← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
Cloning Wild Life: zoos, captivity, and the future of endangered animals
01:16:18
Loading summary
Transcript75 lines
- [00:01]
A
Great. Well, thank you very much for coming. My name's Vivi Wiseman and I'm just so, so delighted. It's a celebration, really. A first book is a sort of phenomenal thing. And it's just such a delight that we've come together to kind of celebrate Carrie Friese's first book. This is it. It looks absolutely beautiful. It's called Cloning Wildlife Zoo's Captivity and the Future of Endangered Animals. I'm actually sort of dressing especially, you know, I'm on scene. They didn't even notice that I spoke to you.
- [00:33]
B
Good on you, animal priests.
- [00:34]
A
Exactly. What are we doing? And I just started looking at the book just today. It just looks absolutely beautiful. Clear, wonderfully written, kind of engaging with absolutely kind of cutting edge issues about, you know, what's nature, what's human, what's being, how we're going to think about these things. So I think it's a sort of fantastic. Just a fantastic intervention. We've all been trying to kind of avoid trying to say cliched things about sort of babies and books. I mean, thinking about this for 24 hours. But I mean, it is a pretty amazing thing actually, to be having a book and a baby in the same year. And I have to say that I've kind of watched this book not as long as Karras has, but I've watched this book in production. And it takes much, much longer to produce a book of just such, you know, we were just talking about this. But actually to produce something that is so good and tight and thoughtful and original takes years and years and years longer, really, than producing a baby in the first place. And I'm really looking forward to hearing about the book for about half an hour. And then we're very, very lucky that Carys Thompson has recently joined us as a new professor in the department and has been very engaged with this project as well. And her expertise is precisely in this area. So when Sort of Carrie has finished giving us a bit of a overview of the book, we're going to have a bit of commentary and then we'll have a little bit of time for questions. And then we've got a very nice reception on the eighth floor of this building. So when we sort of finish, we can all sort of go together up to the eighth floor and have a drink and celebrate the occasion. So it's a great occasion. Thank you very much. And I'll just hand over.
- [02:23]
B
I want to start by thanking all of you for coming out this evening. As Judy mentioned, this book has been rather long in the making. And many of you have supported me along the way. So it's really nice to be able to celebrate this book finally coming out with all of you. And I just want to say a few thank yous. There's many of you who I want to thank in the audience, but I need to thank my partner, Stephanie, who's been hearing about this project for nearly a decade now, and she's still willing to come out and listen to me speak about it. I also want to thank Judy for serving as chair and Karis for serving as the discussant. As I'm sure all of you know, Judy is a pioneer in feminist technology studies. And so it's a real honor to be celebrating this book with you. Judy and Karis. I realized last week, it was nine months or nine years ago that I first went to Charis office hours to discuss discuss this idea that I had about studying cloning endangered animals in zoos as my dissertation. And I was, I have to say, kind of nervous because I was really inspired by her essay, confessions of a Bioterrorist. And I've just been so lucky to have had so many years of support from her. So thank you for continuing to provide that support. Terrorist. And then finally, I want to thank the sociology department first, please me, for supporting this project and for supporting this event tonight. So with that, I will turn to the book itself. In November 2000, a cloned endangered bovine was born on an industrial sized farm in Iowa named noaa. This Gaur was created through an interspecies modification in the somatic cell nuclear transfer process, or what is more popularly referred to as cloning. Rather than use scarce Gaur eggs, researchers from Advanced Cell Technology instead use surplus eggs from domestic cows. And as a note, ACT is an American biotech company that focuses on human embryonic stem cell research in the context of biomedicine. Retrieved from a local slaughterhouse, the common genes found in the nucleus of the cow eggs were removed so that the rare DNA in Gaur bodily cells could be transferred in. Ultimately, 44 of these novel embryos were shipped to Transova Genetics, a company in Iowa that uses assisted reproductive technologies to selectively breed cattle as part of agriculture. Here, the embryos were transferred into domestic cows who acted as gestational surrogates for their endangered Gaur counterparts. In the end, one Gaur resulted from this experiment in interspecies nuclear transfer. Noah sadly died just days after birth. But if he had survived, he would have moved from Transova Genetics to the San Diego Zoo in order to become the world's first cloned endangered animal on display in the zoological park. Amidst high profile controversies regarding human cloning and human embryonic stem cell research, the popular press reported rather positively on the world's first cloned endangered animal. Indeed, one of the surprising facets of this in subsequent endangered animal cloning projects has been the relatively high level of public support for such endeavors. In stark contrast, however, Noah raised a significant amount of controversy and debate within and across zoos. This book describes and characterizes endeavors to clone endangered animals in zoological parks. Along with the debates that have occurred, I argue that different cloned endangered animals embody different imaginaries regarding the future of wildlife on a planet that is increasingly shaped by human presence. Nature is thus being innovated in and through cloning experimentation. This is a nature that is marked by an ever increasing loss of varied habitats, a growing number of species extinctions, and a full range of new kinds of dilemmas posed by global warming. It is also a nature that is being actively made in and through the techniques and knowledge practices of contemporary bioscience and biotechnology. Cloned endangered animals thus provide a window into how nature is being reproduced and transformed within a contemporary milieu that is marked by the joint processes of technological innovation and environmental crisis. As in most areas where reproduction is knowingly changed, recalibrating nature with cloning is politically fraught. And it is for this reason, rather than a kind of knee jerk reaction against cloning per se, that animals produced with interspecies nuclear transfer have been so contentious within zoos. Before demonstrating this argument, let me start by just giving you a little bit of background. Interspecies nuclear transfer has been used to clone animals of five different endangered species as parts of zoological parks. After the Gaur died, Act conducted another cloning experiment in conjunction with the San Diego Zoological Society and Transoma Genetics again. This time, however, the somatic cells that they used were from a different endangered bovine species known as the bantang. The project resulted in the birth of one animal that is currently on display at the San Diego Zoo. And I don't know how well you can see it, but he's this chocolate brown one in the middle. In addition, three liters of African wildcat colognes have been born and two unrelated clone cats reproduced a litter of healthy kittens at the Audubon center for Research of Endangered Species, which I'll refer to as acres from now on. This is the cloned wild cat here. At the time of my research, scientists were using the technical process developed with the African wildcats in order to clone an endangered sand cat. One live birth resulted in 2008 and here's the kitten right here. But sadly the cat died 60 days after birth. Finally, there are ongoing there's an ongoing research program using common frogs, including experiments at the Zoological Society of London, with the hope that this technique could be transferred to endangered amphibians in the future. To study cloning, I have drawn upon social studies of reproduction as well as science and technology studies in order to map out who and what has gathered together in each of these experiments. I contend that the form these gatherings take embodies an argument for doing species preservation in particular ways. Nature is thus being reproduced and transformed through cloning in ways that are embodied by the cloned animal and contested through cloning experimentation itself. In this context, I contend that there have been three different kinds of cloning experiments, each of which has sought to make nature differently. The first is focused on making animals through technology development. The second seeks to remake populations through genetic management and the third appreciates biological diversity through the life sciences. Now, while the zoo may admittedly be a marginal space in the global development of and traffic in biotechnologies today, I also argue that it is an important space for exploring changing notions of nature. Historian Nigel Rothfeld has argued that the zoo mediates varied historical and cultural meanings ascribed to wild animals and nature through the social relationships and practices that enable their collection and display. Over time, these mediations have been explored by historians of zoos who have looked at how humans have variously displayed wild animals in parades, fights, menageries, traveling shows, as well as the modern zoological park. Much of this research has focused on the Victorian era cages. The shift from the Victorian era cages demonstrated with these bars to contemporary immersion exhibits and the Old and New Zoo in Los Angeles really shows demonstrates this transition quite well. We see here the classic Victorian era cage with the bars. This was deemed improper accommodation for animals in the middle of the 20th century and you can see the cages but left there and has become home to a new set of species over time. A mile away with a golf course in between is the New Zoo in Los Angeles, and we see here the classic immersion exhibit, which is the aesthetic of contemporary zoological parsley. However, scant scholarship has considered corresponding shifts in the collection practices of zoos that has accompanied this transition. Across this book, I show that cloning and other assisted reproductive technologies represent new ways of collecting animals for the zoo. Building on Rothfeld's definition, I ask how these new kinds of reproductive practices mediate varied historical and cultural meanings ascribed to the wild animals and nature. The zoo can thus differently refract the question of nature and biotechnology that has long been of central interest to both social states of reproduction as well as sts. So I'll now turn to the different logics and practices of nature that varying cloned animals embody, which is really at the center of these debates. And one of the problems with being pregnant is I got out of breath very soon. The cloned bower, African wildcats and sand cat all embody the idea that technology can and should be used to remake wild animals from the inside out so that they can withstand a human dominated planet. The spectacle of these cloned animals has lied in the ability of scientists and the corresponding institutions to make wild animals through techno scientific means. Technology is here understood as a possible solution to contemporary environmental problems that humans have created. Each of these cloning projects was defined as a proof of principle exercise. The most available materials were used in order to maximize the likelihood of a quick success. For example, one scientist told me that the Gaur was chosen for the first cloning experiment because Gaur embryos had previously been successfully gestated by domestic cows. Cow eggs are also readily available because of the beef and dairy industries. Another scientist told me that the African wildcats were chosen because this species was available to work with. ACRES has a research colony of African wildcats that they've been developing reproductive technologies with over several decades. Each of these projects was therefore rooted in a set of reproductive practices many people I spoke with refer to as demographic, wherein the goal was to increase the number of animals in an endangered population population and this was controversial for reasons I'll discuss later. To understand the cultural mediations of these projects, it needs to be emphasized that seeing wild animals is a spectacular experience, or at least it's supposed to be. Indeed, being able to witness wild animals which one would otherwise never have the chance to see has long brought people and animals to zoos. However, these cloned animals have not been displayed as spectacles within the park. Miles, the cloned African wildcat is not publicly displayed at the New Orleans Zoo, but is instead housed as part of a research colony at Acres. Meanwhile, the gar's next of kin, the clone banting, is publicly displayed at the San Diego Zoo. However, the display practices work to minimize, as opposed to publicize the fact that this animal is a clone. Seeing cloned animals is not made into a spectacle in this. Rather, the birth of these animals has been made spectacular through the popular press. And the goal of these mass mediated accounts of zoological technoscience do not appear to be solely or even primarily based on bringing people to the zoo. Rather, cloning endangered animals is meant to bring in funding for the park, generating a new source of capital. The zoo scientist I spoke with regularly commented that people are interested in technology. Some of these people may not be members of their local zoo, but may want to support the use of biotechnologies for species preservation. Adrian Franklin has noted that the modernist discourse of mastering and controlling nature has not simply alienated people from nature, but has also long generated an interest in nature itself. Biotechnology is here used to create new kinds of interest in endangered species. Zoos out colonial conservation and this is the COVID of the National Geographic.
- [15:29]
A
Special.
- [15:29]
B
Issue on de extinction, which has become the sort of next iteration of the spectacle of cloning endangered animals. And here cloning is used to bring back extinct species so we can understand these cloning projects as sites of technological optimism. Paul Wapner has noted that technological optimism is generally used to dispute environmentalists claims. Species extinction and global warming are not considered problems per se by technological optimists, but rather sites where human ingenuity and technological development are required. However, the development of assisted reproductive technologies in zoos shows how technological optimism has operated within species preservation at sea. The scientists involved in cloning the gaur, African wildcats and sand cat assume that species extinction is a problem, but they've also believed that technology is at least part of the solution. In this context, cloned endangered animals garner their aesthetic value through the application of human skill. They are spectacles of human ingenuity. This has been the basis for imagining new ways of doing conservation into the future, based not only on reconstructing ecologies, but also all animal bodies so that they better fit within a human dominated planet. For example, a field conservationist I spoke with imagined a future in which wild animals could be genetically modified so that they would not kill humans. Another zoo scientist imagined genetically modifying disease resistant birds to protect these birds from going extinct due to avian malaria. Here we see the idea that the human technology interface has created a planet on which wild animals can no longer live. If humans want to continue to see these animals, why not rebuild them at the molecular level so that they might be able to continue to live on this planet as it's become. Indeed, one technology developer commented to me that it would be unethical to not use cloning in order to save endangered wildlife. And so this could be really thought of as the animal extension of post humanism or transhumanism, where the goal is to enhance ourselves through biotechnology and technological means. There were however, many critiques of this vision for the future of species preservation in nature itself. In response, other zoo scientists have taken up cloning in order to articulate different ways of making nature through technological means into the future. And I'll turn to one such rearticulation now. After the birth and death of the Gower, both ACT and Trans ova Genetics wanted to conduct another cloning project with an endangered animal in the hopes that the animal would survive and be transferred to the zoo. However, extensive discussions were organized within the San Diego Zoo in the context of internal disputes. The zoo asked itself whether or not they should engage in another cloning experiment. And if they were to collaborate with ACT and Transomogenetics again, what kind of animal might the zoo want from such a project? Many felt that the Gower cloning project did not sufficiently represent the needs of the zoo. Proof of principle exercises were not understood as sufficient grounds for developing technoscience in the park. Rather, resulting animals had to be meaningful in contemporary XC2 preservation practices. In this context, demographic approaches to endangered animal reproduction were not only out of date, but were also viewed as problematic. In this context, the society decided that it would only participate in cloning experiments if the somatic cell used came from a genetically valuable animal. This created a strong link between cloning, the San Diego Zoo's frozen zoo, as well as species survival plans, which I'll refer to as SSGs. So this is a picture of the frozen zoo at the research center of the San Diego Zoo. And basically what it is is a collection of cryopreserved cells, including somatic cells, sperm cells, and egg cells and embryos, but predominantly somatic cells. And these are all taken from endangered animals, most of whom were born and died in the zoo itself, but some of which were taken from wild animals that are routinely kind of captured samples are taken and then re released into the wild. So that's the frozen zoo. And then this was also articulated with species survival plans. These are small organizations within zoos that manage the gene pool of captive populations of endangered animals. They were developed in the 1980s to selectively breed endangered zoo animals in order to create genetic diversity in the captive population. And thus they really displaced these demographic approaches to reproduction that technological development was based on. The idea here was that demographic approaches led to the breeding of if two animals were willing to breed, they basically would be bred over and over and over again. And this led to highly inbred zoo populations and genetic bottlenecks. And so the species survival plants were meant to counteract this. So taking up the same technologies of agriculture and pet fanciers. The goal here was not to inbreed animals in order to create genetic homogeneity. The focus was much more was on outbreeding animals in order to produce genetic heterogeneity. And this has been the primary mode through which zoos have become ethical institutions today. And that they limit the number of animals caught and collected from the wild by instead reproducing their own populations. And it's in this context that cloning becomes useful. Despite all of these attempts to manage the genetic diversity of captive populations, zoos are very small, closed groups of animals. They will eventually become inbred. Cloning allows these cryopreserved somatic cells in the frozen zoo to be regenerated, thus re embodying genetically valuable information previously lost from the population for death. In this context, the gaur was not deemed the best animal to clone because he was not considered genetically valuable in the context of the selective breeding protocol. Rather, the society decided to use cryopreserved somatic cells from a deceased bantang. This bantang was considered genetically valuable because he did not have extensive kin relations within the captive population. However, he died prematurely in the 1970s due to an accident and had not produced offspring. The level of genetic diversity within the captive population could thus increase by cloning this animal. And in the process, the spectacle of cloning shifted. It was now the SSP managers and other zoo workers more generally who the spectacle of cloning was directed at, rather than the potentially investing public. In this context, the problem cloning has addressed is not animal biologies in the context of a rapidly changing human dominated world. Rather, the problem motivating this cloning experiment was one of space. Zoos are necessarily small spaces which can only house a small number of animals. Meanwhile, the planet is also creating what we understood as a much smaller space, with limited scope for other species to evolve. In this context, cloning is viewed as a space saving technology. Cryopreserved cells take up very little space when compared to a living animal. Species preservationists today know that a minimum number of animals are required to sustain the genetic diversity of both in situ and ex situ populations, which in turn requires a minimal amount to land. But if living animals and suspended genomic information are understood as part of a single population, fewer embodied individuals would hypothetically be required. And this means that less space would be required to sustain a viable population over time. In turn, wild animals could conceivably be collected as cells rather than fully formed animals for zoos to keep as backup. So or reserves as this quote demonstrates, the idea is that cloning allows wild animals to remain in their native habitats, while zoos can still collect new founders, which are the most genetically valuable kind of animal possible because they are not related to any other within captivity. And these collection practices are understood as non consumptive because they're collecting animals as cells rather than fully formed animals. The cloned banting thus embodies the idea that by relocating genetic diversity to include cryopreserved cells, biodiversity can be preserved with less space. Where technology development seeks to work around endangered animal bodies, the genetic values embodied by the banting seek to work around the spaces in which animals live in order to reproduce populations in new ways. The environment is at best strategically marginalized and this articulation of cloning. And this forces us to ask if cloning could be articulated with the questions and concerns of those who are interested in space and place, what might such an articulation look like? And this represents the third kind of cloning project that I'll turn to now. While I was conducting the initial research for this book, a number of people who were critical of cloning suggested that I interview Bill Holt, a reproductive scientist at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London. People told me that he had been a key figure in outlining why cloning endangered animals is premature and problematic. So upon moving to London in 2009, I contacted Holt and asked if we could meet. He kindly agreed, and we met for an informal conversation shortly thereafter. To my surprise, I learned at this meeting not only why Holt had become a critic of clown cloning, but also that he himself is initiating a new cloning project. His research represents the third logic of nature pursuit through interspecies nuclear transfer. In a commentary on cloning endangered animals, Holt had argued that mammals are not the best taxa for scientists to spend time and money developing cloning with. Rather, he thought it would be much better to clone animals that develop many eggs externally. Indeed, this is why much of the cloning research across the 20th century has been conducted with frogs. In this context, Holt decided to conduct basic scientific research using common frogs in order to assess if this technique might assist with endangered amphibian conservation projects. His idea is that not only should frogs be easier to clone than mammals, but this taxa is also of greater is a greater conservation priority. Amphibians are today considered more threatened than either mammals or birds, and the reason for their decline is not generally understood. In this context, Holt has not defined his research as being primarily motivated by either proving the fact of interspecies nuclear transfer or by showing how cloning could help zoos with endangered animal reproduction. Holt is instead using interspecies nuclear transfer as a model system for asking questions about the interaction between the nucleus and the cytoplasm in development. In other words, Holt is using cloning to ask questions regarding how development occurs through the relationships between genes and the cellular environment. Better understandings of this process will determine whether or not cloning could be used to preserve endangered amphibians where live birth has previously stood as proof of the viability of cloning, Holt has instead argued that the interactions between the nucleus and mitochondria should determine whether or not this technique will be used in conservation. If it should prove viable on these terms, cloning would be used along the same lines as seen in the Bantam Project in order to genetically manage small populations of small and closed populations of captive frogs. So it needs to be emphasized that this trajectory in the development of interspecies new nuclear transfer is bound up in the shift towards more relational models of biological development. Contra the deterministic tropes associated with the Human Genome Project, the focus of contemporary molecular biology has shifted to ask things like how genes are switched on and off in the developmental mechanisms of cells and organs. In Holt's research, cloning is somewhat ironically also being articulated in a manner that rejects the notion that genes are independent and deterministic. Holt assumes that other elements within the cell are importantly involved in reproductive processes. The spectacle here is not human ingenuity, but rather the diversity of biology that can be appreciated through science itself. In this sense, science and technology are continuous with the long standing aesthetics of environmentalism and that the life sciences offer a set of practices for understanding and thus appreciating the wonder of nature. In this context, interspecies nuclear transfer is not only a system for making genetic diversity in the zoo, it is also a model system for understanding the diversity and complexity of life itself. Space is not marginalized in this articulation of cloning it is instead of central concern. But what does this do to the genetic values of the the contemporary park pursued through the clone banting and assumed in cloning amphibians? Do relational approaches to biology trouble the idea that genetics is a sufficient link between in situ and ex situ animal populations? In many ways it is too early to answer this question empirically, and so here I provide my own imagined future regarding the meaning of clothing ensues. I suspect that emphasizing the environmental forces involved in shaping biological development could result in a reiteration of the long standing critique of zoos Keeping wild animals in captivity is here understood as fundamentally wrong because the animals are no longer truly part of the species. This reinstates an essentialized version of wild animals as free and other to humans, which has long been used to argue against zoos and to position domestic animals as inferior. However, I do not think that this is the only or the most interesting direction that can be taken when considering the constitutive role of environments. Rather than critique zoos, I think it would be more interesting to ask how cloning and the zoo more broadly might be re articulated to incorporate the concerns of those who are interested in the constitutive role of space infinite environments in the lives of animals. There is, for example, room for geneticists to ask questions about the relationships between zoological environments and reproductive processes. Hannah Landecker has, for example, noted that life scientists are increasingly studying the impact of food on experimental animals, as inbreeding is not considered sufficient for creating similar kinds of animals. In the context of epigenetics, one could easily extend such questioning to ask if and how the diets of zoo animals shape their biologies and socialities. Holtaz, for example, with colleagues, asked if epigenetics could help conservationists understand how global warming is changing animals out there in the wild. I posit that epigenetics could also show how captive conditions change animals in here within the zoo. Such a line of questioning does not delegitimize the zoo as an unnatural environment, but rather highlights the zoo as a particular kind of nature. Greg Mittman has argued that the immersion exhibits developed in zoos enable conservationists to see wildlife in new ways. The zoo functioned as a kind of laboratory for elaborating new conservation practices. Here, wild animals were surveyed at a distance. These visual practices coincided with the emergence of statistics and conservation, where counting animals in habitat became the emphasis. The emergence of these practices was experienced as a loss on the part of naturalists and that it eclipsed the ideal of a chance encounter with wildlife in their habitat. As conservation displaced naturalism and surveying, life supplanted the randomness of an encounter, wildlife has increasingly transformed into an object of knowledge as opposed to a sublime experience. Nature was remade to be like the zoo during this transition. In a play on Mittman's work, I can imagine Holt's articulation of cloning as ushering in a moment wherein the zoo is nature. While the unnaturalness of the zoo has, in a sense, always been one of its defining features, this is now increasingly understood as condition continuous with rather than distinct from, the unnatural histories of most habitats and ecological niches that make up the planet today. For conservationists, this represents an ontological shift and is experienced as a loss of other kinds of animals that can evolve in ways that are not mediated by humans. And here the zoo has stood and symbolized this loss of nature that is separate from humans and culture. But the zoo could alternatively be understood as a kind of nature, as another environment in which different species live together. In this context, the zoo does not have to symbolize loss, but could instead offer space for responsibly experimenting with better ways of living with other species within the constraints of particular kinds of natures. So, to conclude, I want to ask how these different visions of nature, embodied by these different cloned animals, compare and contrast? What does cloning varyingly reproduce? What does cloning transform? How do different cloned endangered animals challenge us to think about and do nature in new ways? How do older definitions of nature get incorporated and remediated in these new iterations? How are decisions made regarding these matters? It is well known that nature, culture, biology, and society are interlinked. However, these spheres of life are interlinked in different ways across varying cloning projects. In technology development, culture is used to remake a family nature. The end of nature here represents the end of biological limits, which has made it possible to make and improve nature in light of social and cultural conditions. Conditions in contrast, the genetic values of population managers do not seek to change the genomes of endangered animals, but instead to use molecular definitions of species as guides to their social practices. Their focus is less on biological control as a mode of survival and more on shepherding the genomes of endangered populations so that they may persist into the future. In this context, the genetics of endangered species are, to use Keras's concepts, strategically naturalized so that zoos can become a more ethical institution by remaking their own populations of animals. Finally, while the focus on biodiversities in basic science builds upon the shepherding ethos, the focus is less upon remaking populations per se and more upon facilitating the surprise of nature in and through science itself. Nature is here remade as research material in the lab so that different kinds of biological differences can be understood and appreciated. As such, the three different kinds of cloning projects link biology and society, nature and culture in different ways. These links mean that the biological and the social loop in the developmental processes of endangered animals differently. Nature is thus potentialized in heterogeneous way ways by variously pursuing the potential of interspecies nuclear transfer. As such, cloning is not contentious in and of itself. Rather, the Ways cloning pieces nature and culture together is the primary site of debate. And the question of what world making science and their practices zoo should engage in is addressed in and through cloning itself. In delineating the notion of matters of concern, Bruno Latour has argued that it is not enough to conclude criticize the technology. Rather, one must engage with the technology so as to change it. In many ways, the Zubay scientists discussed within this book exemplify Latour's argument. While some critics of cloning have certainly scorned the technique and refused to engage with it, others like Holt have articulated their concerns by using interspecies nuclear transfer itself. They've re articulated cloning to address not only their worries about this technique technique, but also the things that they care about regarding species preservation and the remaking of the planet on which we live. The lesson from endangered animal cloning projects is thus not that we should not clone. The lesson is instead that we should learn to respond well to the surprises that cloned animals make. With that I'll stop. Thank you. Thanks very much.
- [37:23]
A
That was lovely.
- [37:24]
B
Actually, can we go straight on?
- [37:26]
A
Yeah, great.
- [37:37]
C
Thank you, Carrie. That was really lovely and an absolutely lovely last sentence that's going to stick with me. I wanted to start by get this up onto slideshow. Is that right?
- [37:55]
B
There we go.
- [37:57]
C
Just by saying a couple of things about the book itself. It's a beautiful book. It looks beautiful, but it's written in a way that is incredibly careful, incredibly generous and incredibly generative. And it's really unusual to put those three things together. So I really wanted to flag that. It's a lovely thing. Okay. So I set up a few slides as a background to what I want to say. And I've done it sort of in the form of a bestiary. Because the bestiaries in the Middle Ages were not only pictures and accounts of peculiar kind, interesting, more normal and less usual animals, but they also attached a moral to them. They attached a value to the animal in question, a reason why we might care about them, or a lesson we could learn from them. And even the word pedigree comes from the Frenchie Pierre de Cru. It comes from the French for the foot of a pelican. So there's the lines of descent come from the animal. So the sense of the science, the values and the optics of the thing being connected come through so strongly in your book. And so I wanted to background with a kind of bestiary of famous cloned animals. As I say a few things about themes that come out to me from the book. Okay, I'm going to sit so I can see my notes on my slide. The first thing to say, I think, is that in this book, Carrie makes it really clear how genealogical this practice is, but just how leaky this genealogy is. And for my particular purposes, having a background in in situ and ex situ biodiversity conservation, the ways that you tie between the different technologies of genealogy, the species survival plans, the reintroduction, the collecting, the frozen zoos is absolutely an incredible strength of the book. You also, in a very kind of quiet, modest way, tie into something which I guess probably people in this room most strongly associate with Professor Sarah Franklin, but also with your work, which is the sense of these technologies of reproduction giving birth to. Pun intended, I guess, a spectacular suite of biological tools, a spectacular biological set of platforms and suite of tools. And the affect, not just the economies, but the affect that goes with that, the scientific excitement that goes with that as well. So we thought we knew what clones were. They're one of those things that everyone thinks they know. They more than think they know what they are and what carries. And Dolly is, I guess, kind of the archetype.
- [41:11]
D
And what Carrie's book shows us is.
- [41:13]
C
That that's not true at all. Although I have to say, my own mother, who is currently very unwell, did say to me, when Dolly was born, that's the first time I ever thought there was any difference among sheep. So there are always people out there seeing diversity and difference in the sameness of the concept of cloning. Okay, moving on. Cloning in humans has a few tropes that are really, really. That are part of this over determination of what we think we know by the idea of cloning. People who are. When it's men who are clones, they're always evil, usually dictators. In the case of the movie, of the boys From Brazil, literally 94, I think it was Hitler's. And they have. Whatever striking features it is, that sort of authoritarianism that's coming to us when it's feminized. It's very often that we're slaves to fashion. We can't say no to the normative, hegemonic and excluding pressures of the day. Consumptive pressures of the day. And then there's always this theme of it going wrong, that the copy isn't as good as the original, or it's better than the original in ways that are troubling, dangerous, mushy. And those themes, I think, are very much there. And what Carrie's book shows us, in part because it is such an internal debate. The way she presents it internal to the field of endangered species cloning. It isn't trafficking these tropes much. I mean, sometimes it is, but in some sense we get the inverse of these tropes. So instead of it being a technology of doing wrong, it's a technology of doing right. And you brought that out really well. The way in which it's kind of a mission or a redemptive mission. Instead of it being a technology of conformity and uniformity, it's a technology of difference and diversity very explicitly. Instead of it being a technology that's run ahead of society, technology that's run amok, society's run ahead, messed up our habitat and the technology's running behind and going to try to clean up. It's going to put them in the frozen zoos until we can get some more habitat or whatever it might be. But it's. So it's reversing in some really important sense all of those tropes. And I think that there's a. There's something that the book does for us which is a habit of asking about inversions that I think is. Would probably be a very good thing more generally to take away from the book. So the. I'm glad that you talked about the de extinctions. Jurassic Park. I guess I always like the velocirapt because I have a tendency when I'm talking of doing velociraptor claws and get teased a lot by my kids and students for it. But that was an early movie where the idea of using cloning to resurrect extinct species.
- [44:14]
A
Came about.
- [44:16]
C
But what Carrie's shown us. And it's really interesting because I've come to realize that you've been co opted into being an expert on this. On the question of de extinction. People talk to me about, you know, ask me what you think about it when I see them about this question of de extinction. So in people's minds there's some slip between. Between the two. But there is a really big. There's an enormous importance that you bring out, I think between already extinct and being on the brink of extinction. That's all about the value there. The value of what we might be losing versus. Versus the danger and the fear of the dinosaur that's going to rip us to shreds. And you know, the difference between Noah, of course, the Gower is named Noah. Noah's Ark versus reviving something that is the hubris of science. Okay. In other. Outside of endangered species cloning, some of the Ways we think about animal cloning that are quite dominant are livestock. Again, Professor Franklin has been somebody who's, you know, in her book Dolly Mix, just did an extraordinary genealogical analysis of that concept of the two halves of that word live and stock. But the idea of reproducing something of great value has caught on in the commercial world. And those people have been amazing. Artificial reproduction or assisted reproduction experts, people in commercial cattle breeding and horse, expensive horses. And they've been incredibly good at arts forever. And then animal models is another area where the idea, and this is a conversation I'd love to have with you at some point, how this connects up to the amphibian project. But the idea that there's something that by cloning you can, as it were, reproduce the. The blank slate or reproduce the same control for things that the very nature of a clone is an experimental setup in some way. And so being able to clone animals so that you can then test differences, the biomedical value of that and the basic science value of that has caught people's imagination very strongly. Okay, let me put this on. In terms of the animals that are explicitly in your book that are in the bestiary of the endangered species cloning, some of the themes. So these, you'll recognize these from the talk that she just gave. The first one is Noah. The second one is the Banteng. And the third one are the early wild cats that would work proof of principle for.
- [46:58]
E
Endangered species.
- [47:00]
C
But one of the things that I want to emphasize here.
- [47:11]
B
Is.
- [47:14]
C
The concepts that actually lurk around cloning when you dig into the stories in the way that you do. So death is there all the time. And what I remember from so this, sometimes they die, and then that's too bad because then it doesn't really work. It didn't work. Excess is there and death is there. And that's true around all the assisted reproductive technology that there are problems about excess and death. There are too many women needed, too many eggs needed. The success rate is too low, the efficiency is too low. The bantame project was. So I spent a certain amount of time at the center for reproduction of endangered species of at the San Diego Zoo as well, the Banting project. One of the things that was completely fascinating about it was that people, his dad, as they called him, although it's him sort of kind of, it's his somatic DNA anyway, it's his nuclear DNA.
- [48:10]
B
Really. Really.
- [48:11]
C
The one that carries had died in the 70s prematurely from an accident. Should have been in the stud book. And it was just that sense of it's almost there. If it just hadn't died, it would be there. So how can we reanimate it so that we can put it back into genetic circulation? And I think that that's. That kind of playing between life and death is really cool. But also the way that these imaginaries work through these elisions or these slippages that it's nearly like that he was nearly in the stud book already. If he just hadn't died, we could have got him there, we could have got him into the frozen zoo, we could have got him in the stud. So this way we can reanimate him and bring that really good diversity. Because they really liked how he looked. It was really different into, back into that, into those lineages, kind of almost apart from the questions of whether or not it was actually one of the species or not. And then all those. So another really interesting area that comes up I think beautifully in your book is this constant how do we bring our histories of what we've come to value. And around endangered species has a. A long, long history of what, what's worth saving and how do we. And what's worth saving kind of is how valuable. So in the Endangered Species act, for example, we exempt, you know, the class, the entire class, insect, you know, insects and other vermin. Insects and other vermin, I think that's the language, are exempt from the Endangered Species Act. So how do people decide that something is worth conserving? And how do you decide whether something is an example of whether it's worth conserving? So if it's not in the same habitat, is it still a member of the same species? The habitat's gone. Does the species still exist? If it was raised in a zoo or raised in a ranch, is it still wild? So this concept of wild that's in your title and echoes through the book is incredibly important. I think one of the things that was also a backstory constantly on the banteng was how co dependent they were in the early accounts of natural historians, from these sort of Victorian accounts about the 18th century with the coffee plantations and that they did really well if they grew in the shade of the coffee plantation. So what nature are we talking about? That's a colonial nature, it's a transnational. So the kind of interplay back and forth is really intense. And then these guys, these coordinators of these species survival plans are the people doing the reintroductions as well for these species. So they're trying to get these animals, okay, so they can put them back in nature, whatever that is, and negotiating with governments to have bits of land that they can call nature, but they can get them back into. So I think that the way that these lag of history and these multiple implications of transnational relations, travel, circuitry, nature culture, go back and forth, it really comes out, really comes out beautifully. The theme that. A theme that comes out in endangered city species cloning, but less so, I think than in other kinds of animal cloning, other ones about biological difficulty. So it's. So that how that becomes more quiet as a story is very interesting to me too. So in the wider world of cloning animals around the pets. So that was the clone that turned out not to look like the animal, the cat it was cloned from. And yikes, if. If your little ducky, whatever the heck, pet dies and you want to clone it and then it doesn't look like the one that you're crying about, you know what? You know, it's not doing what it's supposed to do. There's no fidelity and reproduction. There's no mimesis here. The Afghan hound, that's the famous. That was the veterinary feat that made Hwang Woo Suk, the Korean stem cell scandal guy, famous. Reproductive endocrinology is whether or not it really is. But people always say it's incredibly difficult, it's biologically difficult. And species are really, really bad models, one for another. And the Afghan hound was his name Snuppy, which is Seoul national for the main university in Seoul in Korea puppy Snuppy. And the fact that he was a somatic transplant nuclear clone was a testament to. To the feet. And that kind of a lot of the lore around Bon Mesook goes back to. And then of course he went into this slightly nefarious pet cloning business after he was dethroned. And then the other picture I put there is just this idea that that's a cloned mule. The idea that you can reproduce without reproduction. So the classic thing that you learn in biology class that you cross a horse and a donkey and then they're sterile. So that's not a species. And that's one of the definitions of not being the same species. Oh, but look, actually they can reproduce because we can clone them. All the definitions of being a species, actually none of them really work very well. If you put different species of salmon in a truck and truck them around a dam, they try to mate with each other. So they're not reproductive anyway. So those kind of tropes sort of disappeared in the cloning of endangered species, even though they're very dominant in circulating around other clonings of animals. So that's a question that I'm really interested to know how I kind of get it, the human animal, but I find that one harder to understand. And then I wanted to just.
- [53:54]
B
End.
- [53:54]
C
Up by talking a little bit about. Oh, let me go back for one second to that. The other thing I had wanted to say about these reproductions is how much they illustrate Carrie's theme. But again, she picks up the theme of trans biology.
- [54:15]
A
And.
- [54:18]
C
Makes very clear that nature is not just born and made, but also made and born, which is a theme that Professor Franklin and Professor Frieser have worked on together that you originally developed.
- [54:35]
B
Okay.
- [54:38]
C
So I just wanted to finish up then by talking about the affect of the book, the sort of mood that the book is in, and the exhortation it leaves us as readers, as students of this work with at the end of it. And you actually gave us a really lovely section on this at the end of your talk. But for me, this book shakes me and does so much more for me in terms of values, in terms of passion, in terms of action than the more typical let's protest against the zoo or the, you know, just absolutely pro. There's. I don't know if you can see that from the back, but bringing species back from the brink of extinction, the kind of pro science thing, it's neither. It isn't a pro or a con book. It's a book that shows us in really intricate detail, in its full glory of hybridity, difference and nature, culture crossings all the reasons why and stakes of caring. So thank you for a beautiful book.
- [55:40]
B
Thank you very much.
- [55:44]
A
Well, we've got about 15 minutes for responses and questions and comments. I don't know, do you want to.
- [55:50]
B
Immediately sort of respond in any way.
- [55:52]
A
Or will we open it up to.
- [55:56]
B
I guess the one question you had was the ways in which the kind of impossibility, the feat of colonial gets marginalized, including endangered animals. And I think why that is is because the people who disengage from the technology, who were opposed to it and did and just wanted to distance themselves, that was their main argument, is it's inefficient, it doesn't work very well. And so we shouldn't do this. We shouldn't be mucking around with endangered animals with a technique that just doesn't work very well. And so there was this kind of hierarchy. It was fine to muck around with domestic animals with a technique like cloning that didn't work very well, but it was somehow just unethical to do that kind of mucking around with endangered animals. So I think that that became just part of the for and against framework. But there was. I mean, definitely the turn to frogs was the idea that frogs had been cloned across much of the 20th century, that John Gierdon had already cloned the frog and that it would somehow be easy. So the appeal of the frog was this idea that it wasn't hard. And of course, it's ended up being.
- [57:25]
F
Much harder than they thought it would.
- [57:26]
B
You know, So, I mean, like anything else, it's taken a lot of time for them to be able to establish an interspecies nuclear transfer as a. As a model system for exploring the interactions between nuclear DNA and mitochondria. So I think that's the two elements. Thank you.
- [57:51]
A
Okay. Sarah.
- [57:52]
C
Yes.
- [57:54]
B
Oh, I have to say what a.
- [57:57]
G
Great pleasure it is to be here and to see this book out and to see it looking so beautiful and to see Judy Weissman wearing leopard to celebrate. I actually just wanted to make a comment that's also kind of a question, because in addition to being like an offspring, a book is also a technology and a reproductive technology. And one of the things about your work that's very distinctive is the care you take in your citational practice. And among other things, this book does. It could be used as a manual for how to teach people how to write in a very generous, scholarly. And it's exactly right what Carrot said. You know, it's a very generous book, a very careful book, and a very generative book. And it is, in a way, an ethical statement about reproduction. How you've written this book, it's an ethical statement that says we have to pay attention to the care and the labor and the work that's involved in reproducing things successfully. Because most of reproduction isn't biological.
- [59:07]
B
Biological.
- [59:08]
G
And reproducing something biologically is just a very elementary part of reproduction. It will die unless it's properly looked after, which has, in fact, happened to some of the. And so I'm just wondering.
- [59:26]
B
You know.
- [59:26]
G
Margaret Locke was here watching her book just two weeks ago, and she says the whole problem with Alzheimer's is they keep looking for the biomarker. Even if. If they found the biomarker and they could control the biomarker, most people who get degenerative diseases in old age will need a massive amount of care, and no amount of biological control will ever answer that question. And I'm just wondering, is There almost like a sequel to this book that is about why biological reproduction is the wrong place to look to ensure viability for humans as well as animals.
- [60:03]
B
Well, first of all, thank you and Sarah's work has been incredibly crucial for this book. And I just want to say, you know, I feel like I was raised in a family of feminist scholars where citational practices are massively important in terms of changing the politics of the academy. So thank you. I'm glad BERDITZV is generous in that respect. I mean. Yes. So I think one of the things to point out is a lot of times people assume that these animals died because of cloning. And I've even seen in discussions about de extinction the assumption that the yer, for example, died because of a problem with cloning. But he actually did not die because of a problem with cloning. He died because they didn't know how to take care of him. He had dysentery because they fed him food that he couldn't digest. So this, I mean, my next research project is looking at care as, as a part of science that in the context of cloning has been routinely marginalized to the detriment of the science itself. So that's in a sense where this book has taken me. And I do think that project, it's interesting because it's not about biological reproduction, but I see it as still being within social studies of reproduction for the reasons that you say, because social, because reproduction is, it's not just biological. And that's been the point of feminist scholars for so long. And I think that's why I am interested in pursuing my own kind of imaginary through the amphibian project because I think that that's where we can bring some of that out and to say, and part of, you know, part of what I'm trying to get at is some animals can live very well in zoos. So the bantang, actually, I think, I mean, I'm not an expert, but I think in this respect that the bantate, there's semi domestic domesticated herds of bantae, they live quite well in the zoo. I would say a polar bear, for example, probably shouldn't be in any zoo. They swim 500 miles a day. I don't think that the nature of the zoo could ever accommodate that species. And so that's why I'm trying to say the book is not saying we can't be this for and against zoo. This cross is just really insufficient to deal with the dilemmas that zoos raise. And if we start to shift the Question of care and see science as part of that, we might actually be able to address those dilemmas better. Does that answer your question?
- [63:16]
A
Very nice.
- [63:17]
B
Oh, good friend.
- [63:18]
D
I wanted to. The question that Sarah asked helped crystallize.
- [63:22]
B
One of the things I was thinking.
- [63:23]
D
About, Carrie, about you presentation, because it seemed to me that, you know, you.
- [63:27]
C
Begin, it began at the moment sort of with the problem of.
- [63:31]
D
You know, threatened extinction. And part of that was about the degradation of habitats or just the removal, the destruction of habitats altogether. And then you ended up back with habitats as part. I don't want to say your solution that would be putting it too strongly. But you know, part of your proposition, except you're rethinking or you're thinking in an extended way about what a habitat might be and you might be there. And I think that links up with Sarah's point about the work of care and also the space of care. But how would you account for that movement in your own thinking or your account of your thinking? Because the polar bears have a table is not going to. It seems to be the implication is that some species will become extinct. And that's sort of just tough, you know, ultimately, because potentially we can't have any part in creating a habitat that would. An alternative habitat.
- [64:37]
B
Well, I think, I mean that's, you know, one of the, the conservationists I spoke with basically said, you know, the questions that we're going to face now are are you better off preserving frogs? Well, the species, like the polar bear, for example, in some form, and maybe it's a genetically modified form, maybe it's a semi domesticated form, or are you comfortable saying there's no longer space on this planet for this species, we're going to let it go. And I think the point there is those are tough questions. And part of the question who gets to decide that is I think, the trickiest question of them all. Who gets to make that decision? Because it's a diffuse decision. And so, I mean, he used the California Condor as an example of, you know, where zoos took it upon themselves to bring the California Condor into captivity in order to preserve the species. And in his mind they were basically treated like turkeys. And other conservationists said, no, let's let you know, just as we might, as people want to die individually with dignity, let's let some species die with dignity. So these are debates and I don't think, I don't know if I can answer that, but I do think that these scientific techniques need to incorporate those debates in them. They cannot view themselves as somehow separate. And I think that's the tendency to sort of see, oh, well, we're just doing this thing, and we're somehow separate from these bigger questions about what is it that we're doing here. And what I'm trying to say is actually these questions are being answered in the actual experiment itself. So does that answer. We've got a few, actually. Yes.
- [66:40]
E
I have a question as well. I mean, I know very little about the technology that you described today as fascinating to hear, but I was interested in about the connection between the view of scientists and the teams you work on and what is perceiving in the larger society, because I think there is a different affective attachment towards certain species. So wild cats, for example, and certain species are seen by people as, in a sense, more valuable. There is something captivating. Whereas a frog, for example, is sticky, more difficult to find for. So I wonder how that enter in your business.
- [67:18]
B
Well, that's, I mean, definitely the appeal of cloning a mammal is that they're, you know, or a cat, you know, they're cute little kittens. They, they, they work well in terms of, of engaging with the media. The media is more willing to run a big cover story on mammals. I mean, that's why de extinction is currently getting people excited. The woolly mammoth is, you know, kind of like the extinct version of the panda. You know what I mean?
- [67:53]
A
So I was gonna say the panda.
- [67:57]
B
You know, and so the desire here is for the charismatic megafauna, in part, and that is to. To draw in money to create interest in nature. And so part of Holt's argument there is that what he's trying to do is what he calls boring science. So science that's so mundane that no journalist would ever come to his office to ask about it with the idea that maybe it can become routine more quickly. But his idea is also actually, while frogs might not get him into the newspaper, they are a conservation priority. So within the conservation world, this is a big dispute, you know, because you use these charismatic megafauna to, you know, get people interested. It brings in funds, it brings in support, and it can. I mean, it's not, I don't want to say it's all bad because it is used as a way of then preserving whole ecosystems, which then preserve a whole set of species. But the cloning experiments, you know, don't necessarily have that same, you know, larger impact. Those are really about cloning cute little animals, to bring one into the park. I mean, that's the goal. But at the same time, what I would say is, you know, they're limited. You have to clone animals. All of the animals that have been. All the endangered animals that have been cloned are closely related, you know, are related to a domestic species. So you have cats, you have cows, you know, you have frogs. And so, you know, I have had people say, you know, they looked up the gaur expecting. I don't know what they were expecting, but they're like, it's just a cat. So they're kind of. The problem with them is sometimes they're not charismatic enough. Also, the cats are all small cats. They're not big caps that they're, of.
- [69:50]
E
Course, where you locate legitimacy. If you have, you know, an idea, legitimacy that's actually more popular and what people perceive. I think it's, you know, it's more. I don't know, it's even more complex than that.
- [70:01]
B
Thank you. Anyway, I want to finish.
- [70:03]
A
Did you have your hand up, Dom? I can't tell. I can't tell if it's coming in.
- [70:07]
B
And out of there. All right.
- [70:11]
F
I'm a little bit unclear how to.
- [70:12]
B
Formulate it, but.
- [70:15]
F
In terms of the tropes that you're describing, there's a fascination about the difference between what is actually matters of concern within these scientific and internal communities, as opposed to within a kind of popular culture. I'm thinking that from a kind of cultural studies point of view, actually. I mean, that's how crucial it is not to do textual readings at these events. There's something else going on. But that led me to. To another question. There was one kind of trope, as it were, which wasn't coming out. But you touched on it a few points when it came out in Fran's question. The difference between cloning as a kind of exact reproduction which then just sends the same creature other into the zoo in a protected space, or into looking for habitat attack, which still doesn't exist, versus the idea of something closer to genetic modification. What does it mean? And again, in terms of the popular cultural fears, compare your debates with genetic modification in foods, where a lot of the fears are about new strains which suddenly become resistant to, you know, basically create a world which it might not be human dominant. I'm just interested whether either these kinds of issues which do exercise the kind of popular consciousness, or whatever, you know, society. Whether those do get reflected in these kinds of scientific communities, which I found fascinatingly different and resistant.
- [71:44]
B
Actually, perhaps we could just take the.
- [71:46]
A
Last and then take both.
- [71:47]
B
Yeah.
- [71:48]
A
Is that okay? And then we'll sort of wrap up Quickly.
- [71:50]
B
Yeah, I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about the human activism involved in this, because we mostly talked about reproductive scientists, but are we talking about biological scientists? Is there intersection with veterinary medicine and human medicine?
- [72:12]
A
How does that work?
- [72:15]
B
I can answer both questions in tandem, actually. So the important point with. I didn't talk about this, but. But there's a chapter in the book about this. The important point of cloning endangered animals is that it's interspecies nuclear transfer. So the egg cell comes from a different species than the endangered animal. And so the whole debate has been, do these clones count them as endangered? So the fear is, in a sense, not this reproduction of sameness. And there is, in a sense, no fear that the zoo will be, you know, that you'll go to the zoo and just see clones. You know, if you go to London Zoo, you'll see a clone of the same animal that you see in San Diego. You know what I mean? It's not this mass production fear that is at all at play here. It is, in a sense, it is this fear of creating something new. So the idea is by using interspecies nuclear transfer, you may actually be creating a new kind of animal, one that would not exist. So those are the debates and those are the fears. And then what happens if that spreads? So one of the things I didn't talk about is with the Bantang cloning project, one of the caveats they made was that the Bantang could also be cloned because he was male, but you wouldn't clone a female animal. And the idea here was that mitochondrial DNA inherited from the domestic cow would be spread through that cow's reproduction, whereas the male would quarantine that alien DNA in his own individual body and wouldn't spread this through the population. So there is this fear of contamination. Definitely runs through the story, but in a way that, I mean, I think in a way that's. We could say it's interconnected with the popular cultural discourse, but is also quite different. It's a highly scientized way of articulating the sphere of contamination. Does that answer your question? I think so. Okay. And then in terms of the disciplinary sort of background, I mean, you have biotechnology companies involved that are involved in agriculture and biomedicine. Bct, though, is really. I mean, they paid for the Banting and Galore project, and they paid for it as a proof of principle exercise because they wanted to use interspecies nuclear transfer for human embryonic stem cell research. So that's the point that they played in the zoo. It's largely the people who've largely been involved are reproductive scientists and geneticists. But what the, you know, the death of the Gower showed how much veterinarians and zookeepers were marginalized in that project. And so the bantay was also chosen because the zookeepers and San Diego knew how to hand rear banting so that expertise was brought into that experiment. But yeah, I would say it's largely reproductive scientists and geneticists in zoos, but in collaboration with the biotech companies, predominantly biomedical. Great.
- [75:46]
C
And the field conservation take a strong view.
- [75:48]
B
Yes, yeah, exactly.
- [75:50]
A
Anyway, I'd just like to say thank.
- [75:52]
B
You very much for coming.
- [75:53]
A
It's been a great occasion, great talks. Actually makes me sort of proud to be associated with this field of work. Please come and have a drink with us on the eighth floor. And we've even got just a few books to sell, I think just a few precious, precious copies of the book to sell. So come along up and celebrate. Yeah, we'll get them all signed.