INTERVIEW

of elephants but, ecologically, it will be a mammoth. The goal is to make an elephant that lives in Arctic ecosystems.

Did you sense that this was not something conservationists want to do? As you know, that topic meets with a lot of controversy among conservationists, with some being on board and others being quite sceptical and others being oddly against it for, sometimes, incredibly hypocritical reasons.

For example, there was a paper published recently by a critic of de-extinction that was applauding the umbrella concept of giant panda conservation, which to me is incredibly humorous, because when you evaluate giant panda conservation, by every metric that they’re criticising de-extinction it is equally bad or worse. Pandas are not ecologically significant; they’re not keystone species or top predators.

The paper was about how saving pandas makes people excited about conservation, and motivated to protect bamboo forests and those regions that help lots of other species in need. And that’s all the exact same concept of trying to recreate something extinct: to get people excited about where conservation can go, and to be able to help other species in an ecosystem.

I think another reason people are sceptical about this space is that very big claims are made through the media with few scientific data or publications available for peer-review or scrutiny. Do you publish peer-reviewed data on your projects? Publication is not a first priority for us over making data available. So the concept of getting information up on preprints and genomic data on public databases is our first priority. We encourage all the teams we support to do that, but we also recognise that we’re funding university professors and researchers that need to have peer-reviewed publications to advance their careers and secure other sources of funding. Something we really wish we could push further on is the publication of null data and failures. But journals still don’t want to do that. We just had a preprint published on our Przewalski’s horse cloning, and we have a paper ready to go on black-footed ferret cloning. But overall, we want the breakthroughs our teams make to be used in conservation. We don’t necessarily want them to spend six months trying to make a publication, when, within that same time, they could be getting that technology in the hands of someone in the field.

The reality of conservation genomics as a science is that for 30 years there have been thousands of great papers written that just sit on the shelves or in people’s hard drives, without translating to any application in nature. And that’s what we don’t want our work to do. We don’t want it to be interesting academic stuff that no one uses.

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Revive & Restore, alongside its partners, has cloned two Przewalski’s horses (Equus przewalskii)

Our last issue reported on the perilous status of many of the world’s plant and fungal species. Do you have any programmes focused on genetic rescue for plants and fungi? Plants are something we haven’t worked with much yet. We only have three projects that have anything to do with plants out of the 70-something projects we’ve supported over the years, but we want that to change.

I think in previous decades, a lot of people kind of assumed that plant conservation was simpler than animal conservation and that plants were going to be okay. The other reality is it can be difficult to raise money for plants because people don’t emote with them in the same way they do with animals. We would like to overcome all those barriers and develop more tools for plants. I’m hoping within the decade we can have as many plant projects as we have animal projects. And the threats to fungus are just starting to be appreciated, too.

Can your approach be applied to the ecosystem level as well as to individual species? As a programme we have not focused on whole habitat levels yet. There are ways people have contemplated biotechnologies aiding entire ecological processes but I don’t think they are ready. There’s the use of environmental DNA or environmental RNA sequences for whole ecosystem monitoring – if you want to know that ecological restoration is working, if you were to switch to sequencing ecological RNA, you are monitoring what’s actually being expressed by the organisms’ genes. It’s also very short-lived in the environment, whereas DNA can last for years.

Right now we focus mainly on species because the reality, of course, is that an ecosystem is made up of species and if we help one species the right way, that one species will have a benefit to the other species in an ecosystem in which it lives. We want to know that the application has significance at a bigger conservation level. And whether it could have an inspirational impact on conservation. We do not have the levels of money that the larger international conservation organisations have. We’re not going to be able to pull together several hundred million dollars to roll out a biotech habitat restoration programme. But if we can catalyse several projects that show the clear

16 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 71 No 2