Ben Lamm: Colossal Bioscience Chief Executive discusses plans to bring back the Moa from extinction

A Texas biotech firm is forging ahead with plans to bring the South Island giant moa back from extinction. 

The Colossal Bioscience team is working on the project alongside Ngai Tahu researchers. 

Chief executive Ben Lamm told Ryan Bridge that they'll use ancient DNA and gene editing to bring back the giant bird — the same way they've recreated dire wolves and mammoths.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You remember the American biotech outfit that wants to bring
them More back to life here in New Zealand. It's
called Colossal Bioscience. They're in Dallas. They did the dire
Wolf pups. They use ancient DNA and then they use
gene editing and Huila, they're back to life. They say
they want to do the same with the Mare and
Sir Peter Jackson. Ben Lamb is the chief executive and
co founder. Morning Ben, Hey, how's it going very well?

(00:22):
Thank you? So are you really going to bring back
the More or are you going to bring back something
that's kind of like the More but not quite the More?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Well, I mean, yeah, we're going to bring back the More,
just like we brought back the dire Wolves, and we're
working on Mamamos and Dodos as well.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
But they're not You're not actually bringing back the mall,
aren't you. Like with the wolves, it's a gray wolf
that has some characteristics of what.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Has the genes, So it has the genes that are
specific to that of the Direwolf that made a Darwolf Darrewolf,
and so there's about sixty thousand years of genetic divergence
between our two darwl samples and we have about five
hundred times more data than anyone's ever had on dar wolves.
And so what we do at KLAS, because we're a
geno engineering company, is think of us about think of

(01:03):
it as like rebuilding extinct species for today. Right. So,
I don't know if you've seen Jurassic Park. We occasionally
get that reference, but it's just like Jurassic Park that
in that regard. So we identify the core genes that
make some mammo at, the mammoth, the Maha moa, direwolf, darwolf,
and we engineer them into their closest living relatives. There's
actually more genetic distance between our two dire wolves than

(01:25):
there are from our most recent direwolf, which was Tallved
one thousand, five hundred years ago and today's modern wolf.
And so that's how evolution works. There's a lot of
things that are called fixed mutations that drive core phenotypes
or physical attributes, and those are the things that.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
We identifyin when we picture a moa, I'm picturing it,
you know, a seven major total giant bird running through
the night of forest of New Zealand. Is that what
we'll get?

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, So, I mean it will have all the core
phenom types that are driven by the core genes that
made a moha moa. Now there's as you probably know,
there's nine species of.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Moa A small one yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
No, no, no, we're focusing on the South Island giant moa.
So the first one, which was the biggest puh. So
that's the one that we're starting with. And then if
the you know, New Zealand people, other groups of the
Malory people as well as the government want us to
work on other moa species, we'd be open to it.
But right now we're working at the Knightahu Research Center

(02:24):
and specifically the South Island.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Gianmo okay, and how long before we could see it
running around the bush again.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
So I think it'll be a ten year project. It's
a hard project. It's not quite as hard as some
of our other projects, but it is a very hard project.
You know, there's not great DNA, there's not been great samples.
We've now gone through and sampled, you know, over one
hundred different bones or sorry, two hundred different bones, and
so we're now collecting those additional samples. And the first

(02:52):
thing that we do is to collect the ancient DNA
and then we have to map it all. We have
to do genetic reconstruction of the ancient genos and then
map it to the close little relatives in a different
and we do a ton of genome sequencing, like in
the case the dire wolves, people mistakenly thought the dire
wolves were close related to jackals than they were wolves.

(03:12):
Once we go through the process of understanding the genomes,
we can actually understand specifically where they fall filo genetically.
So there's a lot of really great data that comes
out of this from an educational perspective in terms of
like where animals actually sit in this this tree of life.
And so that is the phase that we're into the project. Now.
As we get through that phase, will then identify kind

(03:33):
of like what the genetic donor will be and then
so who were we start from an editing perspective, and
then we'll start editing from there.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
All right, being sounds like you've got a lot on
your hands, we'll let you get into it. That's been
Lamb from Colossal Bioscience. That's the CEO and co founder for.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
More fam Early edition with Ryan Bridge. Listen live to
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