914: Ben Lamm | Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth

23:54And so you really have to get to the population genomics level so that you can start understanding and narrowing down your targets. Right, because otherwise, if you have just a damaged piece of DNA, you don't know if that missing part is the one that's whole in this other specimen or if that was totally different in both of those species. Yeah, or was this the Wrangell Island piece and this piece of DNA is going to be really bad, right? Yeah. If we were to produce it. That's interesting. There's a lot of computation. So George, as I mentioned, did six to eight years of analysis. The tools have come a long way.

24:25We built an entire software company around doing the analysis of the mammoth and then spun it out. But yeah, doing that work and leveraging the latest tools has been critical. And we have about, it was about 65. It's grown a little bit. It's now in the low 70s. There's about 70 targeted genes that drive all the core phenotypes that have been lost in the elephant lineage. So if the DNA from one animal specimen is damaged, can you use DNA from another specimen to fill in the gaps? That's the kind of Jurassic Park question. Think of it exactly reverse. We use the DNA of the Asian elephant, which is 99.6 % the same as a mammoth, as the reference genome.

25:06So we build a reference genome, which we were the first to ever build a reference genome for the Asian elephant and the African elephant. And once again, that has conservation benefits. So we publish that. We give that to the world. And then we use that as our map, right? Because we know that DNA was taken from a live elephant. So we know that this DNA and this map produced this elephant because we took the blood from it, right? We know that that worked. And then we use that to build, and that with other elephants, to build a reference genome that we can do comparison from. But what's interesting is that, this is an interesting stat that I learned in this process, an Asian elephant is 99.6 % a woolly mammoth, genetically.

25:46It's actually closer to a mammoth than an Asian elephant is to an African elephant. Really? God, you wouldn't have guessed that. I mean, I thought that African elephants and Asian elephants were just so close. Well, yeah. I had no idea that the mammoths were actually closer. Thought it would be like the difference between somebody with blue eyes and somebody with brown eyes or like dark hair and light hair. That's kind of what I figured. Exactly. Wow. But Asian elephants and African elephants can actually still interbreed and produce viables. It's a weird, biology is so weird. It's so amazing.

26:15So this becomes not like a chimera, but like a hybrid species with DNA from non-extinct species. It sounds like you're adding the mammoth DNA to the elephant, not the other way around. So you're kind of adding the cold weather. You're adding the hair, et cetera, and the fat. I'm sure there's more. There's more under the hood, too. But kind of the subsystems and how they work and curved tusk, and there's a lot more to it. But directionally, 100 % accurate in terms of how you're thinking about it. But all animals are effectively hybrids. I was on a podcast or interview a couple months ago, and I got into this philosophical debate, and this guy was not happy with me, which is fine.

26:53It's not a real mammoth. Yeah. They were going down to the dodo. They're like, a dodo is just, you're not building a dodo. You're building a stupid, this is the direct quote, I think. It was like, a stupid looking pigeon. And I was like, but sir, dodos were pigeons. I didn't know that. They were. They are pigeons. Dodos are stupid looking pigeons. A mammoth is a hairy elephant. Those are just facts. And so we get in, for a while, we had this percentage of people that were like, we don't believe it's possible. And then they kind of turn into, oh, no, maybe it's possible. But we don't know if you should do it.

27:28And then we try to explain why we're doing it. But it's not 100%. I was like, well, my dog is a rescue, and she's awesome. She's 100 % dog, but she's not purebred. So it's like, where do you draw the lines? Like, if an Asian elephant can interbreed with a mammoth, does that mean that it's not a mammoth? Like, all species go through a hybridization process. That creates a new species. That is the process. So there is a percentage of people that like to argue the semantics of what we're doing, but it just doesn't affect me.

28:02You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ben Lamb. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel comfortable you're finding top talent you can't find anywhere else. The best part is that those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn, they're 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor.

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29:34Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, well, it's because of my network, the circle of people that I know, like, and trust. I get guests like this through other guests or through other friends of mine. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself for free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I get it, you don't run a podcast. Maybe you think you don't need to network. This is not cringey, it's down to earth, it's not awkward.

30:04There's a happiness dividend from crafting and maintaining relationships. We've talked about the science of that on the show. So it doesn't matter if you're 70 and retired, and it doesn't matter if you're in a government job that supposedly doesn't require networking. I call BS on that, but I digress. And many of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us, you'll be in smart company. Once again, the course is at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Ben Lam. On that same annoying line of thought, is it really a mammoth if it's just the DNA, but it's not raised by other mammoths?

30:36I mean, I guess what I'm asking is they don't have the same habits of other mammoths because they're not raised by like a mammoth mom. Yeah. I asked this at Forest because I was like, is this, how's it going to learn how to do mammoth stuff? That's a great question, right? And so a couple of things. We work with a lot of different partners around the world. So we've been fortunate. We're partners with Elephant Havens and International Elephant Foundation and Save the Elephants. A lot of people are like, but do we think conservation groups hate you? I was like, well, you've been to our homepage because it's on our homepage.

31:02But in all seriousness, you know, you can learn a lot from existing folks that have been working in this for decades. And so Elephant Havens, for example, we're working on a project right now leveraging computer vision and AI to understand herd dynamics and rewilding of orphaned elephants. They're a great group in Botswana that focuses on looking at elephants and saving orphaned elephants and helping rebuild herds for rewilding, right? And so for us, we can learn from that. We can try to be a little bit smarter and layer in AI and computer vision so it doesn't always have to be a human in the loop scenario that kind of comes from our tech background and then we can apply that you know to our herds and i didn't know this either because i always think of like asian elephant tropical equals hot right like in my very simple cave brand my neanderthal brand um but there's interesting we've actually worked with some groups in canada that have asian elephants that you once again follows that kind of same line that in canada and in the winter they you know they sleep in barns and whatnot they can't go to like negative 40 but they actually let them out they break through the ice.

32:07They swim in frozen lakes. I have videos of mammoths playing with snowballs and stuff. And they're just rolling around having a great time. And these are elephant behavioralists that are with them that aren't like, these are distressed mammoths. They can't wait to play in the snow. And it's the same thing for mammoths. Mammoths actually went into pretty warm temperatures too. And so those ecosystems still exist that can survive that. But even an Asian elephant today, raised by an Asian elephant mom, can survive and start playing around in a snow-filled environment. Right, okay. Yeah, you said mammoths, but you meant elephants.

32:41I was like, you already have mammoths? Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. No, there are elephants in the cold water. There are Asian elephants playing in the water, yes. That does make sense. And so what you end up with is, and again, I'm not trying to be like, it's not a real mammoth, bro, but it's a proxy species, an animal that holds its same place in the ecosystem, right? Exactly. It's an animal with the core genes and traits that have been lost to that lineage, right? So the definition of de-extinction, like on Wikipedia is like the bringing back of, or creation, I think they may have added this for us.

33:10We did not add it though, of a proxy species that even resembles that of the extinct species. Yeah. So it's a new category, so it's constantly evolving and being redefined. I assume you're not gonna make the mammal down there in Austin, because it seems like something with a ton of hair would be uncomfortable in that hot climb. Maybe you can speak to from personal experience. Yeah. All my hairiest friends don't last very long in Texas. It seems like a mammoth would be no exception. Our two biggest labs are in Dallas. And, you know, it's until today it was, you know, 111. And so all the core engineering is happening in Boston.

33:45And then we will start to look for not just rewilding locations, but raising locations. And so we just announced, we actually didn't really announce it but it did get out in the press uh we just announced a partnership with north dakota um you know we are talking to other states as well we're talking to canada we're talking to some folks all over kind of the not just the arctic circle but circle polar north which is even bigger now i got to spend about 10 days in alaska last year meeting with lieutenant governor and a bunch of folks but we just did a partnership with north dakota that the government actually invested in colossal which is great yeah and so we're long-term Calabitari and we want to build, it's a great location because they actually get down to negative 30 in parts during the winter in North Dakota.

34:28And so it's a great state that, you know, I think could be a really, it's one, we haven't made a definitive decision, but it could be a place where we have early mammoth calves, um, cause it's got a pretty temperate summer and then a great winter for them. I'm always like, this is so great. It's such, I'm so optimistic about this kind of stuff, but what about other general public perception? You know, how do we get the whole world on board with something that is so radical. Because you certainly must be getting letters from people that are like, this is against what nature intended and this is demonic of you or just like you're insane.

35:00We get a lot of feedback. Yeah, feedback's a good word. Feedback. But before I answer that, I want to say one thing about kind of the last thing. What I didn't know about this business, which I found really interesting, was it's very hard to build a system that is computational analysis and has this Indiana Jones ancient DNA component, has this Jurassic Park genetic engineering component, has this conservation department. But what I didn't, that's all hard. That's all real hard. Building tech, that's all very difficult. Software and technology and sciences, biology is not easy. But what I didn't anticipate is we spend and have teams, as many teams, working on working with the public, working with the government, working with legislators, working with nonprofits, profits, working with indigenous people groups.

35:47Like today, I was on the phone with one of the largest indigenous people groups in the United States, you know, just hearing their cultural feedback and in wording. So we try to take a very inclusive strategy, which gets into your question. But there's a lot around the company that has nothing to do with making a mammoth or a dodo or a thylacine. There's so much around the company that also you have to do and be very mindful of. If we could just stay in our lab and make mammoths and then someone could just run with it from there, That'd be awesome. But there's a lot of extra around it that I did not necessarily anticipate from day one.

36:20In public sentiment, you know, we've garnered, you know, 70 billion media impressions since launch. We haven't even, you know, produced an animal. And so people are pretty excited. Interestingly enough, to your question, 98 % positive or neutral feedback. And I would consider neutral feedback, at least our PR teams are telling us that neutral feedback is anything that, you know, has both a positive sentiment and reflects that as well as the negative in this fair and balanced reporting, right? Got it. Like, seems interesting. Hope it doesn't ruin the whole planet. Is that neutral feedback? Okay.

36:50Yeah, or whatnot. So for us, we do get a lot of feedback. I will say that we get more positive if you take out neutral. We get significantly more positive, about four to one, than negative, which is amazing. And, you know, I think that we've had a very good attitude that some of our top critics, even at launch, like Lou Vidal was a critic at launch, We didn't include him. David Speedy's like, is this, like, didn't really know us. We're like, who are these guys out of the blue that are just saying this crazy stuff? And then instead of just ignoring them or complaining about them, we try to reach out to them and try to work with them.

37:22Because if you are what we call an informed critic, you're pretty smart and you're informed about something that we're doing. And maybe we can, maybe you're totally wrong, but maybe you're totally right and we missed something. And so if we didn't have Lou Badalton, for example, as a part of our project, our work would be significantly harder. And so we reached out to him and said, what do you not like about what we're doing? Where could we be better? And so we try to run towards critics versus away from them. But once again, that's the category of informed critics. There's sometimes we do get annoyed by just like what I call the uninformed critics of like I'm a curator at some random museum that no one's ever heard of.

37:59And I have an opinion on genetic engineering, but I've never taken a genetic engineering class. in the world. But I don't believe George Church, the father of genetic engineering, right? That feedback isn't as helpful. That makes sense. That's a, I think we call that haterade in the sphere that I'm in. Yeah. We do get some haterade. We get some religious debates on it. You know, we try to be really mindful and listen to them, you know, from a religious perspective. You know, we think that we play God when we eradicate a species or we destroy the ecosystem that, and so we try to listen and give that feedback.

38:34But at the same time, you know, we've also taken the reality is like, we're gonna do the best we can. We're gonna do some shit that's really wrong. We're gonna do the best to fix it. And we're gonna try to do a lot more right than we do wrong. And, you know, we'll try to learn from our mistakes and from the public. But, you know, we're not gonna do everything right. So we can't please everybody. If there's religious criticism for this, I do wonder how they sort of explain the Noah's Ark thing. Were they like, well, he had direct permission from God. I mean, that's probably the counter, but it's like the guy literally built a boat to save the animals and put them on there.

39:04I mean, whatever. I don't know. I'm no expert, but it seems - But we're also helping biobank stuff. So in a way, it's very Noah's Arkish. It's very Noah's Arkish, man. We're preserving species. That's not a bad thing. Regardless of where you fall on the religious or belief spectrum, if you are doing things to help preserve the value of life, that seems like a good thing. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, it's the whole concept of shepherding. I'm, again, no expert on religion. So what is the target date for you petting a mammoth and getting that historic, iconic photo that you've been dreaming about for like a decade or whatever here?

39:37Our goal is 2028 for our first cast. Oh, wow. And we are on track for that, you know? Really? As you know, science is hard, engineering's hard. But yeah, I mean, we have over 35, 37 people, I don't know the exact count off the top of my head, on just the mammoth team alone. So it's a lot of people. Wow. And we aren't like still thinking about it. So we've established multiple cell lines, gone through and expanded the edits list. And we are actually making edits and stacking edits. And we're advancing multiplex editing. There's a couple parts of the project that are later staged on the gestational side that we will announce maybe later this year or next year.

40:15Some really interesting milestones on that that have been achieved. So we feel confident about that date. If it slips, I think it could slip months to a year. you know but it's not going to be like oh in 2050 maybe right like we feel pretty confident right it's not fusion we're still 10 years away from fusion every five years we hear that we've been 10 years away from fusion since before i was born yeah absolutely i was going to say it's something about the 60s when they were doing nuclear kind of initial hopeful on it like i'm the yeah we'd all be happy if we get there and i think you know we all was that movie we saw about kilmer and like fusion and we're like yes that was the saint where he's yes stealing the secret Yeah, from Elizabeth Shue, who's the person who invented nuclear fusion.

40:55Yeah. I love that you reach out to your critics. I think that's important. I mean, for every white-bearded, what was his name? John Hammond welcoming you to Jurassic Park. Yeah. There's a Jeff Goldblum somewhere who's shaking his head and being like, chaos theory, life finds a way, right? And you're like, oh, I better find out what that means. Yeah, all the top ten quotes we get tweeted at quite a lot. I can only imagine. By the same 20 people, but yeah. Yeah, by the same movie nerds. But that guy, like the point is he wasn't wrong, right? He was kind of like, well, you know, if they'd asked me, maybe I wouldn't have done the frog DNA thing.

41:26Because wasn't the idea they were going to get off the island because of what they had from the frogs and then they were going to swim to New York and kill everyone? Something like that. Yeah, the frog DNA allowed them to like amorphize sex. And so they were all females, but then they were able to start breeding because they were able to change their sex based on some frogs. Right, right. The asexual reproduction or whatever it was called. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I'm looking at the collapse of species and things like that, and we're slated to lose 50 % of all biodiversity between now and 2050.

41:56And it's just, it's really horrific, you know, 1 ,000 to 10 ,000 times higher in terms of loss of species than natural extinction rate. So what you're doing is providing a backup plant. What do we call it? The sixth extinction crisis or something like that? Is that what we're in right now? Yeah, six mass extinction. It's completely driven by us. That's the most depressing part is it's something that we could control. And it It sounds like Colossal is going to be able to speak the language of money, right? So while we might take a multi-trillion dollar hit from ecosystem decline, we can say, hey, this is going to stem that.

42:28And also, we're going to do something cool that our media brain can pay attention to, which is bring back extinct species. I think we're bringing awareness to the bio. I mean, I hope, maybe I'm wrong, but I hope we're bringing awareness to the biodiversity crisis that we're in. I hope that's, I hope we're doing a good job and good steward of that message. And I hope we're bringing attention to the great, you know, women and men that are solving real problems in conservation. But I do think that, you know, if we can use the extinction, the de-extinction of a couple of these species to develop tech, that conservationists don't have the money to go, or expertise to go develop, I think that's huge.

43:07I think that's a win for humanity, not just a win for Colossal. Yeah, I mean, I think anybody listening probably would agree with that. What ethical considerations are there? I mean, it's exciting to de-extinctify a species, but I'm sure there's somewhere some responsible scientist is like, well, you haven't. Someone's Jeff Goldblum-ing this whole thing, right? And what is that criticism or what is that concern? So we have an incredible team of scientific, executive, and conservation advisors that help One of our bioethicists is Alta Charo. She's incredible. To the point about running Georgia Critics, pre-launch, I was like, who should we have from bioethics perspective?

43:49And I actually saw an interview where she debated George Churchill, why you should never bring back a man. But so I was like, she's the one. Because she's probably thought through this pretty well. So we got Alta. We spent a lot of time with her. I think she realized that someone's going to do this. And we were trying to do this the most transparent, ethical way possible. gave us a lot of feedback, helped us build an ethical framework of how we think about these projects. And what's interesting is within a month before launch, I was talking to her and she's like, you know, we thought about doing a genetically modified tomato first.

44:21And I was like, oh my gosh, the train's left the station. Like we've been out raising money, hiring people. We can't like, my bio doesn't mean what? And so I like, I had this like panic moment of like, please tell me. Remember when you gave us$200 million for the mammoth? Hear me out here. tomato instead. No thing. Yeah. It's going to be a very cold tolerant tomato. Give me my money back, buddy. Yeah. Here's our ABA and routing number. And so what's interesting though, and so we, we judge when we, we talk through that, but you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about that. We have a whole animal husbandry group, an animal welfare group, a conservation group.

44:57You know, as I mentioned earlier, we have this entire group of people in parts of the business that, you know, I honestly didn't think when we were starting the business, I guess I knew people would be excited. I knew we needed to take care of the animals and have an animal husbandry and welfare group. But just thinking through all of the touch points that go into the project outside the science is something that, you know, we have had great guidance from Alta and others on. But those ethical considerations of what animal should you bring back? Why should you bring them back? How do you pair it?

45:30We've got some ideas around not just the conservation side, but how we pair de-extinction events with conservation events in interesting ways and show that the technology that we develop for species X is directly applicable to a sister or cousin species, right? So we're working on some interesting models with governments around that that we think could be helpful. It's not really positioning, but it's really helpful in educating the public because fundamentally it's not really our job to persuade anyone. It's our job to educate people what we're doing and to try to listen and do better. And so if we can find opportunities to educate the conservation community, the general public governments on loss of biodiversity and how the pursuit of de-extinction can these technologies can directly go into their conservation pipelines, then I think that solves a lot of the ethical challenges around this.

46:25It's a heavy lift. You've got to have government cooperation too. Otherwise, right, you could put mammals in Siberia and then they get poached or like some billionaire goes and kills one and takes a selfie or people start eating it or whatever, selling them to people to kill because they're just out there. Jimmy John's founder is not an investment. Was that the guy that went and killed a lion and just got absolutely skewered for it? Yeah, I think or multiple things like while eating one of his sailor tests or something. There was a dentist that went and killed that lion, that endangered one, or the one they lured out of the preserve.

46:57That guy's, I mean, that guy just, I think he had to retire because people were just like, this guy is dead meat. I mean, he never recovered from that. I'm not a hunter. Not probably out of any philosophical, I just never, never my thing. Busy? Yeah, it's just like, it's not a, I don't really have hobbies. So it's definitely not one of the ones I don't have. Um, but I, I do understand that there are pockets of like overpopulation in certain species that hunting makes sense. So I'm not, I am not against philosophically hunting. Like we, we eat a lot. I'm not, I'm also not a vegan. So I do eat animals, meat, animal products.

47:33And so I know those come from somewhere. I'm not like, oh, these were just magically made in the lab. But what I will say is, is that, you know, I do think to your point, we have to be very mindful about the animals because for us, you know, we spend all this money and time effort on bringing back these species and then some random person shoots it. That's just awful. Yeah. We're trying to get ahead of that. We've already been working on facilities. You know, there's some great technology companies out there that we aren't currently working with. But, you know, my last company is in defense. So I know a lot of the big defense technology companies and some of the newer ones.

48:05we'd love to collaborate with those guys on tech to protect the animals in sanctuaries and whatnot. So we're in the early stages of that, but we're at least conceptualizing ideas. If you can add cold resistance to an elephant, which is sort of the first principles, basic thing here, is there a future in which you can add radiation resistance to humans? I mean, not that exact thing, but modify other... So at our core, right, Colossal is starting to understand genotype to phenotype, like gene to physical expression. Like we're trying to understand that and building core technologies around that to make editing easier and whatnot.

48:45Like one of the big areas of our focus is called multiplex editing. There's people talk about CRISPR and other things, but there's one that's where you not do a single knockout or make a single nucleotide, like one little edit. One of the big areas we focus on is multigene edits. It's like a lot of disease states aren't a single, you know, like single cells, like a single gene mutation. But a lot of disease states require gene edits on multiple genes at the same time. And building technologies that allows us to be very efficient without causing all these unintended consequences or off-target, also known as off-target effects, in the genome where it kind of fucks up something you weren't planning on is kind of core to the technologies that we are developing.

49:24And I think that the combination of those will allow for understanding ultimate trait response or engineering through kind of that computational analysis and editing abilities. And so to your point, Chris Mason – by the way, I don't know if you ever get plugs, but Chris Mason is another person you should talk to. I think he's super crazy and interesting like George. And Chris, he has a book that's called like the 500-year person or humans in 500 years or something like that. and one of his big things is radiation tolerance. He works really closely with SpaceX and NASA and whatnot. So he's on our scientific advisor's work.

50:01He's amazing and awesome, crazy. He's crazy smart from New York, just a great guy, has a Mason lab at Cornell. And that's one of the big things that Chris is interested in. And so we've actually worked on a paper together with George and a few others on radiation tolerance in humans and whatnot. So we at Colossal aren't focusing on that, But I do believe there's a world at some point in the future where we're seeing gene editing or gene manipulation even on a complex multiplex edited basis that has incredibly possible effects on humans. So I'll give you a real world example today. We did not develop this.

50:40But you've probably heard of statins and like all these drugs that like – Cholesterol stuff. Your cholesterol. Yeah, yeah. So I don't take statins. I have a million reasons why I don't take statins. podcast in itself, but I have genetically high cholesterol. Well, I take a PKS nine inhibitor, which basically blocks the way a certain gene responds. It's two shots a month and lowers my cholesterol by 60%. Wow. That's incredible. That is. And that was a study that was actually ironically done by Helen Hobbs, another one of our advisors here in Texas. And they found that, I mean, it's a game changer for people that have high cholesterol, whether that's through lifestyle or genetics, especially it's through genetics, which was in my case, and it was a game teacher, like in within, you know, five days of taking my first shot, I was like, wait, I've never seen numbers like that.

51:31That's truly, truly remarkable. And so and that's just us, you know, blocking it. So think about the point when we can just edit that gene, and everyone in the population doesn't have that. So you know, we are doing human genome engineering, but the technologies are here. And And now we need to wrap the, we need to make those technologies better and we need to wrap the right regulation and ethics around them. But I do see a world where a lot of disease states can be eradicated. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ben Lamb. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.

52:12All the deals, discounts, and ways to support the show are over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ben Lamb. I love that stuff. I mean, radiation resistance in humans for space travel reasons or for living on another planet or something like that if we need it with less atmosphere or even something more closer to home, like helping animals who are their natural environment is mostly gone. So you make it so that they can digest different foods or live in a colder or warmer climate.

52:47by tweaking something. Yeah, like drought-resistant cattle and things like that. I think that's the world that we are in. And I think these tools kind of give us some level of dominion, not really over biology, but with biology. Like, you know, we as humans can work with biological systems and help engineer a path where there's a better coexistence. I'm embarrassed that I'm asking you this, and I don't want to waste your time if this is way out there, but is the dinosaur thing possible? why or why not because people are going to be like to ask him about t-rex so ask what's it ask him about velociraptors and i'm gonna so here it is believe it or not we do get this question also i'm sure you're on dinosaurs so i don't want to break hearts but there is no true dino dna one of our other advisors kenneth lacobarro by the way these are all really interesting women in men so if you ever are like oh my gosh i like i'm bored and jordan needs something new If you ever ping me, I'll introduce you to these people because they're amazing.

53:46I will. But Kenneth Bacovara is arguably one of the coolest. He is definitely the coolest paleontologist on the planet, and he's one of the most famous. And one of his big claims of fame is of the dinosaurs that have been discovered, the top four biggest, including Dreadnoughtus, which is the largest dinosaur ever discovered, was discovered by Kenneth. And he's awesome. He's just incredible. and he has actually developed a way to demineralize dinosaur bones or fragments of dinosaur bones so that he could identify the amino acids that's really helpful from paleontology perspective because you could be in the field and you could be like this looks like a triceratops bone but there are no triceratops bone if you do this process you could say oh maybe this has the markers of a triceratops but those are amino acids like individual pieces of the genomes They're not big fragments or even small fragments or genes.

54:36So there is amino acids. There's probably a gene or two out there that has been found and discovered. But fundamentally, you know, there's not big strands of dinosaur DNA. So I do think it's highly unlikely someone could de-extinct a dinosaur because there's just no DNA. It would have to be when we can construct DNA almost out of like whole cloth and then you make something that looks like what we think it probably looked like but isn't that humankind probably at some point could engineer through dna synthesis and doing like ancestral shape reconstructions using ai and you know much harder systems and llms so yeah so uh but yeah i i don't believe it's possible and i don't i personally do not see a path to really you know de-extincting a a dinosaur, even the way that Colossal defines the extinction.

55:29Even that's also just like what we would literally just make a Jurassic Park zoo out of it, which is a little bit like, do we really need that? Do we need that? I don't know if we need that. It seems a little bit cruel to make something. And it's like, this is here for you to gawk at. And then for us to treat it kind of shitty. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we need that. Yeah. What other animals are on the roadmap, even if the roadmap is like a list in your head? So, you know, we're very focused on the mammoth, thylacin, and doe-nope. We get a lot of, kind of like dinosaurs. We get a lot of requests.

55:58And there's a part of me that's like, well, shouldn't we just finish these? We get a lot of requests for new species. We are funding some academic labs on other species. We are thinking about it. One species that we are not working on, but I'm very excited about, which I'd love to make is the stellar sea cow. What is that? Yeah, it's awesome. It's like a whale-sized manatee. So think of like a giant manatee in the Pacific Northwest, all over Alaska, all over, all the way from Oregon up through Washington. And it was, you know, hunted to extinction. And it was vital. It really helped promote and circulate the kelp forest of the Pacific Northwest.

56:36The kelp forest, kelp, another thing that's great for carbon and carbon sequestration. You know, the stellar sea cow was instrumental in making that ecosystem even healthier, significantly healthier than it is today. But what's hard about the stellar sea cow, we actually have genomes. We actually have DNA. But there's nothing to gestate with it. So you can't gestate a whale-sized manatee in a manatee, right, or in a dugong or something else. So you have to be really mindful about, you know, like for us, the whole system has to work. I do think that that would be a great species. If we get that chetero developed, I will make the commitment that if we get artificial wombs to work and work at, like, whale size, we'll totally do that one because that would be amazing.

57:21That is really interesting. It'd be awesome. It'd be great. If we get success in creating these like primordial germ cells, which are, which are, it's a little bit different with avian genomics versus the system that we built for mammalian work. If we get that right, I think there's a lot of bird species like the moa and others that could be really, really cool. But I think that we and like Mike McGrew are, he's one of our advisors are probably the now the furthest when it comes to genetic engineering and birds from what we've already built in this year, which is amazing. But I think that we could get to the point that we could do some pretty cool birds.

57:58Those would be on my list. Like I, I think the MOA is awesome. And I think that, I mean, there's a lot of great extinct species, but what is the MOA? I don't even know what that is. So the MOA was like, think of it like a giant emu or ostrich in New Zealand. It was like it was like its big iconic extinct species is the moa it's super super cool oh i just googled it it's enormous it's enormous it's bigger than a person yeah it's like it's like 12 14 feet something like that oh my god here's what's even weirder it was the prey of the host eagle so think about that what there's a bigger giant eagle that's extinct and um that is basically a pterodactyl Oh my God, that's terrifying.

58:41That is terrifying. That would be just, that's scary. Do not bring that one back. If that eats a bird that's bigger than a human, that would just fly around big events and pick people up. That'd be terrifying, yeah. Wow. Yeah, it'd be like the Jurassic World scene. There's a lot, there's a lot of stuff that's like, maybe that's good. Yeah, maybe that one. Was that extinct because, is that like a dinosaur era thing or was that hunted to extinction? Because I'm imagining. That's in the last couple hundred years. Its primary food source was moa, which partially was hunted. The other thing was the introduction of invasive species.

59:14What a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of people say, oh, the dodo was just killed because it was stupid and people were hungry, which isn't necessarily the case. They laid one egg a year and they were a flightless bird, meaning that that egg was on the ground. So if you introduce rats and wild pigs and other things to wild dogs and they eat those eggs, there's no more. right this kind of talks kind of like the the elephant example i was going to ask about invasive species because i mean i don't see how you could really do this accidentally but you'd have to be really careful i mean you hear about how like a certain kind of muscle or a bug costs the economy billions of dollars in some areas because they they are impossible to get rid of the pigs on the islands are tearing up all the vegetation and killing all the dodos and the rats are eating the bird eggs and the bugs are eating all the trees you can't unring that bill it's hard to unring but you can do it very thoughtfully.

1:00:07So like this whole concept, we aren't working on this, but there are folks that are looking at this. I don't know if there's that many cat hate groups here in the United States, but in Australia they are. Because cats, which were introduced for captivity purposes, have gone crazy in Australia. And there's just a ton of them. And they are eviscerating all of the small marsupial populations, which are only, you know, endemic there. They only exist in Australia. And so there's been talks, you know, we aren't doing this, but we've had conversations with different groups and governments around this, is that you can introduce this concept, which I'm actually very pro, which is called a gene drive.

1:00:51So it doesn't go out and kill the cat, but it makes it where if this cat, you know, eats a certain food or whatever the necessary delivery mechanism, They're doing this also with invasive carp species, this fish species in Australia, where if the cat eats this, it basically makes it become reproductively unviable. So that cat gets to live out its natural life and, you know, be a stray cat and kill marsupials and do all the stuff it does, but it can't mate. And so several generations from now, you get to the point that that isolated population of cat doesn't exist, right? And so this whole concept of gene drives is very, very interesting to remove invasive species.

1:01:33And I'll give you one other example that is being worked on. We're pseudo-collaborating on it. It's not a focus of us. We're just helping the lab a little bit. But there's this incredible animal that's beautiful called the quoll in Australia. It's awesome. It looks kind of like a mongoose. It's a spotted quoll. You should look at it. It's beautiful. But it's endangered and moving towards critically endangered because guess what? it loves to eat toads and settlers out of Australia introduced these animals called cane toads. So if you have a picture of the quoll on one side, you put a picture of the cane toad on the other side, cane toads are just fucking disgusting.

1:02:09They're just gross. And they eat them, but because of the neurotoxin in the cane toad, it kills the quolls. And by the way, it kills other marsupials that eat it as well. I would probably get this wrong. It's either one or two gene edits that make the quoll resistant to the cane toads. So now you don't have to go kill all the cane toads, but you could make minor modifications to populations of quolls and they could, they already love to eat the cane toads. It just kills them. Uh, and they could eradicate the cane toads. And so that's the power of gene drives. And so I do think that we can be very smart and let nature, if we give nature a little bit of boost, we can let nature help fix the problems that we created themselves.

1:02:53You know, we could empower the quals to kill all the canetones. Yeah, you're kind of speeding up natural selection by a few, I don't know. It's a directed evolution. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of years by making sure that it doesn't die, but ends up sort of stemming the tide of battle or whatever. It's so interesting. Thylacine is what, a big cat? Tasmanian tiger, dodo bird? So the thylacine is a, it's called a Tasmanian tiger, but it's actually a big carnivorous marsupial. So it has a pouch and everything. So most people think it's either based on the name, they think it's a cat, or they see it and they think because of convergent evolution, it's not related at all to dogs or canids.

1:03:33But it looks very similar, like the morphology of the shape of the skull. If you have a wolf skull and a thylacine skull, they look almost identical, even though they're not related, just due to this concept of convergent evolution. They both evolved independently that are very, very similar. Yeah. I looked at it and I was like, oh, it's like some kind of, I don't even know. Cause I'm no animal expert. I was like, it's either a hyena or a big cat or something. I can't really tell. Wolfy thing. Yeah. That's so, it's so incredible that this stuff is even possible. When I saw Jurassic park, I was like, well, this is obviously fake and never going to happen.

1:04:07And I mean, look, dinosaurs still not going to happen, but it's really little did I think like, oh, we're going to use some version of this technology to do something in my lifetime. That part had not ever occurred to me. Yeah, same. I mean, I was inspired by it. It made me excited about genetics, but it was until George spent 30 seconds at the end of a call. It just kind of hit me at the right time. It sounds like you've got a mammoth task ahead of you, man. And I've been holding onto that one since I started prepping the show. Yeah, it's a big hairy goal, so we'll get there. And I wish you all the best.

1:04:38I would love to come and say what you're doing at some point, if that's even allowed. I don't know what you got over there. Absolutely. I mean, I'm always happy to talk about it because I'm excited about it. Talking to our scientists is way better. Coming to the lab is even a billion times better than talking to me, but talking to the incredible women and men that are doing the work, it's just awesome. So you're welcome anytime. It's amazing. You would have the most fun. Ask Forrest. Forrest comes and he's like, how do I get, every time Forrest is here, I get texts a day later, it's like, how do I get more involved?

1:05:09How do I get more involved? It's really amazing. And I'm looking forward to that news release where it's just you with a baby mammoth. I mean, that's going to be, you must just be dreaming about that moment every night when you're actually able to sleep. I do. I'm very excited about, you know, we've made a bunch of big promises and it's our job to deliver on those promises. And yeah, I'm excited about that because I think it's not, I think that's a, you know, it's delivery on George. I always like to say I'm kind of the steward of George's vision. So I'd love to deliver that for George and for the world.

1:05:42So I'm pretty stoked. Ben Lamb, thank you very much, man. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Here is a trailer for our episode with Rob Reed, also on synthetic biology, but a little bit more dark than this one. The terrifying thing is COVID is pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around or what could very easily happen next time around, particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed. Society produces a certain small but terrifying percentage of people every year who for whatever reason go to such a dark place that they become suicidal mass murderers and their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have.

1:06:26Technology is the force multiplier. The 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than COVID. and the smallpox genome. Both of those are online and anybody could find them within a short number of minutes. The time would soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate that. And something which scares the bejesus out of me, which is an influenza virus, not a coronavirus, is H5N1 flu that kills 50 to 60 % of the people that it infects. Two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves and they basically made it capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath.

1:07:09No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff running out. And this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization if it's contagious enough. If the lights shut off on a countrywide basis, after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple. That was episode 244, Rob Reed, synthetic biology for medicine and for murder. This is one of those episodes where the guest is doing something so epic, it makes me kind of feel like, well, what am I doing with my life? I'm just talking into a dang microphone with no pants on. This is really incredible stuff.

1:07:48I can't wait to pet a baby mammoth if I ever get the chance. By the way, this also makes economic sense. I know a lot of people are like, wait a minute, they're gonna make one of these things, find out it costs$10 million, it's gonna be a novelty, they'll shut it down. As we mentioned on the show, you can always speak the language of money. I looked this up. The stat varies depending on where you get it. But the global economy takes more than a$5 trillion hit annually from the ecosystem functionality decline. So that's the loss of natural services. And that's probably like all natural resources.

1:08:17So take it with whatever grains of salt required. but it's an astounding 44 trillion, more than half the global GDP relies on nature, including food, materials, fuel, according to UNPRI. So the economic impact of the loss of species and lack of diversity, this can be framed as a business problem, which is frankly what we probably need in order to get a solution that people actually care about. We really do need to speak economic sense here. And I'm hoping Ben's work over at Colossal really is on the forefront of all that. All Things Ben Lamb will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot also on the website, transcripts in the show notes, of course, advertisers, discount codes, deals, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:09:01Please consider supporting those who support this show. We've also got our newsletter. Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect the lessons and takeaways. So if you want to know what to listen to next, you're a fan of the show, you want to dig into the back catalog, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. I'm going to be doing some giveaways on there as well. So I'm pretty excited about that. Reminder, there's no Thursday episode, so you don't have to email me or tweet at me. Your podcast app is not broken, but we will be back with feedback Friday.

1:09:28Don't forget about six minute networking over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And if you want to reach me, I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also hit me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in biology, bringing back extinct species, de-extinction is what we're calling it, definitely share this episode with them.

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