BNW Preview: Ben Lamm

0:05Hi, I'm Tamara Kamornik and you're listening to The Standard Podcast. Today we're sharing a preview from our sister podcast, Brave New World, which has just released a new episode in its latest series. For episode 5, host Evgeny Lebedev is joined by Ben Lam, CEO and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, the company working on de-extinction and species preservation, including its flagship Woolly Mammoth Project. Together, they explore what bringing back an extinct species actually means in practice, from rebuilding fragmented ancient DNA to using gene editing to reintroduce key traits like cold tolerance.

0:49So here's your special preview. To hear the full episode, just search Brave New World Evening Standard on your podcast app.

1:00there's more people now that know about the importance of wolves to ecosystems and and the threatened nature of wolves in different parts of the world there's more people that know about that now because we made dire wolves than before we made dire wolves welcome back to brave new world the podcast from the standard where we explore the cutting edge of science technology and the future of humankind. I'm your host, Evgeny Lebedev. And in this series, we'll venture into the frontiers of neuroscience, longevity, consciousness, and the extraordinary breakthroughs reshaping our species. Today's guest is Ben Lam, serial entrepreneur, technologist, and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.

1:54Ben's mission is audacious, to use genetic engineering not just to conserve endangered species, but to bring extinct ones back to life. In this conversation, we'll explore the science, the ethics, and the imagination behind this new field. Ben Lam, welcome to Brave New World. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to chat. I'm so excited to talk to you because what you're doing really is brave in your world. And it's fucking cool. And I am super jealous in a good way. I'll explain to you why later. But without in any way trying to explain what you're doing, I'll hand over to you because I think you do a much better job.

2:41Well, I'm excited to chat and I'm excited to hear why you're jealous about it. That's even more exciting. But we at Colossal, we're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company. So we're actively working to bring back extinct megafauna and keystone species from various time periods, leveraging genome engineering, computational biology, surrogacy, and even one day, hopefully artificial wombs. And obviously our flagship project is our woolly mammoth. We have about 40 people working on it. And yeah, it's going pretty well. We've built out about 175 scientists in the U.S. and 60 in Australia.

3:24And we've got about 17 academic partners around the world that are all kind of coalescing on this mission to bring back extinct species and, you know, hopefully, you know, help conservation along the way. So how does it actually work? Because it's not cloning. A lot of people have this idea that you're actually cloning the woolly mammoth or cloning the dire wolf, which we should talk about it later. How does the process actually work? I wish we were just cloning. That'd be amazing. In our lobby, which you've got to come see, we've got this giant, like, frozen-looking mammoth that's, like, 10 feet tall that we worked with Peter Jackson and others to design.

4:05because most people have this vision of, we've just found a perfect mammoth or a perfect direwolf or a perfect dodo. We grab a cell and clone it like they did Dolly and the end, right? And so they think it's cloning, but you can't clone from a non-living cell. And so I think of it more from a software engineering perspective as that we're like rebuilding extinct species, leveraging computational analysis. So we look at ancient genomes, which are massively fragmented. For the woolly mammoth alone, we have about 104 genomes, ranging from about 3 ,000 years old all the way back to about 1.4 million years old.

4:45Many of them are from Russia and Northern Siberia. And we spend a lot of time rebuilding the extinct species genomes. And then we have to map all of that data to the closest living relative. In the case of the mammoth, that's the Asian elephant, which is about 99.6 % the same genetically. And then with that, we then identify all of the things that are fixed. And then you have to start editing using a lot of different technologies like CRISPR and others to actually change all of those different sequences that matter. So you don't have to change everything, but the core things that we identify that matter, you have to change all of those.

5:22And then you get to do the cloning step. So once you finally actually have all the editing done, then you get to do what they did with Dolly. It's called somatic cell nuclear transfer, where we take the nucleus of an egg, or sorry, of a cell and put it into that of an egg cell. And then you finally have an embryo that you can either implant in a surrogate species like an Asian elephant or other African elephant, or put into eventually an artificial womb. And so when people come to our lab, they see a lot of the lab side. And I think a lot of times they're shocked at how many women and men are on computers.

5:57There's a ton of computer analysis that goes into this, and a lot of it actually happens in conference rooms and on computers, not just in the lab. So it's only, I say only because I'm sure it's very complicated to bring that 0.4 % to, which elephant is the, I understand the Asian elephant is the one that's closest. Asian's the closest, correct, yeah. So we just try to focus on the things that really gave rise to those lost physical attributes or phenotypes that make them cold tolerant. So what's great about having so much genetic diversity between a million years of samples is we can really zero in on what are those fixed mutations.

6:41Because if you only have one sample or two samples, then sometimes it gets cloudy on what exactly truly drove kind of that species to have its unique characteristics. And so the more samples we get and the more data we have, the more we can refine and refine and refine. People forget that humans were building the pyramids while mammoths still roam the earth. And so sometimes people think they put them in the category of dinosaurs. And they're like, oh, they were like 65 million years ago. It's like, no, we were here when they were here. But for this project to work, you have to have a close living, a species that's close.

7:19So you couldn't bring back a dinosaur, for example. There's no dino DNA. One of the questions we get every single day is about dino DNA. There is no dino DNA. I hate the word impossible. I just don't think there is dino DNA because DNA degrades at such a crazy fast rate that it's highly unlikely that we as humans will stumble on intact dino DNA. I think we could probably get some proteins from demineralization of bones, but that is such a far step from truly understanding the true genetic pickup of a dinosaur was. And if you did, is there a living species that you could edit the genes of? I mean, you'd start with a bird, right?

8:10We put$150 million into our avian genomics group to work on the dodo and then the South Island giant moa. I mean, I'd argue that a giant moa is about as close as we lived next to dinosaurs, right? It's 14 feet tall. And there were actually nine species of moa. And these are a flightless bird. But unlike the dodo or like an ostrich, they don't even have a wing appendage. So they're literally just like a slender body. And their feathers were almost hair-like. And so they're covered from tip to tip in these like feathered hair kind of things that maybe some dinosaurs had, depending on where you fall in that argument about different dinosaurs having different levels of hair or feathers.

8:53And they were 13 feet tall. So they were pretty dinosaur-like. If you ever Google Moa feet and you look at the Moa feet, you're like, oh, that looks like a T-Rex foot. It really does. When did it become extinct? The Moas went extinct about 600 years ago through hunting. So why is the Woolly Mammoth the flagship? I mean, I can kind of understand why because it looks cool, but to explain. And there are no hate groups on, you know, a lot of people have different feedback on different things in this world. But there's not like a lot of Facebook hate groups for mammoths. I think generally speaking, woolly mammoths are globally loved and adored, which is awesome, right?

9:35And it's one of those species that's like just out of human reach, right? Like I said earlier, many people think it was like a dinosaur. People categorize it in that, right? They see Ice Age, they see all these movies, and they're like, oh my gosh, it was right there. And so I don't know what it stirs in our imagination, but it stirs a lot of imagination, and I think it inspires a lot of people. But what's awesome about it is there's great samples from all over the world. It's universally loved. It's been well preserved in the permafrost, so we know what they look like. We don't have to just look at skeletal morphologies and argue, was their hair color brown, or was it, you know, purple or whatever, right?

10:13Like we, we actually know cause we can see it. Um, which is amazing. Uh, there's, as you probably know, uh, well that the, uh, uh, in Northern Siberia and in Northern Canada, Northern Alaska and kind of the Arctic circle and in circle polar North, it's a little bit larger than the Arctic circle. There's tons of, of space and there's an opportunity to help revitalize that ecosystem, leveraging a large coal tolerant megafauna with the mammoths obviously fall within. You'd have a lineage of elephants that don't have human elephant conflict because they are now existing in this other area. And then you have this halo effect outside of inspiration that all of the technologies that you're developing probably have a pretty direct application to elephant conservation and elephants are pretty amazing.

11:05and so it's kind of like okay you get to inspire the next generation you get to like create a lineage of elephants that hopefully won't go extinct again so it's hard not to you know not have the mammoth as the flagship i mean it's i'm not allowed to pick a favorite animal that we're working on or the species mammoth kind of is but the mammoth the man was pretty awesome yeah Yeah. And so I've done lots of elephant conservation in my time and I'm still involved with it. I grew up in a family of scientists. My grandfather was a zoologist, biologist. So I grew up with animals and I'll come to my story of why I'm jealous of what you're doing.

11:51But how does it help elephant conservation? So interestingly enough, not a lot of these species are well-researched. People typically in conservation are conserving land and trying to protect species that way, which is amazing. But we need new tools like assisted reproductive technologies like IVF in elephants. We need to create things like IPSCs, induced pluripotent stem cells. Think of like stem cells that you can differentiate into any different type of tissue. there's a terrible terrible disease called eehv it's this this endothelial herpes virus that kills 20 of elephants every year it kills more than poaching more than elephants that get killed from human elephant conflict eehv is the number one killer of elephants and so uh if we don't want our mammoths to be susceptible to eehv it's kind of in our best interest to cure that or at least play a role in that.

12:47And I'm very happy to say that, you know, after a few years working with Dr. Paul Ling at the University of Baylor College of Medicine and working with a handful of zoos here in America, what we've done is we actually have a vaccine, an mRNA vaccine, that's actually conferring resistance to the most deadly strain of EEHV. So I think there's all these other things, Like we're doing a project right now in Botswana with elephant havens that rescues baby elephants. And they're working to say, how do you build synthetic herds? How do we put elephant orphans together in social dynamics and put them back into the wild, which is important for us, right?

13:29Because we're going to be having to build synthetic herds. So all of that research helps existing elephants while it's also helping us. We've got a really cool project with Save the Elephants in Kenya, where we're using drones and AI to identify migratory patterns and also socialization along those migratory patterns. And how do different elephant families and groups work together with bigger herds of elephants in these migratory corridors? Remember, if you'd like to hear the full episode, search for Brave New World Evening Standard. For all the latest news, visit standard.co.uk. We'll see you back here tomorrow.