Wake up and smell the extinct leucadendrons

Christina Agapakis of Ginkgo Bioworks taking tissue samples from a dried specimen of Hibiscadelphus wilderianus at the Harvard University Herbarium. Credit: Grace Chuang, courtesy of Harvard University Herbaria, © Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc., the Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

How did the extinct flower aroma project come about?

Resurrecting the Sublime started with Ginkgo Bioworks’ co-founder Jason Kelly saying, “Would it be possible to use synthetic biology to reproduce the smell of an extinct flower?” To Ginkgo, whose customers include fragrance companies, the idea of using synthetic biology as a creative force was really powerful. In 2016, Christina Agapakis, Ginkgo’s creative director, went to the Harvard University herbarium and took tiny tissue samples from the specimens of extinct flowers in their collections. This led to a multiyear research project and then to installations in galleries where hundreds of thousands of people around the world have now experienced a memory of a lost flower.

A dried specimen of Orbexilum stipulatum, at Gray Herbarium of Harvard University. Credit: Grace Chuang, courtesy of Harvard University Herbaria, © Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc., the Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

Which were the three flowers you chose to resurrect?

The Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock, or Maui hau kuahiwi, grew in ancient lava fields in Maui, Hawaii. It was decimated by colonial cattle ranching, and the last tree died in 1912. The Orbexilum stipulatum was last seen in Kentucky in 1881 before it went extinct and its cultivation failed. In the 1920s a dam completely destroyed its habitat. The Leucadendron grandiflorum, originally from Wynberg Hill, behind Table Mountain in Cape Town, was lost to colonial vineyards. It was last seen in a collector’s garden in London in 1805.

Christina Agapakis from Ginkgo Bioworks takes a tissue sample from a dried specimen of Leucodendron glandiflorum. Credit: Grace Chuang. © Ginkgo Bioworks, The Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

Did you manage to piece the DNA back together?

The DNA was degraded, so the Ginkgo team worked with paleogeneticists at University of California Santa Cruz to extract the DNA. The Ginkgo team then used synthetic biology to first compare the sequences to known sequences from other species that produce fragrance enzymes, in a kind of matching process, and filled in the gaps. They then resynthesized the gene sequences, put them into yeast, and tested the fragrance molecules using mass spectrometry.

The species now known as Leucadendron grandiflorum. Illustration from Paradisus Londinensis: Or Coloured Figures of Plants Cultivated in the Vicinity of the Metropolis, London: printed by D.N. Shury and published by William Hooker,1805–1807. Credit: William Hooker, courtesy Biodiversity Heritage Library, provided by Missouri Botanical Garden

Hadn’t this been possible before?

I think the work was really new, although of course DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis tools had been around for decades. And no one had focused on lost flowers before this. The Gingko scientists and engineers produced a list of smell molecules that each plant may have produced. I was blown away. Christina had been telling me about this project for a few years, and now the list was real. It was dizzying. It inspires the sense of the sublime, an eighteenth-century theory from art and literature that encapsulates this feeling of awe and terror at the natural world.

Installation of Resurrecting the Sublime at Biennale Internationale Design, Saint-Étienne, March 2019. Each booth is filled with the smell of an extinct flower. Credit: Christina Agapakis, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Sissel Tolaas, with support from Ginkgo Bioworks and IFF Inc. © Pierre Grasset

How would you describe the flowers’ smells?

I am not a smell expert, unlike Sissel Tolaas, who reconstructed the smells from Ginkgo’s lists. But as an amateur I would describe the Leucadendron as deep and tobacco-y, the Orbexilum as citrusy and candy-like, and the Hibiscadelphus as rich.

Installation of Resurrecting the Sublime at Biennale Internationale Design, Saint-Étienne, March 2019. Each booth is filled with the smell of an extinct flower. Credit: Christina Agapakis, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Sissel Tolaas, with support from Ginkgo Bioworks and IFF Inc. © Pierre Grasset

What do you see as the rationale for bringing back lost scents?

It raises a lot of questions. We built these synthetic versions of each flower’s overall smell. But of course, they’re not accurate because we don’t know which molecules were actually in the flower, in what quantities, whether the molecules’ function was smell-related, or even if the genes were switched on to produce those molecules. Hibiscus flowers don’t really smell, as they are bird pollinated. What we end up with is a blurry picture of the past, a false yet powerful memory. But experiencing this creates an emotional, physical connection with the natural world. It is that sense of awe and terror and nature’s fragility in the face of human devastation. Each lost species has a knock-on effect on the pollinators it provides for, affecting the species that rely on those pollinators, affecting habitats, and step by step, contributing to climate breakdown. These plants may seem lost and insignificant, but their loss is significant.

Installation view of Resurrecting the Sublime at the Natural History Museum Bern, 2020. © NMBE Rodriguez

How did your gallery installation capture and transmit that smell to visitors?

The installations are set up like traditional natural history dioramas. But instead of having a stuffed animal as the center of an extinction story, you, the human, are in the frame. In the version at the Natural History Museum, Bern, Switzerland, visitors enter the back of the diorama, turn the corner, and suddenly find themselves in a room containing no sign of living nature, just its traces: limestone boulders, the smell of the lost flower, the soundscape of its lost habitat, all whilst being watched by others. The intention is to make you slightly uncomfortable, to say: “this extinction is because of us.”

What are you trying to say to people by reviving these flowers’ aroma? How does your work touch people’s lives?

Why do we fetishize the new over what already exists? We see technology and nature as separate, but we are part of the natural world and will not survive without it. We invest billions in innovation, on creating new life, whether synbio or AI, but have shamefully failed to protect the extraordinary lifeforms that already exist (of course, the ‘we’ here is not all peoples). Is it because we don’t see other lifeforms as useful to us, whereas new technologies are seen as useful to humanity? This idea of utility is horrifically short-sighted. This paradox is both fascinating and something we urgently need to understand.