[applause]
John Donvan:
Remember “Jurassic Park?” Amazing movie where science brings dinosaurs back from extinction. Okay, that film took sides; the experiment blows up; people get hurt. But not before actor Jeff Goldblum declares, "Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." And then, a dinosaur eats Jeff Goldblum.
[laughter]
Well, we do not take sides at Intelligence Squared U.S. That is what the debaters are here to do. But we are taking sides on the fantasy at the heart of that movie because the science is now getting real. Right now, some very smart scientists and thinkers are working on a way to revive, not dinosaurs, but other extinct species or near replicas of them, or animals that have those traits, like the woolly mammoth, using the gene editing technology known as CRISPR.
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