When the last po'ouli died, that is the Hawaiian songbird.
The body was sent to our pathology department.
And my job was to try to grow cells from the tissues.
This was the last bird of its species. And if I failed growing these cells, we lost everything
that was living.
It was stressful to watch the cells grow so slowly, but eventually they did grow and divide.
And of course, we don't ever want to lose the last animal, but if we do at least we
can bank some part of it in the frozen zoo for the future.
My name is Marlys Houck and I'm the curator of the frozen zoo.
Marlys Houck. And I are the two main contributors to the frozen zoo.
I think what gets me out of bed every morning and coming in here is the interaction with
the animals.
My name is Barbara Durrant and I'm director of reproductive sciences at San Diego zoo
Wildlife Alliance.
The frozen zoo is the largest, most diverse collection of its kind.
And for the cell line collection, we have over 10,000 individuals and nearly 1200 species
and subspecies.
And of that vast collection, about 5.4% are threatened, which means they're endangered
or critically endangered or extinct in the wild or extinct.
The frozen zoo was established in 1975 by Dr. Kurt Benirschke.
And he had an idea that we needed to save materials from these animals as unfortunately,
many of them were becoming endangered.
And he knew that we had the ability to freeze cells on these animals.
It was a new, a new technique, but he also had the vision that in the future, these cells
could be used for something beyond what we were able to do back in the seventies.
And he envisioned cloning and stem cells. And that's what the cells are actually capable
of being used for today among other things.
The really unique thing about the frozen zoo and these cells is that they're alive, they're
living cells, but we need to stop them from dividing like a, almost like a hibernation
or a time capsule.
So if we can freeze them at this very cold temperature in liquid nitrogen, minus 196
Celsius that stops the cells from further dividing and it just holds them in suspended
animation so that they will remain there for decades.
Each of those vials has about one to 3 million cells in it, living cells.
One of the amazing things about this job is when we go back to a vial that's been frozen
and you pull it out of the nitrogen and there it is.
And I know that these cells, maybe not even in my lifetime, but at some point in time,
these cells could contribute to bringing that species back from the brink of extinction.
Currently we're in a sixth mass extinction, and what's different about this extinction
from the other five before this is that it's caused by us by humans.
The Northern white rhino is a wonderful example because the world is watching a species go
extinct.
And they're watching as one by one that small population is dying of old age, and there's
only two left and people are very aware now, and they're, they're starting to understand
what extinction means.
When I started here at the frozen zoo, there were at least 30 and maybe 60 Northern white
rhino individuals living and their numbers started plummeting.
And we knew that we needed to bank these cells.
And we were able over the years to bank the cells of 12 Northern white rhinos, and they've
already been successful reprogramming some of those cells banked back in the seventies,
eighties and nineties into stem cells that can be used to make sperm and egg and possibly
an embryo in the future.
Ultimately, what we intend to do is to produce Northern white rhinos in the lab.
And then these females here at the rhino rescue center will be surrogates for, for those embryos.
The frozen zoo and what we're doing here in banking these cell lines is a backup plan.
It's just a plan B, but we need to protect the environment. We need to have an environment
that these animals can return to.
We have to always be careful in our education and our publicity speaking to the public about
this, that we don't give the false impression that science can solve all the problems of
conservation.
That's not the case. We have to continue always to preserve animals in, in their native habitat
In the future, no one will know who we are. No one will remember our names, none of the
tissue culturists who froze these cells, none of us who cared for the frozen zoo, but they
will know that we froze these cells.
And hopefully if we do our job right, 50 years from now, those cells will still be there.
And the fact that that the Northern white rhino is really teetering on the brink of
extinction
and that I might be able to do something about it is so inspiring that future generations
are going to see so many advances in science and so many exciting things that we can do
for the environment for natural habitats, for endangered species.
It's the most exciting thing on the horizon.
Certainly saving the planet is the most important thing that anyone can do with their future.