Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. Okay, we're recording in the you see
Speaker 1: Santa Cruz, which is which I found I've been. I've
Speaker 1: been in a lot of campuses in my life. I
Speaker 1: guess I was gonna say I haven't been on many,
Speaker 1: but I've been on a ton of them. This is
Speaker 1: the most gorgeous campus I've ever been to. It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: Did you happen to see any e walks on your
Speaker 1: way out? No, but I was. It was like, It's
Speaker 1: funny because driving in here, I was thinking I was
Speaker 1: about to form the sentence to Janice that this is
Speaker 1: like a Star Wars set, and then yeah, like interrupted
Speaker 1: my thought to comment about a Star Wars set quality.
Speaker 1: My youngest child calls it the e walk for us.
Speaker 1: We come up and he goes, it's the book forest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's got to be good for your brain
Speaker 1: to be around these trees. I feel like I could
Speaker 1: be hopeful about that. Yeah, all right, No, I think
Speaker 1: it is. Next time students come up here saying if
Speaker 1: this is a good place for them to come to school,
Speaker 1: and I'll try to give him that line. These trees
Speaker 1: are good for your brain. And you're hearing the voice
Speaker 1: of Dr Beth Shapiro. Who is who deal? Okay, I
Speaker 1: don't let her tell you what she is who. I
Speaker 1: know her from the fact that she deals with what's
Speaker 1: called ancient d n A. And if you follow wildlife
Speaker 1: conservation and wildlife politics, I think that you will in
Speaker 1: your lifetime here a lot you'll hear that term ancient
Speaker 1: d n A, And in surrounding conversations around it, you'll
Speaker 1: hear that progressively more and more, to the point where
Speaker 1: when you grow old and die, it might just be
Speaker 1: like a fact of life that it may be transformed
Speaker 1: our understanding of That's really great. I'm really intrigued to
Speaker 1: hear you say that you know ancient DNA isn't isn't
Speaker 1: something that most people have heard of. And while my
Speaker 1: motivation for doing this is to be able to learn
Speaker 1: something that's useful for conservation by a diversity conservation, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of times people think of it as
Speaker 1: a way to learn about history, particularly human history. I'm
Speaker 1: most interested in animals, but I'm pleased to hear you
Speaker 1: say that you think there's a place for this, and yeah,
Speaker 1: well maybe let me let me let me all to that.
Speaker 1: Because let's say that that you have a technology, and
Speaker 1: you have a technology like the internal combustion engine. Now
Speaker 1: no one talks about the internal combustion engine, but they
Speaker 1: most definitely talk about the creations built around that, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So um, instead of building it all up and talking
Speaker 1: about how important it's going to wind up being, we
Speaker 1: should talk about what it is and can you you're
Speaker 1: probably good at this by now, can you like sketch
Speaker 1: out what ancient DNA is the fields where it's being applied, okay,
Speaker 1: particular to wildlife, and what are some things that's taught us,
Speaker 1: What are some things, what are some areas where the
Speaker 1: work done around ancient DNA has has challenged or added
Speaker 1: to our assumptions about our world? All right, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a lot there, and even me a lot of room.
Speaker 1: But I think what I'll start with is probably something
Speaker 1: that we can come back to later on. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to start with a teaser about what I hope
Speaker 1: ancient DNA can do for wildlife conservations, and then we
Speaker 1: can turn back around and go to the beginning and
Speaker 1: talk more about ancient DNA and the origins of the
Speaker 1: field and how it came about and what else has
Speaker 1: been applied to. So imagine that you are trying to
Speaker 1: protect the last of a particular species um and this
Speaker 1: species is not doing well because the habitat that it
Speaker 1: lives in is disappearing. The climate is changing. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: a bit too warm for it, or maybe it's getting
Speaker 1: a bit cold. Maybe there's just something different about today's
Speaker 1: climate that is affecting this animal and the animals in
Speaker 1: particular trouble because its population has been small for a
Speaker 1: long time, and because it's been small for a long time,
Speaker 1: it's lost a lot of genetic diversity. A good example
Speaker 1: of this right now is the black footed ferret. So,
Speaker 1: the black footed ferret is a species that we thought
Speaker 1: was extinct, but then a population, the surviving population was discovered.
Speaker 1: It turned up on a rancher's doorstep and Matit Wyoming, Wyoming. Good.
Speaker 1: You know more about this than I do I know
Speaker 1: about the DNA. A guy, Yeah, guy in in Martz.
Speaker 1: A guy in Matitz, Wyoming. Um, As I understand it.
Speaker 1: One day, his dog is standing there with a black
Speaker 1: footed ferret that's amazing, and he went out to try
Speaker 1: to find what the animal was and it turned out
Speaker 1: that um, they were not in fact gone, They were
Speaker 1: not gone, so but they are in trouble. And this
Speaker 1: is a problem with black footed farets. So they were
Speaker 1: very small population for quite a long time, and they
Speaker 1: have almost no genetic diversity, and they're threatened in the
Speaker 1: wild today because while they can breathe them, there are
Speaker 1: nice captive breeding facilities that can produce lots of black
Speaker 1: footed farets. As soon as they've released them into the wild,
Speaker 1: they get sick and they die. Can can you just
Speaker 1: a whole because when you hear I think people often say,
Speaker 1: like no genetic diversity, But is there a way to
Speaker 1: put it? Is there a way to put it in
Speaker 1: human terms where you imagine is it as bad as
Speaker 1: if you only had one family? Yes, like you had
Speaker 1: a mother, father, two daughters, two sons, and they needed
Speaker 1: to recolonize and that was it. And then the daughters
Speaker 1: had to breed with their brothers or with their fathers
Speaker 1: literally like literally literally siblings breeding with siblings or extreme inbreeding,
Speaker 1: extreme inbreeding, and it's bad for the population. And and
Speaker 1: you know this population is doing okay, and that it
Speaker 1: can survive in captive environments where it's not exposed to
Speaker 1: any sort of allunges. But as soon as they're released
Speaker 1: into the wild, this inbreeding shows up as something that
Speaker 1: causes them to not be able to survive. It shows
Speaker 1: up behaviorally, it shows up behaviorally probably, but in the
Speaker 1: case of the blackfooted ferrets, it shows up because they
Speaker 1: have no resistance to the diseases that are actually circulating
Speaker 1: in a wild, so they're they're not able to survive
Speaker 1: as they get infected. So one of the most diverse
Speaker 1: parts of our genome of any species genome, is what's
Speaker 1: called the major histamine complex NHC. It creates the proteins
Speaker 1: and enzymes in our body that allow us to fight diseases.
Speaker 1: And we're very different. Everybody is very different. We have
Speaker 1: lots of different circulating alleles or variants in our population,
Speaker 1: and this is so that you know, the more diversity
Speaker 1: we have, the more um diversity of diseases that we
Speaker 1: are potentially able to fight off. And so it's good
Speaker 1: for a population and for an individual to have lots
Speaker 1: of diversity at these alleles, and these black footed ferrets
Speaker 1: and other species that go through these what's called population
Speaker 1: bottle X, where you have a very small population size
Speaker 1: for a long time and you lose a lot of
Speaker 1: your diversity, become um completely lacking in diversity at this
Speaker 1: really important part of the genome. So here's where I'm
Speaker 1: going with ancient DNA. Imagine that you could find a
Speaker 1: bone or some tissue from blackfooted ferrets that lived before
Speaker 1: they went through this population bottleneck. So these would have
Speaker 1: been individuals that are no longer alive. Maybe they lived
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, maybe they lived thousands of years ago,
Speaker 1: but they have diversity in their genome that used to
Speaker 1: be there, that used to be able to help this
Speaker 1: population to fight disease. If we could get that information
Speaker 1: sequence their DNA, grind up a bit of that bone
Speaker 1: and extract the DNA sequences that are preserved in that bone,
Speaker 1: or in the case of blackfooted ferrets, that are actually
Speaker 1: preserved tissue specimens from individuals that lived a couple of
Speaker 1: decades ago that are in what's called the frozen Zoo
Speaker 1: in San Diego. So we can a couple of decades.
Speaker 1: A couple of decades ago in this case is enough.
Speaker 1: In other species, it depend some when your bottleneck was
Speaker 1: So for blackfooted ferrets, the bottleneck was relatively recently. For
Speaker 1: American buffalo the bottleneck was thirteen thousand years ago. So
Speaker 1: you would need older individuals to be able to see
Speaker 1: what the diversity in the past look like, because that's
Speaker 1: that's surprising to hear. But I know you're interested in bison.
Speaker 1: But so we can go back and we can sequence
Speaker 1: the DNA from these older individuals that have this diversity,
Speaker 1: learn what that diversity used to look like, and then
Speaker 1: use genome engineering technologies to cut and paste the no
Speaker 1: diversity region of individuals genomes today living individuals and paste
Speaker 1: in its place, uh synthetic version of the sequences that
Speaker 1: used to exist in that population. And in doing so,
Speaker 1: you have modified the genomes of a living organism in
Speaker 1: a way that gives them a fighting chance to survive. Today.
Speaker 1: You haven't brought back the extinct thing. You have used
Speaker 1: gene sequences that are extinct from the same species to
Speaker 1: bolster the immunity or potentially help this species to survive.
Speaker 1: And this this is one example, but this is where
Speaker 1: I really see the power and the potential of this
Speaker 1: sort of technology. The idea that we can look at
Speaker 1: DNA sequences in the past. Let's say we want to
Speaker 1: create an animal that's more able to survive somewhere cold
Speaker 1: or somewhere hot if we can identify an extinct species
Speaker 1: or a close relative that used to be alive, that
Speaker 1: has a gene sequence that might be able to cause,
Speaker 1: for example, the idea of bringing mammoths back to life.
Speaker 1: And you and you, I'll point out, you have a
Speaker 1: book how to Clone a Mammoth. Yes, so this is
Speaker 1: something that I've been thinking about a lot, and a
Speaker 1: sub doesn't A subtitle could be how to clone a mammoth?
Speaker 1: Um all the reasons why you might want to and
Speaker 1: might might not want to. I think the subtitle is
Speaker 1: actually this science of de extinction or something. But I
Speaker 1: have been suggested several several better subtitles. I think my
Speaker 1: favorite was, um, why cloning a mammoth? Or why how
Speaker 1: cloning a mammoth? Might be? No, I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: of what the best one was that was suggested with
Speaker 1: my friend of mine. It was like, if you have
Speaker 1: limited ethics, a billion dollars and a mammoth, that that
Speaker 1: opens it up. That always what I was trying to
Speaker 1: what I was trying to suggest about it. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: they I mean, we can talk about this later, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to use it as an example because I mean,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to think through. So if you have
Speaker 1: an elephant, this is something that's adapted to living in
Speaker 1: the tropics. Um. The tropics is not a place that's
Speaker 1: really conducive to elephants living right now. Let's say we
Speaker 1: wanted to create an elephant that is able to survive
Speaker 1: somewhere colder, not conducive for human reasons, for human reasons,
Speaker 1: because of because of rampant poaching development, yeah, influx of
Speaker 1: a like pastoral agriculturalists. Right. And and I should say
Speaker 1: right up front that I am not advocating creating mammoths
Speaker 1: that can live in the cold as an alternative to
Speaker 1: trying to fix the terrible situation that Asian elephants and
Speaker 1: African elephants are in right now. I think that this
Speaker 1: is just an alternate pathway that potentially should be followed
Speaker 1: at the same time as existing conservation efforts. UM, But
Speaker 1: it is something that I think we should consider. It's
Speaker 1: not possible to do it yet, but there's no reason
Speaker 1: to turn to say no to a technology before we
Speaker 1: know what's actually feasible because we're a little bit scared
Speaker 1: about the ecological and ethical consequences of of doing it.
Speaker 1: These are things that we need to think through very clearly. However,
Speaker 1: stepping away from the ethics and of and morality of
Speaker 1: this right now, and we will come back to this,
Speaker 1: but I'm just trying to explain the technology here. Let's
Speaker 1: say we can go and sequence the genome of a mammoth.
Speaker 1: Mammoths and Asian elephants are very closely related to each other.
Speaker 1: They shared a common ancestors sometime in the last five
Speaker 1: million years, so that really closely related to each other.
Speaker 1: You pointed out that there's, uh, there's a the difference
Speaker 1: between an Asian elephant in a wooly man ammoth is
Speaker 1: about are similar to the difference between humans and chimps.
Speaker 1: That's right, About one percent of the genome sequence is different.
Speaker 1: I told that to your friend and he said, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's the that's the percent that gave us Mozart.
Speaker 1: It's probably true, and that's the one percent that we're
Speaker 1: thinking about the difference between mammoths and elephants. If what
Speaker 1: we want to do is figure out what it is
Speaker 1: that made mammoths which is an elephant able to survive
Speaker 1: in the cold, and we want to be able to
Speaker 1: create an elephant that that is able to survive in
Speaker 1: a colder environment. If we could identify those important parts
Speaker 1: of mammoth that are different and then cut and paste
Speaker 1: those into an elephant genome, could we create not a mammoth,
Speaker 1: but an elephant that can live somewhere that's colder, that
Speaker 1: can eat this same diet, that can somehow protect itself
Speaker 1: from these cold winters, so that we can potentially find
Speaker 1: a place to put elephants while we are trying to
Speaker 1: solve the problems that are that are ongoing in there
Speaker 1: exists environment. Can I pause you there to have you
Speaker 1: explained a couple of things real quick. Um, you're saying, though,
Speaker 1: like just based on even with some future projecting, you're saying,
Speaker 1: we will not no matter how journalist frame news that
Speaker 1: comes from your world, we will not make a mammoth.
Speaker 1: We will not bring back a living, breathing mammoth. Is
Speaker 1: just a continuation of the mammoths that we're there. I
Speaker 1: think that this is something that is really important for
Speaker 1: people to understand, is that once a species is extinct,
Speaker 1: it is gone. This is not a solution to the
Speaker 1: extinction crisis. De extinction this is the term that people
Speaker 1: are using too to refer to bringing something that's extinct
Speaker 1: back to life. Is it's an idea that is shaped
Speaker 1: more by imagination than by reality. It's very romantic to
Speaker 1: think of the I think that you might be able
Speaker 1: to bring something back that's been gone for a long time.
Speaker 1: But there are people who the scientific reality is there
Speaker 1: are ones that try to do it, who kick around
Speaker 1: ideas it's gone, the ideas. If you dig into these
Speaker 1: ideas though, it's it's not. It's not that. It's not
Speaker 1: that you're going to bring something back that is identical
Speaker 1: to something that's gone. It's that you're going to be
Speaker 1: able to recreate components of those organisms. You could bring
Speaker 1: back traits. You could move genes from a mammoth into
Speaker 1: an elephant. Potentially, we don't know how to do that yet.
Speaker 1: We can move genes from mammoth sequences that we generate
Speaker 1: from bones into cells of elephants that are growing in
Speaker 1: petrie dishes and labs, but we can't then turn those
Speaker 1: cells into some hybrid between a mammoth and an elephant.
Speaker 1: So what would you need if you were going to
Speaker 1: create an exact replica of a species that's extinct, you
Speaker 1: would need it's a DNA sequence. We can do that.
Speaker 1: For for a mammoth, there are incredibly well preserved bones.
Speaker 1: You mean that map its entire genome. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: way we do that in angel DNA kind of getting
Speaker 1: back to this, is we collect these bones. The best
Speaker 1: preserved bones are frozen in the Arctic soil called parmafrost,
Speaker 1: and mostly they've been de fleshed, probably by something like
Speaker 1: a lion or a big bear, and so the bone
Speaker 1: doesn't have any tissue on it. It It gets buried in
Speaker 1: the soil and rapidly frozen. And you spend time including
Speaker 1: this that you spend some you spend field seasons up
Speaker 1: actually like physically look at like actually looking for bones
Speaker 1: sticking out of the ground. Yep, I do. It's good
Speaker 1: fun too. I recommend it. Yeah. Um. But you can
Speaker 1: take these bones and you can take a chunk out
Speaker 1: of them with a drum will drill or something like that,
Speaker 1: and you grind it up into a fine powder and
Speaker 1: then you can dissolve away all the components that aren't
Speaker 1: the DNA, so the tissue and the actual bone. You
Speaker 1: dissolve it away, and then you can chemically and somatically
Speaker 1: pull out the DNA. So the DNA that we get
Speaker 1: out of those bones is not in good shape. This
Speaker 1: is one of the important things to remember. If I
Speaker 1: were to take a swab Q tip in the inside
Speaker 1: of my cheek or spit in the tube like you
Speaker 1: do when you send something off to one of these
Speaker 1: companies that sends you your DNA sequence, you can get
Speaker 1: really long fragments of DNA. Our genomes have about three
Speaker 1: billion nucleotides bases, these A, C, S, G S, and
Speaker 1: T s that make up the the sequence that has
Speaker 1: the genes that make the proteins that make us look
Speaker 1: and act the way we do. And we can get
Speaker 1: millions of them, strings of millions in a row from
Speaker 1: a living person, of living piece of tissue. But the
Speaker 1: bones that we get out of the Arctic, the DNA
Speaker 1: in them is chopped up into tiny fragments. And this
Speaker 1: happens first because once an organism dies, there are enzymes
Speaker 1: in their own body that chop up DNA. These exist
Speaker 1: because if you eat a piece of meat, where you
Speaker 1: eat a leaf of a plant, you don't want that
Speaker 1: DNA to stay really big and long and powerful. In
Speaker 1: your body, you've get enzymes that chew that up and
Speaker 1: make it go away, and that happens to your own
Speaker 1: tissue when cells burst, When cells die, and life chops
Speaker 1: up your DNA so that you can get rid of it.
Speaker 1: That happens post mortem as well. And then there are
Speaker 1: things like bacteria and fung gui that will get into
Speaker 1: these bones and the tissue remains when they're decaying, and
Speaker 1: they will also chop up that DNA. They consume all
Speaker 1: this kind of carbon material for food. And then the sun.
Speaker 1: You know, you go outside and you're supposed to wear
Speaker 1: sun block, and that's because the ultra violet radiation will
Speaker 1: hit your cells and break your DNA. Now, when you're alive,
Speaker 1: you have proof reading enzymes that will go along and
Speaker 1: fix those those bits of damage that the UVY radiation
Speaker 1: causes so that you don't get skin cancer every time
Speaker 1: you walk outside. But once you're dead, those proofitting enzymes
Speaker 1: are not doing their job anymore, and the UV radiation
Speaker 1: and other sorts of radiation will continue to hit the
Speaker 1: cells and break down the DNA, so that the end
Speaker 1: result there is that pretty soon after death, the DNA
Speaker 1: is no longer in long strands. It's in really short,
Speaker 1: chopped up strands, and after time they just getting get
Speaker 1: smaller and smaller and smaller and small. And you say
Speaker 1: pretty soon after death, the first pretty soon means like
Speaker 1: within years. First pretty soon means within minutes, and the
Speaker 1: second pretty soon we're talking tens of thousands of years there.
Speaker 1: It depends on environment. So if something were to die
Speaker 1: and sit in the sun in Arizona today it's supposed
Speaker 1: to be hunter twenty degrees in Arizona, probably we would
Speaker 1: get no good recoverable DNA tomorrow, right, Um, but I
Speaker 1: don't all that because stuff decase. Also, you'll have really
Speaker 1: rapid microbial activity when it's things are rotting in the
Speaker 1: sun like that. So maybe you could get DNA tomorrow
Speaker 1: is probably an exaggeration, but certainly within a couple of days.
Speaker 1: It would be very hard to get recover good quality
Speaker 1: DNA from these things. If something dies, it's that volatile. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: it depends on microbial activity, so and also the sun
Speaker 1: and temperature. So things decay faster when it's hot, and
Speaker 1: when the temperature fluctuates, a lot of things decay. If
Speaker 1: you think about ideal temperatures for stuff to break stuff down.
Speaker 1: I mean when you want to when you're cooking something,
Speaker 1: you want to get it above a particular temperature, and
Speaker 1: that's not the temperature of like your normal ambient temperature
Speaker 1: and Phoenix, Arizona today, right, it's so you don't the
Speaker 1: all the microbes will just multiply at some point, can
Speaker 1: cause a lot of microbial life forms, and you get
Speaker 1: sick when you eat stuff. So you eat I wanted
Speaker 1: to stay cold and frozen, or you wanted to be
Speaker 1: really hot, like cooked. And if it's really hot and cooked,
Speaker 1: you're destroying all the DNA, all the living material. But
Speaker 1: if it's cold and frozen, then you're slowing down the decay,
Speaker 1: just like sticking your steak in the freezer so that
Speaker 1: it lasts for an extra couple of In those cases,
Speaker 1: like when you when you find a well preserved mammoth
Speaker 1: coming out of the permafrost, it probably so that thing
Speaker 1: probably died in sub freezing conditions. Yes, yes, uh maybe,
Speaker 1: I mean when when these animals died during the summer.
Speaker 1: In the summer in the Arctic, it can be you know,
Speaker 1: sixty seventy degrees during the day, but those ones and
Speaker 1: those ones could still potentially be preserved. Could be because
Speaker 1: the the sediment, the dirt in the ground is very cold,
Speaker 1: and if it gets buried right away in volcanic dust
Speaker 1: or whatever, then these the remains of these animals will
Speaker 1: will preserve for a long time. The oldest DNA that
Speaker 1: we've ever recovered was from a bone that we found
Speaker 1: in permafrost in the Yukon territory, and it was associated
Speaker 1: with a volcanic ash layer that we think is around
Speaker 1: seven hundred thousand years old. So we're estimating that that
Speaker 1: is the age of this horse bone. It's also the
Speaker 1: oldest frozen dirt that anyone has ever known. So that
Speaker 1: horse bone, that horse lived around seven hundred thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: It died, its bones were immediately buried and frozen, and
Speaker 1: we're kept in that freezer, that dirt freezer, for the
Speaker 1: last seven hundred thousand years, and that's the only reason
Speaker 1: we were able to recover DNA from that bone. And
Speaker 1: the DNA was in terrible condition. The longest fragments were
Speaker 1: thirty or forty letters long. Remember I said, so that's
Speaker 1: where you're going saying, we have them that are a million, millions,
Speaker 1: millions or millions or million long millions. Yes, we can
Speaker 1: do millions, but because you said three billion total. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it depends you can get very large fragments of DNA.
Speaker 1: How large this depends on how good you are at
Speaker 1: extracting what's called high molecular weight DNA, and there are
Speaker 1: hits that you can purchase in different approaches you can
Speaker 1: use to get larger and larger fragments. Were limited by
Speaker 1: technology in living things rather than by the actual size
Speaker 1: of the DNA, whereas an ancient DNA you're limited by
Speaker 1: the actual size of the surviving fragments of DNA. Our
Speaker 1: technology would allow us to get larger fragments if they existed,
Speaker 1: they just don't. And why is this important? Why are
Speaker 1: we having such a long conversation about this. It's important
Speaker 1: because an elephant genome, a mammoth genome is about four
Speaker 1: billion letters long, and if we have thirty letter fragments,
Speaker 1: we it's kind of like having a trillion zillion piece
Speaker 1: puzzle and we don't know what a mammoth genome actually
Speaker 1: looks like. So we're taking these tiny little puzzle pieces
Speaker 1: and we're trying to figure out where in the elephant
Speaker 1: genome they go. So you've got your massive trillion piece puzzle,
Speaker 1: and the box top is actually not the picture of
Speaker 1: the puzzle that you're trying to put together. Some close
Speaker 1: but not exactly the right picture. And there's another problem,
Speaker 1: and that is that, remember I said that there were
Speaker 1: all these bacteria and fungui and things that were eating
Speaker 1: up the DNA. Their DNA is also in that bone.
Speaker 1: So when you extract DNA from these mammoth bones, you
Speaker 1: get loads of tiny pieces of mammoth DNA. Maybe about
Speaker 1: one to four percent of what you get is tiny
Speaker 1: pieces of mammoth DNA. The rest of it is tiny
Speaker 1: pieces of other types of DNA, and you don't know
Speaker 1: which is which. So you've got chillion piece puzzle that
Speaker 1: actually includes the pieces for about a hundred different puzzles,
Speaker 1: and you've got the wrong box top, right. Can you
Speaker 1: can you? Can you? When you talk about contaminants, can
Speaker 1: you include the anecdote about sheep contaminants in MOA bones?
Speaker 1: So yeah, so this wasn't MOA bones I think that
Speaker 1: you're talking about. This was from we were trying to
Speaker 1: get DNA directly from dirt in New Zealand. And so
Speaker 1: it is true that DNA is preserved in sentiment columns.
Speaker 1: This is really cool and it's something that people are
Speaker 1: just starting to focus on. I think that it's going
Speaker 1: to be really neat way of trying to figure out
Speaker 1: where stuff lives. You know, we there are species that
Speaker 1: are rare or whose ranges we don't know. It turns
Speaker 1: out you can just go out and you can get
Speaker 1: a bit of soil and you can extract DNA from
Speaker 1: that soil and you can ask, is this incredibly rare
Speaker 1: small mammal ever found in this location? And if their
Speaker 1: DNA is there? The answer is yes. So we wanted
Speaker 1: to know how far back in time we could do this,
Speaker 1: So we went to different caves in New Zealand where
Speaker 1: there are sandy environments and DNA will actually percolate through
Speaker 1: sands depending on what the sources of DNA is. And
Speaker 1: we knew that there should not be moa and sheep together,
Speaker 1: right because the moa went extinct before sheep were introduced,
Speaker 1: And means it like four pound birds that used to
Speaker 1: live in New Zealand and we're extrapated by humans, right
Speaker 1: or not not extra but driven to extinction by human Yes,
Speaker 1: like big enormous kisy. Yes, they were impressive birds, and
Speaker 1: they were preyed upon by an even more impressive bird.
Speaker 1: I digress here, but because this is an opportunity to
Speaker 1: talk about one of my favorite extinct species, Harper gourns
Speaker 1: the hosts eagle, the giant eagle that would swoop down
Speaker 1: and pick up these massive moa. So how big was
Speaker 1: the eagle? I can't say. I was top of my head.
Speaker 1: But somebody who has a computer in front of them
Speaker 1: can look this up on and figure it out right now,
Speaker 1: because it's you have to give me the here. I'll
Speaker 1: turn my phone here, I'll turn my phone A A
Speaker 1: st you need a connection, I can do it. H
Speaker 1: A s T alright, so continue, we'll get out of that.
Speaker 1: We'll find it. Yeah, anyway, so this is an amazing,
Speaker 1: amazing animal. Anyway, both of these things went extinct because
Speaker 1: you know, if you're a giant eagle and you thrive
Speaker 1: on eating these giant birds, and the the giant birds go extinct,
Speaker 1: and you're probably going to go extinct too. They went
Speaker 1: extinct several hundred years past, and sheep were introduced into
Speaker 1: New Zealand. So our idea was, if DNA is not
Speaker 1: moving up and down in these caves, we should find
Speaker 1: MOA DNA and then a layer where there's nothing, and
Speaker 1: then a layer where there's sheep dna. But in act,
Speaker 1: what we found was that there was sheep DNA intermingled
Speaker 1: with the MOA DNA. And this is probably because there
Speaker 1: were so many sheep that were wandering around and urinating,
Speaker 1: and of course the urine is a nice source of
Speaker 1: DNA and this was percolating through this sandy soil that
Speaker 1: the sheep DNA was getting down into the MOA DNA.
Speaker 1: And all this tells us is that in some soil
Speaker 1: environments you don't have this nice layering effect, and you
Speaker 1: have to really archaeologists always talk about and it exists
Speaker 1: in some places, for example in and the Arctic, where
Speaker 1: I said, you know, we found this horse bone and
Speaker 1: it associated with this volcanic eruption. You can see these
Speaker 1: volcanic ash layers, they call them tephra, and they go
Speaker 1: cleanly across this permafrost dirt. And you might not know
Speaker 1: anything about whether the layering is good below it or
Speaker 1: the layering is good above it, but if you can
Speaker 1: see this nice clean layer of thick ash, you know
Speaker 1: that there's not stuff moving above and below that ash
Speaker 1: and if we find a bone below it, we know
Speaker 1: it must be older. The bone must be older than
Speaker 1: that eruption. And if we find a bone above it,
Speaker 1: we know that it must be younger. So the bone
Speaker 1: doesn't migrate through the line. The bone won't move. You're
Speaker 1: saying that that's all stuff that ash was coming in from,
Speaker 1: like eruptions in the illusions. Uh, there are a couple
Speaker 1: of different volcanic um mountain chains that are up there
Speaker 1: that cause like the logo, there are a couple of
Speaker 1: different mountain chains up there that will erupt at different
Speaker 1: time points. And you can actually tell by the chemical
Speaker 1: composition of the ash which mountain it came from, and
Speaker 1: you can link eruptions together that you see the ash
Speaker 1: from in different places, and you can kind of learn
Speaker 1: something about the geologic history by studying these ash. So
Speaker 1: that's other cool thing that you can do when you're
Speaker 1: out there working in the tundra. Yeah, it's fascinating, like
Speaker 1: like little time stamps. Right, So where were we? We
Speaker 1: were talking about piecing together the mammoth genome real quick though,
Speaker 1: just everybody knows that how do you pronounce it? Host?
Speaker 1: Twenty six pounds. That's an average between the male and
Speaker 1: the female and uh ten ft to twelve foot wingspan.
Speaker 1: That's a big eagle. Yeah, twelve fan and its closest
Speaker 1: living relative, I believe, at least it was a while
Speaker 1: ago when we studied this UM when I was a
Speaker 1: grad student. Is something called the booted eagle from Australia,
Speaker 1: which is a tiny little thing. I think whenever we
Speaker 1: figure out that there these these enormous phenotypic differences between
Speaker 1: things that are really closely related to each other, it
Speaker 1: just astounds me. The power of evolution and genetic variation,
Speaker 1: and it has a lot to do right with um.
Speaker 1: Certain groups get to islands and they seem to get
Speaker 1: huge islands, they seem to get teeny And there's another
Speaker 1: And I like to talk about bison. So do you
Speaker 1: know about bison ladder frons um. This is an enormous bison,
Speaker 1: much bigger than the other bison that lived in North
Speaker 1: America at the time. We just were able to get
Speaker 1: DNA from a bison ladder frons that was found in
Speaker 1: snowmass Colorado, at this site that was found recently and
Speaker 1: it's about a hundred and twenty thousand years old. This
Speaker 1: particular remain based on the geological setting, and we were
Speaker 1: also able to get DNA from a step bison. This
Speaker 1: is the bison that lived at the same time in
Speaker 1: Alaska that was much smaller, about half the size, if
Speaker 1: not smaller, from bison ladder fronds, and they are the
Speaker 1: same yoetically are you familiar with Do you ever read
Speaker 1: the work of Valarious Geistes? Are you with his idea
Speaker 1: about it? Was that him that came up with the
Speaker 1: founding effect. The founder effect, we're like one of species
Speaker 1: colonized as a new era area, okay, and they have
Speaker 1: like unfettered like like they're in a non competitive environment
Speaker 1: that they will invest for a while. They invest a
Speaker 1: lot of energy into elaborate sexual display and have an
Speaker 1: experience like periods of very high fecundity and kind of
Speaker 1: have a good old days, and then things kind of
Speaker 1: catch up with themselves and they shrink. I think that
Speaker 1: he wrote about ladder Franz as being that it was
Speaker 1: colonizing areas in the wake of glaciers. Yeah, and got huge.
Speaker 1: That idea. Is that idea sound? You know? With bison,
Speaker 1: there's so many competing ideas about the history of these guys.
Speaker 1: You know, at one point there were more than fifty
Speaker 1: different name species of bison that supposedly lived in North
Speaker 1: America during the late licens scene, and I think probably
Speaker 1: there there was actually only one. It was just changing
Speaker 1: all the time depending on where it was, and there
Speaker 1: was a competition between paleontologists to name new species. This
Speaker 1: is a time where people would find these partial horn
Speaker 1: cores and they would turn them in different directions and
Speaker 1: they would measure the width and the length of the
Speaker 1: horn cores, which is a terrible marker because these things
Speaker 1: are they're manipulated by depending on what fights you get into,
Speaker 1: or how much you eat when you're growing up, et cetera.
Speaker 1: This is not a paleontologically equivocal trade. This is not
Speaker 1: something that you can say, ah, that definitely means this
Speaker 1: species or that species. And so people were naming new
Speaker 1: species right and left based on not very much information,
Speaker 1: but the genetic data that we've started to get from
Speaker 1: these bison bones. Um. We think the oldest bison in
Speaker 1: North America are around hundred and sixty years old. And
Speaker 1: that's when they showed up. That's when they showed up,
Speaker 1: came across the bearing strait um. And this is a
Speaker 1: paper that was published really recently that I worked on
Speaker 1: with a colleague collaborative of mine from University of Alberda,
Speaker 1: and it was kicked up in the New York Times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I wrote you an email, so I want to like,
Speaker 1: see we got We're actually having two discussions right now both.
Speaker 1: I want to come back to these animals. Okay, I
Speaker 1: want to come back to bison because just remember this
Speaker 1: because you hear people talk about and this, because we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about extinction. You hear people say, like, an
Speaker 1: extinct form, Okay, the bison ladd of France, which had
Speaker 1: a six ft horn tips tip, huge horns, so six
Speaker 1: ft from tip to tip. People be like, it's an
Speaker 1: extinct one, but it's not. Nope, there's still bison around.
Speaker 1: It's just like it just as different than what we
Speaker 1: have now. But people used to dig this stuff up.
Speaker 1: And there's a there's one on display in in North
Speaker 1: Dakota that came out of the Missouri River that wants
Speaker 1: to look at a really nice skull and um, people
Speaker 1: would dig it up and they'd be like, well that's
Speaker 1: all kind that's not here anymore. Yeah, you know it's
Speaker 1: you know, this is a this is a tough thing. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, and this is a I think it's an
Speaker 1: important question to people who care about wildlife. It's an
Speaker 1: important questions people who care about conservation is how do
Speaker 1: we define the thing that is worth protecting, the thing
Speaker 1: that we don't want to go extinct? Do we define
Speaker 1: it as a species, do we define it as a population?
Speaker 1: Do we find it as something that looks different from
Speaker 1: other things? Because a lot of fronts looked decidedly different
Speaker 1: from the step bison that lived in Alaska, which also
Speaker 1: looked different than the bison bison. The forms that exist today, Um,
Speaker 1: they're a continuum. They certainly are closely related to each other,
Speaker 1: but they aren't. They don't exist anymore. But the same
Speaker 1: thing could be said for you know, you look at
Speaker 1: wolf populations that are alive to day, and they are
Speaker 1: sometimes phenotypically or behaviorally different from each other, but they're
Speaker 1: all wolves. So where do you draw the line? Where
Speaker 1: do you decide what is the thing that you want
Speaker 1: to protect? And and traditionally people think about species, but
Speaker 1: the name species is something that is kind of arbitrary.
Speaker 1: Is something that we decided on and who is well,
Speaker 1: it depends on who's thinking about it and who's asking
Speaker 1: the question, and what the point of asking the question is. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a concept called the biological species concept, which says
Speaker 1: that species are defined as reproductively isolated units. So two
Speaker 1: things that can't make or if they do, they don't
Speaker 1: produce offspring, or if they do produce offspring, those offspring
Speaker 1: are not viable or also can't produce offering themselves. So
Speaker 1: donkeys and mules are distinct species. They can produce. Sorry, sorry,
Speaker 1: donkeys and horses are distinct species. They can produce offspring,
Speaker 1: but that offspring can't reproduce, So the biological species concept
Speaker 1: says they're different. But meanwhile, that definition would mean that
Speaker 1: all of are like mountain cariboo, woodland caribou, bar and
Speaker 1: ground caribou reindeer from Eurasia are just one species, and
Speaker 1: it would get rid of our discussions about the Mexican
Speaker 1: gray wolf and the gray wolf proper. But something I
Speaker 1: think a little bit closer to heart, right, it would
Speaker 1: say that humans and Neanderthals are the same species, because
Speaker 1: we were clearly different, behaviorally, physically different from each other.
Speaker 1: But after our ancestors moved out of Africa, they met
Speaker 1: with Neanderthals and they hybridized with them. And because of that,
Speaker 1: most of us have some component of Neanderthal DNA in
Speaker 1: our genomes. So the biological species concept would call humans
Speaker 1: and Neanderthals the same species. They would also call brown
Speaker 1: bears and polar bears the same species, despite that these
Speaker 1: two animals are behaviorally and physically and ecologically quite different
Speaker 1: from each other. Yeah, because you can see people would
Speaker 1: be like very resistant to the idea because of like,
Speaker 1: hold on right, and it only eats seals, and it swims,
Speaker 1: and it has different dentition and it doesn't hibernate, whereas
Speaker 1: the other one is incredibly different. But they mate and
Speaker 1: they produce offspring, and they do so in zoos, and
Speaker 1: they do so in nature viable viable offspring. All the
Speaker 1: bears on Alaska's Abc Islands are hybrids, all of them.
Speaker 1: They have up to eight percent polar bear ancestry. And
Speaker 1: that's because after the last ice Age, we believe that
Speaker 1: the ABC Islands were actually colonized, were actually just a
Speaker 1: home for polar bears, and then as the climate warmed up,
Speaker 1: brown bear boys because boys leave, and brown bears moved
Speaker 1: from the Alaska mainland onto the Abc Islands, where they
Speaker 1: met this population of polar bears and hybridized with them,
Speaker 1: and gradually this population was converted back to being brown
Speaker 1: bear like, more brown bear like, because brown bears kept
Speaker 1: coming over and mating with these these bears that lived there,
Speaker 1: but mitochondrially, which is only inherited from your mom. This
Speaker 1: is part of DNA and everyone of yourselves that only
Speaker 1: comes from your mom. They are polar bears. They are
Speaker 1: all polar bears with their mitochondrial DNA really and their
Speaker 1: X chromosomes, which come more from mom because Dad only
Speaker 1: has one copy of the X. The X chromosome has
Speaker 1: more polar bear DNA on it than the rest of
Speaker 1: their genome, which again is evidence that their mom's mom's
Speaker 1: mom's mom's mom, at some point in the past, probably
Speaker 1: twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, was a polar bear.
Speaker 1: And and that then jives what you said earlier that
Speaker 1: it was like colonizing males, which kind of fits in
Speaker 1: with just general brown bear behavior like well, like a
Speaker 1: lot of those, like a lot of big predators where
Speaker 1: when they turn up in weird places, not always, but
Speaker 1: so often it's a male turning up in a weird place. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: many in many animals, like I mean mountain lions which
Speaker 1: we have out here, do this to The males are
Speaker 1: the ones that disperse. They're the ones that go out
Speaker 1: to try to find new territory. And so that that's
Speaker 1: what's going on in brown bears, is that juvenile, juvenile
Speaker 1: males move outside, whereas the females tend to stay with
Speaker 1: their mom. Is called maternal philopatrie. But you know that.
Speaker 1: But uh um, that's common in a lot of especially
Speaker 1: I think large predatory species. But okay, now I'm gonna
Speaker 1: back you way up to where you are. I don't
Speaker 1: even remember that you're finding little instead of the millions
Speaker 1: long DNA strands, you're finding little thirties and forties. And
Speaker 1: a problem with those little thirties and forties is that
Speaker 1: there in shitty condition, and their and finding them, figuring
Speaker 1: out where they go, how to line them, and they're
Speaker 1: corrupted because of part of the trickery of finding them
Speaker 1: is that they're corrupted with so much other stuff, right,
Speaker 1: And also they're corrupted themselves because all of these things
Speaker 1: like UVY radiation beating down on the DNA will actually
Speaker 1: cause the molecules to change, to become damaged in their
Speaker 1: own way. So ancient DNA has its own kind of damage.
Speaker 1: It's broken into tiny fragments, and it's mixed up with
Speaker 1: all sorts of other contaminants. And your job as an
Speaker 1: ancient DNA scientist is to take that little thirty and
Speaker 1: figure out where on that big four bill in genome
Speaker 1: that isn't actually the same genome it goes, and then
Speaker 1: to gradually piece this puzzle together. And we do that
Speaker 1: using computers. Um, you know, lots of DNA sequencing and
Speaker 1: lots of computers. Gradually pieces together and come up with
Speaker 1: what we believe the mammoth genome looked like. And you
Speaker 1: can only move it relative to other pieces you found. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you find one isolated piece, if you picture
Speaker 1: on a number line like one to a hundred, you
Speaker 1: have no idea where to place it until you find
Speaker 1: some other thing. Right, Well, what you have is a
Speaker 1: number line. Let's say you have a number line that's
Speaker 1: one to one, and you have a little thirty piece,
Speaker 1: and your thirty piece says so you can kind of
Speaker 1: scan along that one to one hundred to figure out
Speaker 1: where it goes, and you'll find the matching sequence. So
Speaker 1: let's say that number line is your elephant genome, and
Speaker 1: then you've got your little thirty to four, your little
Speaker 1: thirty base pair piece. You can figure out where it goes. Now,
Speaker 1: mammoths and elephants are kind of different from each other,
Speaker 1: so there'll be some places where it doesn't match up exactly.
Speaker 1: But if it's long enough, you can figure out the
Speaker 1: best ice in that number line where your tiny little
Speaker 1: thing goes, because there'll be some common ground. So there
Speaker 1: are lots of computer algorithms that people used to do that,
Speaker 1: and heuristic searching approaches that people used to do that,
Speaker 1: and and this is this is possible? And how apparent
Speaker 1: is it? What that piece? What function that things served
Speaker 1: for the organism function? Now this is something you're getting
Speaker 1: into another whole realm of issue here. We hadn't quite
Speaker 1: gotten there yet, but we can totally get there. So
Speaker 1: this is this is a great question. Um, we have
Speaker 1: very little idea what parts of genomes do. We have
Speaker 1: algorithms that help us to find genes. Genes are not
Speaker 1: the only thing that are in our genomes. There's also
Speaker 1: lots of noncoding stuff. There's positional stuff. There's lots of
Speaker 1: viruses that have gotten in there and made copies of
Speaker 1: themselves and moved around. There are repeat elements. There are
Speaker 1: all these kind of things called like allue elements and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. There's just our genomes are chock full
Speaker 1: of other stuff that's not genes, and that other stuff
Speaker 1: might be portant and it might not. Write. This is
Speaker 1: true for every animal, every organism that's out there. So
Speaker 1: today we have people are saying we have complete genome sequences,
Speaker 1: we have genome sequences available for lots of different species. Um,
Speaker 1: it's true, we have genome sequences available for lots of
Speaker 1: different species, but there are very few species that we
Speaker 1: know very much about, and those that we do know
Speaker 1: a lot about tend to be the ones that we
Speaker 1: study a lot. So things like humans because we care
Speaker 1: a lot about humans, and lab organisms like mice and
Speaker 1: rats and Drosophila fruit flies, things that people use to
Speaker 1: manipulate experimentally in the lab, other things. Any wildlife. You
Speaker 1: pick a wildlife that isn't a domestic, agriculturally important species
Speaker 1: we know very little about, and we guess, we guess
Speaker 1: the function. So we find a gene that we believe
Speaker 1: is the same gene as something that we know that
Speaker 1: if you turn off in a mouse changes the color
Speaker 1: of their eyes. I'm just making that up right, And
Speaker 1: then we can say, ah ha, that gene in the
Speaker 1: mammoth was probably associated with something like that. We have
Speaker 1: no idea, right really, but we have some idea. That's
Speaker 1: kind of unfair. We have some we've educated guesses about
Speaker 1: the functions of genes based on learning something about functions
Speaker 1: of genes in a very different animal that was living
Speaker 1: in a lab. That makes sense, okay. So for example,
Speaker 1: if we want to know what genes are associated with
Speaker 1: cold tolerance in an elephant, we might look at what
Speaker 1: people have written published about um cold tolerance or subcutaneous
Speaker 1: fat or hair development or things like that in mice
Speaker 1: or in humans, and then say, hmm, what's the same
Speaker 1: gene that we found in this mammoth genomesequence. That's probably
Speaker 1: the function of that gene. So we have an educated guess,
Speaker 1: but we don't know for sure. Did when when did elephants?
Speaker 1: Were they like they were in equatorial areas like pre
Speaker 1: mammoth and the mammoth was like a north word. Yes,
Speaker 1: it wasn't the other way around, right, So another the
Speaker 1: thing that we can do to figure out so he
Speaker 1: was like, they were figuring, like Asian elephants existed, No, No,
Speaker 1: as mammoths for figuring out how to deal with the cold. Yes,
Speaker 1: so they had a common ancestor that's probably tropically adapted, right,
Speaker 1: and then they dive. That common ancestor diverged into elephants
Speaker 1: and mammoths Asian elephants in mammos. Yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, um, we didn't evolve from chimpanzees, and
Speaker 1: chimpanzees didn't evolve from us. The two species evolved from
Speaker 1: a common ancestor that was neither a chimpanzee nor a human. Right.
Speaker 1: The same thing is true for Asian elephants in mammoth
Speaker 1: when people say we had come from monkeys, and I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know if anybody is saying you
Speaker 1: came from a monkey, well, great ape, some sort of
Speaker 1: great ape. Yes, and prior to that monkeys or maybe
Speaker 1: they diverged. Anyway, I digress into parts of human evolutionary
Speaker 1: history that I'm not confident. Yeah, well, yeah, don't do that.
Speaker 1: There's enough you are confident with. We don't need to
Speaker 1: do what you're not confident with. I'm not saying I'm
Speaker 1: not confident that we came from great apes. We certainly
Speaker 1: evolved from great apes. Anyway, Um, where was I function mammoths? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you were talking about finding things that would um allow
Speaker 1: cold tolerance and understanding where those things are, and I
Speaker 1: interrupt you to make sure that that, uh, mammoths moved northwards.
Speaker 1: That's right. So another way that we can try to
Speaker 1: identify things that are potentially important to making a mammoth
Speaker 1: looking at like a mammoth instead of like the common
Speaker 1: ancestor of the Asian elephant is to use evolution to
Speaker 1: know what to learn to to use what we know
Speaker 1: about evolution. So we have um African elephant genome sequence,
Speaker 1: which we know diverged prior to the divergence between Asian
Speaker 1: elephants and mammoths, and so we kind of know what
Speaker 1: that ancestor of Asian elephants and mammoths looked like. And
Speaker 1: then we can use the genome sequences and what we
Speaker 1: know about how evolution works to identify the mutations that
Speaker 1: happened just along the mammoth lineage, and we can think,
Speaker 1: maybe those are some of the things that are really
Speaker 1: important to making a mammoth looking act like a mammoth.
Speaker 1: You'ring to the finding the cold tolerance stuff, right, Well,
Speaker 1: how we how we find it? Yeah? I mean you
Speaker 1: just think about the way you can look along these lineages,
Speaker 1: these evolutionary lineages, and ask what things are fixed, what
Speaker 1: things are all the same in mammoth. So we know
Speaker 1: that there are a lot of places in our genomes
Speaker 1: where you and I will differ, and those are probably
Speaker 1: not fundamentally important to making us human. If they were,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't differ. We would be the same as each other,
Speaker 1: but different from our closest living relative, chimpanzee. So that's
Speaker 1: similar to what we're doing with mammoths. If we sequence
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of mammoths, we can look and see
Speaker 1: where there's variation in mammoths and say that's probably not
Speaker 1: that important to making a mammoth look and act like
Speaker 1: a mammoth. But we can also find places where mammoths
Speaker 1: are all the same as each other, but also all
Speaker 1: different from all elephants, and we can say, ah ha,
Speaker 1: there is likely to be some evolutionary difference, some change
Speaker 1: that happened along that lineage to making mammoths look and
Speaker 1: act like mammoths rather than like the ancestral elephant that
Speaker 1: they were, and we can then target those as something
Speaker 1: that we might need to change if we were going
Speaker 1: to turn an elephant into a mammoth. That section of
Speaker 1: the that one one letter. Oh, that's a one letter part,
Speaker 1: one letter, one letter. Yeah, so that's the thing you know,
Speaker 1: or you're talking about. You know, you have four billion
Speaker 1: bases that are different between asian elephant and a wooly
Speaker 1: mammoth and they're four it, no, sorry, four billion basis
Speaker 1: total in a wooly mammoth genome and about one and
Speaker 1: a half million differences, right, and they're going to be
Speaker 1: spread randomly throughout the genome because mutations happen randomly, and
Speaker 1: only some of them are going to be really important
Speaker 1: to making a mammoth mammoth and an elephant an elephant. Right,
Speaker 1: So the goal is to use what we know about
Speaker 1: where genes are and the way evolution works to try
Speaker 1: to figure out which of those million and a half
Speaker 1: differences really are fundamentally important. And if we're only interested
Speaker 1: in in creating specific traits or moving specific mammoth like
Speaker 1: traits into elephants, we got to figure out somehow which
Speaker 1: of those differences that we've decided are important differences making
Speaker 1: mammoths different are actually important differences in making them different
Speaker 1: in that very specific way that we're interested in them
Speaker 1: being different, you know, in the case of cold tolerance,
Speaker 1: which would further limit the number of changes that you
Speaker 1: would have to make if you were going to make
Speaker 1: an elephant that had that particular trait. But this is hard.
Speaker 1: This is something that you know, we we we kind
Speaker 1: of have some idea about how to do, but we
Speaker 1: don't know enough about the way genomes function, or the
Speaker 1: way mammoth genome in particular functions, to to know exactly
Speaker 1: what the right what the right decision would be. So
Speaker 1: what what year was it when there was the announcement
Speaker 1: that they had mapped the human genome? That was two
Speaker 1: thousand and one, And the person who led that the
Speaker 1: public effort for the Human Genome Consortium is in that
Speaker 1: building right there behind you through the treats. What what
Speaker 1: percent of the mamoth genome is complete? Uh? Well, can
Speaker 1: I answer the question about the human genome? First? Two
Speaker 1: thousand and one we said we had mapped the human genome?
Speaker 1: About the human genome is known? Now? Oh yeah, Now
Speaker 1: sixteen years later, we still don't have the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Oh well, why was it? Well, you know, to be fair, well, no, there,
Speaker 1: I mean there are The genome is a big and
Speaker 1: complicated place, right and there are parts of our genome
Speaker 1: towards the centromeres the middle of the genome, and toward
Speaker 1: the end of the telomeres that are just made up
Speaker 1: of these really um tightly wrapped repeat sequences that there
Speaker 1: is no existing sequencing technology that we can get through. Um.
Speaker 1: There's no way to sequence through these things right now.
Speaker 1: There's no way to do it. And in fact, a
Speaker 1: big challenge that genome scientists are often thinking about it's
Speaker 1: who is going to actually finish the complete human genome?
Speaker 1: This would be a really cool thing to be able
Speaker 1: to do. To be fair, we know most of the
Speaker 1: genome that actually has genes in it that's doing stuff,
Speaker 1: and the parts that we don't know are is very
Speaker 1: small compared to that. But we don't know all of
Speaker 1: it yet, and we certainly don't know the entire genome
Speaker 1: sequence for something that is not human, where we haven't
Speaker 1: spent billions and billions and billions to tell me that
Speaker 1: you're almost there on the mammoth. No, and a harder
Speaker 1: thing about something like a mammoth. There's something that's something
Speaker 1: that's extinct. Is that, Remember I said, we don't we
Speaker 1: don't have long sequences. So the only way to get
Speaker 1: through these repeat fragments for these regions of the genome
Speaker 1: that are just the same thing, repeated over and over
Speaker 1: and over and over again is to be able to
Speaker 1: sequence these long strands of DNA. We're never going to
Speaker 1: have that for something that's extinct, and so we're always
Speaker 1: going to have to take these broken fragments and map
Speaker 1: them to an existing genome sequence. We can't do what's
Speaker 1: called a DiNovo genome assembly, where you don't have anything,
Speaker 1: which is what impressively these teams managed to do for
Speaker 1: the human genome. We had no map, we had no puzzle,
Speaker 1: top right. They just did it. They took these long
Speaker 1: fragments and used sophisticated computer algorithms to piece these these
Speaker 1: long fragments together. And the more data they get, so
Speaker 1: the more they have to realize they got some parts wrong.
Speaker 1: They can rearrange it and and and try to figure
Speaker 1: out what the real sequence is. It's very hard to
Speaker 1: put together these denovo genomes where all you have is
Speaker 1: just good quality tissue and you don't want to use
Speaker 1: any map. The reason you don't want to use any
Speaker 1: map is that the map might be wrong, and this
Speaker 1: is particularly important when something is extinct and doesn't have
Speaker 1: any close relatives. Um think, for example, of the moa,
Speaker 1: where the closest living relative is the tinamou, and they diverged.
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly how many, but more than thirty
Speaker 1: million years of between these two lineages, so there's a
Speaker 1: lot of opportunity for parts of the genome to move around,
Speaker 1: for chromosomes to break and move around. Probably doesn't happen
Speaker 1: so much in birds, but in in mammals we know
Speaker 1: that chromosomes rearrange all the time. And if your map
Speaker 1: your living thing, the tinamou is really different from the
Speaker 1: ancient sequence ancient genome you're trying to map, where you
Speaker 1: only have your thirties and forties, there might be big
Speaker 1: chunks the genome that you just never get. They'll never recover,
Speaker 1: no matter how many bones are because you don't have
Speaker 1: those long fragments, which is what you would need to
Speaker 1: be able to extend off the ends of these sequences.
Speaker 1: So this is a hard thing for ancient genomics and
Speaker 1: for many species. We might be forever restricted to just
Speaker 1: being able to use this stuff that doesn't change so quickly,
Speaker 1: and maybe this is a bad thing, right right, And
Speaker 1: this goes back to um whether you can bring back
Speaker 1: a species that's extinct If the most important parts are
Speaker 1: the most divergent parts, and therefore the parts that you
Speaker 1: actually can't sequence or put together, how are you ever
Speaker 1: going to know what they are? So if if a
Speaker 1: fellow wanted to go make a mammoth, right, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: like and there are some of those fellas, right, Well,
Speaker 1: that's the thing you talked about is there was someone
Speaker 1: who was hopeful. I don't want to dwell on things
Speaker 1: that just aren't going to happen, But just as an example,
Speaker 1: there was someone who is hopeful, um that you talked about,
Speaker 1: who would find semen. Right, So, there are two teams
Speaker 1: that are out there that are looking either for semen
Speaker 1: or for cells, just frozen cells that are in good condition,
Speaker 1: and they want to clone a mammoth. This is most
Speaker 1: common word that you hear when you think about Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park type clone of mammoth. Yeah. Clone. Well, you see,
Speaker 1: even bringing up Jurassic Park kind of calls all this
Speaker 1: into questions because then you got to talk about how
Speaker 1: many journalists have asked you to explain why amber it's
Speaker 1: not actually good for DNA. How many journalists are there.
Speaker 1: It's a good question, though, I mean to be fair.
Speaker 1: This is this is what people think about ancient DNA
Speaker 1: is is, Oh, look we can find things preserved and amber.
Speaker 1: We're gonna able to bring dinosaurs back to life. Medium
Speaker 1: It makes sense. It does. It does. When you see
Speaker 1: a piece of amber, you see a fly in it,
Speaker 1: you're like, well of And it was inspired by reality.
Speaker 1: So Michael Crichton, when he wrote his book actually wrote
Speaker 1: in the acknowledgments UM that he was grateful to the
Speaker 1: Extinct Species Working Group at you see Berkeley Allen Will
Speaker 1: because they were talking about ancient DNA and that was
Speaker 1: what inspired him. And then his movie book inspired people
Speaker 1: to see if they could actually recover DNA from insights
Speaker 1: in amber, and people published papers saying that they had
Speaker 1: um Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you are and
Speaker 1: how you feel about these things. There is this ubiquitous,
Speaker 1: uh source of DNA that's everywhere, that gets into everything,
Speaker 1: and I could extract DNA from anything and get some DNA.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that it's DNA from that thing. Amber
Speaker 1: is very porous, it's formed a very hot environment. It
Speaker 1: turns out that it is a terrible, terrible preserver for DNA,
Speaker 1: which is very sad that there's these beautiful skeletons or
Speaker 1: exo skeletons of things that you see in amber, but
Speaker 1: there isn't any DNA that is from those animals that's
Speaker 1: in there. There was a a group of scientists in
Speaker 1: in London at the Natural Museum in London in the
Speaker 1: late nineties who tried to replicate some of these experiments
Speaker 1: by going into their collection, and they were They recovered
Speaker 1: pieces of amber and copal. Copal is the recent precursor
Speaker 1: to amble. Amber. First it's copeal and then it hardens
Speaker 1: and becomes amber. And these were only decades old. We
Speaker 1: know we can recover decade old DNA. And some of
Speaker 1: these things had bugs in them and some of them didn't.
Speaker 1: They extracted DNA from all of these different pieces of amber, saying,
Speaker 1: if it doesn't have an insect, we shouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to get DNA. If it does, we should be able
Speaker 1: to get DNA. And therefore this is some sort of
Speaker 1: test of the hypothesis of whether amber preserves DNA, and
Speaker 1: they were able to recover DNA from their pieces of
Speaker 1: copal and amber, but there was no correlation between their
Speaker 1: ability to recover DNA and whether there were insects there.
Speaker 1: And it turns out they were just recovering insect DNA
Speaker 1: because there's insect DNA everywhere. I mean, I could take
Speaker 1: a swab off this tabletop here and get insect DNA
Speaker 1: off of it, and probably your DNA as well, because
Speaker 1: you've been sitting here and breathing on the table for
Speaker 1: a while. That doesn't mean it's already there. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So I could go to the toy store and get
Speaker 1: a dinosaur and extract DNA and show that I have
Speaker 1: recovered dinosaur DNA, but really it's just going to be
Speaker 1: chopped up pieces of human and cockroach DNA, right, you know.
Speaker 1: So the early days of ancient DNA were filled with
Speaker 1: some of these spectacular claims, none of which have been
Speaker 1: able to be shown to be true. The oldest DNA
Speaker 1: that we've recovered as reliable is that seven hundred thousand
Speaker 1: year old horse bone from the Arctic because it was frozen, right,
Speaker 1: and that's why it was recovered. Um Dinosaurs went extinct
Speaker 1: sixty five million years ago. There is no frozen dirt
Speaker 1: that's sixty five million years old. There is no DNA
Speaker 1: and dinosaurs and talk about the um. You don't need
Speaker 1: to dwell on it. But the sperm path to a
Speaker 1: mammoth cloning. Uh, let's do cells and then sperm. Right,
Speaker 1: So the idea with sperm, I guess I'll start with sperm,
Speaker 1: would be that you could find frozen sperm and then
Speaker 1: you could you could get an elephant egg cell and
Speaker 1: you could use it to fertilize the elephant egg cell,
Speaker 1: so you would have something that's half mammoth half elephant.
Speaker 1: Um like you surrogate, surrogate, you'd like impregnate a female
Speaker 1: Asian elephant with this frozen sperm and get a half mammoth,
Speaker 1: and then do it again and get a three quarter
Speaker 1: mammoth's And they're fired up about that because I think
Speaker 1: you should explained that. And you get in your book
Speaker 1: that they found that old frozen sperm is still viable.
Speaker 1: That gives him whole We're not old old right, right,
Speaker 1: but just the term you guys use old old, it's
Speaker 1: like alternative old. Yeah. Uh no, So when an animal
Speaker 1: dies and I think I've already said this. The DNA
Speaker 1: and IT cell starts to degrade immediately, and the cells
Speaker 1: started to grade immediately. So this requires that you were
Speaker 1: able to be fine, you would able you would be
Speaker 1: able to find frozen viable cells or frozen viables. Oh,
Speaker 1: I got you, So the same problem. I hadn't really
Speaker 1: put that together, right, Yeah, the sperm has Yeah, I
Speaker 1: got you. It's destroyed everywhere, and so it had to
Speaker 1: be that sperm was It's like sperms that some special holders,
Speaker 1: so that makes it a special holder. Actually probably would
Speaker 1: be the testicles, right, And this is what I read
Speaker 1: when I was doing my research for this, is that
Speaker 1: because the testicles were outside of the body, they would
Speaker 1: get frozen faster and that would protect the sperm. It
Speaker 1: turns out they're not outside of the body in a mammoth,
Speaker 1: which is probably you know, for good reason, right if
Speaker 1: you think about the environment where they lived, So yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not then no, it's not a viable pathway. That
Speaker 1: was the interesting thing I heard about mammoth um. You
Speaker 1: talk about the cold tolerance for but a thing that
Speaker 1: Asian and African elephants have big ears, and mammoths had
Speaker 1: small ears because imagine that thin flat Yeah, what would
Speaker 1: happen to it in cold temperatures? Right? And the elephants
Speaker 1: have big ears for heat this patient, right, so um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to dissipate your heat if you're living
Speaker 1: at forty below. Okay, So now that I understand the
Speaker 1: sperm thing that it is, it's it's just like the
Speaker 1: cell thing. Yeah. And and so when when people say
Speaker 1: cloning cloning, what what you really mean? And we say
Speaker 1: this cloning dinosaurs and dinosaur bar you say cloning mammoths,
Speaker 1: What you really mean when you say cloning is an
Speaker 1: actual scientific process where you take a cell and that's
Speaker 1: already a particular type of cell, like a skin cell
Speaker 1: or Okay, so here we go. Who's the most famous clone? Dolly,
Speaker 1: Dolly the sheep. That's so, Dolly was a clone and
Speaker 1: she was a clone of a mammary cell from another
Speaker 1: female sheep. Right, So what you do in cloning is
Speaker 1: you take an egg cell that is viable, ripe egg cell,
Speaker 1: and you suck out the nucleus, the stuff that has
Speaker 1: the nuclear DNA, the all the stuff that is going
Speaker 1: to code for the genes that make the animal look
Speaker 1: and act like it does that normally, in an egg
Speaker 1: cell would be fertilized by sperm that would make everything
Speaker 1: diploid ut of Mom's DNA and Dad's DNA, and then
Speaker 1: that would um cause this process of differentiation. Because that
Speaker 1: fertilized cell is is a stem cell. It has the
Speaker 1: it's called tote potent. It has the capacity to become
Speaker 1: every type of cell that's necessary to create an organism.
Speaker 1: Um it doesn't yet have any instructions that say, be
Speaker 1: heart cell, be a memory cell, be a lung cell,
Speaker 1: but it will begin to divide and differentiate, and as
Speaker 1: it does, those cells will gradually get the instructions that
Speaker 1: are necessary to be different types of cells. You don't
Speaker 1: need the same genes turned on to be a heart
Speaker 1: cell as you do to be a liver cell, for example.
Speaker 1: So this process of differentiation just turns genes on and
Speaker 1: off as necessary to create different functions. So the idea
Speaker 1: of cloning is that you have a cell that's already
Speaker 1: way down that path. It already has exactly the genes
Speaker 1: turned on and off to be that particular type of cell.
Speaker 1: In Golly's case, it was a mamory cell. And you
Speaker 1: have to somehow trick it into forgetting those instructions and
Speaker 1: resetting itself into one of those types of cells that
Speaker 1: can begin this process of dividing and differentiation. This reprogramming
Speaker 1: is really important in cloning. So you take that egg
Speaker 1: cell and there's some magic in that egg cell, and
Speaker 1: that is that the proteins that are in that egg
Speaker 1: cell can cause that reprogramming to happen. So you take
Speaker 1: the excel, suck out of the nucleus, and then you
Speaker 1: you take this tissue cell that you want to clone,
Speaker 1: and you stress it out. You starve it if nutrients
Speaker 1: and put it in a state where super stressed, right,
Speaker 1: and then you can suck the nucleus out of that cell,
Speaker 1: injected into the egg cell, zap it with a bit
Speaker 1: of electricity. Some magic happens that causes the proteins in
Speaker 1: that egg cell to reset that cell, causing it to
Speaker 1: forget all the instructions to be a memory cell and
Speaker 1: start that process of dividing and differentiating. That, it turns out,
Speaker 1: is really hard and still is really inefficient. This if
Speaker 1: the cell is not entirely reprogrammed, reset it completely to scratch,
Speaker 1: then it won't work. It won't divide correctly. It'll go
Speaker 1: wrong at some point, and that's why cloning of animals
Speaker 1: remains um really inefficient. It's gotten better than than it
Speaker 1: was in Dolly's time, but it still isn't you know.
Speaker 1: It's not like every time you do it it works.
Speaker 1: You need, though, is for that cell, that tissue cell
Speaker 1: to be alive. There can't be anything wrong with it.
Speaker 1: If there's anything wrong with it, miracle of life alive,
Speaker 1: like is able to divide in a in a dish,
Speaker 1: it has to be, you know. It can't be broken,
Speaker 1: It can't be turned off. The DNA can't be chopped up.
Speaker 1: It has to be capable of resetting itself. And as
Speaker 1: we've already established, once an animal dies, all of its
Speaker 1: cells start to break up and die, the enzymes chop
Speaker 1: up the DNA, it can't replicate itself anymore. And because
Speaker 1: that is true, one will never find a living mammoth cell.
Speaker 1: The most recently live mammoths were live years ago. They
Speaker 1: have no living cells remaining, and end of story, one
Speaker 1: will never be able to clone a mammoth, really sorry,
Speaker 1: or dinosaur. And that's that's a particular particularly bold statement
Speaker 1: comes from someone in your position. It it's a statement
Speaker 1: I've been making for very but just but okay, I've
Speaker 1: seen the deal, the operating You live and operate in
Speaker 1: the world of the impossible, do I? Yes? Because things
Speaker 1: that things that would have been regarded things that a
Speaker 1: decade ago or two decades ago would have been regarded
Speaker 1: as No, that won't happen, right, Okay, how do you
Speaker 1: know that you're not? But I don't. I don't doubt
Speaker 1: that you are. But you're not worried about becoming the
Speaker 1: laughing stock. You know what, if somebody finds a living
Speaker 1: mammoth cell, it will be so freaking exciting that I
Speaker 1: won't mind being a laughing stock. The chances that'll outweigh
Speaker 1: your embarrassment. Exactly is that the likelihood of this happening
Speaker 1: is very, very very close to zero, so close to
Speaker 1: zero that I'm willing to say it's never going to happen.
Speaker 1: And is that is that? Um? I don't want dwell,
Speaker 1: But is that like sort of like the consensus among
Speaker 1: your peers. Yes, So if that's the case, let's move
Speaker 1: on to what might work. Well, this is why we
Speaker 1: get to moving genes, so we know that we can
Speaker 1: come up with these DNA sequences if we can identify
Speaker 1: using a computer which parts of those genomes are important
Speaker 1: to making something look an act like mammoth. Then we
Speaker 1: can take an elephant cell that is alive, right, that's
Speaker 1: living in a dish, that's able to replicate itself and
Speaker 1: turn into two cells whatever from an Asian elephant, and
Speaker 1: we can then cut and paste using geno mediting technologies,
Speaker 1: the elephant DNA sequences can be cut out and paste
Speaker 1: into their place the parts of the mammoth genome sequence
Speaker 1: that are there. So then you have a living cell
Speaker 1: as an elephant cell that has some mammoth DNA sequences
Speaker 1: in it, right, Yeah, but that is not the same
Speaker 1: thing as having a mammoth cell. No, yeah, I'm with you, right,
Speaker 1: And what are the things that you would be Let's
Speaker 1: just make let's assume for a menthy that this is
Speaker 1: already and you could do it. Can we can we
Speaker 1: finish why that cell is not ever going to be
Speaker 1: the exact same thing as a mamothy, because this was
Speaker 1: the question you asked me at the very beginning, and
Speaker 1: we kind of gone down a lot of different rabbit
Speaker 1: holes here. But let's see. So let's say you somehow
Speaker 1: managed to identify all the places where mamoths and elephants
Speaker 1: are different. And you managed to make all of those changes,
Speaker 1: cut and paste one and a half million different letters
Speaker 1: in that cell that's growing in additional lab So now
Speaker 1: you have a genome sequence that looks, as far as
Speaker 1: you can tell, like a mammoth genome sequence. Right, Why
Speaker 1: wouldn't that turn into a mammoth? Well, the main reason
Speaker 1: is that we are more. Every organism is more than
Speaker 1: the sequence of the A, C, S, G S, and
Speaker 1: T s that make up our d N A. That um.
Speaker 1: There are things that happened during development that change the
Speaker 1: way our genes expressed. Our mom's diet, whether she gets sick,
Speaker 1: what she's exposed to, how stressed she is, et cetera.
Speaker 1: All those things will change the way our genes are expressing.
Speaker 1: Some of the developmental things that happen in utero are
Speaker 1: caused by hormonal changes in mom, which are coded for
Speaker 1: by her genome, which is an elephant at this point, right.
Speaker 1: And then the animal is born and it consumes an
Speaker 1: elephants diet, and it's taught how to behave like an elephant,
Speaker 1: and it has a gut microbes that are like an elephant,
Speaker 1: and we're just beginning to learn how important the things
Speaker 1: that live in our gut are to a lot of
Speaker 1: animals I know do this, but they'll eat like fegal
Speaker 1: matter of the mother to colonize their guts what it needs.
Speaker 1: That's right. And so those organisms living in its gut
Speaker 1: are going to be expressing different chemicals and etcetera, and
Speaker 1: those are going to affect the way the genes are expressed.
Speaker 1: And so this thing that is born might have mammoth DNA,
Speaker 1: but it's not going to be a identical to a
Speaker 1: mammoth that used to be alive, and that's because mammoths
Speaker 1: aren't here anymore. You would need a family of mammoths
Speaker 1: and a mammoth habitat and and mammoth gut microbes and
Speaker 1: etcetera if you were going to make something that's identical
Speaker 1: to a mammoth, which is why it can't happen. But
Speaker 1: I think the people who are proponents of using this
Speaker 1: sort of technology as a way of preserving by a
Speaker 1: diversity or or replacing parts of ecosystems that are missing
Speaker 1: because of an extinction don't really care that you're not
Speaker 1: creating something that's identical to something that's there What they
Speaker 1: really want is to create an ecological proxy, to create
Speaker 1: something that can fill the components of that niche that
Speaker 1: are missing and therefore somehow threatening either the stability of
Speaker 1: the ecosystem in the given in the existing climate or
Speaker 1: or phenomena or threatening other species from going extinct. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that this is necessarily true for mammoths.
Speaker 1: I think that there are people who are interested in
Speaker 1: bringing mammoths back because it's phenomenal, Like, how cool would
Speaker 1: it be to have a mammoth that's back? Can you
Speaker 1: can you hold that thought like touch on why why mammoth?
Speaker 1: Is it because the person they're crazy enough, but RecA
Speaker 1: they're crazy enough to have attention, but recent enough to
Speaker 1: be in the realm of supposed possibility. I think kind
Speaker 1: of boils down to that. My personal opinion about why
Speaker 1: people have focused on mammoth's and my book is about
Speaker 1: mammoth's as well, even though I don't personally work on
Speaker 1: mammoths in my lab, but it is the thing that
Speaker 1: people talk about. I think people think of mammoths as
Speaker 1: soon as they realize that they can bring back dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: I just think it's like the second most spectacular things
Speaker 1: t rex is out but right right, it's also but
Speaker 1: it is because it's like saber tooth cats, let's bring
Speaker 1: them back. Or arc Todus giant short faced bear that
Speaker 1: we made extinct because it would stand up and would
Speaker 1: be fourteen feet tall and we didn't like that when
Speaker 1: we were trying to let our kids run around outside.
Speaker 1: You know, that was um. So mammoth they seem well,
Speaker 1: they're huge, they're spectacular, they're definitely gone. Um, but they
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't kill us. You know, there's some like kind
Speaker 1: of snuggly about them. But it's nothing else in that.
Speaker 1: It's nothing, it's it's nothing other than just those like
Speaker 1: sort of issues of charisma. And maybe it's in the
Speaker 1: realm of possibility because they're coming up out of the ice.
Speaker 1: And I think this is the reason that we see
Speaker 1: a lot of popular attention to it. Now. There are
Speaker 1: people who make ecological arguments for bringing mammoths back to life. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a father son team that live in northeastern Siberia,
Speaker 1: the Zimov Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita. They have
Speaker 1: this this place called Pleistocene park Um where they're trying
Speaker 1: to bring enough big herbivores back that they can re
Speaker 1: establish this rich grassland that used to be in the
Speaker 1: Siberian tundra during the ice age. And they have um
Speaker 1: imported bison from Canada, and they have a couple different
Speaker 1: species of deer, and they have horses, etcetera. And they
Speaker 1: have been able to show that having these animals on
Speaker 1: the landscape sort of increases the production of this grassland.
Speaker 1: So they move things around, the recycling nutrients, they're chewing
Speaker 1: stuff up. And they've even made the argument um that
Speaker 1: because these animals are there and they're feeding during the winter,
Speaker 1: they're pulling away the snow and creating these exposed bits
Speaker 1: of soil. And this would have happened during the ice age,
Speaker 1: where the snow would have been removed and the soil
Speaker 1: was exposed. And in doing so, they're actually causing the
Speaker 1: sediment that is in the area to warm up less
Speaker 1: quickly than it does when the snow is on top
Speaker 1: of this is a little bit counterintuitive. So if you
Speaker 1: think about it, if the average temperature of the soil,
Speaker 1: if the sorry, if the soil temperature is really the
Speaker 1: average annual ambient temperature, right then um, during the summer,
Speaker 1: it's you know, up there during the winter it's forty
Speaker 1: below So the soil temperature can be very cold as
Speaker 1: long as there's not snow sitting on top of it,
Speaker 1: because snow is a really efficient insulator. And what the
Speaker 1: snow sitting on top of this the soil does is
Speaker 1: it keeps that summer heat in the soil and actually
Speaker 1: causes the soil to warm up faster. Whereas if you
Speaker 1: can pull that snow away, the bare earth is exposed
Speaker 1: to the really cold Siberian winter and cools down that
Speaker 1: that sediment. And so they have made the argument that
Speaker 1: if we could get rid of a lot of the snow,
Speaker 1: which we could do by having really big herbivores like
Speaker 1: mammoth's wandering around, we could slow the rate of permafrost
Speaker 1: warming and slow the relate rate of release of carbon
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere that's coming from parmafrost warming. So they
Speaker 1: are making an ecological argument for why we should have
Speaker 1: these animals back on the landscape. That's something I hadn't
Speaker 1: heard of, because I know that um the the area
Speaker 1: like the Arctic and what was the Bearing land Bridge
Speaker 1: at the time when people talk about with their horses
Speaker 1: up there, there was like an American lion. Everything lots
Speaker 1: of cool things. There was a grassland, there was like
Speaker 1: step grasslands, and now it's tassi, it's tundra. I'd never
Speaker 1: heard the idea that that train. I had always heard
Speaker 1: that transition explained as a climate issue. I never heard
Speaker 1: it explained as perhaps related to grazing habits. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I do you know. Things don't have been in isolation. Obviously,
Speaker 1: ecosystems change. Ecosystems are dynamic. But if you remove grazing
Speaker 1: herbivores from a landscape, the landscape changes. You can see
Speaker 1: that in the desert southwest. There's this little thing called
Speaker 1: the kangaroo rat and it's kind of makes these little tons.
Speaker 1: They're pretty cool, huh. And but once they disappear, and
Speaker 1: they are disappearing, it takes you half a year, and
Speaker 1: the entire landscape has changed because that animal was doing
Speaker 1: a lot to maintain this different type of habitat. It changes,
Speaker 1: other species move in, some other species will disappear. But
Speaker 1: having that little guy there really maintained that habitat. And
Speaker 1: there's little doubt to my mind that having these herbivores
Speaker 1: on the landscape in the High Arctic will have had
Speaker 1: an impact on the the grasslands. I mean they were
Speaker 1: consuming things. They were favoring some plants over others. They
Speaker 1: were moving nutrients around all over the place. They were
Speaker 1: churning the soil by walking over things. Um, they were
Speaker 1: We know that when mammoths and other large mammals disappeared
Speaker 1: from the southern part of North America and California, for example,
Speaker 1: they would have actually kept the trees at bay, these mammoths,
Speaker 1: and so there would have been an enormous change to
Speaker 1: the ecosystem that happened with the extinction of mammoths. And
Speaker 1: it's probably the change that caused Native Americans who lived
Speaker 1: there to start using fire instead of these large animals
Speaker 1: to try to keep the trees at bay so that
Speaker 1: they other things would grow there. So yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: the animals that live in a habitat definitely have some
Speaker 1: feedback into the what habitat is there? Now you know
Speaker 1: that you have the chicken and egg problem. What happened first?
Speaker 1: Did the landscape change so much that it couldn't support
Speaker 1: the animals, or did the animals disappears that the landscape disappeared.
Speaker 1: Probably these things happened together. So the a biotic changes,
Speaker 1: the climate changes associated with warming probably fed into the
Speaker 1: disappearances some of these animals that then fed into more
Speaker 1: changes that were being to the landscape. So remember that,
Speaker 1: you know, when you think about the ecology of a system,
Speaker 1: you're not thinking about one animal or just the vegetation.
Speaker 1: You really have to think about how everything interacts with
Speaker 1: each other, which is one of the arguments for UM
Speaker 1: potentially thinking about using this genome engineering technology to try
Speaker 1: to preserve some components of ecosystems, because as components disappear,
Speaker 1: ecosystems change. However, proximate, however proximate. Are you ready now?
Speaker 1: Can I now prompt you along to what the uh
Speaker 1: what might the mammoth? In quotes, I'm making quotes what
Speaker 1: might the mammoth be? And look like I have no idea.
Speaker 1: It would depend on what genes were changed, you know,
Speaker 1: it would really depend on what what sciencests were interested
Speaker 1: in doing this. We're trying to select. Probably if it
Speaker 1: was something that wanted to live in the high Arctic,
Speaker 1: it would be something that was harriier than an elephant,
Speaker 1: because it needs to be able to protect itself from
Speaker 1: the cold. Um, so our ears probably smaller ears, but
Speaker 1: you know it's a these are it's fluid. You know,
Speaker 1: there has to be so that you thought about a
Speaker 1: great deal. I haven't. I you know, I if I
Speaker 1: had to pick species that I think we should use
Speaker 1: this technology on, I don't think the mammoth would be
Speaker 1: high up on my list. Yeah, is it your Your
Speaker 1: lab has the greatest connection of collection of passenger pigeon
Speaker 1: also not high up on my list for a species
Speaker 1: we should bring back to life, but a species that
Speaker 1: I think is fascinating, which is why we have this collection.
Speaker 1: I am so you're you're not gonning for to bring
Speaker 1: back a billion passenger pigeons. I don't think that's a
Speaker 1: good idea. I think that. You know, when you think
Speaker 1: about bringing a species back to life, there are there
Speaker 1: are technical hurdles, there are ethical hurdles, and there are
Speaker 1: ecological hurdles to doing this. In this case for passenger pigeon,
Speaker 1: there are technical hurdles. One can't clone birds. So the
Speaker 1: point where you have a living cell that you edited
Speaker 1: that you then clone using regular cloning technologies. We can
Speaker 1: do that with birds because we can't get to the
Speaker 1: egg cells at the time in their reproductive cycle where
Speaker 1: they're actually um ripe. They're ready to ready to have
Speaker 1: that little magical thing that happens that reprograms the cells.
Speaker 1: We can't do that. So in order to clone or
Speaker 1: genetically modify birds, we need entirely new technology. And there
Speaker 1: are some technologies that are under development, but they're really
Speaker 1: not as far advanced as I think. So there's technical hurdle. Um. Ethically, uh,
Speaker 1: now with mammoths, there are many ethical hurdles. I mean,
Speaker 1: I elephants in captivity don't do well. We need to
Speaker 1: know a lot more about how to you know, keep
Speaker 1: them psychologically and physically healthy if they're going to be
Speaker 1: in captivity. Obviously this would be a captive breading experiment. Um.
Speaker 1: I think elephants should be allowed to make more elephants
Speaker 1: rather than to be used in experiments to do this.
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of sort of moral
Speaker 1: ethical questions involved with and also they're very highly social creatures.
Speaker 1: Why would you bring one back? You'd need to do
Speaker 1: this over the course of you know, many many generations.
Speaker 1: Elephants have fourteen to eighteen year um eighteen years generate
Speaker 1: times in the wild. Generation times that's how old they
Speaker 1: are when they first have their first babies. This is
Speaker 1: a long and I have a two year gestation, And
Speaker 1: to your gestation, yeah, so there there are technical and
Speaker 1: to my mind a lot of ethical problems with mammoths.
Speaker 1: So has your feeling about this matured over time? I
Speaker 1: think as I've learned more about the technical hurdles, I
Speaker 1: think I've thought more about Um. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: guess obviously your feelings about anything that you're learning a
Speaker 1: lot about mature as you learn more about them. But
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever really been in favor of
Speaker 1: mammoths for for these ethical reasons. UM. What I try
Speaker 1: to do when I think about what species might be
Speaker 1: good for this is I try to think through these questions. First,
Speaker 1: what are the technical hurdles, what are the ethical hurdles,
Speaker 1: what are the ecological implications? And if we get to
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons, I mean, where would they live? But this
Speaker 1: is a species that flocked in the billions, one big
Speaker 1: flock of billions of individuals that would move through forests,
Speaker 1: just destroying forests in their way. We don't even have
Speaker 1: those forests anymore, so where would they go? Maybe they
Speaker 1: didn't need to live in such big flocks. We have
Speaker 1: some genomic evidence now that suggests that they might have
Speaker 1: been genetically adapted to living in large flock, So maybe
Speaker 1: they did that. Yeah, that's that's been explained to me
Speaker 1: that with some things like passenger pigeons, it would be
Speaker 1: that you might have to have many to have any
Speaker 1: because those mass groupings of birds trigger Yeah. Well, this
Speaker 1: is actually fascination with passenger pigeons and why we've been
Speaker 1: interested in studying their their d n A. It is
Speaker 1: amazing to me that a bird could be that abundant,
Speaker 1: and even with the amount of hunting and you know,
Speaker 1: human use of these birds that went on, how did
Speaker 1: they actually disappear? How is it that no tiny little
Speaker 1: pockets of these birds survived. There's no long autumn, right.
Speaker 1: There must have been something about them that made them
Speaker 1: adapted to living in these large flocks, and that's why
Speaker 1: we've been studying them. I'm I'm fascinated to one standard,
Speaker 1: why how something could evolve to be adapted to living
Speaker 1: in such big populations, and why that extinction would have happened.
Speaker 1: And you say you have not found small pockets. No,
Speaker 1: no one ever found small pockets of passenger pigeons surviving.
Speaker 1: They in forty years, they went from millions to billions
Speaker 1: of individuals to extinct, So what are what are if
Speaker 1: those two are out? Like, what is a good candidate? Spees?
Speaker 1: I mean, I know that you like you professionally, like
Speaker 1: I I you don't separate plausibility with the ethics, right
Speaker 1: like you have the conversations at the same time, and
Speaker 1: there's no sense in doing this big ethical exploration of
Speaker 1: something that just isn't going to happen. So you're doing
Speaker 1: these in tandem. As you do them in tandem, considering
Speaker 1: the technology and the ethics, where would be a place
Speaker 1: that maybe not even in your generation, but in the
Speaker 1: next generation of people in your field, where would be
Speaker 1: a place where you might picture if you were able
Speaker 1: to make an edict? Now, I think this is going
Speaker 1: to disappoint you, but I think that this technology has
Speaker 1: its most I'm already disappointed because you're not You're not
Speaker 1: shooting for You're not shooting for the stars here. I
Speaker 1: think this technology has the most potential as a tool
Speaker 1: for conserving species, preserving species that are still alive today.
Speaker 1: I think that we should think about this technology, and
Speaker 1: obviously people like this sort of spectacular nature of thinking
Speaker 1: about bringing things that are extinct back to life. But
Speaker 1: we should think about how we might use DNA sequences
Speaker 1: from individuals from the same or related species that used
Speaker 1: to be alive to increase the diversity decrease vulnerability of
Speaker 1: species that are in danger of going extinct today. And
Speaker 1: whether that means wooly rhinos or kangaroo rats or blackfooted ferrets,
Speaker 1: I don't care, right but I I what I worry
Speaker 1: about is that the kind of spectacular nature of thinking
Speaker 1: about bringing extinct species back might make people less likely
Speaker 1: to think about some of the real benefits of this technology.
Speaker 1: Could have two species that are still alive. There's you
Speaker 1: know this, this thoughts among conservation groups that um, this
Speaker 1: excitement about the extinction is taking away resources that would
Speaker 1: otherwise go to protecting species that are alive. And and
Speaker 1: I don't think that's true. Um. I don't think that
Speaker 1: people who care about preserving polar bears or care about
Speaker 1: preserving woodpeckers are all of a sudden going to stop
Speaker 1: caring about that because some far off possibility of bringing
Speaker 1: mammoths back to life might be there. The money thing
Speaker 1: seems real unless you feel that no money would really
Speaker 1: was headed in one direction and goes off in a
Speaker 1: different direction. I think that where the extinction is right now,
Speaker 1: which is in this let's see how the mammoth genome looks,
Speaker 1: or let's see that Any money that goes into that
Speaker 1: is going to be new money. It's gonna be it.
Speaker 1: There wasn't going to the Eastern Bluebird Society now, but
Speaker 1: you know later if if you actually have an animal,
Speaker 1: you would need to figure out how to regulate it,
Speaker 1: how to rear it, where it goes, and that I
Speaker 1: think would come into conflict with some of the money
Speaker 1: that's going into conservation UM, which is why I think
Speaker 1: that we need to have more realistic conversations about where
Speaker 1: this technology can go and bring people together to think
Speaker 1: about how we might develop this technology as a new
Speaker 1: weapon in what I really feel should be a growing
Speaker 1: arsenal in ways that we are thinking about combating UM
Speaker 1: the extinctions that are happening today, the crises that of
Speaker 1: biodiversity loss that are real UM where wildlife is disappearing,
Speaker 1: and what can we do what what? How can we
Speaker 1: think about modern technologies in a way that is conducive
Speaker 1: to collaboration with people who are interested in conservation rather
Speaker 1: than conflict. I think some of the more spectacle also
Speaker 1: there's this this fear that there's a lot of money
Speaker 1: going to the extinction, which is not true. I know
Speaker 1: it's not true. I know that there are some people
Speaker 1: who care very much about particular species who have been
Speaker 1: who have been generous in thinking about so there are
Speaker 1: people who care about prairie chickens, for example, and are
Speaker 1: very interested in helping to UM to think about ways
Speaker 1: that we can use this technology to increase diversity and
Speaker 1: the robustness of prairie chickens. UM including maybe thinking about
Speaker 1: what is the heathen, which is a prairie chicken that
Speaker 1: used to live on Martha's vineyard, and can we find
Speaker 1: out the differences between heath hens and other species and
Speaker 1: maybe think about using this as a technology to bring
Speaker 1: heathens back. And there have been some people who have
Speaker 1: been generous and donating small amounts of money to do
Speaker 1: sequencing of heathen remains and then some analyzes to figure
Speaker 1: out what we might do there UM the mammoth funding stuff. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, George Church is doing a lot of that
Speaker 1: work at his lab and Harvard. He might have some
Speaker 1: UM specific donors who have been given him money to
Speaker 1: do that. I'm not sure there's zero public funding going
Speaker 1: to this zero. So that's a checkable big number. Yes. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think when I assume my book, I
Speaker 1: actually looked at places like World Wildlife Fund and conservation
Speaker 1: organizations and to figure out exactly how much money had
Speaker 1: gone into de extinction projects, and the number when I
Speaker 1: was writing this book was it was zero. So so
Speaker 1: let me throw two hypotheticals that you if you don't,
Speaker 1: and you can pick which one you like, but I'm
Speaker 1: talk in what you're talking about with that you would
Speaker 1: prevent the technology would be applicable in preventing extinctions, what
Speaker 1: might be imminent extinctions. And I'll throw two cases at you,
Speaker 1: so one you have. We spent a long time having
Speaker 1: a conversation with someone about Mexican the Mexican gray wolf.
Speaker 1: Now they were down to seven all in captivity. They've
Speaker 1: got them up to around a hundred living in the wild.
Speaker 1: They're the barrier to recovery is that they're inconvenient to
Speaker 1: have around. Okay, that's it's like, it's not a habitat issue,
Speaker 1: it's not an animal issue. It's just people don't like
Speaker 1: predators that they're inconvenient. Right, I don't know how to
Speaker 1: quite break it. Out, But fifty of that fifty of
Speaker 1: the inconvenience argument comes from hunters who want more dear
Speaker 1: and out, particularly out on the ground that they can
Speaker 1: hunt and eat and enjoy. And again I'm not sure
Speaker 1: on the percentage is livestock producers who don't these wolves
Speaker 1: are affecting their ability to make a living. Let's say, like,
Speaker 1: would it be the kind of thing you're talking about,
Speaker 1: could you ever imagine that you would make a gray
Speaker 1: wolf that doesn't eat? No, no, let's rule that out
Speaker 1: manipulated gray wolf that you would find in them? Like
Speaker 1: what is it about lives cattle? That's you can pick
Speaker 1: from that one or you can pick from this one.
Speaker 1: Why are why is the greater sage grouse? So per
Speaker 1: snickitty about where it lives? Which of those is better?
Speaker 1: If you're gonna look at some way to explore like
Speaker 1: what you're talking about with helping species, because we have
Speaker 1: two species sage grouse and the reason, well, just because behavior.
Speaker 1: Trying to to understand the behavior of a predator that's
Speaker 1: not going to be one gene or ten genes or
Speaker 1: hunter genes. This is going to be a gene environment,
Speaker 1: heredity interaction thing that's going to be extremely difficult to understand,
Speaker 1: so you're never going to suss out like why do
Speaker 1: these things? But you might be able to do experiments
Speaker 1: with sage grouse that we're able to identify individuals that
Speaker 1: were capable of living in different habitats um, and and
Speaker 1: then you could hone in on whatever genes are associated
Speaker 1: with the why is this? Why is this one? Okay?
Speaker 1: With being with breeding, with nesting next to an oil rig, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just as happy and productive. So that would be
Speaker 1: It's not easy, right because you're still talking about behavior
Speaker 1: and you're still talking, but there are other things about
Speaker 1: stage grouse. They have shorter generation times, it's an easier
Speaker 1: thing to think about. Um, you're talking about nesting habitat preference,
Speaker 1: which is something that you could select for. You could
Speaker 1: do artificial selection for individuals that want to nest in
Speaker 1: particular places. Whereas trying to teach a wolf not to
Speaker 1: be a wolf. That's a tough one, right. So is
Speaker 1: there a one like I gave you two? Is there
Speaker 1: one that you really love, like a scenario that you
Speaker 1: think is like right for exploration? I you know, I
Speaker 1: would like a low hanging fruit um, like the black
Speaker 1: footed ferret, so is there Yeah, so something where there's
Speaker 1: a particular trait that you can hone in on that's
Speaker 1: not caused by too many different genes that is missing
Speaker 1: in a population, or that one population has but another
Speaker 1: one doesn't, and that would be like that would be
Speaker 1: the disease resistance. Yeah. So, well this isn't a wildlife question,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of easier to get your get your
Speaker 1: wrap your head around. Um, there are we know that
Speaker 1: oceans are becoming more cidic, and if you could identify
Speaker 1: populations of fish and there there was a paper recently
Speaker 1: where they identified a picular population of particular species of
Speaker 1: fish that was capable of surviving and producing more offspring
Speaker 1: in an environment of higher acidity than other populations. If
Speaker 1: you could figure out what genes cause that, you could
Speaker 1: move those genes into other fish, then maybe we would
Speaker 1: have a way of of safeguarding fish against some of
Speaker 1: the acidity increases happening in the oceans while we try
Speaker 1: to figure out a way to stop that as well.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we should do this instead. This is important,
Speaker 1: but you know these changes, some of these anthrogenic changes
Speaker 1: to our our climate are happening too quickly for evolution
Speaker 1: to sort it out on its own, and if there
Speaker 1: are these scenarios where we could find genes and move
Speaker 1: them around. Another thing is heat tolerance and corals. So
Speaker 1: if you could find corals that are able to survive
Speaker 1: and higher temperature environments, and you could figure out what
Speaker 1: genes are associated with that, could you then move those
Speaker 1: genes into different species of corals so we could stop
Speaker 1: all the corals from dying. These are hard, like probably
Speaker 1: really hard, maybe impossible questions to answer, but there are
Speaker 1: things where you can imagine targeting coming up with a
Speaker 1: way of figuring it out. Now, you know, there's, as
Speaker 1: I said, there's little, very little money going into this
Speaker 1: because you know, public funding these days, we only like
Speaker 1: to fund things that we know are going to work,
Speaker 1: which mostly means you have to already have done the
Speaker 1: experiments using your own money in order to do it,
Speaker 1: or it has to have immediate impact on human health.
Speaker 1: And there has as yet to be a recognition enough
Speaker 1: of a recognition of how important healthy, diverse habitats are
Speaker 1: to maintaining healthy humans. Um but this is something that
Speaker 1: I think is going to become more and more apparent. Hopefully,
Speaker 1: hold on, you're saying that we're like connected to the
Speaker 1: natural world. Um. Yeah, don't don't tell Congress, but tell them.
Speaker 1: Actually A questions. Two questions. Question number one, Um, you're
Speaker 1: sensitive about Uh, you're sensitive about the idea that people
Speaker 1: would accuse people in your field of promoting this idea
Speaker 1: that we could just say screw it, will fix it later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we can't. We cannot fix it. Once something is gone,
Speaker 1: it is gone. Even if we create proxies of that
Speaker 1: thing so that we can try to have other things
Speaker 1: not disappear, it's not the same thing as say, eavning
Speaker 1: it in the first place. And you know that I
Speaker 1: don't think that you know, people have made that argument
Speaker 1: to me before. I tend to be more of an
Speaker 1: optimist than that. I think that it thinks that assumes
Speaker 1: two things about people that are both kind of awful. Um.
Speaker 1: Actually one of them maybe I'm not being too optimistic
Speaker 1: about I think the first thing is it assumes is
Speaker 1: that people in general care about extinction. Um. And I
Speaker 1: think maybe they don't. I think maybe most people, inasmuch
Speaker 1: as it doesn't actually affect them personally, don't care. And
Speaker 1: maybe by talking about things that are extinct and what
Speaker 1: we're missing we can get more people to actually care
Speaker 1: about things going extinct in the first place. Will it
Speaker 1: make these people feel more comfortable about stuff going extinct? Maybe,
Speaker 1: And that is something we have to work against by
Speaker 1: not letting this report that mommoths are going to be
Speaker 1: cloned in two years continue to go through the news
Speaker 1: cycle because they're not. We can never bring a mammoth back,
Speaker 1: and it's really important that we don't falsely say that
Speaker 1: we can, because this or what I could see happening,
Speaker 1: is that someone creates a hairy elephant and he's in
Speaker 1: a part and then all of a sudden there's a
Speaker 1: story about how you know, however they want to pitch
Speaker 1: at that time, and we'll go, oh, yes, that might
Speaker 1: be the thing that happens. First, we're a very far
Speaker 1: away away from from creating any sort of manipulated elephants.
Speaker 1: We can't we can't actually do any of that reproductive
Speaker 1: technology for elephants yet. So there's you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of technical stuff that we didn't talk about that's
Speaker 1: in the in between you know, today and having edited
Speaker 1: Mammoth's Mammoth's Back. But the other thing that it assumes
Speaker 1: is that people who do care about extinction, people like
Speaker 1: me and hopefully people like you and people listening to
Speaker 1: this podcast, are all of a sudden not going to
Speaker 1: do so because some far off crazy thing happens and
Speaker 1: a mammoth like thing comes back. I think people are
Speaker 1: still going to care about losing the animals that are
Speaker 1: in their backyard that they care about having there, and
Speaker 1: that like some idea that maybe someday in the future
Speaker 1: someone might be able to bring them back, won't stop
Speaker 1: them from worrying that they're not going to be there
Speaker 1: next week or in ten years or when their kids
Speaker 1: want to go out and and hunt or play with
Speaker 1: these animals that are in the backyard. I think people
Speaker 1: who care will continue to care. I hope that people
Speaker 1: who don't care will care even less. And that's that's
Speaker 1: the fear well sort of the argument. Like someone with
Speaker 1: a big trust fund right doesn't develop a sort of
Speaker 1: aggressiveness in an opportunistic sense because they always know that
Speaker 1: no matter what they do, they're going to be okay
Speaker 1: down the road. But here's my here's my second last question.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like the that the people in I
Speaker 1: don't know how to put it, like your peers, what
Speaker 1: do you call your community. That's like, it's not your community.
Speaker 1: Who are the you know, my peers, my colleague, Yeah,
Speaker 1: your colleagues who who deal in this world? How much
Speaker 1: are you guys? Sort of um, like a jockey looking
Speaker 1: for a horse. Okay. So obviously it was like a
Speaker 1: love of the technology that drew many of many of
Speaker 1: your peers into this field. Have you had to try
Speaker 1: to become a little bit elastic in how you apply
Speaker 1: it or talk about applying it in order to make
Speaker 1: it palatable like this to sort of steer the conversation about,
Speaker 1: you know, playing god. As you pointed out a criticism
Speaker 1: in your book that that you found that it's advantageous
Speaker 1: to like turn the technology towards a discussion about de
Speaker 1: extinction or saving nearly extinct species, because it just is
Speaker 1: a good way to sell it. I think that, um,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a big group of people and were
Speaker 1: actually a UM, we have a big community and a
Speaker 1: list serve and it's very active and people are talking
Speaker 1: about people have different motivations for being interested in this,
Speaker 1: and there are some people who really want to bring
Speaker 1: a particular species back, Like there's the group in the
Speaker 1: Netherlands that want the ROCs, which is the ancestor of
Speaker 1: domestic cattle. They want to bring this back and are
Speaker 1: trying to do this by breeding together different breeds of
Speaker 1: all that have different characteristics of the ancestor to eventually
Speaker 1: come up with some new breed that has, you know,
Speaker 1: a cluster of characteristics. Their work was initiated by the
Speaker 1: desire to see like by the desire to make the orcs,
Speaker 1: because they want to be able to have this ORACX
Speaker 1: in these habitats that they're trying to rewild. And so
Speaker 1: they think that in order to bring um wildlife back
Speaker 1: to these parts of Europe that where all all the
Speaker 1: trees were cut down and went to pasture, it said,
Speaker 1: they need to have some of these animals back because
Speaker 1: they want to re establish it. And so their desire
Speaker 1: is to see wildlife in its natural state and they
Speaker 1: think in order to do that, they need to bring
Speaker 1: back something that is like an orox. And so that's
Speaker 1: what's motivating that there's a group in Australia that there's
Speaker 1: there's like the wildlife to biochem path Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's you know, there are people who are interested in
Speaker 1: gastric brooding frogs that people who are interested in MOA's
Speaker 1: for the sake of MOA's there are you know, George
Speaker 1: is interested in using this technology to come up with
Speaker 1: ways to cure um. I think it's her peace in
Speaker 1: elephants and and you know other things. And also then
Speaker 1: there's the Zimovs who really want to to re establish
Speaker 1: tundra in Siberia. So I would say that the motivations
Speaker 1: for this range from conservation to ecological to just really
Speaker 1: being astounded and impressed by the technology, to really wanting
Speaker 1: to bring a particular species back. And obviously people are
Speaker 1: flexible in the way that they talk about this, and
Speaker 1: as people learn more about different motivations and different opportunities
Speaker 1: and different technical and ethical ecological challenges, we change the
Speaker 1: way we are thinking about these things. We grow, we
Speaker 1: learn and adapt, and that's that's not a bad thing. No,
Speaker 1: And it's not like you're and as you pointed out,
Speaker 1: it's not like you're like chasing the money because right
Speaker 1: now there isn't any money change. It's not like you're
Speaker 1: trying to like like human longevity. I imagine there's a
Speaker 1: budget there. In fact, if anyone would like to donate, Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: if we were studying aging or you know, human diseases.
Speaker 1: Then there's there's pockets and money out there for that.
Speaker 1: But as people who are involved with conservation, no, there's
Speaker 1: there's not enough money going around in conservation. I don't
Speaker 1: want to compete with people who are trying to conserve
Speaker 1: species um that are alive today. What I'd like to
Speaker 1: do is collaborate with them. I'd like to create opportunities
Speaker 1: for us to work together so that our motivations, my
Speaker 1: desire to see this technology developed so that it can
Speaker 1: be a useful tool for conservation, happens along with someone
Speaker 1: who's really trying to conserve a particular species. And in
Speaker 1: that way, I guess I am kind of a jockey
Speaker 1: looking for a horse. I want to find people who
Speaker 1: have a question, a problem that they're trying to solve
Speaker 1: that this technology might help to solve, and I want
Speaker 1: to work with them, not against them, because I do
Speaker 1: see that there's tremendous potential in this technology as long
Speaker 1: as we're not too scared of it to try it
Speaker 1: real quick. Um. So your own book, uh, Beth Shapiro,
Speaker 1: How to Clone a Mammoth The Science of de Extinction. Um?
Speaker 1: Where else might people go if they want to if
Speaker 1: they're curious about this, are there's some good There's lots
Speaker 1: of videos on YouTube. There is UM. There was an
Speaker 1: event that's our Community de Extinction community held at National
Speaker 1: Geographic several years ago that you can find a ted
Speaker 1: x D extinction. So there's lots of different talks from
Speaker 1: ethicists and conservation biologists, both for and against UM some
Speaker 1: of the technology, and there is a bit out at
Speaker 1: a date now, but it's a nice place to start,
Speaker 1: a good resource for finding out about the way that
Speaker 1: people are thinking about this. Now is your book current? Yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: The technology moves slowly. All right, Well, thanks so much
Speaker 1: for talking to this man. This is great stuff. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I want I want to schedule another talk for one
Speaker 1: decade from now. Okay, I'll put it on my calendar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then and we'll we'll send up come up with
Speaker 1: the funding to have you for a whole day. I
Speaker 1: feel like we could have talked a lot longer. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Thank you asssssssssssssssssssssss