Lars Kenseth > Lars's Quotes

“Here’s the strangeness of having a Tourette’s brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot—coulda been a contender!—at centrality. Personalityness. There’s a lot of traffic in my head, and it’s two-way.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“At Xanadu in 2001, I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth’s performance in Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage, breaking his leg, was “the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake

“An electric milk van on fat tires rolling creamily.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“We still tend to speak of Neanderthals as though they’re somehow alien from us, even though many of our genomes show that they’re literally a part of us. To be a species is a murky thing. Many of us are mutts already, but de-extinction could multiply the spectrum of hybridity in some startling ways.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp—or by an extremely adventurous female human.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“He tells me that dealing with ancient DNA “is like taking the entire collection of Encyclopedia Britannica, ripping it up into two-letter pieces, scrambling it all up, and then having some grad student put it back together without coffee.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“The bull the testicles came from was named Yasufuku, a prized sire whose offspring grew into beautiful bovine specimens that could be farmed for their marbled Wagyu beef.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“I think there’s a huge misconception about how much science is actually going on. In the back corner of George Church’s lab [at Harvard] they have a few people who are using a tiny amount of resources that are available to them to attempt to swap out genes in elephant cells which are growing in culture in a dish in a lab. I have a student who’s trying to convince me that it’s a good idea to bring passenger pigeons back to life. There’s a group in Australia who are thinking about the gastric-brooding frog but are stuck because they can’t cause the cells to actually grow up. There’s a group in New Zealand that is thinking about bringing a Moa [an extinct bird] back to life and are working on sequencing the moa genome, which is not de-extinction, in itself. There’s a Spanish group that’s thinking about the bucardo [a subspecies of Spanish ibex that went extinct in 2000], and there’s the backbreeding group for the aurochs [an extinct species of wild cattle] in Holland. That’s it. That’s everything that’s going on in the world right now.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“The idea can be traced to this meditation of Gary Snyder’s on a Zen Buddhist verse: “The precept against taking life, against causing harm, doesn’t stop in the negative. It is urging us to give life, to undo harm.” As Revive & Restore sees it, this rehabilitative tenet has been woven into the ideological fabric of de-extinction.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“The ecosystem function of a species is going to be dependent on learned behaviors that come from living with other individuals of its kind, not on morphology alone.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“Keystone species are those known to crucially affect the overall function of an ecosystem,”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“When a species goes extinct, the role it once played in its ecosystem—as a fertilizer, forest disturber, predator, and so on—vanishes along with it.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“For example, virus-resistant genes could be inserted in the genome of a species that is dying from an infection, or genetic susceptibility to a disease could be altered with precision gene editing,”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“They call their genetic rescue work on extinct species de-extinction, and the work they’re doing on endangered species genetic assistance, but their separation is much more taxonomical than philosophical. “I don’t separate out our de-extinction work from our endangered species work or the work that we might potentially do one day around wildlife diseases to help endangered species,”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“Church also figured out how to encode an HTML version of a book, one he’d cowritten, in a single drop of DNA,”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“As opposed to the precautionary principle, which says do nothing because you don’t know what the unknown consequences are, we say, use cautionary vigilance with transparency and responsibility,” Phelan told me. By biting off only one small chunk of technological risk at a time in the hope of creating a better future, this approach allows Phelan and Brand to iteratively test what is going right and wrong so that they can adapt their projects along the way.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“The fact that it took so many attempts to achieve success is not unusual with cloning, and that raises ethical questions about cloning extinct animals. Because of complications in development, lots of embryos are sacrificed in the cloning process. Many that grow into fetuses die soon after birth. Congenital diseases are common in clones, so they may suffer fatal complications before they leave the lab. Nobody knows how many lives or potential lives will be lost in the attempt to clone extinct species until these techniques are perfected for it. Pushing ahead with de-extinction by cloning inherently means taking risks.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“Even when beautifully maintained mammoth carcasses that are pulled out of frozen Siberian soils ooze with liquid resembling blood, the cells that scientists recover have always been damaged.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“Later, back in the lab, Roy Weber, a professor in the Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University, spins the liquid in a vial to run tests on it, allowing him to see that the dark liquid was indeed full of red blood cells. But they had all broken open and released their hemoglobin—the molecule that carries oxygen in blood—out into the slurry.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“There are all sorts of hormones from the mother that can affect the fetus when life starts to sprout.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“it took more than two hundred implantation attempts in fifty-seven goats for seven of them to get pregnant. Out of those seven pregnancies, only one was brought to term, and on July 30, 2003, Celia’s clone—the world’s first unextinct animal—was born, weighing in at 4.5 pounds. Roughly ten minutes later, though, she died; an extra growth on her lung prevented her from flourishing, and the bucardo became extinct a second time around.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction