Speaker 1: According to some scientists, we are in the middle of
Speaker 1: the sixth mass extinction, well past extinctions with the result
Speaker 1: of things like giant asteroids. This one's probably on us.
Speaker 1: Species go extinct on their own in the wild, but
Speaker 1: scientists estimate the extinction rates are about one hundred times
Speaker 1: greater than baseline extinction rates due to human impacts, and
Speaker 1: this rate is increasing over time. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I remember hearing the phrase extinction is forever? But is it?
Speaker 1: With current and future technologies, can we undo the damage
Speaker 1: we've done and bring back the species whose demise is
Speaker 1: our causing. Today we're going to talk about the science
Speaker 1: of d extinction. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think I've
Speaker 2: tasted eight different kinds of animals.
Speaker 1: Hello. I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study space and parasites,
Speaker 1: and I didn't expect you to start with that, so
Speaker 1: I don't know that I have a good count. Give
Speaker 1: me your list. What are the eight kinds of animals
Speaker 1: you've eaten?
Speaker 2: Let's see, of course, pork, I've eaten cows, I've eaten deer,
Speaker 2: I've eaten snake, I've eaten alligator, chicken, turkey, duck, goose.
Speaker 1: All right, that's nine?
Speaker 2: Oh is that nine? Oh my gosh, I already beat
Speaker 2: my record.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good job, Daniel, You're a winner. Let's
Speaker 1: say I've done chickens and ducks and turkey and.
Speaker 2: Moose, deer, pigs and cows.
Speaker 1: Alligator, pigs and cows. We currently have deer in our
Speaker 1: freezer from our property.
Speaker 2: Really sheep?
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that's right. And you've had sheep too, right, Yeah, so.
Speaker 2: That's ten for me, and I've had goats. What's the
Speaker 2: weirdest thing you've eaten?
Speaker 3: Then?
Speaker 1: Moose hearts?
Speaker 2: Ooh yeah, it was dried oh, moose heart jerky.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like moose heart jerky. And it was
Speaker 1: in a paper bag and the host that I was
Speaker 1: visiting pulled it out of the paper bag and there
Speaker 1: was still fat on top of it and it looked,
Speaker 1: you know, like a heart, and it got sliced and
Speaker 1: then put on a cracker with some butter and if
Speaker 1: I shut my eyes, it was delicious, but I kind
Speaker 1: of had to like not make eye contact with the food.
Speaker 2: Well that's my question for you today, is which extinct
Speaker 2: animal do you think is the tastiest? Oh, what in
Speaker 2: the past did humans really savor that we will never experience. Gosh,
Speaker 2: I wonder how wooly mammoth tasted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well we might know soon, according to Colossal, in
Speaker 1: five years we might be able to find out.
Speaker 2: Do you think this is the real motivation for bringing
Speaker 2: back species?
Speaker 1: I don't know. But there's an interesting movement called invasive war.
Speaker 1: I think it's what it's called. And the idea is
Speaker 1: that if you have an invasive species, you try to
Speaker 1: kick up a market around eating it. Some people will
Speaker 1: help you bring those numbers down. I can't think of
Speaker 1: any particularly delicious animal we drove to extinction.
Speaker 2: I always wondered about that with Australia, because don't they
Speaker 2: have a bunny infestation? And I thought a lot of
Speaker 2: people eat rabbits. Yeah, don't they just eat the rabbits.
Speaker 1: I mean, at some point there's a lot more rabbits
Speaker 1: than people. I know some people who can't eat bunnies
Speaker 1: because they're cute and they have like a cute filter
Speaker 1: for what they'll eat, and so I think there are
Speaker 1: some people who just can't have bunnies for that reason.
Speaker 1: And maybe there's just not enough people. I don't know
Speaker 1: I've eaten rabbit. There's another one, Have you eaten rabbit?
Speaker 2: I don't think I've knowingly eaten rabbit, but I've eaten
Speaker 2: at some French restaurants where I didn't understand the menu,
Speaker 2: and so there's always a question there. Oh wait, snails,
Speaker 2: I've had snails. Oh so boo, I'm up to eleven.
Speaker 1: Yeah, snails get infected by lots of trema toad species,
Speaker 1: and you can't get sick by eating the snails. But
Speaker 1: that knowledge, I won't be able to ever eat a snail.
Speaker 1: I don't think I also have a texture thing. I
Speaker 1: don't think snails are for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not sort of second serving kind of a
Speaker 2: thing either.
Speaker 1: I'm also not an oyster person, and I know loads
Speaker 1: of people love oysters.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, oh wait, we didn't even count the kinds
Speaker 2: of fish. Oh, the whole other category of animals. Wow,
Speaker 2: we've eaten a lot more than we imagine. Yeah, we
Speaker 2: should do a thorough accounting.
Speaker 1: We should. We should. I guess if you include plants
Speaker 1: and herbs and stuff, I'm sure we've conde many many
Speaker 1: species in our lives.
Speaker 2: Katrina tries to eat thirty different kinds of plants every day.
Speaker 1: Wow? Why why not? Okay, yeah, sure, sure.
Speaker 2: I think the diversity is good for your gut, you know,
Speaker 2: keep all those little microbes.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Oh wow. I would get on a Katrina
Speaker 1: diet if she were like a fitness instructor, you know,
Speaker 1: I think it would be science informed.
Speaker 2: You know, she's working on a recipe book, Science Informed
Speaker 2: Recipes for your Health.
Speaker 1: Sign me up. I want that book.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Ever since we had her on the show, I do
Speaker 1: make sure that I have a cup of beans every day.
Speaker 2: There you go, all right to your health.
Speaker 1: Zach does not say thank you, but I feel better.
Speaker 2: All right. Well, we're not here to talk about what's
Speaker 2: coming out of Kelly. We're here to talk about what's
Speaker 2: coming out of a really interesting research project that's made
Speaker 2: the news recently.
Speaker 1: I love your transitions.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's a big step to get us back on track.
Speaker 1: But do you always find the cleverest path between them.
Speaker 1: So today we're talking about a company called Colossal, and
Speaker 1: Colossal is all about de extinction. So they're trying to
Speaker 1: bring back animals that have been driven to extinction in
Speaker 1: every case by humans, and they made the news recently
Speaker 1: because they are claiming to have brought back the dire wolf,
Speaker 1: And so we asked our listeners did Colossal bring back
Speaker 1: the dire wolf? And here's what they had to say.
Speaker 2: I have no idea that you got me on that one.
Speaker 4: No, they created something that will resemble the dire wolf
Speaker 4: but is not actually a dire wolf.
Speaker 5: Did Colossal bring back the dire wolf in the sense
Speaker 5: of that a being is the product of using a
Speaker 5: specific DNA recipe in an Earth environment to recreate a
Speaker 5: member of the species.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, did they bring back the dire
Speaker 5: wolf to be a staple resident of this planet? We're
Speaker 5: far a cry from that.
Speaker 2: Did what bring back?
Speaker 3: The what philosof falling into a parallel universe is that
Speaker 3: the gene.
Speaker 2: Editing thing probably not clickbait. I'm not buying it.
Speaker 4: It's a genetically modified gray wolf that happens to have
Speaker 4: some traits of a dire wolf. So I did see
Speaker 4: the headlines on this, and I guess it depends on
Speaker 4: the quality of the sequence. If they didn't have a
Speaker 4: complete sequence and had to splice in like regular wolf genes,
Speaker 4: then maybe not. I saw a direwolf skeleton at the
Speaker 4: Libret Tarpitz and on Game of Thrones, but I don't
Speaker 4: know anything about Colossal. Seems to be like a rock
Speaker 4: band touring, but with only one of the original band members.
Speaker 6: They really only brought back certain traits of a dire wolf,
Speaker 6: but not necessarily every single trait.
Speaker 2: So it looks like a dire wolf, but we don't
Speaker 2: really know if it has all the other traits of
Speaker 2: a dire wolf.
Speaker 6: Colossal brought back the dire wolf like Jurassic Hark brought
Speaker 6: back to velociraptor.
Speaker 2: I always thought dire wolves were fictions, so I didn't
Speaker 2: know they could come back. I thought they were just
Speaker 2: from like Game of Thrones and things. I'm going to say,
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: No, I didn't think so three individuals are not a population,
Speaker 3: let alone any species. That doesn't mean that it's not interesting.
Speaker 3: I'm sure they learn a lot about the phenotypical features
Speaker 3: that make wolf differentiate extinct wolves from current wolves, so
Speaker 3: I'm sure it's a very interesting work.
Speaker 6: I think that they brought it mostly back, but I
Speaker 6: think that because it had to be an animal from
Speaker 6: today and DNA from a dire wolf, then technically it's
Speaker 6: not actually the one hundred percent complete dire Wolf.
Speaker 1: A lot of skepticism here, a lot of skepticism. The
Speaker 1: answers either fell into I have no idea what you're
Speaker 1: talking about mmmm, or no they did not. I don't
Speaker 1: think anybody was like, yes they did. One person said
Speaker 1: it was interesting, nonetheless, but they didn't completely bring back
Speaker 1: the dire wolf.
Speaker 2: So give us some background. Tell us about this project.
Speaker 2: What is de extinctification and why would somebody want to
Speaker 2: do it?
Speaker 1: Okay, so you've added a lot of unnecessary syllables.
Speaker 2: What do you mean de extinctification?
Speaker 5: Is this?
Speaker 1: Let's see a lot. We can get it by the
Speaker 1: end of the show. I'm digging it. I think the
Speaker 1: way that most people imagine the extinction is that you
Speaker 1: are bringing back exactly the organism that we drove to
Speaker 1: extinction at some point in the past, and so it
Speaker 1: has the exact same genotype. You could PLoP it back
Speaker 1: in the environment and it would be exactly the same.
Speaker 1: Behave the same have the same genome, all the same.
Speaker 2: All right, But if we're going to be really technical
Speaker 2: and nerdy about what is and isn't de extinctificationism, then
Speaker 2: you know, what does that even mean? Because when you
Speaker 2: had an extent population. It's not like you had a
Speaker 2: single genome that define the species, right, You had a variation,
Speaker 2: you had diversity, and so what does it mean to
Speaker 2: say I'm going to bring back the exact species in
Speaker 2: that context anyway?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're already starting to hone in on some
Speaker 1: of the problems here. So, especially for long dead organisms,
Speaker 1: you probably don't even have one complete genome from that organism,
Speaker 1: let alone genomes from I don't know the one thousand
Speaker 1: organisms that you would need to have a functioning population.
Speaker 1: In the more near term, we are sort of raising
Speaker 1: from the dead genotypes for for example, black ferret. So
Speaker 1: the black ferret population is in decline. This is happening
Speaker 1: right now. But every once in a while, some lab
Speaker 1: or zoo will find a black ferret frozen in their
Speaker 1: freezer and they'll extract genetic material from that black ferret
Speaker 1: and bring to life of black ferret with that genome.
Speaker 2: Is this something that happens to biologists? They just like
Speaker 2: find black ferrets in their freezer, like, oh, what's this,
Speaker 2: there's a chocolate pie from last week. Oh, here's a
Speaker 2: black ferret.
Speaker 1: I mean, Katrina has never found bags fecis in your
Speaker 1: freezer that.
Speaker 2: Got lost, yes, but never a ferris.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, all right, Well she's not the right kind
Speaker 1: of biologist. If you were dating the right kind of biologists,
Speaker 1: there'd be ferrets in there.
Speaker 2: Okay, So this is something you put in your freezer.
Speaker 2: It's not just something you discover. Oh my gosh, look
Speaker 2: there's a ferret in my freezer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, Like, you know, maybe it was part
Speaker 1: of your zoo population. You thought maybe I could use
Speaker 1: this for later, because that's something biologists think, and so
Speaker 1: I ended up in a freezer and then it got
Speaker 1: found and they're like, oh, that could help. So one
Speaker 1: problem is that it's very hard to get the genetic
Speaker 1: diversity that you need, especially when you're working with very
Speaker 1: long dead organisms.
Speaker 2: So I think you're saying that the population had diversity
Speaker 2: and it's not easy to pull back the whole population. Yeah,
Speaker 2: But I'm wondering, even on a more technical level, like
Speaker 2: which individual would you pull back, and would any of
Speaker 2: them qualify or would some sort of mixture of them qualify.
Speaker 2: Like when you say de extinctification, you mean you've resurrected
Speaker 2: an individual that previously existed or a representative individual from
Speaker 2: that species. Like I want to know exactly what it
Speaker 2: means and what qualifies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, so let's get to that. So let's
Speaker 1: start with Colossal's definition of de extinctificationization and they are
Speaker 1: calling it functional de extinction, and they say it's the
Speaker 1: process of generating an organism that both resembles and is
Speaker 1: genetically similar to an extinct species by resurrecting its lost
Speaker 1: lineage of core genes, engineering natural resistances, and enhancing adaptability
Speaker 1: that will allow it to thrive into day's environment of
Speaker 1: climate change, dwindling resources, disease, and human interference. Wow, I
Speaker 1: know it's low.
Speaker 2: That's not a definition, it's an essay.
Speaker 1: They've got a lot of words on their website, but
Speaker 1: you can see already a couple things popping up. They're
Speaker 1: not saying that they are bringing back the entire genome
Speaker 1: or a diversity of different types of genomes. They are
Speaker 1: bringing back core genes. So they are picking which genes
Speaker 1: they think are critical to making a particular extinct species
Speaker 1: and comparing that to the nearest living relative, and they're
Speaker 1: bringing those genes back.
Speaker 2: Do you think that they're doing this way because this
Speaker 2: is all that's possible, or do you think, as maybe
Speaker 2: implied by their little essay, they're doing it this way
Speaker 2: because they want to create a version which could actually
Speaker 2: survive in today's environment rather than something which died out
Speaker 2: and lived in a previous environment.
Speaker 1: It's probably both, I see, But that limitation in what's
Speaker 1: possible is really important. So DNA degrades pretty quickly after
Speaker 1: an animal dies, so by the time you're looking at
Speaker 1: something like the dire wolf or mammoths, if you find
Speaker 1: a specimen maybe that was frozen very soon after death,
Speaker 1: there's going to be a lot of the genetic sequence
Speaker 1: that you can still read if you're lucky, but you're
Speaker 1: not going to have the entire genetic sequence. And with
Speaker 1: mammoths in particular, we're lucky because there have been more
Speaker 1: than one specimen where we can get some genetic material.
Speaker 1: But you can't put together an entire exact genome for
Speaker 1: the wooly mammoth. There's not enough intact genomes for organisms
Speaker 1: that are long dead.
Speaker 2: All right. So then before we dig into the dire
Speaker 2: wolf real project, I just want to know from a
Speaker 2: philosophical perspective, Kelly, say, if I gave you infinite resources,
Speaker 2: there are no technical limitations. You could create any organism
Speaker 2: you wanted, what would you consider de extinctification OFSM It
Speaker 2: would be like you create a whole population. You pull back,
Speaker 2: look the last time there was a thousand living entities
Speaker 2: and you created all of them, or you just picked one,
Speaker 2: or you like average them. Like, if you could do anything,
Speaker 2: what would be the most pristine version of de extinctification.
Speaker 1: My answer is also going to include my thoughts on
Speaker 1: motivations for de extinction. I think that if you are
Speaker 1: bringing an animal back into a world that it never
Speaker 1: existed in and it can't fill its prior ecological role,
Speaker 1: I think from a conservation standpoint, I'm not super interested
Speaker 1: in that. And so if the blackfooted ferrets were to
Speaker 1: go extinct tomorrow and you were able to bring back
Speaker 1: enough individuals so that there wouldn't be in breeding problems,
Speaker 1: and that would depend on how many and what kinds
Speaker 1: of genomes you could get, I don't know, say it's
Speaker 1: five hundred individuals, and then you could put them back
Speaker 1: in their natural environment and somehow they'd be able to
Speaker 1: still have their wild behaviors, which sometimes is you know,
Speaker 1: through learning from other individuals, So that could be to
Speaker 1: get back. But if you're able to get enough genetic
Speaker 1: diversity where they won't decline because of inbreeding, and then
Speaker 1: they can go back into their wild habitat and survive.
Speaker 1: That to me would be successful de extinction. What do
Speaker 1: you think?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think that's fascinating because it says something
Speaker 2: about what a species really is. It's more than one individual,
Speaker 2: it's a community, and it's also their environment and how
Speaker 2: they interact and as you say, like learned behaviors that
Speaker 2: are passed down. So it takes a lot to really
Speaker 2: recreate a lineage. I guess my motivation would be different.
Speaker 2: I'm not an ecologist. I would just be wondering how
Speaker 2: many do you have to bring back so that I
Speaker 2: could have a tasty burger of each kind, you know,
Speaker 2: in a sustainable way. Of course.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, Let's jump a little bit more than into
Speaker 1: motivation for de extinction before we get into the method.
Speaker 1: So Colossal is pushing for de extinction as a method
Speaker 1: to protect ecosystems that are in some form of decline.
Speaker 2: For example, like bees are going extinct and we need
Speaker 2: them as pollinators, so let's make sure we can bring
Speaker 2: them back.
Speaker 1: That kind of thing kind of although I can hear
Speaker 1: a bunch of people saying, the honeybees that we use
Speaker 1: are not native, and so you've already created something artificial.
Speaker 1: But the big example that they use are mammoths. Mammoths
Speaker 1: used to live in like tundras in Siberia, for example,
Speaker 1: and as they walked across the landscape, they would crush
Speaker 1: or knock over trees and their impact on the environment
Speaker 1: resulted in a sustainable grassland. Oh interesting, Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: grassland absorbed a lot of carbon dioxide. And I should
Speaker 1: say I'm parroting exactly what I saw on their website.
Speaker 1: So this is all assuming that they are correct on
Speaker 1: their website, because this is out of my area of knowledge.
Speaker 1: But these grasslands absorb a lot of carbon, which could
Speaker 1: help us in this period of global climate change. And
Speaker 1: having that grass there helps the permafrost not melt, and
Speaker 1: as the permafrost melts, that releases more greenhouse gases and
Speaker 1: is bad for a variety of other reasons. So they're
Speaker 1: arguing that if you de extinct the wooly mammoth, who
Speaker 1: can put it back into this environment which is maybe
Speaker 1: still in the process of changing, and it can push
Speaker 1: the environment back to a more ancestral state, and actually
Speaker 1: that more ancestral state is better for the ecosystems and
Speaker 1: the globe.
Speaker 2: Wow, I'm even more skeptical after hearing that, because this
Speaker 2: sounds to me not like we're going to resiss the
Speaker 2: data species because we think it's cool or it's a tragedy,
Speaker 2: but instead as an element of ecological planetary geoengineering, like
Speaker 2: we think we bring this back, it can change the climate. Like, wow,
Speaker 2: is that a huge Rube Goldberg machine that we do
Speaker 2: not understand? And you start banging on those levers like
Speaker 2: who knows what's going to happen? That seems very dangerous
Speaker 2: to me. To me, that's as bonkers as like the
Speaker 2: folks who want to put sulfur in the atmosphere to
Speaker 2: make it more reflective and see what happens.
Speaker 1: And I think they would argue that putting sulfur in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere to see what happens is different than trying
Speaker 1: to revert back to a state that once did exist.
Speaker 1: I totally see your point. And I'm also skeptical that
Speaker 1: you're going to be able to release wooly mammoths. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's some parts of the world where they'll survive, but
Speaker 1: there won't be a lot of people, and somebody in
Speaker 1: Russia has put a side land that they've called Plistocene
Speaker 1: Park for these mammoths. But you know, like in the US,
Speaker 1: farmers were not happy when wolves were reintroduced. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine suddenly needing to deal with wooly mammoths. I see
Speaker 1: a lot of human animal problems if you actually try
Speaker 1: to work this out.
Speaker 2: I can imagine all sorts of videos on Twitter and
Speaker 2: TikTok of a mammoth like crushing a playground, like walking
Speaker 2: through a soccer game, or you.
Speaker 1: Know, they kill people accidentally. Elephants do accidentally just because
Speaker 1: they're big, lumbering giants. You know, people die to try to,
Speaker 1: you know, give the colossal argument here. The other reasons
Speaker 1: for why they do it are one along the way,
Speaker 1: you learn things you didn't expect. And so I watched
Speaker 1: a video from the chief science officer, her name is
Speaker 1: Best Sapiro, arguing that along the way to studying elephants,
Speaker 1: they came up with a vaccine for this virus that's
Speaker 1: really bad for elephants today. So you have to understand
Speaker 1: elephants today in order to edit them into being something
Speaker 1: mammoth like. And then they explicitly make this space argument
Speaker 1: that when we went to the moon there were all
Speaker 1: of these side benefits along the way, and as we
Speaker 1: shoot for this you know crazy dream of ours, there's
Speaker 1: probably all sorts of cool stuff we're going to come
Speaker 1: up with along the way. I feel like you could
Speaker 1: also argue that if you really wanted to solve this
Speaker 1: virus problem for the elephants, you should have just invested
Speaker 1: in solving the virus problem for the elephants. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so these are the current arguments for de extinction. You
Speaker 1: and I discussed a book called Venomous Lumpsucker. It's a
Speaker 1: fictional book, but it deals with some of the ethical
Speaker 1: problems that might arise if people are like, oh, we
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about driving that animal into extinction
Speaker 1: because we can just bring it back. But you're not
Speaker 1: bringing back the exact same thing. Any of the like
Speaker 1: learned behaviors get lost when that last individual dies, and
Speaker 1: they don't come back when you bring the last one back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I really did enjoy that book, Venomous Lumpsucker. It
Speaker 2: talks about like the corporatization of it and how it
Speaker 2: just gets folded into economic formulas. But it's fascinating to
Speaker 2: me that none of the arguments you've made so far
Speaker 2: about de extinctification and the motivations of it touch the
Speaker 2: reason I think it's exciting, or the reason I would
Speaker 2: be enthusiastic about it, which is this that every lost
Speaker 2: species is like a lost bit of treasure. You know,
Speaker 2: each one is evolved over millions or billions of years.
Speaker 2: It's a solution to a really complex optimization problem. It's fascinating,
Speaker 2: it's inherently valuable. It may be potentially that creates some medicines,
Speaker 2: you know, like aspirin from the bark of a tree.
Speaker 2: Who knows what solutions evolution has come up with that
Speaker 2: might be useful. You know, we're just like the value
Speaker 2: of a species to exist, and it's so tragic that
Speaker 2: it seems so one directional. You know, once a species
Speaker 2: is extinct, it's gone, maybe gone. I remember having that
Speaker 2: drilled into my head as a kid. It just feels
Speaker 2: so tragic. It's like a black hole almost right. Things
Speaker 2: fall in and they never come out. So the idea
Speaker 2: of being able to pull these things from beyond the
Speaker 2: biological event horizon, to me, that's exciting because it opens
Speaker 2: up a whole world of species that we could maybe
Speaker 2: bring back I don't know if that's a terrible idea,
Speaker 2: and I don't actually really want to eat burgers made
Speaker 2: of these animals, But to me, there's an appeal to
Speaker 2: just bringing things back from beyond the event horizon.
Speaker 1: I think we should revisit this question at the very
Speaker 1: end of the episode. You should decide if what it
Speaker 1: is that is being brought back actually checks that box
Speaker 1: that you're talking about, like this thing that's been lost
Speaker 1: is back. So let's take a break and when we
Speaker 1: get back, we'll talk about what exactly was done to
Speaker 1: bring back the dire wolf, and we'll revisit your question.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, and we were just talking about
Speaker 1: why you would bring an animal back from extinction. So
Speaker 1: now let's go into a little bit of detail about
Speaker 1: what Colossal did with the dire wolf. So what exactly
Speaker 1: did they bring back. They had two dire wolves that
Speaker 1: had died in a way that preserved some of their
Speaker 1: genetic material.
Speaker 2: And when did dire wolves go extinct?
Speaker 1: Then went extinct about thirteen thousand years ago, which is
Speaker 1: a lot of time for DNA to degrade.
Speaker 2: Even when it's frozen, it still degrades.
Speaker 1: Even when it's frozen, it can still degrade. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: you know often if you're in an area that's frozen,
Speaker 1: and every once in a while it will thaw out
Speaker 1: a little bit and then it will freeze again, and
Speaker 1: so you know, over time you get these sort of
Speaker 1: fluctuations that break down the DNA. And so what they
Speaker 1: did was, first they figured out what the most closely
Speaker 1: related species alive today is and they determined that that's
Speaker 1: the gray wolf. So they got the genome from the
Speaker 1: gray wolf and they use that as a reference. And
Speaker 1: so they put together the genome of the dire wolf
Speaker 1: as best they could from the sequences that they had,
Speaker 1: and they matched that up to the gray wolf so
Speaker 1: that they could try to figure out where the like
Speaker 1: chunks of DNA that they had collected, because a lot
Speaker 1: of time the DNA gets like broken into pieces and
Speaker 1: then it's like a puzzle. You need to figure out
Speaker 1: where the pieces are supposed to go, and if you
Speaker 1: match it up with the gray wolf, that kind of helps.
Speaker 2: You, all right. So we don't have a complete genome
Speaker 2: of the dire wolf. We have some snapshots and bits,
Speaker 2: some snippets here and there from a couple of dire
Speaker 2: wolves that were frozen thirteen thousand years ago, just from
Speaker 2: two individuals. Yep, Wow, that's amazing. And so to fill
Speaker 2: it out, they compare with the gray wolf, which they
Speaker 2: think is similar, and it's sort of like sketching out
Speaker 2: the bits that were missing and then also understanding the differences.
Speaker 2: Is that what's going on?
Speaker 1: Yes, And so to try to understand the differences, what
Speaker 1: they did is they'd look at areas where the genomes
Speaker 1: seemed to differ, and they would say, Okay, this genetic
Speaker 1: code in other species has been associated with, for example,
Speaker 1: white fur coats or with more muscular thighs, and so
Speaker 1: they'd look for areas where the genomes differed and they
Speaker 1: found Why does that make you laugh?
Speaker 2: Because I'm imagining dire wolves with the like really chunky thighs,
Speaker 2: like looking out the gym like direwolf says, don't skip
Speaker 2: leg dais.
Speaker 1: That is a trait that they honed in on.
Speaker 2: How do we know that just from the frozen diar
Speaker 2: Roves were like, wow, look at those.
Speaker 1: I don't actually know if they were able to tell
Speaker 1: from the frozen dire wolves, but they looked at the
Speaker 1: genotypic sequences and they were like, Okay, this looks a
Speaker 1: little different, and I think often they'd say this looks
Speaker 1: a little different in ways that are consistent with more
Speaker 1: muscular legs, So that's probably what they had. So they
Speaker 1: ended up deciding that probably dire wolves differed from gray
Speaker 1: wolves by having increased size, broader skulls, a white coat,
Speaker 1: stronger shoulders and legs, and a thick and sort of
Speaker 1: condensed coat.
Speaker 2: They sound kind of awesome. Why did they go extinct?
Speaker 1: They do sound awesome. I don't know why they went extinct.
Speaker 1: Probably humans, that's my guest.
Speaker 2: Too many dire wolf burgers.
Speaker 1: It sounds like, yeah, well, animals can be delicious. It's
Speaker 1: not their fault. And so they found twenty genes that
Speaker 1: they thought, you know, it looks like these are important differences.
Speaker 1: So we're going to take the gray wolf genome and
Speaker 1: we're going to edit it in those twenty locations so
Speaker 1: that it looks like the dire wolf genome. But it's
Speaker 1: important to keep in mind that when an organism is
Speaker 1: expressing a trait, it's not just about the genes that
Speaker 1: it has. It's also about when those genes are turned
Speaker 1: on and how long they're turned on. So you might
Speaker 1: remember when we were talking about coat color when we
Speaker 1: were answering our listener questions episode, Whether or not a
Speaker 1: particular hair cell makes black or white is all about
Speaker 1: whether or not this promoter for a gene is turned
Speaker 1: on or off, whether or not a gene is getting
Speaker 1: the message to make black or not. But none of
Speaker 1: that timing information is probably incorporated in this technique. But
Speaker 1: they did end up getting organisms that look like what
Speaker 1: we imagine dire wolves look like. They sort of look
Speaker 1: like the specimens we've collected. They look like what we
Speaker 1: all saw in Game of Thrones. And so the stuff
Speaker 1: that they took after they edited the genome is they
Speaker 1: put that genetic information into an egg from a gray wolf,
Speaker 1: and then they got that gray wolf pregnant, she carried
Speaker 1: it to term, and she gave birth to a dire wolf.
Speaker 1: And they did that three times.
Speaker 5: Mm.
Speaker 2: So this sort of answer is the deep philosophical question, right,
Speaker 2: what came first the dire wolf for the puppy? I guess,
Speaker 2: because here you implanted a dire wolf into another species
Speaker 2: and it was able to gestate and give birth to it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and does that require the species to be similar? Like
Speaker 2: you couldn't put that inside an elephant for example.
Speaker 1: Right, that's right. It requires the species to be similar,
Speaker 1: but this is another area where things could be different.
Speaker 1: So maternal effects refers to all of the different ways
Speaker 1: that a fetus is impacted by the mom's body. It
Speaker 1: could be the hormones that she's producing, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: subsequently it can be the bacteria that she passes on
Speaker 1: to her offspring, or the things that you get from
Speaker 1: the milk, including bacteria, and so any of that maternal
Speaker 1: effects stuff that was dire wolf specific, they are now
Speaker 1: getting gray wolf versions of.
Speaker 2: And give us a sensum like the distance between these
Speaker 2: two species. I mean, it's sort of amazing to me
Speaker 2: that you can have one species give birth to another.
Speaker 2: I mean, could you put a human baby inside a
Speaker 2: gorilla for example. I'm not suggesting anybody do that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is a thought experiment to think about the difference,
Speaker 2: Like how far away from us could you get and
Speaker 2: still have a live birth.
Speaker 1: I don't think enough experiments have been done where we
Speaker 1: could have a good answer to that.
Speaker 2: It sounds like you're suggesting some human experimentation in there.
Speaker 2: I'm not signing on to that.
Speaker 1: I have absolutely not suggesting that kind of human experimentation.
Speaker 1: I think that's wildly unethical to be clear on the record,
Speaker 1: shouldn't do that.
Speaker 2: But you're saying that the only way to know is
Speaker 2: to do the experiment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think in a lot of cases that would
Speaker 1: be the best way to know. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: closer related species probably have similar requirements. It wouldn't surprise
Speaker 1: me if a chimpanzee or a bonobo could well. But
Speaker 1: so like, we're much bigger than them, and so at
Speaker 1: some point you get to how big is the head
Speaker 1: that's coming through a tiny opening? And like, chimpanzees might
Speaker 1: not be able to survive that part.
Speaker 2: You know, Well, do we know how much experimentation Colossal did,
Speaker 2: Like is this their first attempt and their first success
Speaker 2: or did they have a bunch of failures first?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know that they have publicly reported
Speaker 1: if there were gray wolves who had miscarriages or who
Speaker 1: died in childbirth or anything. I don't remember seeing anything
Speaker 1: like that. I think in general, they've kept this project
Speaker 1: pretty close to the vest and haven't been releasing too
Speaker 1: many details. But we know that it worked at least
Speaker 1: three times.
Speaker 2: And is this like a scientific project or they can
Speaker 2: be publishing papers in peer review journals, or is it
Speaker 2: a commercial project like they're going to be selling dire
Speaker 2: wolf puppies both.
Speaker 1: I don't have any evidence that they're selling dire wolf puppies.
Speaker 1: They have been publishing scientific papers as they go. So
Speaker 1: for example, they have a paper in review right now
Speaker 1: showing that gray wolves are the closest living relatives to
Speaker 1: the dire wolfs. Beth Shapiro does study ancient DNA, and
Speaker 1: she works on these questions about relatedness between species, and
Speaker 1: so as they go, they're doing a lot of science
Speaker 1: and they're publishing it and sharing it as they go.
Speaker 2: And do you get the sense that this is cutting
Speaker 2: edge science? I know that a lot of times in
Speaker 2: popular science we hear about something and we're told it's amazing,
Speaker 2: and then people in the field are like, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: not very impressive, and Bob over there at Georgia is
Speaker 2: already doing that. Is this cutting edge science?
Speaker 1: I would say that in addition to doing solid science,
Speaker 1: they are doing pretty cutting edge stuff. I do feel
Speaker 1: like bringing back these ancient genes is impressive. I'm not
Speaker 1: feeling completely satisfied at an emotional level that we have
Speaker 1: undone any damage our species might have done. Like, I
Speaker 1: don't necessarily feel like this method does that, but I
Speaker 1: do feel like they've done some pretty interesting stuff.
Speaker 2: All right. So they've started from a gray wolf and
Speaker 2: they've basically taken a big step towards dire wolf DNA,
Speaker 2: not completely all the way there, only twenty edits, but
Speaker 2: still in the sort of information space of DNA. They've
Speaker 2: gone from the gray wolf towards a dire wolf and
Speaker 2: then successfully given birth to this critter which is like
Speaker 2: alive in running around and baying at the moon and
Speaker 2: stuff like that. So I guess the question then is like,
Speaker 2: is this a dire wolf? What is this thing?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that is the big question. And I want
Speaker 1: to real quick say something that maybe I wish I
Speaker 1: had mentioned earlier, which is that we don't yet have
Speaker 1: the ability to print genomes. So even if you did have,
Speaker 1: for example, the entire direwolf genome read out, we don't
Speaker 1: have a machine that can print an entire genome at
Speaker 1: a reasonable cost, like I think it would be like
Speaker 1: a billion dollars or something. And so that's another reason
Speaker 1: why you take gray wolf genomes and edit them and
Speaker 1: then use that to make the next round of babies.
Speaker 1: So it's possible that in ten twenty years or something,
Speaker 1: you could print everything you know about the dire wolf
Speaker 1: genome instead of picking these twenty genes to tinker with,
Speaker 1: and then you could fill in the spaces with whatever
Speaker 1: you know about the gray wolf genome and get a
Speaker 1: little closer. But these are the techniques we have right now.
Speaker 2: And so when you say print, you mean like synthetically
Speaker 2: assemble from the basic amino acids, because in the end,
Speaker 2: it is just chemistry, right, or like, let's bring these together,
Speaker 2: click them together. This is a molecule we know can exist.
Speaker 2: But you're saying that's still really expensive.
Speaker 1: Exactly, Yeah, it is very expensive. And you know you've
Speaker 1: got billions of base pairs or something in a genome.
Speaker 1: So even if the cost is fairly minor, it adds
Speaker 1: up pretty quick.
Speaker 2: It's the kind of thing that feels like, in ten years,
Speaker 2: it's going to cost seventeen cents. Yeah, maybe it's somebody's
Speaker 2: Pahd thesis and it cost millions of dollars. But biology
Speaker 2: makes these leaps and bounds all the time, where like
Speaker 2: things that used to be Peachd thesis are now like
Speaker 2: a little machine that sits on the bench and it
Speaker 2: takes two minutes and you press the button.
Speaker 1: And I imagine that's both frustrating and exhilarating if you're
Speaker 1: a student who's like I, I spent five years on
Speaker 1: something that now takes thirty minutes. But you know you
Speaker 1: had to be part of the people who made the
Speaker 1: path to get there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's why biology can do so many amazing
Speaker 2: things because things that used to be impossible are now trivial,
Speaker 2: which opens up the space of possibilities for like new
Speaker 2: whole emergent concepts that nobody even imagined before. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I look forward to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So let's get back to the question. Yeah, is this
Speaker 2: thing that they made a diar wolf Kelly, what's your ruling?
Speaker 1: Well, so before I give you my opinion, I'm going
Speaker 1: to back up and say that, you know, when this
Speaker 1: announcement first came out, apparently, I think it's the New
Speaker 1: Yorker broke the embargo. So when a research group has
Speaker 1: a finding that they want to share, they will send
Speaker 1: a report out to major news organizations and they'll say,
Speaker 1: you can't mention this until we tell you you can
Speaker 1: mention it. But if you want to start writing the
Speaker 1: story now, so that when we give the thumbs up
Speaker 1: you're already ready to go, then we'd be happy to
Speaker 1: talk to you now. And apparently the New Yorker broke
Speaker 1: the embargo. And the way that I heard this story
Speaker 1: was that they have brought back the die wolf. And
Speaker 1: you know, Zach even sent it to me and he
Speaker 1: was like, the dire wolf is back. How cool is that?
Speaker 1: And we both actually should have been a little bit
Speaker 1: more skeptical because we had interviewed Beth Shapiro, who's the
Speaker 1: chief science officer for Colossal, for our book Soon Is,
Speaker 1: because we had a little section on de extinction and
Speaker 1: she had made very clear in that interview what the
Speaker 1: process actually involves, which is not making an exact replica.
Speaker 1: But in the days after that article that Zach sent
Speaker 1: me from Time that was like, we have the dire wolf. Now,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of like anger heaped on Colossal
Speaker 1: for being like, this isn't a dire wolf. And so
Speaker 1: Beth Shapiro, again the chief science officer, has said, you know,
Speaker 1: there's something like thirty definitions of a species out there,
Speaker 1: and she's right, there's a big debate about what counts
Speaker 1: as a species and the dire wolf that Colossal made
Speaker 1: fits some of those definitions, but doesn't fit others I see.
Speaker 1: And so the question is, you know, to what extent
Speaker 1: should you be excited about this? And I think from
Speaker 1: the standpoint of of wonder, you know, like bringing back
Speaker 1: an organism that so many people want to see, like
Speaker 1: from Game of Thrones for example. You know, I can
Speaker 1: imagine you put these dire wolves in a zoo and
Speaker 1: people get more excited about conservation. I can see some
Speaker 1: benefits in that regard, but I guess again, my concern
Speaker 1: is that people are going to feel like the moral
Speaker 1: responsibility that should be on our shoulders for killing a
Speaker 1: species could go away if we're able to bring these
Speaker 1: species back. But again, we don't know if their behaviors
Speaker 1: are natural. Maybe there were very unique behaviors that were
Speaker 1: taught to them by their mothers that they'll never express
Speaker 1: now because there's no one there to teach them those things.
Speaker 1: And so you know, to me, they differ in ways
Speaker 1: that matter because I don't think you could ever release
Speaker 1: them back out into the wild. They'll never fill their
Speaker 1: ecological role. They won't be what we lost.
Speaker 2: Could be something else though, right like if they escape
Speaker 2: into the wild. They could create some new niche from themselves.
Speaker 2: They could be invasive, right, and we could be overrun
Speaker 2: with dire wolves or you know, ancient guinea pigs with
Speaker 2: really strong legs or whatever we're going to bring back next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what do you think they bring back the dire wolf?
Speaker 1: Are you excited?
Speaker 2: I think it's really cool and an awesome demonstration of
Speaker 2: biological technology. It doesn't feel to me like they brought
Speaker 2: back the direwolf. I mean, I imagine if humans went
Speaker 2: extinct and then in the future AI brought back something
Speaker 2: kind of similar to humans and they're like, look, yeah,
Speaker 2: we didn't kill them all there back. I wouldn't really
Speaker 2: feel like we're back. And so, yeah, it doesn't really
Speaker 2: feel like the direwolf, but doesn't have to be, right, Like,
Speaker 2: this shows that you can do biological engineering in a
Speaker 2: really cool way. You can start from one animal. You
Speaker 2: can move through that information space towards another animal you
Speaker 2: think is interesting or useful or cool or worth bringing back,
Speaker 2: and you could do that multiple times. Right, You could
Speaker 2: go in the direwolf direction and you could add a
Speaker 2: little bit of fox or something. I think this opens
Speaker 2: up a whole new avenue. I think that's the exciting
Speaker 2: thing about it, not like, oh, we have cleansed ourselves
Speaker 2: of this crime we committed.
Speaker 1: And I think that is a great point. So if
Speaker 1: you're trying to understand what makes two species that are
Speaker 1: closely related different, this now does get of us the
Speaker 1: tools to answer those questions. You know, is it this gene?
Speaker 1: Is it that gene? What happens if you take her
Speaker 1: with this gene? And so we do now have this
Speaker 1: amazing ability to better understand how the genome results in
Speaker 1: differences in appearance and function for organisms. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: And we could take chihuahuas and give them like really
Speaker 2: strong legs, that would be really amazing. I'd like to
Speaker 2: see that totally buff chihuahua's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my daughter would absolutely adopt one of those. But
Speaker 1: she would adopt any chihuahua, no matter how pitiful they look.
Speaker 2: You know, I used to be kind of anti chihuahua
Speaker 2: because I thought about them as like little gappy dogs.
Speaker 2: But the dog that we adopted, he's like forty percent chihuahua,
Speaker 2: but he's really wonderful and he never barks. He's like
Speaker 2: German shepherd and chihuahua, which is an interesting combination.
Speaker 1: How did that happen?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was an interesting evening or somebody somewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 2: one night in Mexico. But he's got this wonderful German
Speaker 2: shepherd plus chihuahua face. It's like German shepherd but a
Speaker 2: little bit of sad eyes. I don't know. Oh, I
Speaker 2: love him.
Speaker 1: That sounds wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm warming up the chihuahua.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 1: Well, let's take a break and then when we come
Speaker 1: back to talk a little bit more about their plans
Speaker 1: for bringing back the mammoth, which we talked about a
Speaker 1: little bit earlier. So start dreaming of mammoth steakes and
Speaker 1: we'll be back to you soon. And we're back from
Speaker 1: the commercial break, which seems like a fine time to
Speaker 1: mention that. On Apple, if you subscribe to our podcast,
Speaker 1: you can get this podcast without ads. But thank you
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Speaker 2: If you love the show and don't like the ads,
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Speaker 2: And you'll be forced to listen to them all retroactively.
Speaker 2: Oh no, that's not what we're doing today. We're talking
Speaker 2: about retroactive undeletion of animals called de extinctificationisism. Tell us
Speaker 2: about how we might bring back the wooly mammoth. Now,
Speaker 2: I've been joking about dire wolf steaks, but a lot
Speaker 2: of humans made it through the winter on the meat
Speaker 2: of the wooly mammoth. Isn't that true? It's really something
Speaker 2: humans have eaten for a long time.
Speaker 1: I think that is true. Yeah, I think we did
Speaker 1: eat wooly mammoth. I mean they give you a large
Speaker 1: quantity of food, whether it's delicious or not.
Speaker 2: Based on my research, mostly from reading Farside comics, I
Speaker 2: think a lot of humans have did with the mammoths.
Speaker 1: I mean, Gary Larson never got anything wrong ever, I
Speaker 1: think so I'm on board with that.
Speaker 2: You have the best science consultants.
Speaker 1: For sure, he did. He did so. Mammoths went extinct
Speaker 1: about four thousand years ago, and so when you find
Speaker 1: a specimen preserved the right way, you can get more
Speaker 1: information out of it. And they tended to live in
Speaker 1: cold areas like tundras, so I think you've got a
Speaker 1: slightly better chance at getting their DNA in the first place,
Speaker 1: and so we found a lot of mammoths that are
Speaker 1: preserved in a way where you can get some DNA
Speaker 1: from them. So we have a lot more information to
Speaker 1: work with than we did with the dire wolf and
Speaker 1: so in this case. But again it's still difficult, and
Speaker 1: I just want to highlight a couple of reasons why
Speaker 1: it's difficult. We talked about the DNA degrading, and that
Speaker 1: makes it hard and it breaks into little pieces. But
Speaker 1: you also have to be sure that you're not getting contamination.
Speaker 1: So for example, when that mammoth died, bacteria probably started
Speaker 1: to break it down before it completely froze through, So
Speaker 1: you have to make sure you're not getting any of
Speaker 1: those bacterial genomes in your genome. Or you know, some
Speaker 1: clumsy scientists didn't have their gloves on the whole time.
Speaker 1: Now you've got human DNA in there. So not only
Speaker 1: do you have to try to find the ancient DNA
Speaker 1: and figure out what to do with it, you need
Speaker 1: to make sure that all of the DNA that's contaminating
Speaker 1: it has been removed.
Speaker 2: This sounds like an awesome update of the fly Guman
Speaker 2: accidentally injects their DNA into the mammothtinctification project. Weird mammoth
Speaker 2: baby comes out with like Jeff Goldbloom's head on.
Speaker 1: It, I'd feel so weird about that. Jeff Goldbloom is
Speaker 1: so handsome.
Speaker 2: You'd make a great mammoth. I think, okay, all right, anyway, Netflix,
Speaker 2: call us if you want to turn that into a
Speaker 2: real project.
Speaker 1: We've got lots of other ideas too.
Speaker 2: Few more terrible than that, but yes, we do, right,
Speaker 2: all right. So you get this DNA from the specimen,
Speaker 2: and I think it is similar living species, right for
Speaker 2: a reference, don't you? What are you using the case
Speaker 2: of the mammoth.
Speaker 1: So there are three living species of elephants. There are
Speaker 1: two African elephants. One lives in the forest and one
Speaker 1: lives in the grasslands or the savannahs, and then there
Speaker 1: is an Asian elephant. The Asian elephant they think is
Speaker 1: closer genetically to the wooly mammoths, and so they're using
Speaker 1: the Asian elephant as their reference genome. They are trying
Speaker 1: to essentially make a more cold adapted Asian elephant because
Speaker 1: again they are saying that they want to release the
Speaker 1: wooly mammoth into what would have been its native environment,
Speaker 1: so they're trying to create a wooly mammoth that can
Speaker 1: survive there, and so they're looking at things like shaggy hair,
Speaker 1: fat deposits. They also want to bring back the curved tusks,
Speaker 1: and I think maybe that's partly because those are just
Speaker 1: like iconic mammoth things, but also maybe they're important for
Speaker 1: knocking down trees. And so they've identified sixty five genes
Speaker 1: that they think could make the Asian elephant more cold tolerant,
Speaker 1: and so they're going to make these edits to the
Speaker 1: Asian elephant genome. And then they're not sure if they're
Speaker 1: going to impregnate an African elephant or an Asian elephant,
Speaker 1: because the African elephant is bigger than the Asian elephant,
Speaker 1: and so they think it might have a better time
Speaker 1: giving birth to a wooly mammoth baby. And elephants are
Speaker 1: pregnant for some crazy amount of time, like a whole
Speaker 1: year or something. Maybe if it's even longer basically.
Speaker 2: Like two years, two years, I think, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's something like twenty two months. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine carrying around a wooly mammoth baby for twenty
Speaker 1: two months If they're bigger than Asian elephants. That sounds
Speaker 1: incredibly unpleasant. But anyway, and it's not even yours, and
Speaker 1: it's not even yours, right, but in.
Speaker 2: Some sense it is right you were saying earlier. The
Speaker 2: maternal environment is an important factor. Right, It's not like
Speaker 2: when you're the surrogate, you're just some sort of irrelevant host.
Speaker 2: Like the maternal environment plays a role in the development
Speaker 2: of the baby.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right, and the things you eat might be
Speaker 1: playing a role. And then also after elephants are born,
Speaker 1: Beth Shapiro was telling me that they often consume some
Speaker 1: of the feces of family members to get their microbiome.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, Yeah, And so if the wooly mammoth had
Speaker 1: a wooly mammoth specific microbiome, they're going to be getting
Speaker 1: an Asian or African elephant specific microbiome. But anyway, so
Speaker 1: they're going to be growing up with an Asian or
Speaker 1: African elephant parent. And then the plan is to yeah,
Speaker 1: release them into the wild at some point to try
Speaker 1: to recreate what the wooly mammoths were doing.
Speaker 2: That's a whole fascinating other angle. I never even thought
Speaker 2: about the microbiome of these creatures, right, which is usually
Speaker 2: passed down from the parents. If you bring a species back,
Speaker 2: it's microbiome has gone extinct with it, And obviously you
Speaker 2: don't have the DNA or its microbiome unless you like
Speaker 2: dug into its gut and found those bacteria and sequence
Speaker 2: their DNA also, and that could somehow replicate that. That's
Speaker 2: a whole other fascinating dimension it is. Or maybe you're
Speaker 2: just going to end up with decincified species members with
Speaker 2: like bad digestive problem.
Speaker 1: Direwolf with IBD could be I mean, maybe they were
Speaker 1: essentially the ecosystems that like cold adapted bacteria were thriving in,
Speaker 1: and maybe you've lost those bacteria altogether. Maybe you can't
Speaker 1: bring them back. I don't know, who knows.
Speaker 2: We could end up with like wooly mammoths with horrible diarrhea.
Speaker 1: Oh man, IBD wooly mammoths. That would be a bummer.
Speaker 2: That'd be quite a science achievement, though, wouldn't it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 2: So, So where do we stand on this progress towards
Speaker 2: creating these diarrhea spraying elephants.
Speaker 1: So they are claiming that in five years they will
Speaker 1: be able to bring a cold adapted Asian elephant into
Speaker 1: the worlds that you could call the colossal wooly mammoth.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty short timeframe.
Speaker 2: How reliable are they with their predictions? Did they predict
Speaker 2: their ability to do the Direwolf or is this sort
Speaker 2: of like Elon Musk like projections.
Speaker 1: I don't know that we have the data to make
Speaker 1: those statements yet, because my sense was that the dire
Speaker 1: Wolf surprised everybody, like they didn't really let folks know
Speaker 1: where they were, and then all of a sudden they
Speaker 1: were like, hey, we've done it. I don't know. This
Speaker 1: sounds like an incredible amount of work. And additionally, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think they've gotten to the step yet where
Speaker 1: you try to impregnate either of the elephants, and you know,
Speaker 1: if you get halfway through that pregnancy and then it fails,
Speaker 1: you've got another year to wait. And so I think
Speaker 1: it's hard to figure out the timing for that stage
Speaker 1: in particular, Like maybe they have a good handle on
Speaker 1: how long the gene editing takes now, but if it's
Speaker 1: going to take in the elephants or not, I don't
Speaker 1: think we know yet. Fascinating one of the benefits that
Speaker 1: they're touting to this technique is that along the way
Speaker 1: they've done research on elephant endoheliotropic herpes viruses, which are
Speaker 1: a leading cause of death in wild elephants. You'll note
Speaker 1: I can't correctly say prions or prions, but I think
Speaker 1: I got endoheliotropic herpes viruses out. Okay, sounded good, Yeah, great,
Speaker 1: thank you. And so they've been working to understand that
Speaker 1: this is a leading cause of death in wild elephants
Speaker 1: and I think also in zoo populations. And so you know,
Speaker 1: they're arguing that one of the benefits is all of
Speaker 1: this science that comes along on the ride that they
Speaker 1: figure out our moonshot. They say they're about five years away,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna have to wait and see how they do.
Speaker 1: They also have a project in the works on the
Speaker 1: thylacine and another one on the dodo.
Speaker 2: What's the thylacine? That sounds like an amino acid?
Speaker 1: That does sound like an amino acid. Now you're making
Speaker 1: me wonder today. Write the name wrong. It really sounds
Speaker 1: like an amino acid. No, that's actually an animal.
Speaker 2: Oh it's a Tasmanian tiger.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that only went extinct in nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: and so I think we have a fair number of
Speaker 1: specimens that were like stuck in freezers from animals that
Speaker 1: were held in zoos back when we were like, oh wait,
Speaker 1: we should try to turn this all around. Oh we
Speaker 1: waited too long. So yeah, they're working on that. They're
Speaker 1: working on the Dodo, and the Dodo went extinct something
Speaker 1: like three hundred years ago, and so you know, both
Speaker 1: of those projects, the animals are thousands of years less
Speaker 1: dead than the others, but those projects are also in
Speaker 1: the works.
Speaker 2: And those feel like efforts to write some wrong, you know,
Speaker 2: to undo some crime that we committed by like lazily
Speaker 2: or sloppily or greedily or selfishly wiping out some species.
Speaker 1: And you know, I should be clear that Colossal's website
Speaker 1: isn't saying de extinction rights past wrongs. I think what
Speaker 1: they are arguing is that the science is important. I'm
Speaker 1: sure a lot of people go to work every day
Speaker 1: because it sounds awesome to bring back the dire wolf,
Speaker 1: and it's important to be excited about your job, and
Speaker 1: they believe in this, like replacing of ecosystem processes that
Speaker 1: were lost when the organisms went extinct. But I agree
Speaker 1: that does feel to me also like a get out
Speaker 1: a jail free card for the things that we've done
Speaker 1: in the past.
Speaker 2: Then let's revisit one of the Solar System's greatest crimes,
Speaker 2: which is wiping out the dinosaurs sixty five million years ago.
Speaker 2: So Kelly is Colossal going to open Jurassic Park at
Speaker 2: some point.
Speaker 1: So I asked Beth Shapiro this like a decade ago,
Speaker 1: and her answer was no. And I was like, but
Speaker 1: like maybe when the technology advances, and she was like, no, never, never, never,
Speaker 1: why never? And she's like, look, you almost certainly can't
Speaker 1: read DNA sequences that are over a million years old,
Speaker 1: and so we just don't have the DNA to work
Speaker 1: off of from fossils. And so what you could do
Speaker 1: is you could say, all right, I know that this
Speaker 1: gene controls feathers, and this gene controls teeth, and this
Speaker 1: gene controls mouth size, and you could try using what
Speaker 1: you knew and some dinosaur like reference genome to like
Speaker 1: tinker with that and make something dinosaur oid. But she's like,
Speaker 1: you're never gonna bring back t Rex as it was.
Speaker 1: You could bring back some frank and Rex that was
Speaker 1: your best.
Speaker 2: Guess you could bring back t Rex with even stronger
Speaker 2: thighs and diarrhea like the Wooly Mammoth.
Speaker 1: You're really on the thigh thing. I'm guessing you never
Speaker 1: skip thy day, Daniel or leg Day leg Day.
Speaker 2: I think that's too personal a question, Kelly. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to answer that on the pod.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: Daniel. No, I just want to cheat. I just want
Speaker 2: to borrow the Direwolves DNA so I don't have to
Speaker 2: do leg day.
Speaker 1: No, that'd be great. Just a little crisper in your
Speaker 1: thighs and so that it takes care of it for you.
Speaker 2: Sounds like a menu option now, Daniel's crisper thighs. Would
Speaker 2: you like it with barbecue sauced.
Speaker 1: I know that question is too personal, right, Let's return
Speaker 1: to this observation you made at the beginning of the show.
Speaker 1: It is awesome to bring back, you know, something beautiful
Speaker 1: that existed once and we lost it and now we
Speaker 1: get a chance to interact with it again, and that's amazing.
Speaker 2: Ya.
Speaker 1: Do you still have that sense of wonder with the
Speaker 1: version that we are able to bring back?
Speaker 2: Doesn't feel like traveling to the past or undoing something
Speaker 2: we've done. It feels like a simulation of that or
Speaker 2: an approximation of that doesn't totally scratch that itch, but
Speaker 2: it definitely goes in that direction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I would go to see the dire
Speaker 1: wolf exhibit at the Zool for sure, Or maybe i'd
Speaker 1: go to see a wooly mammoth exhibit at the Zoo
Speaker 1: where you're ring cook and bring your bleach wipes. There's
Speaker 1: part of me that feels a little sad thinking about,
Speaker 1: you know, like if only one wooly mammoth is brought back,
Speaker 1: because it turns out it was really dangerous for the
Speaker 1: elephants to go through that childbirthing process, and so we
Speaker 1: get one wooly mammoth and we decide that's all we're
Speaker 1: ever going to do.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's all alone.
Speaker 1: Something about that feels sad, like we're observing an animal
Speaker 1: going extinct all over again. And maybe I'm just being
Speaker 1: like too sentimental, but I don't know, what do you think?
Speaker 2: No, I think that's an important aspect. You're creating a creature,
Speaker 2: It has an experience. What have you created? And it's
Speaker 2: like in great pain because you've created some weird Frankin
Speaker 2: creature and it doesn't really work or it's miserable for
Speaker 2: some other reasons. So I think that's definitely something we
Speaker 2: should consider, especially the more intelligent species. I mean, wolves
Speaker 2: are smart, right, they're pack animals, they have emotions, they
Speaker 2: have relationships. Philosophically and morally, there are a lot of
Speaker 2: questions there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Zach asked me, what would I think if we
Speaker 1: could bring back Neanderthals and try to, you know, figure
Speaker 1: out what a close human relative was like, you know,
Speaker 1: are they as intelligent as we are? Were we just
Speaker 1: more aggressive? And so we managed to like knock them
Speaker 1: out of the species pool.
Speaker 5: M hm.
Speaker 1: I feel like that is quite clearly unethical. But what
Speaker 1: do you think where is the line?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Wow, that is a thorny question. Yeah. I mean even
Speaker 2: just like editing your own babies he's in crisper, is
Speaker 2: pretty unethical. But I feel like philosophically it's kind of fuzzy.
Speaker 2: I mean, you choose your mate. Also, that affects the
Speaker 2: DNA of your kids. You have some influence over it,
Speaker 2: but it's weird to edit it directly. I don't know
Speaker 2: exactly where that line is or why there's the line there.
Speaker 2: There's lots of things we do. Like I created children,
Speaker 2: brought them into this world. They didn't get to choose
Speaker 2: it at all. Maybe they're happy, maybe they're miserable. You know,
Speaker 2: it's sort of on me. I feel like having intelligent
Speaker 2: babies is already a philosophical quandary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fair enough. Then bringing Neanderthals would be yeah, complicated too,
Speaker 1: because they're like a scientific creation. To be clear, Colossal
Speaker 1: has no plans to bring back the Neanderthals.
Speaker 2: That they've made public.
Speaker 1: Don't start trouble, don't start trouble. So let's say Gigantic
Speaker 1: Evil the corporation decides they're going to bring back Neanderthals,
Speaker 1: and they bring back two of them, and it turns
Speaker 1: out those two need a lot of support. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then Big Evil goes out of business. What happens to
Speaker 1: those Neanderthals who would be responsible for them? Would they
Speaker 1: be happy in this world where they're the only two
Speaker 1: representatives of a different species?
Speaker 2: Sounds like a great Black Mirror episode. You should write.
Speaker 1: There, you go. Well, if somebody wants to pay me
Speaker 1: to write that, I am ready. I will always take
Speaker 1: your money.
Speaker 2: All right, Netflix, right to us. Two questions at Danielantlly.
Speaker 1: As you can see, we have loads of ideas. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: on that sort of dark note, that's all I have
Speaker 1: to say about the extinction today. I think I just
Speaker 1: like to bottom line by saying I am still excited
Speaker 1: about this. I think it's cool. I think they have
Speaker 1: made some interesting breakthroughs. I just have complicated feelings about
Speaker 1: the extinction in general, what about you.
Speaker 2: I think it also tells us something about the science
Speaker 2: communication universe. This is an impressive step forward technologically and
Speaker 2: fascinating scientifically, but it was over sold in the press
Speaker 2: a little bit, and now there's like this back reaction
Speaker 2: against it, and I think, you know, the whole science
Speaker 2: communication ecosystem encourages people to over sell every time you
Speaker 2: step forward as a revolutionary advance, which means that the
Speaker 2: folks out there don't really know what they're reading. Is
Speaker 2: this just overblown hype or not? And so there's a
Speaker 2: lot of sort of cynicism out there, and you can
Speaker 2: see that in people's responses to the questions. And we
Speaker 2: got a lot of emails, and I get emails all
Speaker 2: the time about science headlines, people like is this real?
Speaker 2: Daniel did now so really discovered thirty seven extra dimensions. No,
Speaker 2: they didn't. So you've got to become like a critical
Speaker 2: thinker and an educated consumer of this science news.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great point, And I think conveying
Speaker 1: exactly what was done is a little bit more complicated
Speaker 1: and requires an attention span from the reader to like
Speaker 1: get through the entire description. But I think that if
Speaker 1: you fail in that goal, then you lose trust with
Speaker 1: your audience, and that has massive implications for any kind
Speaker 1: of science you're trying to communicating, like vaccines and stuff,
Speaker 1: for example. So I think you've got to be really
Speaker 1: careful about how you do this stuff.
Speaker 2: Big problem that we're not going to solve today on
Speaker 2: the pod. But thanks everybody for listening to our effort
Speaker 2: to communicate real science in a credible way to you,
Speaker 2: because we know you're interested in learning more and digging
Speaker 2: deeper beyond what's covered in the popsie articles, and that's
Speaker 2: what we try to bring you here on the pod.
Speaker 2: Thanks everyone for listening.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is
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