June 4, 2025 • 28 mins
Ben Lamm is an entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. That's the genetic engineering company making headlines for its bold mission – bringing extinct species back to life. From dire wolf pups to woolly mice, Colossal’s breakthroughs have sparked awe and controversy. Lamm sits down with Oz to unpack the science behind de-extinction, the ethical questions it raises, and what it could mean for the future of conservation.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Ben Lamb,
an entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences.
By now, you might have heard of the company's wooly mice,
(00:36):
fluffy creatures with the same type of fur as the
extinct wooly mammoth. Or maybe you saw the April issue
of Time magazine, the one with a white direwolf on
the cover, a type of wolf that hasn't walked the
Earth in over ten thousand years. It might sound like sorcery,
but Colossal Biosciences actually genetically engineered these animals ancient DNA,
(01:02):
and while resurrecting extinct animals is pretty cool on its own,
our guest today, Ben Lamb, wanted to start the company
because of what he believed the extinction could do for
our current ecosystem and the future of science.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I learned in this process that in the next twenty
five years, half of species will either be extinct or
be at least threatened with extinction. So I thought maybe
there was an opportunity to build a company that we
could develop tools to help conservation, hopefully inspire kids and
give people excited about science through something that was like
truly a moonshot and like the Apollo Days.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
CEO Ben Lamb has a background in tech entrepreneurship, but
became interested in the extinction after meeting the renowned geneticist
George Church and having a pivotal experience in his own life.
Ben Lamb, thank you so much for joining on tech stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So we're going to talk about Willy mammoths and Willie
mice and dire wolves and gene editing and fa but
I kind of want to start with you and your
drive to create arguably the most engaging, live scientific experiment
ongoing in the world. So my question is why this
science project and why this mission for you?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, so my background is in just building technology companies
with much smarter women and men than me, and I
met this guy, George Church. He's the head of genetics
at Harvard and he'd actually invented a lot of these
core technologies. So he's one of the first people to
ever use Crisper and some of these advanced technologies in
genome engineering, and I was really fascinated about the intersection
(02:38):
of synthetic biology, access to compute and AI and really
being able to direct life and be able to engineer
life and be able to evolve life.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
And one of my employees, my chief strategy officer, was fantastic.
His name was Greg. He passed away of a sudden
cardiac event. And it causes you to really kind of
you reconsider your priorities, and especially when with someone that
you've known for fifteen years. You're flying back from NASA
one night joking about UFOs and the next morning you're
talking to his wife and widow right, and so you
(03:10):
know those moments where mortality and reality hits you. I
think you know our major inflection points. So I thought
I would jump into the weird world of biology.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You had that moment of how much time might I
have left? And the time I do have left is
more of a blessing than I may have considered. Therefore,
how do I want to spend it? I remember, I
think before twenty twenty, reading about George Church and reading
about the Wooly memmoth project and being fascinated by it,
but how did you catch this de extinction bug? In
other words, going not just from the mammoth but to
(03:43):
this larger project you're working on mount.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
So I had met George and was fascinated by the
fact that this person that's at the top of their
field had told.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Me that we have all the tools to do this.
This is really a.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Function of funding, and if we could bring the right
people together with the right focus and the right funding,
we had the technologies to make extinction a thing of
the past. But over time, if we can make them
more efficient, well then that has massive ripples into conservation,
into human healthcare.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
So he told me that.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
In twenty nineteen, I just kind of went back to
my day job and I was interested.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Maybe I'd fund his lab, maybe I'd work with him.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
But then after I went through this introspection period, I
was like, well, worst case scenario, this is a massive failure,
and I'll just go back to making software. And then
what George was right about was there are no real
science gits. We have all of the tech in some
form or fashion, and so we really these are in
some cases innovation problems. And I think that with AI
(04:44):
and automation, we're seeing scientific discoveries slowly moving from scientific
experiment to scientific engineering. So I think that science and
engineering are going to continue to blur and get closer
and closer together in the next five to ten years.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
What do you actually mean by the extinction? And was
there an accepted definition or if you kind of created
to concept it on with George.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
So, the extinction is a made up word, right, like
a stinction of the word the extinction. You know, we
learned from Jurassic Park and whatnot. It's become one of
these these just part of the nomenclature. And up until
this year, Wikipedia defined the extinction as engineering a species
to look like an extinct species, or cloning an extinct species. Well,
(05:28):
I don't like to say things are impossible, but it
doesn't seem like it is or will be possible to
clone an extinct species because you don't have living cells.
You're not just going to take nucleus from one cell
and put it into another cell because there are no
living cells.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
For extinct organism that's been dead for quite some time.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Right, we thought that just engineering something that look like
an extinct species is kind of like phoning it in,
and so we came up with this idea that the
definition of the extinction was flawed, and so we really
wanted to focus on how do we bring back loss diversity,
lost genes, how do we ensure that it has the
core phenotypes or physical attributes, but are also are there
(06:06):
opportunities for enhancements?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Right, So I guess you're thinking beyond using genetic engineering
to make animals that look like extinct animals, but actually
trying to bring back extinct genes or re express extinct genes,
and then in turn trying to see if any of
them can be used to solve genetic problems that are
found in species today.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So I'll give you one example of that is like EEHV,
which is the number one killer of elephants, specifically Asian elephants,
but it kills about twenty percent of elephants every year.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
More than poaching, more than anything.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
We're working with Baylor College of Medicine and others to
actually eradicate this disease, and we've actually have a MR
and A based vaccine that's being tested right now in
elephants and is conferring resistance, which is awesome for existing elephants.
But here's the deal, mammas are actually closely related to
Asian elephants. They are African elephants, and they were susceptible
(06:59):
to eat.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
We know that.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And so if you can engineer in resilience at EEHV,
why wouldn't you.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I really want to talk about the wooly mice and
the dire wolves. I was at south By Southwest this
year as you were, and I think the release of
the wooly mouse. I've never seen a conference being taken
by storm, or not just a conference, I mean the
whole internet, frankly, as the release of.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
The wooly mouse, I think you saw the direwolves, and.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Then and then you saw the dire wolves, which, yeah,
which were an apex predator. When it came to hype
that said, it's a little uncanny to talk about animals
as though their product releases. But hold my hand and
walk me through this. You guys are trying to make
the wooly mammoth, a species that existed and then went
extinct thousands of years ago, and in that process you
(07:48):
make an entirely new creature, which is the wooly mouse.
Why mice? Why not just work on the mammoth?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
So one we wanted to test our Indian pipeline two.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
We want to ensure that if your I didner find
phenotypes or physical attributes that you believe will be engineered
that have been lost to time in the Asian elephant lineage,
but engineered back into that lineage from the mammoth. And
you want to confer cold tolerance, hair color, hair texture,
hair thickness, wave length. Your three options, or you make
a mammoth, right, But going back to an ethics perspective,
(08:19):
like if you have better ways to test it, let's
test it there.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
The second is you grow organoids, which this sounds.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Frankenstein, It's super cool, though, is we actually create stem cells,
program them into organoids, and we actually grow mammoth hair
in little follicles and dishes, so it's alive, so we.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Know it's working.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
But that's still not a complete animal model, right, And
so taking that same into end pipeline, applying it from
the specific variance from mammoth to the mouse specific variance.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
In terms of the gene that expresses as hey, you
can mention the mammoth headed gene to the mouse head.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Gene exactly exactly when we did this for the mouse,
It's like there's two hundred million years of genetic divergence
between an ELpH in the mouse, and so I believe
it's irresponsible and unethical to just shove it in, cross
your fingers and see what happens, right, because why would
we do that, right, Because we're really trying to test
if the pathways and the edits express the phenotypes or
(09:14):
physical attributes. Right, So we did an extra step of
like mapping all to mouse, and what we found was that,
you know, in twenty days versus twenty two months, that
all of the hair phenotypes.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Twenty days versus twenty two months because the gestation period
of the mouse versus an elephant correct correct.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And we found that we get healthy wooly mice with
the exact predicted phenotype that all of our modeling showed.
And so it's a much faster, easier, and more ethical
way to test. And then the only unintended consequence is
that they were objectively cute and they took the Internet
by storm. We thought it was interesting and we thought
(09:52):
it proved our endo end process works really well.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We did in one month, by the way, which I
think no one seemed to write or care about.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
But that's amazing and most people at the time, we
made eight edits and seven genes. And what most people
think is that sometimes the number like eight doesn't sound
like a big deal, but when you're dealing with genome engineering,
and most people were making an edit in one generation
of a mouse, making an edit in the next generation
of mouse, and so that they were stacking eight generations
(10:19):
to get to eight edits, right, And so we did
it all with one multiplex delivery in one shot with
nearly one hundred percent efficiency, which is insane, But we
did it because we wanted to really do three things.
One is, we built this end the end process right
of taking competitional analysis from ancient DNA, identifying genes, engineering
(10:40):
those genes, and doing a combination of either editing those
in the actual embryos themselves or somatic some onny code transfer.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Where we edit the cell and then move the nucleus.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And then we wanted to test our monoclonal screening process
at the end to ensure that all the sequencing. So
Colossal does a lot of extra steps. Probably the most
people would in our.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Boat this just to make sure you don't make Frankenstein
woody mice switch it, which have horrible illnesses and which
are in pain and one of those things exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
So none of these technologies are perfect.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
You know, before the Wooly Mouse and before the Dire Wolf,
people were making like one, maybe two edits at a
time that weren't what are called linear repeats.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
We neither the same edit over and over again.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Right, there's thousands of those, but those are just copies
of the same thing. Right, But making a lot of
edits all over the genome with ninety plus percent efficiency
and not creating what's called off target effects or unintended
consequences is what you're talking about. It's really really hard,
and that's where I think Colossal is really succeeding. But
still you want to screen, and so we sequence, and
so think about like sequencing is.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Reading the DNA.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
We read the DNA at every step and that's insanely
computationally heavy and it's exanely costly.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
But here's what we know.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
The embryos that we transfer, we know one hundred percent
of them are healthy. And so we're certified by American
Humane Society. And we don't do it because that certification,
but we do it because we care about conservation.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
We care about animal welfare.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
And so the reason why we have successfully birth, you know,
animals with no unintended consequences, is because we do it
before the editing, during the editing, after the after the
embryo creation.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
And I think that's really really important.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
But practically functionally, how much closer to the wooly mice
take you to the wooly mammoth? Have they knocked off?
Three months? Six months a year?
Speaker 3 (12:25):
So they don't speed up anything. They're just a validator.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
It's like, oh, okay, well this is behaving exactly as
we were predicting, and so this is a validation step.
So we're all the edits that we made the woy mouse.
We've already made the mammoth equivalent of them in Asian
elephant cels. We just haven't taken them to term right,
So I'd say less likely that it will speed up
(12:50):
the project, more likely that it means that we aren't
getting the project wrong.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
When we come back. What Ben says is the first
the extinct species, the dire wolf, stay with us. So
the Woolli mice were a validator, but the dire wolves were,
at least as far as you're concerned, the first the
(13:23):
extinct species.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yes, I think the dire wolves were the first extinct
species brought back. The will mice never existed, so we
can't classify them in that category.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
And the dire wolf this species that went extinct about
ten thousand years ago. I guess it was kind of
reintroduced into the popular imagination, at least by George R. R.
Martin in the Game of Thrones series, which I know
you're a fan of. But can you tell me what
it was like to see these die wolves coming into existence,
being born? Holding them?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Yeah, it was highly emotional.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So I was on FaceTime while they were being born,
so I was actually in London.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I remember exactly where I was.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Your hearts palpitating, You feel like like you want everything
because everything healthy is.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
I was like, it's like when you have your first child,
was like to they have the right feet.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
And when they came out, they were white, which you
know wolf when they're born they're all black or gray
dark gray, like super dark gray, so that was an
early indicator.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
They were much larger.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
They're about forty percent larger than normal wolf puppies. So
I didn't because I'm not an animal veterinarian, like, I
had no value add I actually waited until they were
about five weeks.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
And then I got to see them.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So and when I saw them the first time, I
got I mean, I still do, I get chill bumped,
I teared up.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
It's very very emotional.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
And what's been interesting is even people that aren't as
attached specifically to the Extinction or specifically to Colossal, they
have a very similar response. And it awakened something in you.
The importance of the moment isn't lost on you. I
remembered one of the first people I showed the how
(15:06):
video that became very very popular on the internet.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
You're talking, of course, about the YouTube video of the
die Wolf Pops Howling. Who did you show it to?
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Peter Jackson.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Peter's a dear friend and he's director for Lord of
the Rings and he's an investor in Colossal, And so
I was in his living room with his partner fran
I hooked up old school like HDMI to my laptop.
I said, I got to show you something, and I
showed it to him. He was overwhelmed. It's a very
very surreal experience.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
I can only imagine. Ben, this is the Tech Stuff podcast.
So I just want to make sure, I do have
the tech right. I actually wrote down seven bullet points
for myself about the the extinction process, which includes the
use of generating tools like CRISPA. But I wonder if
you could sort of let me know if I've got
the steps right. Starting with step one, which is you
(15:56):
go out and find as much DNA as you can
of an extinct species.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yes, and that can come in the form of some
researchers already have it on their hard drives, sometimes from
museum specimens.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Sometimes it's expeditions.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Digging through permafrost.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I mean, yeah, you go.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Into the permafrosts, you go into caves, but it's really
a global collaborative effort. It's you're in the sub basement
of a museum talking to a researcher at some university
that's sent their whole life sequencing it.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
To You're actually out in a cave or in the
Arctic and whatnot. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Okay, So now I'm going to go through steps two
to five. You take the sample from the field back
to the lab and sequence the DNA. Then you cross
reference to DNA with other samples from the extinct species.
Then you build as complete a genome as you can
of the extinct species using AI, and then you cross
(16:53):
reference with that genome with all living animals to find
the closest living relative.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
That is correct, But on that last parts to those
don't exist either, so you actually have to go build
the reference genome for the closest living relative. There's not
like a database of all life on Earth.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
So you have a hypothesis about what the closest living
relative might be and then go and build that genome
in parallel. Then yeah, okay, yeah, Then you identify the
key genes that you need to edit in the living
species to make it genetically closer to the extinct.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Species exactly right.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Then you use CRISP gene editing to edit the embryo
of the living species.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So this is where it kind of forks a little bit.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
So we use a combination of I think it's better
to classify it as genome engineering tools. One of the
things that colossals I think done a really good job
of is figuring out, we actually built an AI model
for this, what is.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
The right tool for the right job.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
And with that our system actually now recommends what combination
of tools in what order, and how that guide design
should be packaged to deliver the highest levels of efficient
see AI for us.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Has been a game changer in how we then deliver
the edits.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
So then you've made the edits, you go to an embryo.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Sorry, you've got to cell.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Okay, And then so the next step is to do
the same thing they do with Dolly the sheep, which
is sematic cell nuclear transfer. So you've got two types
of cells, germ cells and sematic sels. Germ cells are
like egging sperm. Somatic cells are everything else, right, So
we're editing sematic cells in most cases. And so you
take the nucleus from the sematic cell and you put
(18:29):
it into that of a germ cell, and that almost
acts like the fertilization process of like when egg and
sperm meets, and then you go through a process that
stimulates those cells to start dividing, and then you have
the precursor to something that you would implant.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Two big criticisms.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
One is only two that's incredible, fantastic.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
We only have an em no. But one is that
it's not really the extinction if you're just changing a
few phenotypes. In other words, you justanging the appearance of
an animal to look more like an animal that was extinct.
Some people accuse you guys of doing that. On the
other end of the spectrum, some people say, no, you're
playing god. And Jennifer Dowton at the inventor of Chris,
(19:12):
but she didn't say this in reference to what you're doing,
but she said more broadly in her book, if we
can avoid altering nature more than we already have, shouldn't
we try to do so?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
So I come from software, right is predominantly my background
in some space hard mostly software. And if you can
build something to achieve a function that's got three hundred
lines of code, and then you've got something that can
do it in seven lines code, every great programmer will
take you to the second one because there's less room
for error, there's less things to troubleshoot, it's cleaner, it
(19:44):
runs fast, it's more efficient.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
There's a million reasons to do that.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
We spend a lot of time and a lot of
money on compute AI comparative genomics, because no matter how
good you get at this, we're still in the world
of discovery. I do think, as I mentioned, it will
move to the world of strictly engineering and the entire
idea of genotype of phenotype expression. What genes cause different
(20:10):
things to do different things that result in a physical
attribute of an animal is.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
The great medical question of our age.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
It's a huge medical question, right, And that is the
core of what we were doing at Colossal, right. And
so you know, I would argue that we're a genetic
engineering company and a genotype of phenotype company at our core.
And so when you can do that, and you know,
if you look at a species, if you ask me
if you could just make a couple changes to the elephant,
(20:39):
you know, and it wasn't informed in any way by mammos,
but you just made like a hairy elephant.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
I wouldn't consider that the extinction. I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
But if you can take data like true data from
a mammoth and it can tell you what are the
genes that were fixed over time that really drove these phenotypes,
and you can either engineer in those exact variants which
we did in the direwolf, and potential enhancements that are
(21:11):
in the world of synthetic biology to produce those phenotypes
that are informed by ancient DNA, that's the extinction.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
And so what's.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Interesting to me is all the people that saw Jurassic
Park and say it's a movie about dinosaurs, but then
don't want to call my direwolf direwolves. It's like, well,
you're just a fucking hypocrite because those are either genetically
modified frogs and birds with dino DNA in it, or
their dinosaurs.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
And so this is a semantic question. It is not
a scientific question. It is a human construct that we're
putting on this. And so going to your second.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Question, the accusation that you're playing gold, you know.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
I think that we play God every day, and I
think that taking cholesterol medication is a form of playing
God on a personal level.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
I think the idea of cutting down the rainforest or
overfishing the ocean is playing God. So if you think
of if you define playing God is interfering with the
natural order.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
To Jennifer's point, we do that all day long.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
So why not do it in a way that helps
us develop technologies for human health care, inspires kids, and
can help with conservation. Because every conservationist will tell you
that while conserving land and protecting species is the primary
focus of conservation, which by the way we agree with.
We think that's where everyone should just spend ninety nine
percent of their time. Everyone in that field will still
(22:35):
tell you, even the most hardcore conservations in the world,
that is a losing battle in the end human progress
or whatever you want to define it as encroachment, overfishing,
overfeeding livestock versus natural order of animals that will end
with massive losses of biodiversity and potentially various ecosystem collapses.
(22:56):
And so the best thing in the world is for
us to continue to conserve land and save species because
of the hell of a lot, cheaper and more efficient
to save a species then bring back a species.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
But there may be a day in humanity's future.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
And I'm an eternal optimist, so I hope I'm wrong
on this, even though im running.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
At the Extinction Company.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
There could be a day in human history where there
is a species that we lose in the near future
that we have to bring back. You know, not to
get too Star Trek four on you, but who knows.
We may have to bring back blue whales, not to
appease some drone from an alien planet like in Star Trek,
but to potentially help with ocean currents and the phytal
(23:39):
plankton turnover in the nutrient cycling in the oceans. Right,
we don't know, and I think that having these technologies
are inevitable. In applying them in a way that helps humans,
helps animals and hopefully inspires kids is probably not a
bad thing.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Just to play Demod's evocat though. I mean, the dire
wolves are living on the enclosure, going to breed. What
will be different in future about animals that you bring back?
How will they be integrated in a way that these
tibles on being to the real world.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
So they could breed. They are physiological capable of breeding.
We use different cellions as with male and females, right,
and then you know they are to your point, secure
expansive ecological preserve.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
But what isn't these days? Like what is truly the wild?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
This Kruger National Park is six million acres in Africa
that's fully fenced with lots of biodiversity.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Some would consider that the wild. It's still a park.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Right, So these animals, I assure you you know, they've
got ten full time people that take care of them.
They're on two thousand acres of a yellowstone like environment.
They live quite quite well, but our long term goal
with all of our species is to put them back
into the wild in collaborations with indigenous people groups, private landowners,
and governments. Right, So those are very long term processes.
(24:54):
I won't say that we have a clear date that
we could put dire wolves back in the wild, but
I also say we won't. Right, that's really not even
up to colossal, that's up to We've had indigenous people
groups express interest in wanting that, but we have to
work with you know, the government, the EPA.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
There's a lot that goes into this, right.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
So, like one of the projects we just announced was
in partnership with Yellowstone is using AI for bioacoustics for wolves,
so we understand migratory patterns, so we understand different call patterns,
so we understand things, right, Because you know, the best
thing that humans can do is figure out how we
live with nature, not just bring back nature. And I
think that those technologies are critical to be developed in
(25:34):
concert with the extinction projects so that we can make
rewilding work for the animals themselves and humanity that has
encroached on their land.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
No, and I like what you said earlier about some
of these secondary benefits like the vaccine for the elephants.
I know there are tons and tons of others, including
you know, potentially bacteria to eat, ocean plastic. We've talked
at the beginning about mortality, and then we talked a
lot about de extinction. So I just want to close
with this question. If you had a Chillncee to read
(26:06):
your obituary and you're happy with it, how do you
complete the sentence? He did this because.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
He did this because others were too afraid to do it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I think that making change is hard, and I think
it requires determination, it requires thick skin. I think that
some of the biggest and boldest things have had a
perspective of abundance, and it's also a not zero sum game.
And I think that's important because I think right now,
(26:40):
sometimes when you work on new things, it's scary and
it's hard, and I've been criticized a lot. You know,
I've been a very long term supporter of developing technologies
for climate change. Yet I have a lot of people
that have been very very kind to me for quite
some times that aren't as kind of me today as
they used to be.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
But it's okay, because at.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
The end of the day, I am convicted in what
I'm doing and I'm not afraid to do it because
I truly believe that we need these technologies for conservation,
and I think we need to also do big, bold
things that will inspire the next generation so that we
have more scientists and astronauts and fewer influencers.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Thank you, very very well said, Thanks so much for
having me for tech Stuff. I'm most velocian. This episode
(27:55):
was produced by Eliza Dennis and Tori Dominguez. It was
executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed
this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join
us on Friday for the Week in Tech, when Karen
and I will run through the tech headlines that you
(28:15):
may have missed, and please do rate, review, and reach
out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
We love hearing from you.
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Ben Lamb,
an entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences.
By now, you might have heard of the company's wooly mice,
(00:36):
fluffy creatures with the same type of fur as the
extinct wooly mammoth. Or maybe you saw the April issue
of Time magazine, the one with a white direwolf on
the cover, a type of wolf that hasn't walked the
Earth in over ten thousand years. It might sound like sorcery,
but Colossal Biosciences actually genetically engineered these animals ancient DNA,
(01:02):
and while resurrecting extinct animals is pretty cool on its own,
our guest today, Ben Lamb, wanted to start the company
because of what he believed the extinction could do for
our current ecosystem and the future of science.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I learned in this process that in the next twenty
five years, half of species will either be extinct or
be at least threatened with extinction. So I thought maybe
there was an opportunity to build a company that we
could develop tools to help conservation, hopefully inspire kids and
give people excited about science through something that was like
truly a moonshot and like the Apollo Days.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
CEO Ben Lamb has a background in tech entrepreneurship, but
became interested in the extinction after meeting the renowned geneticist
George Church and having a pivotal experience in his own life.
Ben Lamb, thank you so much for joining on tech stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So we're going to talk about Willy mammoths and Willie
mice and dire wolves and gene editing and fa but
I kind of want to start with you and your
drive to create arguably the most engaging, live scientific experiment
ongoing in the world. So my question is why this
science project and why this mission for you?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, so my background is in just building technology companies
with much smarter women and men than me, and I
met this guy, George Church. He's the head of genetics
at Harvard and he'd actually invented a lot of these
core technologies. So he's one of the first people to
ever use Crisper and some of these advanced technologies in
genome engineering, and I was really fascinated about the intersection
(02:38):
of synthetic biology, access to compute and AI and really
being able to direct life and be able to engineer
life and be able to evolve life.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
And one of my employees, my chief strategy officer, was fantastic.
His name was Greg. He passed away of a sudden
cardiac event. And it causes you to really kind of
you reconsider your priorities, and especially when with someone that
you've known for fifteen years. You're flying back from NASA
one night joking about UFOs and the next morning you're
talking to his wife and widow right, and so you
(03:10):
know those moments where mortality and reality hits you. I
think you know our major inflection points. So I thought
I would jump into the weird world of biology.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You had that moment of how much time might I
have left? And the time I do have left is
more of a blessing than I may have considered. Therefore,
how do I want to spend it? I remember, I
think before twenty twenty, reading about George Church and reading
about the Wooly memmoth project and being fascinated by it,
but how did you catch this de extinction bug? In
other words, going not just from the mammoth but to
(03:43):
this larger project you're working on mount.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
So I had met George and was fascinated by the
fact that this person that's at the top of their
field had told.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Me that we have all the tools to do this.
This is really a.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Function of funding, and if we could bring the right
people together with the right focus and the right funding,
we had the technologies to make extinction a thing of
the past. But over time, if we can make them
more efficient, well then that has massive ripples into conservation,
into human healthcare.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
So he told me that.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
In twenty nineteen, I just kind of went back to
my day job and I was interested.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Maybe I'd fund his lab, maybe I'd work with him.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
But then after I went through this introspection period, I
was like, well, worst case scenario, this is a massive failure,
and I'll just go back to making software. And then
what George was right about was there are no real
science gits. We have all of the tech in some
form or fashion, and so we really these are in
some cases innovation problems. And I think that with AI
(04:44):
and automation, we're seeing scientific discoveries slowly moving from scientific
experiment to scientific engineering. So I think that science and
engineering are going to continue to blur and get closer
and closer together in the next five to ten years.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
What do you actually mean by the extinction? And was
there an accepted definition or if you kind of created
to concept it on with George.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
So, the extinction is a made up word, right, like
a stinction of the word the extinction. You know, we
learned from Jurassic Park and whatnot. It's become one of
these these just part of the nomenclature. And up until
this year, Wikipedia defined the extinction as engineering a species
to look like an extinct species, or cloning an extinct species. Well,
(05:28):
I don't like to say things are impossible, but it
doesn't seem like it is or will be possible to
clone an extinct species because you don't have living cells.
You're not just going to take nucleus from one cell
and put it into another cell because there are no
living cells.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
For extinct organism that's been dead for quite some time.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Right, we thought that just engineering something that look like
an extinct species is kind of like phoning it in,
and so we came up with this idea that the
definition of the extinction was flawed, and so we really
wanted to focus on how do we bring back loss diversity,
lost genes, how do we ensure that it has the
core phenotypes or physical attributes, but are also are there
(06:06):
opportunities for enhancements?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Right, So I guess you're thinking beyond using genetic engineering
to make animals that look like extinct animals, but actually
trying to bring back extinct genes or re express extinct genes,
and then in turn trying to see if any of
them can be used to solve genetic problems that are
found in species today.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So I'll give you one example of that is like EEHV,
which is the number one killer of elephants, specifically Asian elephants,
but it kills about twenty percent of elephants every year.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
More than poaching, more than anything.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
We're working with Baylor College of Medicine and others to
actually eradicate this disease, and we've actually have a MR
and A based vaccine that's being tested right now in
elephants and is conferring resistance, which is awesome for existing elephants.
But here's the deal, mammas are actually closely related to
Asian elephants. They are African elephants, and they were susceptible
(06:59):
to eat.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
We know that.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And so if you can engineer in resilience at EEHV,
why wouldn't you.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I really want to talk about the wooly mice and
the dire wolves. I was at south By Southwest this
year as you were, and I think the release of
the wooly mouse. I've never seen a conference being taken
by storm, or not just a conference, I mean the
whole internet, frankly, as the release of.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
The wooly mouse, I think you saw the direwolves, and.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Then and then you saw the dire wolves, which, yeah,
which were an apex predator. When it came to hype
that said, it's a little uncanny to talk about animals
as though their product releases. But hold my hand and
walk me through this. You guys are trying to make
the wooly mammoth, a species that existed and then went
extinct thousands of years ago, and in that process you
(07:48):
make an entirely new creature, which is the wooly mouse.
Why mice? Why not just work on the mammoth?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
So one we wanted to test our Indian pipeline two.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
We want to ensure that if your I didner find
phenotypes or physical attributes that you believe will be engineered
that have been lost to time in the Asian elephant lineage,
but engineered back into that lineage from the mammoth. And
you want to confer cold tolerance, hair color, hair texture,
hair thickness, wave length. Your three options, or you make
a mammoth, right, But going back to an ethics perspective,
(08:19):
like if you have better ways to test it, let's
test it there.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
The second is you grow organoids, which this sounds.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Frankenstein, It's super cool, though, is we actually create stem cells,
program them into organoids, and we actually grow mammoth hair
in little follicles and dishes, so it's alive, so we.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Know it's working.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
But that's still not a complete animal model, right, And
so taking that same into end pipeline, applying it from
the specific variance from mammoth to the mouse specific variance.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
In terms of the gene that expresses as hey, you
can mention the mammoth headed gene to the mouse head.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Gene exactly exactly when we did this for the mouse,
It's like there's two hundred million years of genetic divergence
between an ELpH in the mouse, and so I believe
it's irresponsible and unethical to just shove it in, cross
your fingers and see what happens, right, because why would
we do that, right, Because we're really trying to test
if the pathways and the edits express the phenotypes or
(09:14):
physical attributes. Right, So we did an extra step of
like mapping all to mouse, and what we found was that,
you know, in twenty days versus twenty two months, that
all of the hair phenotypes.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Twenty days versus twenty two months because the gestation period
of the mouse versus an elephant correct correct.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And we found that we get healthy wooly mice with
the exact predicted phenotype that all of our modeling showed.
And so it's a much faster, easier, and more ethical
way to test. And then the only unintended consequence is
that they were objectively cute and they took the Internet
by storm. We thought it was interesting and we thought
(09:52):
it proved our endo end process works really well.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We did in one month, by the way, which I
think no one seemed to write or care about.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
But that's amazing and most people at the time, we
made eight edits and seven genes. And what most people
think is that sometimes the number like eight doesn't sound
like a big deal, but when you're dealing with genome engineering,
and most people were making an edit in one generation
of a mouse, making an edit in the next generation
of mouse, and so that they were stacking eight generations
(10:19):
to get to eight edits, right, And so we did
it all with one multiplex delivery in one shot with
nearly one hundred percent efficiency, which is insane, But we
did it because we wanted to really do three things.
One is, we built this end the end process right
of taking competitional analysis from ancient DNA, identifying genes, engineering
(10:40):
those genes, and doing a combination of either editing those
in the actual embryos themselves or somatic some onny code transfer.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Where we edit the cell and then move the nucleus.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And then we wanted to test our monoclonal screening process
at the end to ensure that all the sequencing. So
Colossal does a lot of extra steps. Probably the most
people would in our.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Boat this just to make sure you don't make Frankenstein
woody mice switch it, which have horrible illnesses and which
are in pain and one of those things exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
So none of these technologies are perfect.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
You know, before the Wooly Mouse and before the Dire Wolf,
people were making like one, maybe two edits at a
time that weren't what are called linear repeats.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
We neither the same edit over and over again.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Right, there's thousands of those, but those are just copies
of the same thing. Right, But making a lot of
edits all over the genome with ninety plus percent efficiency
and not creating what's called off target effects or unintended
consequences is what you're talking about. It's really really hard,
and that's where I think Colossal is really succeeding. But
still you want to screen, and so we sequence, and
so think about like sequencing is.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Reading the DNA.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
We read the DNA at every step and that's insanely
computationally heavy and it's exanely costly.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
But here's what we know.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
The embryos that we transfer, we know one hundred percent
of them are healthy. And so we're certified by American
Humane Society. And we don't do it because that certification,
but we do it because we care about conservation.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
We care about animal welfare.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
And so the reason why we have successfully birth, you know,
animals with no unintended consequences, is because we do it
before the editing, during the editing, after the after the
embryo creation.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
And I think that's really really important.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
But practically functionally, how much closer to the wooly mice
take you to the wooly mammoth? Have they knocked off?
Three months? Six months a year?
Speaker 3 (12:25):
So they don't speed up anything. They're just a validator.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
It's like, oh, okay, well this is behaving exactly as
we were predicting, and so this is a validation step.
So we're all the edits that we made the woy mouse.
We've already made the mammoth equivalent of them in Asian
elephant cels. We just haven't taken them to term right,
So I'd say less likely that it will speed up
(12:50):
the project, more likely that it means that we aren't
getting the project wrong.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
When we come back. What Ben says is the first
the extinct species, the dire wolf, stay with us. So
the Woolli mice were a validator, but the dire wolves were,
at least as far as you're concerned, the first the
(13:23):
extinct species.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yes, I think the dire wolves were the first extinct
species brought back. The will mice never existed, so we
can't classify them in that category.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
And the dire wolf this species that went extinct about
ten thousand years ago. I guess it was kind of
reintroduced into the popular imagination, at least by George R. R.
Martin in the Game of Thrones series, which I know
you're a fan of. But can you tell me what
it was like to see these die wolves coming into existence,
being born? Holding them?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Yeah, it was highly emotional.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So I was on FaceTime while they were being born,
so I was actually in London.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I remember exactly where I was.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Your hearts palpitating, You feel like like you want everything
because everything healthy is.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
I was like, it's like when you have your first child,
was like to they have the right feet.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
And when they came out, they were white, which you
know wolf when they're born they're all black or gray
dark gray, like super dark gray, so that was an
early indicator.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
They were much larger.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
They're about forty percent larger than normal wolf puppies. So
I didn't because I'm not an animal veterinarian, like, I
had no value add I actually waited until they were
about five weeks.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
And then I got to see them.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So and when I saw them the first time, I
got I mean, I still do, I get chill bumped,
I teared up.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
It's very very emotional.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
And what's been interesting is even people that aren't as
attached specifically to the Extinction or specifically to Colossal, they
have a very similar response. And it awakened something in you.
The importance of the moment isn't lost on you. I
remembered one of the first people I showed the how
(15:06):
video that became very very popular on the internet.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
You're talking, of course, about the YouTube video of the
die Wolf Pops Howling. Who did you show it to?
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Peter Jackson.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Peter's a dear friend and he's director for Lord of
the Rings and he's an investor in Colossal, And so
I was in his living room with his partner fran
I hooked up old school like HDMI to my laptop.
I said, I got to show you something, and I
showed it to him. He was overwhelmed. It's a very
very surreal experience.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
I can only imagine. Ben, this is the Tech Stuff podcast.
So I just want to make sure, I do have
the tech right. I actually wrote down seven bullet points
for myself about the the extinction process, which includes the
use of generating tools like CRISPA. But I wonder if
you could sort of let me know if I've got
the steps right. Starting with step one, which is you
(15:56):
go out and find as much DNA as you can
of an extinct species.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yes, and that can come in the form of some
researchers already have it on their hard drives, sometimes from
museum specimens.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Sometimes it's expeditions.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Digging through permafrost.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I mean, yeah, you go.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Into the permafrosts, you go into caves, but it's really
a global collaborative effort. It's you're in the sub basement
of a museum talking to a researcher at some university
that's sent their whole life sequencing it.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
To You're actually out in a cave or in the
Arctic and whatnot. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Okay, So now I'm going to go through steps two
to five. You take the sample from the field back
to the lab and sequence the DNA. Then you cross
reference to DNA with other samples from the extinct species.
Then you build as complete a genome as you can
of the extinct species using AI, and then you cross
(16:53):
reference with that genome with all living animals to find
the closest living relative.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
That is correct, But on that last parts to those
don't exist either, so you actually have to go build
the reference genome for the closest living relative. There's not
like a database of all life on Earth.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
So you have a hypothesis about what the closest living
relative might be and then go and build that genome
in parallel. Then yeah, okay, yeah, Then you identify the
key genes that you need to edit in the living
species to make it genetically closer to the extinct.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Species exactly right.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Then you use CRISP gene editing to edit the embryo
of the living species.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So this is where it kind of forks a little bit.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
So we use a combination of I think it's better
to classify it as genome engineering tools. One of the
things that colossals I think done a really good job
of is figuring out, we actually built an AI model
for this, what is.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
The right tool for the right job.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
And with that our system actually now recommends what combination
of tools in what order, and how that guide design
should be packaged to deliver the highest levels of efficient
see AI for us.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Has been a game changer in how we then deliver
the edits.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
So then you've made the edits, you go to an embryo.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Sorry, you've got to cell.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Okay, And then so the next step is to do
the same thing they do with Dolly the sheep, which
is sematic cell nuclear transfer. So you've got two types
of cells, germ cells and sematic sels. Germ cells are
like egging sperm. Somatic cells are everything else, right, So
we're editing sematic cells in most cases. And so you
take the nucleus from the sematic cell and you put
(18:29):
it into that of a germ cell, and that almost
acts like the fertilization process of like when egg and
sperm meets, and then you go through a process that
stimulates those cells to start dividing, and then you have
the precursor to something that you would implant.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Two big criticisms.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
One is only two that's incredible, fantastic.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
We only have an em no. But one is that
it's not really the extinction if you're just changing a
few phenotypes. In other words, you justanging the appearance of
an animal to look more like an animal that was extinct.
Some people accuse you guys of doing that. On the
other end of the spectrum, some people say, no, you're
playing god. And Jennifer Dowton at the inventor of Chris,
(19:12):
but she didn't say this in reference to what you're doing,
but she said more broadly in her book, if we
can avoid altering nature more than we already have, shouldn't
we try to do so?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
So I come from software, right is predominantly my background
in some space hard mostly software. And if you can
build something to achieve a function that's got three hundred
lines of code, and then you've got something that can
do it in seven lines code, every great programmer will
take you to the second one because there's less room
for error, there's less things to troubleshoot, it's cleaner, it
(19:44):
runs fast, it's more efficient.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
There's a million reasons to do that.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
We spend a lot of time and a lot of
money on compute AI comparative genomics, because no matter how
good you get at this, we're still in the world
of discovery. I do think, as I mentioned, it will
move to the world of strictly engineering and the entire
idea of genotype of phenotype expression. What genes cause different
(20:10):
things to do different things that result in a physical
attribute of an animal is.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
The great medical question of our age.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
It's a huge medical question, right, And that is the
core of what we were doing at Colossal, right. And
so you know, I would argue that we're a genetic
engineering company and a genotype of phenotype company at our core.
And so when you can do that, and you know,
if you look at a species, if you ask me
if you could just make a couple changes to the elephant,
(20:39):
you know, and it wasn't informed in any way by mammos,
but you just made like a hairy elephant.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
I wouldn't consider that the extinction. I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
But if you can take data like true data from
a mammoth and it can tell you what are the
genes that were fixed over time that really drove these phenotypes,
and you can either engineer in those exact variants which
we did in the direwolf, and potential enhancements that are
(21:11):
in the world of synthetic biology to produce those phenotypes
that are informed by ancient DNA, that's the extinction.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
And so what's.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Interesting to me is all the people that saw Jurassic
Park and say it's a movie about dinosaurs, but then
don't want to call my direwolf direwolves. It's like, well,
you're just a fucking hypocrite because those are either genetically
modified frogs and birds with dino DNA in it, or
their dinosaurs.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
And so this is a semantic question. It is not
a scientific question. It is a human construct that we're
putting on this. And so going to your second.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Question, the accusation that you're playing gold, you know.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
I think that we play God every day, and I
think that taking cholesterol medication is a form of playing
God on a personal level.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
I think the idea of cutting down the rainforest or
overfishing the ocean is playing God. So if you think
of if you define playing God is interfering with the
natural order.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
To Jennifer's point, we do that all day long.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
So why not do it in a way that helps
us develop technologies for human health care, inspires kids, and
can help with conservation. Because every conservationist will tell you
that while conserving land and protecting species is the primary
focus of conservation, which by the way we agree with.
We think that's where everyone should just spend ninety nine
percent of their time. Everyone in that field will still
(22:35):
tell you, even the most hardcore conservations in the world,
that is a losing battle in the end human progress
or whatever you want to define it as encroachment, overfishing,
overfeeding livestock versus natural order of animals that will end
with massive losses of biodiversity and potentially various ecosystem collapses.
(22:56):
And so the best thing in the world is for
us to continue to conserve land and save species because
of the hell of a lot, cheaper and more efficient
to save a species then bring back a species.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
But there may be a day in humanity's future.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
And I'm an eternal optimist, so I hope I'm wrong
on this, even though im running.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
At the Extinction Company.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
There could be a day in human history where there
is a species that we lose in the near future
that we have to bring back. You know, not to
get too Star Trek four on you, but who knows.
We may have to bring back blue whales, not to
appease some drone from an alien planet like in Star Trek,
but to potentially help with ocean currents and the phytal
(23:39):
plankton turnover in the nutrient cycling in the oceans. Right,
we don't know, and I think that having these technologies
are inevitable. In applying them in a way that helps humans,
helps animals and hopefully inspires kids is probably not a
bad thing.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Just to play Demod's evocat though. I mean, the dire
wolves are living on the enclosure, going to breed. What
will be different in future about animals that you bring back?
How will they be integrated in a way that these
tibles on being to the real world.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
So they could breed. They are physiological capable of breeding.
We use different cellions as with male and females, right,
and then you know they are to your point, secure
expansive ecological preserve.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
But what isn't these days? Like what is truly the wild?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
This Kruger National Park is six million acres in Africa
that's fully fenced with lots of biodiversity.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Some would consider that the wild. It's still a park.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Right, So these animals, I assure you you know, they've
got ten full time people that take care of them.
They're on two thousand acres of a yellowstone like environment.
They live quite quite well, but our long term goal
with all of our species is to put them back
into the wild in collaborations with indigenous people groups, private landowners,
and governments. Right, So those are very long term processes.
(24:54):
I won't say that we have a clear date that
we could put dire wolves back in the wild, but
I also say we won't. Right, that's really not even
up to colossal, that's up to We've had indigenous people
groups express interest in wanting that, but we have to
work with you know, the government, the EPA.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
There's a lot that goes into this, right.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
So, like one of the projects we just announced was
in partnership with Yellowstone is using AI for bioacoustics for wolves,
so we understand migratory patterns, so we understand different call patterns,
so we understand things, right, Because you know, the best
thing that humans can do is figure out how we
live with nature, not just bring back nature. And I
think that those technologies are critical to be developed in
(25:34):
concert with the extinction projects so that we can make
rewilding work for the animals themselves and humanity that has
encroached on their land.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
No, and I like what you said earlier about some
of these secondary benefits like the vaccine for the elephants.
I know there are tons and tons of others, including
you know, potentially bacteria to eat, ocean plastic. We've talked
at the beginning about mortality, and then we talked a
lot about de extinction. So I just want to close
with this question. If you had a Chillncee to read
(26:06):
your obituary and you're happy with it, how do you
complete the sentence? He did this because.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
He did this because others were too afraid to do it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I think that making change is hard, and I think
it requires determination, it requires thick skin. I think that
some of the biggest and boldest things have had a
perspective of abundance, and it's also a not zero sum game.
And I think that's important because I think right now,
(26:40):
sometimes when you work on new things, it's scary and
it's hard, and I've been criticized a lot. You know,
I've been a very long term supporter of developing technologies
for climate change. Yet I have a lot of people
that have been very very kind to me for quite
some times that aren't as kind of me today as
they used to be.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
But it's okay, because at.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
The end of the day, I am convicted in what
I'm doing and I'm not afraid to do it because
I truly believe that we need these technologies for conservation,
and I think we need to also do big, bold
things that will inspire the next generation so that we
have more scientists and astronauts and fewer influencers.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Thank you, very very well said, Thanks so much for
having me for tech Stuff. I'm most velocian. This episode
(27:55):
was produced by Eliza Dennis and Tori Dominguez. It was
executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed
this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join
us on Friday for the Week in Tech, when Karen
and I will run through the tech headlines that you
(28:15):
may have missed, and please do rate, review, and reach
out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
We love hearing from you.
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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