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Speaker 1: You remember the American biotech outfit that wants to bring

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Speaker 1: them More back to life here in New Zealand. It's

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Speaker 1: called Colossal Bioscience. They're in Dallas. They did the dire

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Speaker 1: Wolf pups. They use ancient DNA and then they use

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Speaker 1: gene editing and Huila, they're back to life. They say

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Speaker 1: they want to do the same with the Mare and

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Speaker 1: Sir Peter Jackson. Ben Lamb is the chief executive and

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Speaker 1: co founder. Morning Ben, Hey, how's it going very well?

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Speaker 1: Thank you? So are you really going to bring back

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Speaker 1: the More or are you going to bring back something

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Speaker 1: that's kind of like the More but not quite the More?

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Speaker 2: Well, I mean, yeah, we're going to bring back the More,

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Speaker 2: just like we brought back the dire Wolves, and we're

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Speaker 2: working on Mamamos and Dodos as well.

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Speaker 1: But they're not You're not actually bringing back the mall,

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Speaker 1: aren't you. Like with the wolves, it's a gray wolf

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Speaker 1: that has some characteristics of what.

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Speaker 2: Has the genes, So it has the genes that are

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Speaker 2: specific to that of the Direwolf that made a Darwolf Darrewolf,

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Speaker 2: and so there's about sixty thousand years of genetic divergence

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Speaker 2: between our two darwl samples and we have about five

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Speaker 2: hundred times more data than anyone's ever had on dar wolves.

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Speaker 2: And so what we do at KLAS, because we're a

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Speaker 2: geno engineering company, is think of us about think of

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Speaker 2: it as like rebuilding extinct species for today. Right. So,

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Speaker 2: I don't know if you've seen Jurassic Park. We occasionally

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Speaker 2: get that reference, but it's just like Jurassic Park that

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Speaker 2: in that regard. So we identify the core genes that

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Speaker 2: make some mammo at, the mammoth, the Maha moa, direwolf, darwolf,

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Speaker 2: and we engineer them into their closest living relatives. There's

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Speaker 2: actually more genetic distance between our two dire wolves than

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Speaker 2: there are from our most recent direwolf, which was Tallved

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Speaker 2: one thousand, five hundred years ago and today's modern wolf.

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Speaker 2: And so that's how evolution works. There's a lot of

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Speaker 2: things that are called fixed mutations that drive core phenotypes

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Speaker 2: or physical attributes, and those are the things that.

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Speaker 1: We identifyin when we picture a moa, I'm picturing it,

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Speaker 1: you know, a seven major total giant bird running through

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Speaker 1: the night of forest of New Zealand. Is that what

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Speaker 1: we'll get?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, So, I mean it will have all the core

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Speaker 2: phenom types that are driven by the core genes that

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Speaker 2: made a moha moa. Now there's as you probably know,

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Speaker 2: there's nine species of.

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Speaker 1: Moa A small one yeah.

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Speaker 2: No, no, no, we're focusing on the South Island giant moa.

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Speaker 2: So the first one, which was the biggest puh. So

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Speaker 2: that's the one that we're starting with. And then if

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Speaker 2: the you know, New Zealand people, other groups of the

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Speaker 2: Malory people as well as the government want us to

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Speaker 2: work on other moa species, we'd be open to it.

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Speaker 2: But right now we're working at the Knightahu Research Center

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Speaker 2: and specifically the South Island.

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Speaker 1: Gianmo okay, and how long before we could see it

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Speaker 1: running around the bush again.

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Speaker 2: So I think it'll be a ten year project. It's

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Speaker 2: a hard project. It's not quite as hard as some

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Speaker 2: of our other projects, but it is a very hard project.

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Speaker 2: You know, there's not great DNA, there's not been great samples.

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Speaker 2: We've now gone through and sampled, you know, over one

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Speaker 2: hundred different bones or sorry, two hundred different bones, and

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Speaker 2: so we're now collecting those additional samples. And the first

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Speaker 2: thing that we do is to collect the ancient DNA

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Speaker 2: and then we have to map it all. We have

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Speaker 2: to do genetic reconstruction of the ancient genos and then

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Speaker 2: map it to the close little relatives in a different

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Speaker 2: and we do a ton of genome sequencing, like in

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Speaker 2: the case the dire wolves, people mistakenly thought the dire

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Speaker 2: wolves were close related to jackals than they were wolves.

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Speaker 2: Once we go through the process of understanding the genomes,

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Speaker 2: we can actually understand specifically where they fall filo genetically.

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Speaker 2: So there's a lot of really great data that comes

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Speaker 2: out of this from an educational perspective in terms of

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Speaker 2: like where animals actually sit in this this tree of life.

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Speaker 2: And so that is the phase that we're into the project. Now.

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Speaker 2: As we get through that phase, will then identify kind

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Speaker 2: of like what the genetic donor will be and then

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Speaker 2: so who were we start from an editing perspective, and

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Speaker 2: then we'll start editing from there.

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Speaker 1: All right, being sounds like you've got a lot on

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Speaker 1: your hands, we'll let you get into it. That's been

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Speaker 1: Lamb from Colossal Bioscience. That's the CEO and co founder for.

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