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WORK TITLE: Bring Back the King
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.helenpilcher.com/
CITY: Warwickshire, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bring-back-the-king-9781472912251/ * http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/helen-pilcher/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017003243
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017003243
HEADING: Pilcher, Helen
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100 1_ |a Pilcher, Helen
370 __ |e Warwickshire (England) |2 naf
372 __ |a Science |a Stand-up comedy |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Authors |a Women comedians |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Pilcher, Helen. Bring back the king, 2016: |b title page (Helen Pilcher)
670 __ |a Publisher’s web-site, Jan. 10, 2017 |b (Helen Pilcher is a tea-drinking, biscuit-nibbling science and comedy writer. She has a PhD in Cell Biology from London’s Institute of Psychiatry. A former reporter for Nature, she now specializes in biology, medicine and quirky off-the-wall science, and writes for outlets including New Scientist and BBC Focus. Unusually for a self-proclaimed geek, Helen also used to be a stand-up comedian before the arrival of children meant she couldn’t physically stay awake past 9pm. She now gigs from time to time, and lives in rural Warwickshire with her husband, three kids and besotted dog.) |u http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/helen-pilcher/
PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
EDUCATION:London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Ph.D. (stem-cell biology).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Science writer and comedian. Nature, reporter; New Scientist, BBC Focus, and the Guardian, science writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
British science and comedy writer Helen Pitcher writes about biology, medicine, and other scientific topics. A former reporter for Nature, she has also written for New Scientist, the Guardian, and BBC Focus. In addition, she teaches workshops on how to tell stories, talk and write about science, and deal with the media. Pilcher holds a Ph.D. in stem-cell biology from London’s Institute of Psychiatry. She has also performed stand-up comedy at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and in clubs across Britain.
In 2016, Pilcher published Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction, which explores the science behind bringing back extinct animals and even people. She posits how genetics could be used to recreate the king of dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaurus rex, or the king of rock ‘n’ roll, Elvis Presley, as well as the dodo bird, the woolly mammoth, or Neanderthal people. Pilcher explains cloning, DNA research, de-extinction technology, and how genomes can be mapped and edited, and she gives an overview of genetic-engineering techniques currently in use and scientific possibilities for the future. Already, scientists can clone dead pets and have experimented with other animals, such as sheep.
With an estimated 30 and 150 species on earth now becoming extinct every day, the ability of genetic science to halt extinction or revive lost genetic lines may become a viable solution. Pilcher discusses bringing back the bucardo mountain goat, the Tasmanian tiger, and the passenger pigeon. She also takes a look at other procedures, such as genetically devolving chickens to resemble dinosaurs, harvesting ova from rhinos and elephants, and terraforming the arctic tundra into grasslands.
Pilcher also delves into moral and ethical issues behind genetic engineering. Even if the technology exists to bring back T-rex, should we? Library Journal reviewer Eileen H. Kramer thought that while Pilcher provides “answers with delightfully comprehensible prose,” her discussions of ethics is somewhat lacking and her “nontechnical approach to genetic manipulation’s wonders fails to stand out in a crowded field.” Kramer found also felt that Pilcher’s digressions into her own pregnancy and Elvis collectibles “add little” to the book.
Other reviewers were more impressed with Bring Back the King, including a writer for Kirkus Reviews who remarked that Pilcher offers “a unique perspective on our responsibility to preserve the chain of being of which we are only a part.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted, “Pilcher uses humor effectively to keep readers engaged, and there is a great deal here to entertain and educate them.” In the New York Times, John Williams commented that while “she writes with nearly unbridled enthusiasm,” Pilcher “brings little deep skepticism to the subject, but perhaps inadvertently provides plenty through her reporting.” Williams added, “There are things to recommend de-extinction, but a slightly less cheery approach to an incredibly complex subject (scientifically and ethically) might have helped me find [Pilcher’s arguments] more persuasive.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Eileen H. Kramer, review of Bring Back the King, p. 107.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of Bring Back the King.
Publishers Weekly, October 10, 2016, review of Bring Back the King, p. 66.
ONLINE
Bloomsbury, https://www.bloomsbury.com/ (July 20, 2017), short profile and summary of Bring Back the King.
Helen Pilcher Website, http://www.helenpilcher.com (July 20, 2017).
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ January 30, 2017, John Williams, review of Bring Back the King.
Helen Pilcher is a tea-drinking, biscuit-nibbling science writer, presenter and comedian, who sometimes writes in the third person.
Her new book, "Bring Back the King: the New Science of De-extintinction", is available now. That means you could literally walk into a bookshop and buy a copy ... or order one from Amazon .... or buy it from Audible and have her read it to you directly. It's a popular science book featuring dinosaurs, dodos and a blow by blow account of the most bizarre and memorable plane journey of Helen's life.
In other news, Helen used to work as a reporter for Nature, managed the Royal Society's Science in Society Program, and has a PhD in Cell Biology from London's Institute of Psychiatry. Happily freelance, she now specializes in biology, medicine and quirky off-the-wall science, writing for outlets including New Scientist, The Guardian and BBC Focus. She also teaches people how to tell stories, talk and write about science, and deal with the media.
Unusually for a self-proclaimed geek, Helen also used to be a stand-up comedian before the arrival of children meant she was unable to stay awake past 9pm. She now gigs from time to time, and lives in rural Warwickshire with her family and besotted dog.
Pilcher, Helen: BRING BACK THE KING
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pilcher, Helen BRING BACK THE KING Bloomsbury Sigma (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 1, 10 ISBN: 978-1-4729-1225-1
An intriguing look at the possibilities of bringing the passenger pigeon and other currently extinct species back to life.A British science writer
with a doctorate in stem cell biology and a second career as a stand-up comedian, Pilcher examines the possibility of reversing the extinction of
our Neanderthal cousins as well as other creatures. "Through interdisciplinary research," she writes, "it's now possible to marry the secrets of
ancient DNA with cutting edge genetic technology." This is not an idle fantasy. Although we still have somewhere between 5 and 9 million
species on the planet, the author quotes estimates that somewhere between 30 and 150 are becoming extinct every day. As she writes, "over 99
percent of all the species that have ever lived on Earth are no longer with us. They are extinct." Perhaps scientists could resurrect the king of
dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaurus rex, from fossils, but the author reminds us that T. rex was not a fussy eater; as such, a human could become a
"potential entree." An even more enticing possibility would be reacquainting ourselves with our cousins, the Neanderthals, "the undisputed King
of the Cavemen." Pilcher reports that anthropologists have unraveled "the genetic secrets of the Neanderthal" from fossil remains. A first step in
bringing them back to life might be to inject Neanderthal DNA "into a human egg that had...its only nuclear genome removed." Modern genetic
evidence shows that they have successfully interbred with humans in the path and thus could do so again. However, in Pilcher's view, their very
humanity should preclude engaging in such experimentation. The passenger pigeon is another case in point of why we can't go back in time.
Would our farmers tolerate large flocks of hungry passenger pigeons? A more likely candidate for resurrection might be the northern white rhino:
there are only three remaining on Earth. A unique perspective on our responsibility to preserve the chain of being of which we are only a part.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Pilcher, Helen: BRING BACK THE KING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865651&it=r&asid=e6d5622b608373fdb0ed2fe1099ee52a. Accessed 12 June
2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865651
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Pilcher, Helen. Bring Back the King: The New Science of
De-Extinction
Eileen H. Kramer
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p107.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Pilcher, Helen. Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-Extinction. Bloomsbury. Jan. 2017. 304p. illus. index. ISBN 9781472912251. $27;
ebk. ISBN 9781472912282. SCI
Can science use genetic engineering to resurrect extinct species, and should it even try? Science writer Pilcher (theknickknackatory.blogspot.com,
formerly Nature) answers with delightfully comprehensible prose. Pilcher traces how scientists recover ancient DNA, map and edit genomes, and
clone animals. Though the explanations feel feather-light, the nontechnical language occasionally slips into sloppiness. The author does not call
the Cretaceous/Tertiary (Paleogene) Extinction by name and labels 80-million-year-old fossils Jurassic rather than Cretaceous. Digressions about
her own pregnancy and Elvis kitsch add little, while the ethical arguments are sometimes inconsistent or incomplete. Pilcher mentions
deextinction's possible ecological consequences but advocates disrupting an established ecosystem to transform arctic tundra into grassland. She
lauds zoo veterinarian Thomas Hildebrandt for harvesting ova from rhinos yet opposes creating a similar technique for elephants. And she
dismisses human cloning with a few authorities' pronouncements, even though the procedure has advocates and is not banned in the United
States. This title competes with M.R. O'Connor's Resurrection Science, Ed Regis and George M. Church's Regenesis, and Beth Shapiro's How To
Clone a Mammoth. VERDICT Sadly, this extremely nontechnical approach to genetic manipulation's wonders fails to stand out in a crowded
field.--Eileen H. Kramer, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kramer, Eileen H. "Pilcher, Helen. Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-Extinction." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 107. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413056&it=r&asid=359d5148dbaa40b7268be89f679fdaf7. Accessed 12 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413056
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Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction
Helen Pilcher. Sigma, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-14729-1225-1
Pilcher, a British science journalist and comedian, details how scientists are using the latest advances in molecular genetics and reproductive
biology to explore possibilities in the realm of de-extinction. Though de-extinction isn't an established scientific field--at least not yet--Pilcher
reveals that researchers are finding ways to re-create genomes of extinct species and figuring out how to turn such genomes into living, breathing
organisms. They're also attempting to increase the reproductive capacity of endangered species that are not yet extinct. In accessible prose,
Pilcher describes many of those techniques as well as the passion of those involved in these efforts. She also explores the current technical
limitations and explains why we will likely never be able to bring back extinct species of dinosaurs and the vast majority of species that have
been lost. Pilcher presents an insightful discussion of the ethical and ecological reasons why it might not make sense to do so even if we could.
Whether she's dealing with wooly mammoths, peculiar Australian frogs, Neanderthals, or Elvis Presley, she asks provocative questions about
both the nature of science and what it means to be human. Pilcher uses humor effectively to keep readers engaged, and there is a great deal here to
entertain and educate them. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 66+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616193&it=r&asid=3df1eca8df4b7e92fe51cca25109facc. Accessed 12 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466616193
BOOKS
‘Bring Back the King,’ a Gung-Ho Guide to Resurrecting Species
Books of The Times
By JOHN WILLIAMS JAN. 30, 2017
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BRING BACK THE KING
The New Science of De-Extinction
By Helen Pilcher
Illustrated. 304 pages. Bloomsbury Sigma. $27.
Promoting his novel “Jurassic Park” on the “Today” show in 1990, Michael Crichton said, “Part of why I was interested in the book was to take an idea that seemed like a good idea and show why it might not be a good idea.”
Long after the film version of “Jurassic Park” graphically cemented the “not a good idea” side as the winner, Helen Pilcher, a cell biologist, science journalist and erstwhile stand-up comedian, tries to rehabilitate the “good idea” in “Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-Extinction.” She writes with nearly unbridled enthusiasm about the possibility of bringing back dinosaurs, the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird and other extinct creatures, and about the people in the labs who are doing the work.
The introduction displays everything that will be entertaining, harrowing and sometimes infuriating about the rest of the book. Pilcher starts off with humor, describing Celia, the last bucardo (a kind of mountain goat) to ever live: “Celia weighed as much as a washing machine, but was much more agile.” Researchers took small samples of Celia’s skin before she died in 2000, and in 2003 they delivered a clone, de-extincting the bucardo for a very brief time. The newborn goat looked great at first sight, but she had been born with deformed lungs. She “began struggling for breath and became increasingly distressed,” dying just seven minutes after birth.
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Soon after that gruesome moment, Pilcher regains her breezy footing. “Sure, the researchers were disappointed that she didn’t live longer,” she writes, “but then cloning has never been an exact science.”
Photo
Helen Pilcher Credit RLP Photography
Pilcher’s subject is mostly “interspecies cloning,” “where the DNA of an endangered or extinct species is reprogrammed by the egg of a closely related, living species.”
She brings little deep skepticism to the subject, but perhaps inadvertently provides plenty through her reporting. She writes about Jack Horner, a scientist who wishes, in Pilcher’s words, to “persuade evolution to run backwards.” He hoped to genetically modify modern-day chickens so that, one day, they would start resembling dinosaurs. One scientist on the project told Pilcher, “We ended up with a chicken with an odd-looking hand.” (That hand was on the embryo; because of ethical regulations, the embryos were never allowed to hatch.)
If chicken embryos with odd-looking hands don’t sound likely to attract the attention of Steven Spielberg, they and their like seem enough to sustain Pilcher’s excitement.
Michael Archer is an Australian paleontologist who wants to bring back the thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger. He broached the subject with his colleagues. “There was uproarious laughter,” he told Pilcher. They thought the idea was “completely ridiculous.” Pilcher writes, “But he wasn’t put off.” Her book sometimes feels like a gallery of people not put off by uproarious laughter.
Pilcher ends nearly every chapter by admitting the impossibility or near impossibility of cloning the animals under review. Dinosaurs are out, for instance, because DNA has been found to have a half-life of 521 years, meaning that no trace of it could survive longer than 6.8 million years, about a tenth of the time since dinosaurs last roamed.
Yet Pilcher sympathizes with a stubbornly optimistic scientist named Mary Schweitzer, who says: “If you can get DNA from a 700,000-year-old fossil, why not a million-year-old one? And if you can get DNA from a million-year-old fossil why not one that is seven or even 70 million years old?”
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It’s useful that Pilcher is upfront about her advocacy for her subject, though it does give one pause when she writes about especially controversial figures, like Hwang Woo-suk, convicted in 2009 of publishing fraudulent stem-cell research.
Pilcher quickly acknowledges Hwang’s “spectacular, humiliating and public fall from grace,” but in the same sentence writes, “Yet through gritted teeth, dogged determination, and the emotional and financial support of many loyal fans, Hwang has quietly rebuilt his career.” He now clones dogs in South Korea. In a 2015 interview with NPR, Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist, said of Hwang, “I just don’t think someone like him can be trusted to follow the rules appropriately.”
Pilcher does offer many of popular science’s deep and trivial brainy pleasures along the way. Just learning the name of the Cape Verde giant skink (a lizard) seems worth the price of admission. There are also informative condensed histories of extinct species like the passenger pigeon, which flew with a lot of company. (“If you took all the pigeons in the U.K., multiplied them 400 times, then launched them into the air, that would be the size of a single passenger pigeon flock.”)
We’re told that we could probably bring back a Neanderthal today, and that at least one expert believes it might be best if he or she was home-schooled. (Neanderthals didn’t do well around strangers.) One of the last great auks, flightless birds, was “inexplicably branded a witch and beaten to death.” And maybe this doesn’t fall under pleasure, exactly, but you’ll learn far more than you want to know about an elephant’s sexual anatomy.
Pilcher’s levity is welcome at times, but the former stand-up in her is given too many lines. Strenuous rimshots ring throughout the book. “There are no living fossils,” she writes, and an asterisk takes us to a footnote: “Apart from the Rolling Stones.” I’ll let that stand in for its ilk.
By the time I got to the chapter on whether to clone Elvis Presley, I was worried the whole thing would be a forced gag. But Pilcher mostly uses it to discuss the genetic phenomenon of twins, given that Elvis had one, Jesse, who died at birth.
“Of course, just because we can do something doesn’t mean we automatically should.” Pilcher writes this sentence, and others nearly identical to it, several times throughout “Bring Back the King.” Yet it rarely serves as more than a speed bump before another bout of cheerleading.
One of the most convincing arguments she makes for aggressive efforts at de-extinction is that they help the living as well. They can teach us a lot about biology, information that we could apply to humans and other species. They might help people like you and me with things like stomach ulcers, and might help animals like the northern white rhino and others come back from the verge of extinction.
There are things to recommend de-extinction, but a slightly less cheery approach to an incredibly complex subject (scientifically and ethically) might have helped me find them more persuasive.
One scientist mentioned in the book believes de-extinction could help humankind, as Pilcher paraphrases it, “atone for its crimes against biodiversity.” This sounds specious. Forgetting the possible unintended ecological consequences of, say, darkening skies with passenger pigeons again, I don’t think the bucardo that lived for seven minutes would testify on our behalf at a trial for crimes against biodiversity.
Sunday book review – Bring Back the King by Helen Pilcher
MARK ♦ OCTOBER 16, 2016 ♦ 9 COMMENTS
9781472912251
Helen Pilcher is a science writer and comedian – and not many people can claim that. In this book she looks at the possibility of de-extinction – bringing back extinct species – and searches for the species most worthy of the effort.
This book made me laugh (as early as the last four words on page 10) and made me think (many pages and for a quite a while after finishing the book).
Helen Pilcher has a track record in doing science (a PhD in fiddling about with DNA) and in writing about it, and that’s a lot more important to the success of this book than her background in comedy (though that definitely helps too). This is a serious, but yes, amusing, overview of what de-extinction might entail, how feasible it would be (a very interesting review to my mind) and how desirable it would be.
The reader is invited to let their imagination run riot at the beginning and to think which species they would like to see back on Earth were it possible to do so, and then we are brought through a series of reality checks to the realisation that not much is feasible and not that much is desirable. But the journey is very enjoyable.
The Passenger Pigeon makes an appearance and the right decision is made, in my opinion.
And when Pilcher reveals her choice for the species to benefit from the possibility of de-extinction she makes an excellent case – but I’ll leave it to you to discover for yourself.
I notice that others have praised this book for being funny – some of it is funny but that is almost a slight to the skill of the author. This book should win prizes because it takes the ‘we could do this’ of the subject and examines its real possibilities but then moves on to the more important question of ‘should we do this?’ and treats that very seriously (in a very readable way). There are many things that we can do that maybe it would be better if we didn’t do. Is space exploration really worth the money? Is Trident worth the money? Is the spend on medical research to make us live longer on an overcrowded planet really worth it?
This book takes a somewhat unpromising subject and makes it fizz. It’s a really good read and will make you think.
Ugly cover – that’s a shame.
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Bring Back the King review: Helen Pilcher on the battle to recreate the extinct
Steven Carroll
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Bring Back the KIng. By Helen Pilcher.
Bring Back the KIng. By Helen Pilcher. Photo: Supplied
This is one those chatty, pop-science books designed for the general reader and probably destined for TV. Subject: de-extinction, bringing back T-Rex and whatever else isn't about. And we do learn a lot because Helen Pilcher knows her stuff and has an accessible style. The rungs of the human DNA spiral are made from chemical pairs called "nucleotides", a bit like alphabet spaghetti, she says, adding that you'd need 14 million tins of the stuff (London to Sydney and back) to match human DNA. Of course, DNA is crucial in the brave new world of de-extinction. In 2002 scientists "reproduced" an extinct goat for seven minutes. Jurassic Park may be getting closer, the northern white rhino may be saved, the king brought back. She is in favour of reversing extinction, but also mindful of the ethics involved and scientists seen to be playing god.