And they're very, very interesting fauna, this unique marsupial fauna. More of Australia's native mammals have gone extinct than anywhere else. And Australia, for for many reasons, mostly having to do with introduced species, is the mammalian extinction capital of the world. And so a lot of creatures eat them, you know, reptiles, snakes, lizards, birds, mammals, they're marsupials, now.

And one of the projects that I've visited in Australia, which was at a very, very bio secure one of the most secure facilities in the world in the city of Geelong, near Melbourne, they were gene editing an animal called a cane toad, which is an invasive, very destructive, invasive species.

And that has opened up a lot of possibilities, including in the world of wildlife conservation. And so now it's been discovered that you can program these enzymes basically, you can just program this system to cut DNA wherever you want to. They create these enzymes that can cut their enemy at very precise locations. And then they use those as like mug shots, so that they can identify their enemies. So what bacteria do is they can incorporate little bits of viral genetic material into their own genome. KOLBERT: So CRISPR is a set of gene editing techniques that humans have borrowed from bacteria, interestingly enough. (Photo: Brian Gratwicke, Flickr, CC BY 2.0) Scientists are working on genetically modifying the animals to break their toxicity genes.

The Cane Toad is a poisonous amphibian that is invasive in Australia. How does this process work? And where does that come into play in your book? And what I'm talking about is microbiology and genetic engineering and CRISPR, physically changing the genetic composition of an organism. O'NEILL: When it comes to human hubris, there is the as always, cynics saying, well, you're playing God here. Elizabeth Kolbert spoke with Living on Earth's Aynsley O'Neill about some of these controversial new technologies including the gene-editing process, CRISPR. Her book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future features scientists and other leaders who argue that in order to save the planetary systems that humans have altered, we must alter it again. Now she's out with a book that explores some cutting edge and controversial technologies that could address some of the world's most pressing environmental challenges. In 2015, Elizabeth Kolbert won the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which chronicles the human-made mass extinction crisis. CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood.

Book under a white sky