Professor David Farrier

They had a very different set of questions.

And they're all kind of grounded in the kind of the Maori way of thinking about life, Maturanga, which is all about connection and kinship.

So Kevin has felt on his journey to thinking about how to use this technology responsibly, if at all.

realized how important it was to talk to Maori conservationists.

In HRO New Zealand, there's been many problems created by the introduction of non-native species, rodents that eat groundless birds and so on.

A synthetic gene drive would be a way to sort of reduce these populations.

But he realized how important it was to speak to the Maori conservationists who have so much at stake, so much invested in this project.

Well, they asked very different questions of this technology.

That was the thing that surprised me.

You know, they didn't instinctively go to the kind of the fearful responses that many of us have about, you know, kind of intervening in nature and creating unintended consequences.

They asked how does this cohere or not with Maturanga, you know, the whole Maori philosophy of

kinship and relationship, everything being related to everything else.

One of the central concepts in Maturanga is whakapapa.

It's often translated badly in English as genealogy.

It's the idea that everything has a kind of lineage going back to creation.

Every living thing has whakapapa.

But Marcus Shadwell, one of the Māori conservationists, said he describes, he defines it more as taxonomy, a way of sorting relationships between things.

you know, not in a kind of Linnaean sense, you know, describing what's distinct about a species, but describing what is the relationship between one living thing and another.

As an example, he told me the story you mentioned about Tahura, the whale, the southern right whale and the Kauri tree, which, you know, once the whale lived on land and the whale and Tahura and Kauri were brothers.

And the whale evolved this longing for the ocean.