clue maybe this was a tiny bit out came from fossils.

For years people thought fossils had simply fallen from the sky,

or were left by the devil.

By the end of the 1700s

fossils had become something of an elephant in the room.

Quite literally when French naturalist Georges Cuvier

presented a paper on fossilised elephant bones in the 1790s.

He made the controversial claim that one was the jaw of a creature

that no longer existed, an animal that was extinct.

It turned out to be a mammoth.

While many scientists argued that the animals were still around,

just they hadn't been found alive yet,

but Cuvier was adamant

suggesting this and other extinctions were caused by catastrophic events.

By the early 19th century, although extinction had been established,

the Bible still held sway.

And Noah's Flood

was deemed responsible for both extinction and fossils.

But again, the earth suggested otherwise.

A Scottish physician, James Hutton,

developed the concept of deep time and geology.

Now, using the power of geology, the estimated age of the earth

spread from thousands to millions,

and finally, thanks to the advent of radioactive dating,

we now know that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

Then, towards the end of the 20th century,

as geologists looked more closely,

periods of mass extinction were identified,

times when species were dying out at quite frankly an alarming rate.

It was one of these, however, that gave mammals their big break,

and consigned dinosaurs

to the entrance halls of natural history museums.

Ultimately, this paved the way for we humans

to become the dominant animal on earth.

In the course of our ascendency,

we have been responsible for quite a few extinctions ourselves.

Of course, there is the dodo,

but there is also the Steller's sea cow,

extinct within a mere 27 years of its discovery.

And the Tasmanian wolf, listed as an endangered species

three years after the last one was seen in the wild.

Indeed, we are so good at killing animals

it's been suggested we're actually in the middle of

a great period of extinction right now.

All of our own making.

APPLAUSE

So...

if the number of animal species dying out could be graphed,

it would be a steady level of noise but with spikes for massive events.

What kind of events are we talking?

Well, the great dying was about 250 million years ago,

at the end of the so-called Permian Period,

where 90%...90% of all species are supposed to have died out.

That's the biggest one in the history of life that we know.

The ones where dinosaurs died out, the K-T Event,

the figure's about 60% there,

so it is very, very serious

and a lot of people think we are now in a man-made one,

just at the moment.

99.9% of all species that have ever lived on the planet are now gone.

Yes.

The thing about extinction is it is a natural process,

but it is happening at an unnatural rate at the moment.

For instance, the amphibians,

my best friends, they are one of the most threatened class of animals

and their rate of extinction is something like 25,000 to 45,000 times the normal base rate.

There is the passenger pigeon, the passenger pigeon was hunted

because they use to flock in mass,

there was a point at which you could shoot them,

you could shoot 50 in one go.

The sky was dark with them.

Yes, people thought you couldn't over-hunt them.

And there was a small 14-year-old boy in Ohio who killed the last one.

It takes a fair amount of guts to be the last person to go,

this is the one, photograph with the very last one.

The sad thing is, something you can eat, for example,

the fewer there are, the more the price goes up,

the supplies of some of the rarer species of tuna,

so the more the hunters go after them.

Many factors cause extinction

and the last couple of hundred years we've added some of our own.

In honour of the passenger pigeon and the dodo,

which was also a type of pigeon, by the way,

Prof Mark Miodownik presents a guide to the humble shotgun.

Technology turned the human hunter into a killing machine.

The shotgun is the perfect piece of kit

to solve the problem

of how to get a bird from the sky onto your dinner plate.

But with a shotgun, you can kill more than you could ever eat.

It may seem obvious,

but what's so special about the shotgun is the shot.

So unlike other guns which fire one bullet at a time,

shotguns fire many little projectiles.

Let me show you what it looks like

if you fire a shotgun at a target from about 40 yards.

You can see all these tiny little impacts.

That makes it ideal for trying to hunt or shoot fast-moving objects,

because you don't have to be entirely accurate to hit something.

As long as you hit something in here you are very likely to kill it.

Shot means that even unskilled hunters

can bring down huge flocks of birds, all too easily.

This is a flintlock shotgun.

It consists of three parts, a lock, a stock and a barrel.

In this type of shotgun

the shot goes down the barrel here,

but before it goes down we need to add a propellant

and that's gunpowder.

Saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal.

And then we just need to add the final ingredient, fire.

Mind out.

The Chinese invented gunpowder and they used it for fireworks,

and you can see why.

But what you can't see is

the huge amount of carbon dioxide that is given off,

and it's that that's useful for guns.

The carbon dioxide creates a huge pressure inside the barrel,

which propels the shot out.

But muzzle-loading guns are slow to reload.

However, one simple invention

drastically improved the rate of firing,

and turned the shotgun into something that can kill on an industrial scale.

The cartridge encapsulates all the stages of loading a gun,

in one container.

It makes it easier, quicker and more reliable.

It has the top cap, the shot,

the wad, the gunpowder, the cartridge,

and one extra ingredient,

the primer.

And this contains a pressure-sensitive chemical

that explodes on impact.

The cartridge meant that the design of the shotgun's lock mechanism,

which is activated when you pull the trigger, had to change.

Here is the side lock. This is the mainspring.

When the trigger is pulled

it throws the hammer forward

and that hammer

impacts the firing pin here.

And that pushes through and detonates the cartridge.

Then the rest follows, the gunpowder ignites,

the carbon dioxide is produced,

pressure builds up,

the shot is propelled out,

and that all happens in a split second.

The dramatic increase in the speed of reloading

meant that within 50 years of the invention of the shotgun cartridge

the passenger pigeon,

once one of the most numerous birds on the planet,

was wiped out completely.

APPLAUSE

But extinction...extinction isn't necessarily

always as obvious as shotguns and changed habitats.

-It moves in mysterious ways, sometimes.

-Very mysterious.

Who are these?

This is Xenopus, the African clawed toad.

He is very likely responsible

for one of the biggest extinction crises

since the dinosaurs were wiped of the planet.

And that's happening right now.

It's happening right now.

His fellow amphibians are being wiped out in massive numbers.

How massive? Compare it to the dinosaurs being wiped out,

how many frogs, species of frogs?

There's 40% hurtling towards extinction.

It's more than any other vertebrate.

And there's about... over 120 that have gone extinct in the last 20-odd years.

Why is this frog at fault and why is this frog not extinct?

Well, so this amphibian here

is the sort of Typhoid Mary of the amphibian extinction.

And asymptomatic carrier of something.

So amphibians are being killed off globally by fungus,

the question was, where is this coming from?

They have figured out the likely suspect is this frog.

It carries this particular fungus and spreads it.

This is the frog which is very popular in the scientific community.

It's your standard default frog for experiments.

Exactly, he is a scientific superstar,

the first vertebrate to be cloned and he's even been into space.

Wow, hell of a frog!

There is actually very funny footage, the frog doing that.

Can we get it out? Is it likely to get out?

Yes, he's a very slippery customer, I'm going to try to get him out.

This is an African clawed toad, and he evolved and lived in Africa

until a chap called Lancelot Hogben,

who was studying the effects of hormones on amphibians,

was also working in South Africa,

and he stumbled upon this frog and started using it in his experiments.

What he discovered was that this frog makes a great pregnancy test.

This is not... When are we talking about, 1920s?

This frog was the number one pregnancy test in the world.

For almost 20 years.

If you go into family planning clinics in London,

they'd have a basement full of frogs who would be

consulted as to whether you were pregnant or not.

Just to confirm, it did not mean you needed to wee on the frog.

If you wee on it, it does not turn blue. That's not how it works.

What did you have to do?

You inject its lymph gland with a woman's urine,

and if she's pregnant, the frog will lay eggs within 8 to 10 hours.

It got exported out of Africa into labs all over the world

so that lots of ladies could find out if they were pregnant.

It's a young, healthy, virile crowd in the peak

of their reproductive years, does anyone who's not sure if they may

be pregnant... No judgements will be passed, we're not that kind of show.

This is merely science. Nobody is stepping forward.

It's really unfair that you're not taking part in this experiment.

Is this very common?

Basically, what happened was it got exported to laboratories

all over the world, and when the little blue strip replaced the toad,

people were like, "What are we going to do with all these toads?"

They just released them.

What they didn't know was that it carries a fungus on its skin.

Is it just a case of plunging your hand in?

Yes, plunge your hand in, they are slippery,

so try to catch them in a scoop.

Am I in danger of breaking them? Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

No, no. Really patronising round of applause,

given I hadn't actually caught the frog.

Stop, stop. You're there. You're a bad frog. You're a bad, evil frog.

I'm going to drop you from a great height and it'll teach you a lesson.

His little face! Look at that. Oh no!

-Hang on, they're very slippery.

-That's fine, nobody saw that.

APPLAUSE

OK.

There are many factors that influence extinction,

one of the key reasons for current extinction is us,

our meat-eating habits, we like steaks.

But they devastate other animals' habitats. Let's look at the numbers.

Lots of land is taken up with producing meat.

Each person in the United States consumes

an average of 120 kilograms a year, that's 1,060 quarter pounders.

Brits get by on 84.2 kilograms.

Since 1961, the UK has increased its total meat consumption by a fifth,

to 84.2 kilograms per person.

America by a third, and China is now eating 15 times as much.

To feed these mouths,

America's meat production has more than doubled in less than 50 years.

India's has more than tripled,

and China in the same period has increased production by 30 times.

There are now at least 1.4 billion cows on planet Earth

with a total mass of 550 million tonnes.

If you put them on a scale with every wild mammal,

cows would outweigh them 10 to 1.

APPLAUSE

Yes, yes.

We are obviously applauding the making of that film rather

than the sentiments involved, because we just love burgers.

-It's not just burgers, either.

-It's frogs' legs as well.

-Really?

You think of the French eating frogs' legs,

but actually there is a billion frogs imported into America every year.

-There is no eating in the middle part of a frog.

-I've never tried it.

I'm just saying, clearly there is a billion frog middles waiting

to be eaten at the moment.

Yes, we are diluting the planet in the search of making burgers,

but just in time, science comes riding into the rescue.

Do you want to see the future of food?

In a Science Club exclusive, Tali Sharot

has been to Maastricht in Holland to bear witness to a historic event.

This Petri dish could provide a solution to reducing

the impact we are having on species extinction.

These are bovine muscle cells.

They will be turned into a piece of beef steak,

but one that has been grown in the lab.

At the University of Maastricht, for the last five years

Professor Mark Post has been perfecting a way to create lab-cultured meat.

The idea is very old, in 1932,

Winston Churchill put forward this idea that you could grow pieces

of meat without the entire animal, because it seemed inefficient

to grow an entire animal if you're only eating the wings or the legs.

The process begins by taking a biopsy of muscle from a cow.

From this bovine muscle, stem cells are isolated.

These are the undifferentiated cells that go on to grow into muscle fibres.

These individual stem cells are then suspended in Petri dishes

and nutrients and placed in an incubator to grow.

At the moment,

there's not enough meat here to make even one single dinner, it is

running at a very small scale, more proof of concept.

But it's thought that when the process is scaled up,

cells from one single biopsy of muscle, from one single cow,

would be able to produce over 20,000 tonnes of lab-grown beef.

As they multiply, the muscle cells naturally fuse together to form fibres,

which are then encouraged to form these rings of muscle tissue.

After about six weeks, the rings of muscles are harvested

and cut into strips.

They might not look like traditional muscle tissue,

because there is no blood or fat or connected fibres,

but at the cellular level,

each strip is indistinguishable from regular beef.

It's one thing to grow muscle cells in the lab,

but at the moment this looks like tiny little worms.

It doesn't smell very appetising either.

Really, the key in passing man-made meat as a nice piece of beef

lies wholly in the taste.

-Have you tasted your lab-grown beef yet?

-We haven't yet.

We're going to do that this afternoon.

I'm very excited about that.

This is actually the first time we have sufficient material

to make tasting a realistic thing to do.

To oversee this historic moment,

Mark has drafted in food technician Peter.

Looks a bit like noodles.

I agree, yeah.

'Peter's first task is to try to turn these strips of man-made meat

'into something like a miniature hamburger.'

-How many individual fibres do we have there?

-Around 600.

And they are all individually grown.

'The muscle fibres are mixed with salt to bind them together,

'then, it's into the frying pan.'

-Are you anxious?

-Yes, I am, definitely.

-Very much so.

-OK, the first-ever frying of lab-grown meat.

-Yes.

'It doesn't look like much, but this is a big moment in culinary science.

'Peter assesses if the tiny burger is behaving like a more traditional beef patty.'

A little bit of shrinkage.

-The water is coming out.

-Yes, which is normal. It was quite wet.

-That's to be expected.

-How does it smell?

-Neutral.

-Neutral.

-Yeah.

There you see a slight, brown, crispy brown coating appearing.

'Finally, the moment of truth.

'It may be one very small mouthful,

'but it's one giant leap for the future of lab-grown beef.'

-Go ahead.

-Really? Well, here we go.

I don't need a big fork like this.

It's salty.

It has a very smooth texture.

You feel the individual fibres, still.

And it basically tastes like fried chicken.

It is fried chicken. Salty, fried chicken.

So in its most naked of forms, even beef tastes like chicken.

It's going to take around 3,000 strips of lab-grown muscle fibres

just to make one average-sized hamburger.

But Mark has already started cultivation.

Admittedly, I was a little bit sceptical this morning,

but after seeing it cooked now, I'm much more convinced.

Although I wasn't allowed to taste the actual meat, it did smell

and look like proper meat.

Maybe in the future, we're all going to make burgers from this lab-grown beef.

APPLAUSE

You could go either way, you could mock them for the ridiculousness

of making a tiny white hamburger, and poring over it,

or you could say that was history being made to a certain extent.

Do you think it was history?

Yes, it took them 15 years to get there,

so it's a lot of work just making that tiny little piece of beef,

but as we said, it's a proof of concept.

Are there any vegetarians in the room?

As a vegetarian, are you vegan?

I'm vegetarian, and I think I would eat fake meat like that.

It would be quite interesting to try.

You could put yourself aside...

It wouldn't be a grey area, the fact that it is taken from stem cells?

I'd have to try it and think about how I felt about it after trying it.

I'm loving the journey.

"I'd think about how I felt, aw, I like the cow."

Is there anyone who just wouldn't take it at all,

who finds the idea of it quite disgusting? Anyone with that objection to it?

That's quite interesting, nobody thought that small, white...

No disgust kicked in.

The other thing, our fear about beef is the amount of resources it takes

to create a single hamburger.

It's an insane amount of effort. Grain and water...

That doesn't look like it's particularly efficient.

At the moment it isn't.

At the moment they have vast resources that you have to put in

to make that tiny little piece.

It's not helpful at the moment.

It's a good avenue to try, at this point I don't think we know...

-OK.

-..if it will be something that will be fruitful.

The goal is that sometime in the future,

you can take one biopsy from one cow, and make hundreds of burgers.

Presumably if we can do it for cows, we can do it for pigs, we can do it for chickens.

If we can make a chicken taste more like chicken...

-A chicken that tastes like fish, maybe.

-That would be fantastic.

OK, we have a lot in tonight's show, as ever.

If you'd like to know more, there are a number of ways you can get involved.

You can go to the website, you can follow us on Twitter,

for extra science like surprising facts and helpful doodles,

and you can join the conversation at hashtag scienceclub.

Still to come, Dr Helen Czerski goes in search of the secrets

of resurrection, visiting a lab in New Orleans in the US

where they're working on bringing extinct species back to life.

Comedian Mark Steel attempts to save the planet and goes on a quest

to find out how we should deal with any incoming asteroids.

There is now a whole industry working on trying to save

species around the world, but isn't it all being done in a piecemeal way?

Are we putting our efforts into the right animals?

Science journalist Alok Jha dares to ask the question,

should we just let the pandas die?

Humans have increased the level to which things are going extinct.

We've increased the speed.

So some of us might think that we've got a responsibility

to try and save as much as possible.

But we don't have infinite resources, so in that finite world,

what do we choose to save?

I think the world would be a far worse-off place

if it didn't have giant pandas.

This is a species that has been on the planet in one shape or form

for about 8 million years.

That means it's been on the planet a lot longer than we have.

Habitat loss is the greatest man-made threat to wild pandas,

yet it's a habitat they don't seem entirely suited to.

They evolved as carnivores, yet gave up meat in favour of just bamboo.

They also have a very dull sex life.

These animals are a bit weird, they don't really help themselves.

They're only on heat for three days a year,

and they are really fussy eaters.

So you have to really ask yourself the conservation question,

are they cost-effective? Basically, are pandas worth the effort?

At the Zoological Society of London, they are running a project

that is helping decide how limited conservation funds are best spent.

So, what they are trying to do here is find the most important species,

work out how important they are to their environments,

and then prioritise their conservation.

They are looking for evolutionarily distinct

and globally endangered species, or EDGE for short.

They hope that by giving EDGE species priority,

they can maintain as wide a gene pool as possible.

So, how do you go about selecting the animals for that programme?

They are not always the most pretty. They are the weird and wonderful,

the things that have really kind of developed on their own, in their

own lineage, that are really special, be that genetically

or the type of body shape they have, the type of things they do in the wild.

In terms of genetics and evolution, they are really important

-and interesting and different?

-Yeah, that's right.

If I was going to force you to choose, EDGE species or pandas...

-Which would I choose?

-What are you going to choose?

I would choose the EDGE every day.

If we were to lose the EDGE species, we would be losing species which

provide key functions within those environments,

things that really engineer the ecosystems they live in.

Alongside the pure science value,

you can also factor in the value that species bring directly to us.

Like the many varieties of bees and other pollinating insects.

-So, Dave, what have bees ever done for us?

-Bees have done lots for us.

As we can see here, they pollinate our crops.

Roughly a third of the food we eat is insect pollinated.

That third includes most of the really interesting,

nice, tasty stuff - raspberries, blueberries, runner beans,

courgettes and so on.

Without the insect pollinators, no fruit or veg.

Sadly, due to increased pesticide use and loss of habitat,

many bees species are now in decline across the globe.

But compared to other wildlife,

losing bees would have much more far reaching effects.

If we lose our bees, we're going to lose our wildflowers, which means

that entire ecological communities would collapse and all the other

species that are dependent on those flowers will also disappear.

So it is not just bad for our diets if we lose bees,

we are talking about a kind of ecological armageddon.

Does it bother you that millions and millions of pounds are spent

on other charismatic mega-fauna, pandas, for example?

Everyone likes pandas. They are big and cute and furry.

But actually, ecologically, those creatures are nowhere near

as important as the little furry things

flying around our heads at the moment.

So, are the panda's days numbered? Maybe.

But it is possible that this is a species

that transcends pure scientific reasoning.

Perhaps being a conservation pin-up is enough.

The animals are here to help us

highlight the issues of giant pandas in the wild, through our visitors.

They are there to help us generate cash for ourselves,

which we then reinvest back into conservation research and education.

So it is self-sustaining.

APPLAUSE

Alok, look into the giant, doey eyes of the panda and tell me

you would let the pandas die.

I'm not suggesting we take a shotgun and shoot all these things in the wild.

They are not helping themselves.

Why don't we just take a sense of perspective?

The hundreds and hundreds

of millions of pounds we spend on this animal,

as cute as it is, honestly,

really cute, I saw one up close, we could spend them

on so many other things, great apes, for example,

they are also endangered.

Orang-utans and gorillas, a few thousand left.

Why not just shift some of that money into those things?

Are we running at a net loss on pandas?

Do they not bring so many people into a zoo...?

The zoo says, we bring these people in, it gives us visitor numbers,

we get money and then put that into other conservation programmes.

I am not sure I believe that actually works,

because they will spend £20 million over the course of a decade

on looking after these pandas

because of the amount they eat, the stuff they are housed in,

I am not sure they will get

£20 million worth of visitors in that time.

Not to get bogged down in the numbers, but we do rent pandas.

Anyone who has a panda outside China is paying a yearly lease to China.

£1 million a year per panda.

And it costs about several hundred thousand pounds

a year for maintenance, and every panda baby that is born,

and they will try and have babies, belongs to China immediately.

Richard, how do you feel on this?

Well, you know, who can resist a panda?

But I do think the important thing is,

if you conserve a species, it is too focused.

What you need to do is conserve the species which also conserves

the whole habitat in which it lives.

So I am not saying don't save the panda, but rather,

if you save the panda, save the whole environment in which it lives.

We all know that tremendous environmental degradation

is going on in China right now.

And if we can save a flagship species

and a whole habitat as a result, that has to be a good thing.

Lucy, what kind of monster would prioritise away from the panda?

-Where are you on this?

-I say, stuff the panda, save the salamander!

-Really?

-Yeah.

APPLAUSE

Why... Firstly, why the salamander?

Because the giant Chinese salamander

shares a mountain home with the panda,

and the albino version in particular may look

like a six-foot penis and be slightly less cute and cuddly,

but it is the world's largest amphibian,

it is an incredible creature, it has been around for millennia.

And it gets almost no conservation funding.

In fact, there was a study about three years ago that showed

the charismatic mega-fauna get 500 times more funding

for conservation and research than, say, endangered amphibians.

Can I just throw it to the audience, just a show of hands?

I want to put this in a way

which doesn't lead the questions too much.

But would you let the pandas die... That's emotive, isn't it?

Do you think we place too much emphasis on pandas, let's say,

and that kind of enormously charismatic...

Mega-fauna is the word of the day, I believe!

How many of you would let the pandas die in this situation?

-The majority...

-Not bad!

-The majority,

when the argument is made a certain way, can see other priorities.

If tonight's programme has given you

some burning questions about extinction,

we have our after-hours science club starting when we finish,

when an extinction expert is waiting to answer your questions.

Just go to the website to please get involved.

Let's assuage our species guilt here.

It's not all about the damage we are doing.

We ourselves could be the victims of extinction.

I mean, we have had major events occur.

How many major extinctions do we now think there have been?

Everybody is agreed on five.

And the one we are doing now is sometimes

-regarded as the sixth extinction.

-The one previous to that,

-was that the dinosaurs one?

-The big KT event, yes.

-But even now,

it's one of these things we've always known,

that asteroids killed the dinosaurs, that's relatively recent, isn't it?

Yes, the evidence for the arrival of the meteorite was gleaned

from a little layer in the rocks,

that was enriched in the element iridium.

And this was brought in and engendered by the arrival of this massive impact.

Although we talk about the dinosaurs dying out,

and they did, the ancestor of the birds was a small dinosaur.

-So the ancestor of the dodo was in fact a dinosaur?

-Exactly.

That's cruel irony for you, if you're a dodo in all this.

For all we know, one of those asteroids, meteorites,

comets, could be winging its way to us right now.

And there is no way we wouldn't have come up with a way of dealing with it, right? Course not.

Mark Steel has been to Berlin to meet the man with the plan.

The human race seems to love the idea of armageddon.

We are fascinated with the notion of being wiped out by ice ages

and alien invasions.

I had to keep a shovel by the front door for a year

because my son insisted it was the best way

of fighting off the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

But an impact between Earth and an asteroid does seem to be

the most credible of all these potential cataclysmic events.

So I have come to Berlin

to find out how we can avoid this death by asteroid.

I'm going to meet the leader of a multinational group

of scientists who hope to save us from impending armageddon.

'Professor Alan Harris is from the German Institute of Planetary Research.'

So, how do we detect these things, how do we come across them?

If you take a series of pictures like this

and track the object through

one night, and you come back the following night

and find it again, you can join the dots, as it were.

And that will tell you

if this asteroid is potentially hazardous or not.

In other words, could it one day hit the Earth?

So how likely is it that a dangerous extraterrestrial object

will hit Earth in, say, the next hundred years?

One that has been discovered is, I think, called Apophis,

-which is a near-Earth asteroid...

-Great names, by the way!

Is it people who were put out of work when Star Trek was finished,

and they had to come up with names?

Let me tell you that Apophis

will come very close to the Earth in the year 2029.

And it will pass by the Earth's surface at a distance

of about 30,000 kilometres.

Now, that is beneath the altitude of TV satellites, for instance.

So this is really coming into our back garden. It is a wake-up call.

But if it passes by the Earth at a particular distance

from a particular small region of space,

it could be deflected by the Earth's gravitational pull to exactly

the right extent that it might come back in 2036 and hit the Earth.

But the chances of this happening, I have to say,

are currently about one in 250,000, so don't lose sleep over it.

-Oh, right, it's better than winning the Lottery.

-Um, you're right!

'So apparently, there is a danger from space that could strike

'within our lifetimes. But if this is true,

'is there anything we can do about it?

'Well, this is where my new friend Alan comes in again.

'He is the project leader of the Near Earth Object Shield,

'or NEOShield for short.

'With a 5.8 million euro budget,

'they are investigating what methods could be used to avert armageddon,

'based on current technology.'

So, have you come up with

a favourite solution to the asteroid conundrum?

One is simply taking a massive spacecraft

and throwing it at the asteroid.

Here we have a very nasty, dangerous asteroid

that is on course for the Earth.

That blue ball there is the Earth.

And you are going to try

and deflect the asteroid with a kinetic impacter.

Try with this much lighter ball - that represents the spacecraft.

It didn't quite work,

and that is a very realistic scenario in which you could deflect

the asteroid slightly, but it could still end up hitting the Earth.

A different bit of the Earth.

Yes, and that is the problem,

because then you have a terrible political situation.

-It was about to hit Chicago, and you've deflected it to Peking.

-Yeah.

-Go on!

-Very good.

Another method we are considering in the NEOShield project

is something we call blast deflection.

And this is basically throwing a bomb at the asteroid.

This is going to be your bomb.

It is actually a blast of air, but it will do to try

and demonstrate the idea of blast deflection.

Oh, dear, it looks like you have failed.

I think we ought to try again.

We are going to try and make it more realistic by reducing

the size of the asteroid, making it much less massive than the Earth.

-That is, I think, the thing that stops it being realistic.

-Exactly.

Other than that, it's as if we're in space.

Ooh! You've just caught the outside of Turkey.

It skimmed through the atmosphere,

but you just saved millions of lives.

Hmm.

APPLAUSE

You all right, Mark? Let us hope that day never comes.

Were you impressed with the science of this?

Well, I don't know, I started out not particularly fretful,

to be honest, that we were going to be hit by an asteroid.

By the end of it, I thought, well, we're still not going to be

-hit by an asteroid, but if we are, then we're stuffed.

-Yeah, we are.

Apophis is the interesting one,

the one that is going to pass us in 2029.

Yes, well, there is one that is going to pass

and then possibly loop back, so that will be

an interesting eight-year period,

when we've just waited for an asteroid to come and destroy us.

I think we should point out, as has to be done intermittently

and repeatedly, the difference between the terms meteorite,

meteor, asteroid, comet...

It is quite hard, isn't it? I always forget.

Basically, anything which intrudes into our atmosphere from outer space

is an meteorite if it hits the ground

or a meteor if it is just a falling star?

So that can be either asteroid or comet. What is the difference between an asteroid and comet?

And asteroid is a rocky metal thing. It is really heavy.

This is a meteorite, but it could have come from an asteroid

and burnt up and hit the ground.

This hit the ground in Arizona in 1891.

It is really worth holding in your hand because it is enormously heavy.

The main thing of holding it in your hand is that this has been in space!

-It feeds the six-year-old in you.

-It does.

Although it really would damage the six-year-old in you

if you happen to be standing underneath it when it hit.

We have comets here. This is our favourite, Halley's Comet.

We sent Giotto up to have a look. We have the photographs.

You are going to make a comet for us.

To get your head round what a comet is... The best way is to make one.

Here we go. We're going to make a comet

The early European space mission Giotto to Halley's Comet

discovered something great about them which is that they have a lot of water in them.

First of all, we will mix up some water. Also carbon.

That is a common element in the solar system and there is loads.

We have the image of a dirty snowball.

These things are icy, but they don't look like a snowball.

There is some mineral content - silica, aluminium and a few other things.

Which you are representing with sand here.

The incredible thing is that the NASA Stardust mission, to Wild 2,

they found they had amino acids in them.

That was really startling and amazing

-cos that means....

-We got these from bodybuilders.

It's incredible because that might suggest that comets cannot just be

harbingers of doom, but they carry the components of life.

Amino acids are the building blocks of all our protein.

Is there any justification for using Eastern European vodka?

It's not vodka. It's ethanol, alcohol.

Not only did these comets deliver water, but booze.

So there is volatiles, there is organics in there,

and of course, there is carbon dioxide.

I wonder if you can help me. Mark, can you put on these gloves?

We should all put on gloves and safety glasses.

Although this is solid carbon dioxide, it is -78C.

It's not terribly dangerous, but it will give you frostbite.

What we do next means that it might spit.

Whack that in here.

-How much of this goes in there?

-About three cups.

That will cool this down and create this icy black snowball.

-Cheap special effects.

-This is brilliant.

-I shouldn't put my hand in there.

-Don't put your hand in.

If a comet landed, all the rock bands in the world would have

to rush out really quickly.

This looks like some cheap trick.

But it will create something that is uncannily like a comet.

I'm trying to solidify that water we put in there

and all the carbon and the vodka is being squeezed together.

I think we have a comet. OK.

If you have just tuned in,

this isn't the Great British Bake Off.

-Look.

-Oh, wow!

Look at the jets. The jets coming across.

These are the carbon dioxide subliming and creating...

And cooling the water and the water in the air is creating this steam.

There would be jets on an actual comet?

As it comes near the sun, this starts to happen.

As it comes near to Mark, the warmth of his charisma,

his personality starts to warm the side of it.

And that is the coma you see around a comet.

It's amazing how much you've created a comet

-that looks like a human brain.

-Yeah.

Wow, that's fantastic. That's exactly as it would appear in space.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mark Miodownik's comet.

APPLAUSE

If tonight's programme has given you

some burning questions about extinction,

we have our after-hours science club starting when we finish.

Go to the website and get involved.

APPLAUSE

Loads more sources of information for you there.

Now we have our unsung scientist Hall of Fame.

This is where we big up scientists

who don't get enough credit for their achievements.

Richard, who would you like to add to the Hall of Fame?

We have heard about the influence of guns on life.

One wonderful species that almost died out,

almost became extinct, was the North American buffalo, the bison.

It was only thanks to a few people who conserved them,

who valued then, that this species survives now.

My unsung hero is a farmer or farmer's wife, Molly Goodnight...

who kept a small herd

and now there are healthy populations once again

of this magnificent animal.

Who are you going to add?

Alfred Russel Wallace who discovered my favourite frog

which is... LAUGHTER

You're noticing a theme here.

He discovered Wallace's flying frog which is a frog that flies

which is amazing. But that's not why he's going on.

He's going on because he thought of the theory of evolution

by natural selection,

possibly even before Darwin or definitely around the same time.

The co-presented. You never hear about Arthur Russell Wallace.

You always hear about Charles Darwin.

Do you want to take Darwin out of the...?

-And put Alfred Russel Wallace in.

-That's not going down well in the room.

Genuinely spontaneous booing for that.

The one I'm going to bring in is our old friend Lancelot Hogben

who invented the frog-based pregnancy test that you'll be delighted to know

isn't the way you'll be pacing

nervously in a bathroom in 10 years' time.

-He was the one who popularised that frog?

-Absolutely.

It was because he turned it into a scientific superstar.

That's the reason it became a model organism. He has a lot to answer for.

He goes on to the side. Thank you very much.

I told you at the start of the show this wouldn't be a big depressing

guilt trip about how bad we are to little animals and pandas crying.

Yes, resources and species are disappearing at an alarming rate and

it may be all our fault, but we, as humans, have ingenuity on our side.

What if we could bring these defunct species back?

Dr Helen Czerski has been to New Orleans

to uncover some astonishing experiments.

Keeping endangered animals behind bars is one way to preserve them

for future generations.

The idea of rescuing a few specimens in the hope that they'll breed

is as old as Noah's Ark.

Creating Noah's Ark in a zoo isn't practical because, even if

you had several of every species,

you have then the enormous problem of finding habitats and food for them.

At the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans, they have a solution.

A way of keeping animals that doesn't have those problems.

They're building a genetic ark.

For over 10 years, Martha Gomez and her team have been collecting

the next generation of endangered animals

by storing their DNA in liquid nitrogen.

Basically, we have here the frozen soup.

We have cells from lions, antelopes, gorilla and elephants.

What Martha's team have is effectively a biological hard drive

to recreate endangered species from around the world.

After defrosting genetic material like these wildcats sperm and eggs,

they use IVF procedures to create new embryos in the lab.

These eggs, there is a cell membrane round the outside

-and the genetic material from the mother is in there.

-Exactly.

Then swimming around out here,

these are all the sperm with the genetic material from the father.

-Mm-hmm.

-They are combining here.

-It is in-vitro fertilisation.

-Is this better magnification?

-Yes.

-Look at that!

You can see how many sperm you have around. And just one...

-One more cat in the world, here we go.

-Here we go.

By freezing the embryos, too,

Martha's team are experimenting with starting life

then pausing it at will.

Defrosting the embryos of endangered species years down the line is

all very well, but they need mothers to bring them into the world.

So what do you do if the mothers are dying out?

This African black-footed wildcat is the first of her kind to be

born through interspecies surrogacy.

This is Crystal.

She might be the most astonishing animal I have ever seen.

The sperm that make up half of her DNA were frozen for a year

then they joined the egg to make an embryo

and that embryo was frozen for eight more years.

And at the end of that,

that embryo was implanted not in the same species as Crystal,

but in a domestic cat.

So that little cat over there was carried to term

by a mother of a whole separate species.

So, even if an animal becomes extinct,

the frozen zoo could use a common relative to resurrect the species.

But in their latest research,

Martha's team don't even need frozen sperm and eggs.

They can now create an embryo from a skin cell using cloning.

A normal domestic cat donates unfertilised eggs or oocytes.

Under the microscope, Martha adds fluorescent dye to make

the mother's DNA visible for extraction from the oocyte.

What she's doing is going in with another pipette

and removing the DNA that is already in this egg cell.

The DNA is now here and there is nothing...

Nothing. Can you see that this is the DNA?

Now that there is an empty egg cell,

a blank, the next stage is to take one of these cells that has come from

the skin tissue of a different species of cat

and put that into the oocyte.

That's the complete genetic package effectively going into the egg cell.

So the domestic cat DNA inside the egg

has been replaced with wildcat DNA.

Martha will apply an electric pulse across the cell

so that the new DNA will fuse with the egg cell.

This is the spark of life.

I'm going to pass it. 3, 2, 1.

What I do there is helping.

You can clearly see how the cell got attached.

Cloning is nothing new, but using separate species to provide eggs

and surrogate mothers is groundbreaking.

Martha's team hope to eventually clone tigers

using the more common lion as a surrogate.

This technology opens up tantalising possibilities for long extinct animals.

APPLAUSE

That is astonishing. It's nothing short of miraculous.

Even watching the video again, shivers are going down my spine.

We spent two days there and they have honed this procedure.

It's very clever. They're using the natural machinery of the cells.

So there is little artificial about it.

They are switching things in the cell the right way,

so they can put whole skin cells into this egg.

-The technology is astonishing. It makes me shiver.

-Dinosaurs?

Is that a stupid question? This is Jurassic Park.

It's all about the integrity of the DNA.

To reproduce an entire animal,

you need a lot of things to be exactly right.

In the depths of mammoth DNA that have been found so far,

no-one's got an intact sequence.

It's difficult to patch together sequences from different animals.

DNA does denature quite quickly.

No DNA has survived in any decent chunks from the age of the dinosaurs.

The mammoth is a more interesting possibility,

because deep frozen mammoths are found...

Wrangel Island, they lived until just a few thousand years ago.

It's just conceivable that somewhere, there would be a whole strand.

That is the passenger pigeon shot by a 14-year-old in Ohio

in the year 1900. Presumably, whose great-grandchildren are still alive.

So, if you could bring him back he could fly above and shit on him.

That would be a small piece of vengeance.

It's a miraculous film but it may be a far more confusing

and complex issue than that.

We are almost at the end. Mark, if you could come back in again.

We want to thank all our reporters. Helen, Tali, Alok and of course our own Mark.

Mainly our science gurus Richard Fortey

Lucy Cooke and of course our special guest Mark steel.

How do we tie a bow on this, ladies and gentlemen?

Given what we've done to the animals, we've shot them,

eaten them, knocked down their homes, introduced them to cats

and we've weed on them to find out if we're pregnant.

We probably deserve an asteroid strike, but before that happens,

we're coming after the pandas.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's all for this week. Good night.

APPLAUSE

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