3 days ago
Frozen sperm vault bringing animals back from brink of extinction
Producer: Maeve Campbell
In just a few years, we'll be able to make a new tiger from a vat in a lab in the Shropshire fields – at least that's the hope.
Talk about playing God – and all in the name of saving our most endangered species from extinction.
But god needs to get to work, say some.
70 percent of species have been lost
since the 1970s. We are moving through the dying – the sixth Great Extinction – caused almost completely by humans.
Nature's Safe has its lab a few miles southeast of sleepy, prosperous Whitchurch in rural Shropshire. Chairman and founder, Tullis Matson, started out in the family stud farm inseminating mares. He then realised our endangered biodiversity was screaming more urgently, and he set up this charity.
'This is cryogenics. That's what we do here. I mean, we call it cryo- conservation.'
– Tullis Matson
Lifting the lid on frozen animal species' DNA, at minus 80 degrees Celsius. A lifeline, they say, to saving our rarest species from extinction.
'This is like a nuclear bunker in this room. We've got the genetics of some of the rarest animals out there stored, cryo-frozen in time, basically waiting to be thawed out in 10, 20 or maybe 1,000 years' time, and bring those cells back to life within about 30 seconds, which is quite incredible, what science and cryo science, or cryo conservation, can actually do to many of our endangered species that are literally on the brink. They're on a cliff edge. So I believe we have to do something. This runs alongside normal conservation efforts,' says Matson
In Svalbard, Northern Norway, a frozen seed bank of the world's plants is slowly assembling.
But the Shropshire operation is the only place in Europe where freezing of animal species – sperm, eggs, and, crucially, skin samples – is happening at scale. They've just passed the 300 species mark, and it is skin which unlocks the cryogenic future.
I suddenly find myself asking Tullis if he could maybe make me four new Scottish wildcats, teetering on the edge of extinction oblivion.
Well, not yet, but it is coming in a few years, is the answer.
Shropshire is the only place in Europe where freezing of animal species – sperm, eggs, and skin – is happening at scale.
Skin has the whole DNA of that particular animal. And when we freeze that down, we can freeze its entirety, and then when we bring it back, we can turn that skin cell eventually into a sperm or into an egg. They've done it in mice, and the technology will evolve.
I don't know whether to be ecstatic or terrified.
Right now here there is a push to conserve red squirrels. For the first time in Europe, their cells have been successfully grown here. And that initial stage is actually relatively straightforward. The more challenging stage is, once you get stem cells, you then divert it into a different cell type, from which semen or eggs could emerge. And that's the more complicated stage. That's the bit where the research and development really needs to come through for different species.
A few miles away, Janet King successfully breeds magnificent Shire horses. She also has two wild cats, a species whose DNA already lies frozen in the nearby lab, but her red squirrel breeding enclosure lies empty. They failed to breed. So she's donated some red squirrel skin DNA to the lab.
'Sometimes you can go into like a downward spiral and it becomes fewer and fewer animals. The gene pool becomes smaller and smaller, and by doing the work that Nature's Safe is doing is protecting species for the future, whether it's this year, next year, five years, 20 years, 50 years' time. If it's needed, it is there. It's banked. It could still be a route back for us.'
Growing brand new red squirrels remains just a few years' off, but the lab has already produced new coral – an animal, not a plant.
It's now being matured in a London museum for potential reintroduction to depleted wild reefs.
The application of all this for wild species in the biosphere is obvious then, but there's also a domestic dimension to all this – the preservation of rare breeds like Suffolk Punch horse, for example, currently being worked on here.
There is universal agreement here and among the wider conservation movement, though, that this can only ever be a small part in the global fight against species extinction, an absolute last possible resort.
A word for warning from Craig Bennett, CEO of The Wildlife Trusts.
'Let's be really wary of any of those tech bros out there who think there's some kind of simple tech silver bullet solution to the loss of nature.'
– Craig Bennett
'What we need is thousands of different efforts to restore nature at scale and to do it at pace and at scale and with a sense of urgency and political will and political leadership to make it happen. Be wary of anyone that offers you a simple solution to a complex problem.'
Over at the lab, Tullis totally agrees with that sentiment. One day soon, we will be able to make a new snow leopard, white rhino, red squirrel, you name it, from a frozen vat in Shropshire. It's coming.
'We never want to have to use these tanks in a way. We hope we don't have to dive into them, because you're only diving into them if you have to. But I fear we will have to, at some point. A hundred per cent, we have to be using these new technologies without a shadow of a doubt. Otherwise, I'm afraid we're going to see many of our species disappear in front of our eyes.'
All sides agree successfully preventing extinction rests on preserving wild habitat. Above all, if we have to use cryogenics, it will be indeed the very last resort, and also a sign of our failure.
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