What Would You Bring Back?

The Hay Ladies, including bucksmiss and myself, said our goodbyes after breakfast at the Barn and went our separate ways having agreed that we'd all be up for returning for longer next year.

Being a Saturday, the crowds were much busier and buzzier at the Hay Festival.  My final talk was all about the science of "de-extinction".  It was given by the very lively and enthusiastic evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, author of the book "How to Clone a Mammoth".  Beth quickly debunked the central premise of the film "Jurassic Park", where dinosaurs are "de-extincted" using their DNA from mosquitos preserved in amber, as being scientifically impossible.  However she went on to explain that, in theory at least, it might eventually be possible to reintroduce into elephants some physical characteristics of the extinct woolly mammoth using DNA from ancient mammoth carcasses that sometimes emerge from the melting permafrost.  Part of the talk was also about the ethics and effects on ecology of achieving this.  In her flyleaf dedication when she signed my copy of her book, Beth posed the tantalising question "what would you bring back?"  I'm not too sure, but perhaps I'll have a better idea when I've read the book.  Beth told me she doesn't think a creature that is 100% mammoth will ever walk the earth, but that it's probable that within my lifetime there will indeed be elephants born that incorporate perhaps 1% of mammoth in their DNA.  Fascinating stuff.

After some lunch and a general wander around the Festival tents and stalls, I got on the road.  This time I took the longer but much quicker route via the motorways, and consquently arrived home exhausted from the effort of concentration.  Maybe it wasn't so mad to take the more leisurely A40 route over to Wales after all?  And, of course, driving more slowly would allow more opportunity to spot a woolly mammoth roaming the hills.....