Program Description: Restoration In Mongolia, a paleontologist raises the bones of an early mammal and fits them back together, imagining what they might have looked like under a living skin. In New York, an artist rediscovers a lost manuscript, an early explorer's transcription of the language of a lost South American tribe, a language he learned from its only remaining speaker, an ancient parrot. She acquires two parrots of her own and teaches them to speak the words preserved on Humboldt's pages. In London, a novelist who writes about everything from forensic anthropology to restoration ecology is working on a radio play about the parrots and the artist. As she writes, she is working with the artist herself to bring her drama onto the page and, eventually, into living voice, working to restore the events of the artist's own restoration, to present them as they might have happened. It's the nature of the world that nearly everything, it seems, is eventually lost to time. Entire species of animals. Plants that might have brought us a little beauty or medicinal cures to any number of diseases. Manuscripts by Ptolemy. Horoscopes by Kepler. Our words. Our paintings. Our office keys. Texts sacred and profane. Any number of items that might have been useful, or merely interesting. Our bones. Our very selves. Even when we examine the stars, we are looking deep into the past, into what those bodies were when the light reaching our eyes departed light years earlier. Even our best maps are representations of what was, bearing more or less resemblance to what is now. Restoration: our hedge against time, our effort to believe we can understand the past, perhaps even relive it as it was. Through it, we try to bring back into presence what is lost. But is restoration an illusion or a reality? Can we ever bring back what is gone? Can we look at traces of the past­--the scatter of bones, the words sounded out on a yellowed page, the flight of parrots speaking into shadows­--and from those traces recover the lost thing that left them? And if we cannot really restore any thing to what it was, what is the point of restoring it at all? The writer working on a radio play in London, the artist teaching parrots a lost language in New York, the paleontologist digging up the earliest mammals to stalk the plains of Mongolia: these are novelist Leslie Forbes, artist Rachel Berwick, and paleontologist Michael Novacek. They will come together for the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, along with other seekers after what is lost­--linguists in search of the lost word, mathematicians seeking any lost theorem, anthropologists working to restore the singular story of a murdered child or the larger story of the development of the human race. Please join us as we talk about loss and recovery, activities crucial to the making of science and of art, to our understanding of ourselves and the world.