The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 075: Cloning Mammoths

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with paleogeneticist Dr. Beth Shapiro, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: U.C. Santa Cruz and the Ewok forest; ancient DNA and the assumptions it has added to our world; black footed ferrets; the romance versus the reality of de-extinction; the volatile speed of DNA decay; mammoth tusks and sheep piss; horn-core morphology; 400 pound kiwis and 9-foot Haast's eagles; volcanoes; big-assed bison with 6-foot horn spreads; biological species concept; the persnickety sage grouse; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we're recording in the UC Santa Cruz, which I've found...

I've been on a lot of campuses in my life, I guess. I was going to say I haven't been on many, but I've been on a ton of them. This is the most gorgeous campus I've found, I've been on a lot of campuses in my life, I guess. I was going to say I haven't been on many, but I've been on a ton of them. This is the most gorgeous campus I've ever been to. It's pretty amazing. Did you happen to see any Ewoks on your way out? No, but it's funny because driving in here, I was thinking, I was about to form the sentence to Giannis that this is like a Star Wars set. And then Giannis interrupted my thought to comment about a Star Wars set quality.

My youngest child calls it the Ewok Forest. We come up and he goes, it's the boo Ewok Forest. Can we go up? Yeah, it's like, it's gotta be good for your brain. Really? To be around these trees, I feel like. I could be hopeful about that. Yeah, all right.

No, I think it is. Next time students come up here seeing if this is a good place for them to come to school, I'll try to All right. No, I think it is. Next time students come up here seeing if this is a good place for them to come to school, I'll try to give them that line and see how it works. This place, these trees are good for your brain.

Yeah. And you're hearing the voice of Dr. Beth Shapiro, who is, who deal, okay, I'm going to let her tell you what she is, who I know her

from the fact that she deals with what's called ancient DNA. And if you follow wildlife conservation and wildlife politics, I think that you will, in your lifetime, hear a lot. You'll hear that term, ancient DNA, in surrounding conversations around it you'll hear that progressively more and more to the point where when you grow old and die it might just be like a fact of life that it maybe transformed our understanding of. Yeah that's really great I'm really intrigued to hear you say that say you. Ancient DNA isn't something that most people have heard of. And while my motivation for doing this is to be able to learn something that's useful for conservation, biodiversity conservation,

I think a lot of times people think of it as a way to learn about history, particularly human history. I'm most interested in animals, but I'm pleased to hear you say that you think there's a place for this. Yeah, well, let me alter that because let's say that you have a technology and you have a technology like the internal combustion engine. Now, no one talks about the internal combustion engine, but they most definitely talk about the creations built around that. Right. Okay. So instead of building it all up and talking about how important it's going to wind up being, we should talk about what it is.

And can you, you're probably good at this by now. Can you like sketch out what ancient DNA is? The fields where it's being applied. Okay. Particular to wildlife. Well, okay. What are some things it's taught us? What are some areas where the work done around ancient DNA

has challenged or added to our assumptions about our world? All right, there's a lot there. You're giving me a lot of room. But I think what I'll start with is probably something that we can come back to later on. So I'm going to start with a teaser about what I hope ancient DNA can do for wildlife conservation. And then we can turn back around and go to the beginning and talk more about ancient DNA and the origins of the field and how it came about and what else has been applied to. So imagine that you are trying to protect the last of a particular species. And this species is not doing well

because the habitat that it lives in is disappearing. The climate is changing. Maybe it's a bit too warm for it. Or maybe it's getting a bit cold. Maybe there's just something different about today's climate that is affecting this animal. And the animal's in particular trouble because its population has been small for a long time.

And because it's been small for a long time. And because it's been small for a long time, it's lost a lot of genetic diversity. A good example of this right now is the black-footed ferret. So the black-footed ferret is a species that we thought was extinct, but then a population, a surviving population was discovered. Yeah, it turned up on a rancher's doorstep in Matitsi, Wyoming. Matitsi, Wyoming. Good. You know more about this than I do. I know about the DNA. No, a guy, yeah, a guy in Matizzi,

a guy in Matizzi, Wyoming. As I understand it, one day his dog is standing there with a black-footed ferret. No way, that's amazing. And he went out to try to find what the animal was. And it turned out that they were not not in fact gone they were not gone no so but they are in trouble and this is a problem with black-footed ferrets so they were

a very small population for quite a long time and they have almost no genetic diversity and they're threatened in the wild today because while they can breed them there are nice captive breeding facilities that can produce lots of black-footed ferrets as soon as they release them into the in the wild today because while they can breed them, there are nice captive breeding facilities that can produce lots of black-footed ferrets. As soon as they release them into the wild, they get sick and they die. Can you, just to hold on, because when you hear,

I think people often say like no genetic diversity, but is there a way to put it in human terms where you imagine, like, is it as bad as if you only had one family? Yes. Like you had a mother, father, two daughters, two sons, and then they needed to recolonize. And that was it.

And then the daughters had to breed with their brothers or with their father. So literally siblings breeding with siblings. This is extreme inbreeding, extreme inbreeding. And it's bad for the population. And this population is doing okay in that it can survive in captive environments where it's not exposed to any sort of challenges.

But as soon as they're released into the wild, this inbreeding shows up as something that causes them to not be able to survive. It shows up behaviorally? It shows up behaviorally probably, but in the case of the black-footed ferrets, it shows up because they have no resistance to the diseases that are actually circulating in the wild. So, they're not able to survive until they get infected. So, one of the

most diverse parts of our genome, of any species genome, is what's called the major histamine complex, the MHC. It creates the proteins and enzymes in our body that allow us to fight diseases. And we're very different. Everybody is very different. We have lots of different circulating alleles or variants in our population. And this is so that, you know, the more diversity we have, the more diversity of diseases that we are potentially able to fight off. And so it's good for a population and for an individual to have lots of diversity at these alleles. And these black-footed ferrets and other species that go through these, what's called population bottlenecks, where you have a very small population

size for a long time and you lose a lot of your diversity, become completely lacking in diversity at this really important part of the genome. So here's where I'm going with ancient DNA. Imagine that you could find a bone or some tissue from black-footed ferrets that lived before they went through this population bottleneck. So these would have been individuals that are no longer alive. Maybe they lived a hundred years ago. Maybe they lived thousands of years ago, but they have diversity in their genome that used to be there, that used to be able to help this population to fight disease. If we could get that information, sequence their DNA, grind up a bit of that bone and extract the DNA sequences that are preserved in that bone,

or in the case of black-footed ferrets, there are actually preserved tissue specimens from individuals that lived a couple of decades ago that are in what's called the frozen zoo in San Diego. So we can sequence- That's a couple of decades ago is enough? A couple of decades ago in this case is enough. In other species, it depends on when your bottleneck was. So for black-footed ferrets, the bottleneck was relatively recently. For American buffalo, the bottleneck was 13,000 years ago. So you would need older individuals to be able to see what the diversity in the past looked like. All right, we got to come back to that because that's surprising to hear.

But, and I know you're interested in bison. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. But so we can go back and we can sequence the DNA from these older individuals that have this diversity, learn what that diversity used to look like, and then use genome engineering technologies to cut and paste the no diversity region of individuals' genomes today, living individuals, and paste in its place a synthetic version of the sequences that used to exist in that population.

And in doing so, you have modified the genomes of a living organism in a way that gives them a fighting chance to survive today. You haven't brought back the extinct thing. You have used gene sequences that are extinct from the same species to bolster the immunity or potentially help this species to survive. And this is one example, but this is where I really see the power and the potential of this sort of technology. The idea that we can look at DNA sequences in the past. Let's say we want to create an animal

that's more able to survive somewhere cold or somewhere hot. If we can identify an extinct species or a close relative that used to be alive that has a gene sequence that might be able to cause, for example, the idea of bringing mammoths back to life. Yeah, and I'll point out, you have a book, How to Clone a Mammoth. Yes, so this is something that I've been thinking about a lot.

Yeah, and a subtitle could be How to Clone a Mammoth, All the Reasons Why You Might Want to and Might Not Want to. Yeah, I think the subtitle is actually the science of de-extinction or something, but I have been suggested several better subtitles. I think my favorite one was why cloning a mammoth or how cloning a mammoth might be. No, I'm trying to think of what the best one was

that was suggested by a friend of mine. It was like, if you have limited ethics, a billion dollars and a mammoth. Oh, there you go. I'll give my friend to bring it back. That opens it up. That opens up what I was trying to suggest about it. But anyway, I mean, we can talk about this later,

but I'm going to use it as an example because I mean, it's very easy to think through. So if you have an elephant, this is something that's adapted to living in the tropics. The tropics is not a place that's really conducive to elephants living right now. Let's say we wanted to create an elephant that is able to survive somewhere colder. You say not conducive for human reasons. For human reasons, exactly. Because of rampant poaching, development. Yeah. Influx of pastoral agriculturalists.

Right. And I should say right up front that I am not advocating creating mammoths that can live in the cold as an alternative to trying to fix the terrible situation that Asian elephants and African elephants are in right now. I think that this is just an alternate pathway that potentially should be followed at the same time as existing conservation efforts. But it is something that I think we should consider. It's not possible to do it yet,

but there's no reason to turn, to say no to a technology before we know what's actually feasible because we're a little bit scared about the ecological and ethical consequences of doing it. These are things that we need to think through very clearly. However, stepping away from the ethics and morality of this right now, and we will come back to this, but I'm just trying to explain the technology here. Let's say we can go and sequence the genome of a mammoth. Mammoths and Asian elephants

are very closely related to each other. They shared a common ancestor sometime in the last 5 million years. So they're really closely related to each other. Yeah, you pointed out that the difference between an Asian elephant and a woolly mammoth is about similar to the difference between humans and chimps. That's right. About 1% of the genome sequence is different. I told that to a friend and he said, yeah, but that's the percent that gave us Mozart.

It's probably true. And that's the 1% that we're thinking about the difference between mammoths and elephants. If what we want to do is figure out what it is that made mammoths, which is an elephant, able to survive in the cold. And we want to be able to create an elephant that is able to survive in a colder environment. If we could identify those important parts of mammoth that are different and then cut and paste those into an elephant genome, could we create not a mammoth, but an elephant that can live somewhere that's colder,

that can eat this same diet, that can somehow protect itself from these cold winters so that we can potentially find a place to put elephants while we are trying to solve the problems that are ongoing in their existing environment. Can I pause you there to have you explain a couple of things real quick? You're saying though, like just based on even with some future projecting, you're saying we will not, no matter how journalists frame news that comes from your world, we will not make a mammoth. We will not bring back a living, breathing mammoth that is just a continuation of the mammoths that were there.

I think that this is something that is really important for people to understand is that once a species is extinct, it is gone. This is not a solution to the extinction crisis. De-extinction, this is the term that people are using to refer to bringing something that's extinct back to life. It's an idea that is shaped more by imagination than by reality. It's very romantic to think that you might be able to bring something back that's been gone for a long time. But there are people who- The scientific reality is that once it's gone- But there are people who try to do it,

who kick around ideas. It's gone. The ideas, if you dig into these ideas though, it's not that. It's not that you're going to bring something back that is 100% identical to something that's gone. It's that you're going to be able to recreate components of those organisms.

You could bring back traits. You could move genes from a mammoth into an elephant, potentially. We don't know how to do that yet. We can move genes from mammoth sequences that we generate from bones into cells of elephants that are growing in petri dishes and labs, but we can't then turn those cells into some hybrid between a mammoth and an elephant.

So what would you need if you were going to create an exact replica of a species that's extinct? You would need its DNA sequence. We can do that for a mammoth. There are incredibly well-preserved bones. You mean that you'd map its entire genome? Yeah. So the way we do that in ancient DNA, kind of getting back to this is we collect these bones. The best preserved bones are frozen in the Arctic soil called permafrost. And mostly they've been defleshed probably by something like a lion or a big bear. And so the bone doesn't have any tissue on it. It gets buried in the soil and rapidly frozen and you spend time including this that you spend some you spend field seasons up like actually like physically look at like actually looking for bones sticking out of the

ground yep i do it's good fun too i recommend it yeah but you can take these bones and you can take a chunk out of them with a Dremel drill or something like that. And you grind it up into a fine powder, and then you can dissolve away all the components that aren't the DNA. So the tissue and the actual bone, you dissolve it away, and then you can chemically, enzymatically pull out the DNA. So the DNA that we get out of those bones is not in good shape. This is one of the important things to remember. If I were to take a swab, Q-tip in the inside of my cheek or spit in a tube like you do when you send something off to one of the important things to remember. If I were to take a swab, Q-tip in the inside of my cheek or spit in a tube like you do

when you send something off to one of these companies that sends you your DNA sequence, you can get really long fragments of DNA. Our genomes have about 3 billion nucleotides bases, these A, Cs, Gs and Ts that make up the sequence that has the genes that make the proteins that make us look and act the way we do. And we can get millions of them, strings of millions in a row from a living person, a living

piece of tissue. But the bones that we get out of the Arctic, the DNA in them is chopped up into tiny fragments. And this happens first because once an organism dies, there are enzymes in their own body that chop up DNA. These exist because if you eat a piece of meat or you eat a leaf of a plant, you don't want that DNA to stay really big and long and powerful in your body. You've got enzymes that chew that up and make it go away. And that happens to your own tissue when cells burst,

when cells die and lice chops up your DNA so that you can get rid of it. That happens post-mortem as well. And then there are things like bacteria and fungi that will get into these bones and the tissue remains when they're decaying, and they will also chop up that DNA. They consume all this kind of carbon material for food. And then the sun, you know, you go outside and you're supposed to wear sunblock, and that's because the ultraviolet radiation will hit your cells and break your DNA. Now, when you're alive, you have proofreading enzymes that will go along and fix those bits of damage that the UV radiation causes so that you don't get skin cancer every time you walk outside.

But once you're dead, those proofreading enzymes are not doing their job anymore. And the UV radiation and other sorts of radiation will continue to hit the cells and break down the DNA. So the end result there is that pretty soon after death, the DNA is no longer in long strands. It's in really short, chopped up strands. And after time, they just get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. When you say pretty soon after death, the first pretty soon means like within years.

First pretty soon means within minutes. Okay. And the second pretty soon, we're talking tens of thousands of years. There it depends on environment. So if something were to die and sit in the sun in Arizona, today it's supposed to be 120 degrees in Arizona, probably we would get no good recoverable DNA tomorrow, right?

Really? I didn't know that. Because stuff decays. Also, you'll have really rapid microbial activity when things are rotting in the sun like that. So maybe you could get DNA tomorrow. It's probably an exaggeration. But certainly within a couple of days,

it would be very hard to recover good quality DNA from these things. If something dies- I had no idea that it's that volatile. Yeah. Well, it depends on microbial activity. And also the sun and temperature. So things decay faster when it's hot and when temperature fluctuates a lot things decay if you think about ideal temperatures for stuff to break

stuff down i mean when you want to when you're cooking something you want to get it above a particular temperature and that's not the temperature of like your normal ambient temperature in phoenix arizona today right it's uh so you don? So all the microbes will just multiply at some point, can cause a lot of microbial life forms, and you get sick when you eat stuff. So you either want it to stay cold and frozen, or you want it to be really hot, like cooked. And if it's really hot and cooked, you're destroying all the DNA, all the living material. But if it's cold and frozen, then you're slowing down the decay, just like sticking your steak in the freezer so that it lasts for an extra couple of months. But in those cases, like when you find

a well-preserved mammoth coming out of the permafrost, so that thing probably died in sub-freezing conditions. Yes. Yes. Maybe. I mean, when these animals die during the summer, in the summer in the Arctic, it can be, you know, 60, 70 degrees during the day. But those ones, and those ones could still potentially be preserved? They could be because the sediment, the dirt in the ground is very cold. And if it gets buried right away in volcanic dust or whatever, then the remains of these animals will preserve for a long time. The oldest DNA that we've ever recovered was from a bone that we found in permafrost in the Yukon Territory. And it was associated with a volcanic ash layer that we think is around 700,000 years old. So,

we're estimating that that is the age of this horse bone. It's also the oldest frozen dirt that anyone has ever known. So that horse bone, that horse lived around 700,000 years ago. It died. Its bones were immediately buried and frozen and were kept in that freezer, that dirt freezer for the last 700,000 years. And that's the only reason we were able to recover DNA from that bone. And the DNA was in terrible condition. The longest fragments were 30 or 40 letters long. Remember I said- Oh, so that's where you're going.

You're saying that we have them that are a million, millions, million or millions or million long? Millions, yes. We can do millions. Our chromosomes are longer than that. Yeah, yeah. But off this- Like a hundred million?

Because you said 3 billion total. Yeah, so it depends. You can get very large fragments of DNA. How large just depends on how good you are at extracting what's called high molecular weight DNA. And there are kits that you can purchase and different approaches you can use to get larger and larger fragments. We're limited by technology in living things rather than by the actual size of the DNA. Whereas in ancient DNA, you're limited by the actual size of the surviving fragments of DNA. Our technology would allow us to get larger fragments if they existed, they just don't. And why is this important? Why are we having such a long conversation about this?

It's important because an elephant genome, a mammoth genome is about 4 billion letters long. And if we have 30 letter fragments, it's kind of like having a trillion zillion piece puzzle. And we don't know what a mammoth genome actually looks like. So we're taking these tiny little puzzle pieces and we're trying to figure out where in the elephant genome they go. So you've got your massive trillion piece puzzle. And the box top is actually not the picture of the puzzle that you're trying to put together. It's some close, but not exactly the right picture. And there's another problem. And that is that, remember I said that there were all these bacteria and fungi and

things that were eating up the DNA? Their DNA is also in that bone. So when you extract DNA from these mammoth bones, you get loads of tiny pieces of mammoth DNA. Maybe about one to 4% of what you get is tiny pieces of mammoth DNA. The rest of it is tiny pieces of other types of DNA. And you don't know which is which. So you've got a trillion piece puzzle that actually includes the pieces

for about a hundred different puzzles. And you've got the wrong box top, right? Can you, when you talk about contaminants, can you include the anecdote about sheep contaminants in moa bones? So, yeah, so this wasn't moa bones, I think that you're talking about. This was from, we were trying to get DNA directly from dirt in New Zealand. And so it is true that DNA is preserved in sediment columns. This is really cool. And it's something that people are just

starting to focus on. I think this is going to be really neat way of trying to figure out where stuff lives. You know, we, there are species that are rare or whose ranges we don't know. It turns out you can just go out and you can get a bit of soil and you can extract DNA from that soil. And you can ask, is this incredibly rare small mammal ever found in this location? And if their DNA is there, the answer is yes. So we wanted to know how far back in time we could do this. So we went to different caves in New Zealand where there are sandy environments and DNA will actually percolate through sands depending on what the source of the DNA is. And we knew that there should not be moa and sheep together, right? Because the moa went extinct before sheep were introduced.

And these are like 400 pound birds that used to live in New Zealand. Right, yes. And were extirpated by humans. Right. Or not extirpated, but driven to extinction by humans. Yes, yes, yeah, yes. Like big ass, like 400 pound Kiwis. Yes, yes. They were impressive birds. And they were preyed upon by an even more impressive bird.

I digress here, but because this is an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite extinct species, Harper Gornus, the Host's Eagle, a giant eagle that would swoop down and pick up these massive moa. So how big was the eagle? I can't say right off the top of my head, but somebody who has a computer in front of them

can look this up and figure it out right now because it's- Yeah, I'll also do that. You'd have to give me the- Here, I'll turn my phone on. It's H-A-A-S-T. You need a connection? I can do it.

H-A-A-S-T. All right, so continue. We'll get on to that. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

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Yeah, anyway, so this is an amazing, amazing animal. Anyway, both of these things went extinct because, you know, if you're a giant eagle and you thrive on eating these giant birds the giant birds go extinct then you're probably going to go extinct too they went extinct several hundred years passed and sheep were introduced into new zealand so our idea was if dna is not moving up and down in these caves we should find moa dna and then a layer where there's nothing and then a layer where there's sheep DNA. But in fact, what we found was that there was sheep DNA intermingled with the moa DNA. And this is probably because there was so many sheep that were wandering around and urinating. And of course, the urine is a nice

source of DNA. And this was percolating through this sandy soil that the sheep DNA was getting down into the moa DNA. And all this tells us is that in some soil environments, you don't have this nice layering effect and you have to really be careful. Yeah, the stratigraphy that archaeologists always talk about. Right. And it exists in some places. For example, in the Arctic, where I said, you know, we found this horse bone and it was associated with this volcanic eruption. You can see these volcanic ash layers, they call them tephra, and they go cleanly across this permafrost dirt. And you might not know anything about whether the layering is good below it

or the layering is good above it, but if you can see this nice clean layer of thick ash, you know that there's not stuff moving above and below that ash. And if we find a bone below it, we know it must be older. The bone must be older than that eruption. And if we find a bone above it, we know that it must be younger. The bone must be older than that eruption. And if we find a bone above it, we know that it must be younger.

So the bone doesn't migrate through the line. The bone won't move. And you're saying that's all stuff, that ash was coming in from like eruptions in the Aleutians. There are a couple of different volcanic mountain chains that are up there that cause like the low, there are a couple of different mountain chains up there that will erupt at different time points.

And you can actually tell by the chemical composition of the ash, which mountain it came from. And you can link eruptions together that you see the ash from in different places. And you can kind of learn something about the geologic history by studying these ash. So it's another cool thing that you can do when you're out there working in the tundra.

Yeah, no, it's fascinating. Like little timestamps. Right? Yeah. So where were we? We were talking about piecing together the mammoth genome. That's right. Real quick though, just so that everybody knows,

how do you pronounce it? Haas eagle. 26 pounds. That's an average between the male and the female and 10 foot to 12 foot wingspan. That's a big eagle. Yeah. Giant.

12 foot wingspan. That's a big eagle. Yeah. Giant. 12 foot wingspan. And its closest living relative, I believe, at least it was a while ago when we studied this when I was a grad student, is something called the booted eagle from Australia,

which is a tiny little thing. I think whenever we figure out that there are these enormous phenotypic differences between things that are really closely related to each other, it just astounds me,

the power of evolution and genetic variation. Yeah, and it has a lot to do, right, with certain groups get to islands and they seem to get huge and some things get to islands and they seem to get teeny. Yeah, and there's another, I like to talk about bison. So do you know about bison latifrons?

Yeah. This is an about bison. So do you know about bison latifrons? Yeah. This is an enormous bison, much bigger than the other bison that lived in North America at the time. We just were able to get DNA from a bison latifrons that was found in Snowmass, Colorado at this site that was found recently. And it's about 120,000 years old,

this particular remain based on the geological setting. And we were also able to get DNA from a steppe bison. This is the bison that lived at the same time in Alaska. That was much smaller, about half the size, if not smaller, from bison latifrons. And they are the same genetically. Are you familiar with, do you ever read the work of Valerius Geist? Yes.

Are you familiar with his idea about, was it him that came up with the founding effect, the founder effect? Where like when a species colonizes a new area, okay, and they have like unfettered, like they're in a non-competitive environment. Right. That they will invest for a while.

They invest a lot of energy into elaborate sexual display. Right. And experience periods of very high fecundity and kind of have a good old days. Yeah. And then things kind of catch up with themselves and they shrink. Yeah. things kind of catch up with themselves and they shrink. I think that he wrote about latifrons as being that it was colonizing areas in the wake of glaciers and got huge.

Does that idea sound- You know, with bison, there's so many competing ideas about the history of these guys. At one point, there were more than 50 different named species of bison that supposedly lived in North America during the late Pleistocene. And I think probably there was actually only one.

It was just changing all the time, depending on where it was. And there was a competition between paleontologists to name new species. This was a time where people would find these partial horn cores and they would turn them in different directions and they would measure the width and the length of the horn cores, which is a terrible marker. Horn core morphology. These things are, they're manipulated by, depending on what fights you get into or how much you eat when you're growing up, et cetera. This is not a paleontologically equivocal trait. This is not something that you can say, aha, that definitely means this species or that species.

And so people were naming new species right and left based on not very much information. But the genetic data that we've started to get from these bison bones, we think the oldest bison in North America are around 160,000 years old. Like that's when they showed up. That's when they showed up, came across the Bering Strait. And this is a paper that was published really recently

that I worked on with a colleague, a collaborator of mine from University of Alberta. Yeah, and it was picked up in the New York Times. Yeah. And I wrote you an email. That's right. So I want to like, see, we're actually having two discussions right now,

both. I want to come back to these animals. Okay. Okay, I want to come back to bison because just remember this. Right. Because you hear people talk about, and this,

because we're going to talk about extinction. You hear people say like an extinct form. Right. Okay, the bison latifrons, which had what, a six foot horn tip to tip? Yeah, huge. Horn span. So six feet from tip to tip.

Yep. People would be like, it's an extinct one, but it's not. Nope, there's still bison around. It just is different than what we have now. But people used to dig this stuff up and there's one on display in North Dakota that came out of the Missouri River that I wanted to look at, a really nice skull.

And people would dig it up and they'd be like, well, that's a kind that's not here anymore. Yeah. You know, this is a tough thing, right? I mean, and this is a, I think it's an important question to people who care about wildlife. It's an important question to people who care about wildlife. It's an important question

to people who care about conservation is how do we define the thing that is worth protecting? The thing that we don't want to go extinct. Do we define it as a species? Do we define it as a population? Do we find it as something that looks different from other things? Because latifrons looked decidedly different

from the step bison that lived in Alaska, which also looked different than the bison bison, the forms that exist today. They're a continuum. They certainly are closely related to each other, but they don't exist anymore. But the same thing could be said for, you look at wolf populations that are alive today

and they are sometimes phenotypically or behaviorally different from each other, but they're all wolves. So where do you draw the line? Where do you decide what is the thing that you want to protect? And traditionally people think about species, but the name species is something that is kind of arbitrary. It's something that we decided on. And who is we? Well, it depends on who's thinking about it and who's asking the question and what the point of asking the question is. There's a concept called the biological species concept, which says that species are defined as reproductively isolated units. So two things that can't mate, or if they

do, they don't produce offspring. Or if they do produce offspring, those offspring are not viable or also can't produce offspring themselves. So donkeys and mules are distinct species. They can produce, sorry, donkeys and horses are distinct species. They can produce offspring, but that offspring can't reproduce.

So the biological species concept says they're different. But meanwhile, that definition would mean that all of our like mountain caribou, woodland caribou, barren ground caribou, reindeer from Eurasia are just one species. Caribou. And it would get rid of our discussions about the Mexican gray wolf. Right, right. And the gray wolf proper.

But something I think a little bit closer to heart, right? It would say that humans and Neanderthals are the same species because we were clearly different behaviorally, physically different from each other. But after our ancestors moved out of Africa, they met with Neanderthals and they hybridized with them. And because of that, most of us have some component of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes. So the biological species concept would call humans and Neanderthals the same species. They would also call brown bears and polar bears

the same species. Despite that, these two animals are behaviorally and physically and ecologically quite different from each other. Yeah, because you can see people would be like very resistant to the idea because they're like, but hold on, that one's white. Right, and it only eats seals and it swims

and it has different dentition and it doesn't hibernate. Whereas the other one is incredibly different, but they mate and they produce offspring and they do so in zoos and they do so in nature. Viable offspring. Viable offspring. All the bears on Alaska's ABC islands are hybrids, all of them.

They have up to 8% polar bear ancestry. And that's because after the last ice age, we believe that the ABC islands were actually colonized, were actually just a home for polar bears. And then as the climate warmed up, brown bear boys, because boys leave in brown bears, moved from the Alaskan mainland onto the ABC islands where they met this population of polar bears and hybridized with them. And gradually this population was converted back to being brown bear like, more brown bear like, because brown bears kept coming over and mating with these bears that lived there. But mitochondrially, which is only inherited from your mom, this is part of DNA in every one of your cells that only comes from your mom. They are polar bears. They are all polar bears with their mitochondrial DNA.

Really? And their X chromosomes, which come more from mom, because dad only has one copy of the X, the X chromosome has more polar bear DNA on it than the rest of their genome, which again is evidence that their mom's mom's mom's mom's mom at some point in the past, probably 12 to 15,000 years ago, was a polar bear. And that then jives what you said earlier, that it was like colonizing males. Yes.

Which kind of fits in with just general- Brown bear behavior. Yeah, like a lot of those, like a lot of big predators, where when they turn up in weird places, not always, but so often, it's a male turning up in a weird place. Yeah, well, in many animals,

like mountain lions, which we have out here do this too. The males are the ones that disperse. They're the ones that go out to try to find new territory. And so that's what's going on in brown bears is that juvenile males move outside, whereas the females tend to stay with their mom. It's called maternal phylopatry, but you know that. But that's common in a lot of,

especially I think large predatory species. Okay, now I'm gonna back you way up to where you were. I don't even remember where I was. Well, I'll tell you where you were. You're finding little, instead of the millions long DNA strands, you're finding little 30s and 40s. And a problem with those little 30s and 40s. Right. And a problem with those little 30s and 40s

is that they're in shitty condition. Right. And finding them- Figuring out where they go, how to line them up. And they're corrupted because of, and part of the trickery of finding them is that they're corrupted with so much other stuff. Right.

And also they're corrupted themselves because all of these things like UV radiation beating down on the DNA will actually cause the molecules to change, to become damaged in their own way. So ancient DNA has its own kind of damage. It's broken into tiny fragments and it's mixed up with all sorts of other contaminants.

And your job as an ancient DNA scientist is to take that little 30 and figure out where on that big 4 billion genome that isn't actually the same genome it goes. And then to gradually piece this puzzle together. And we do that using computers, lots of DNA sequencing and lots of computers, gradually piece these together and come up with what we believe the mammoth genome looked like. And we have done that. You can only move it relative to other pieces you found.

Yeah. So- Like if you find one isolated piece, if you picture it on a number line of like one to a hundred, you'd have no idea where to place it until you find some other thing, right? Well, what you have is a number line. Let's say you have a number line that's one to 100 and you have a little 30 piece and your 30 piece says 25, 26, 27, 28. So you can kind of scan along that one to 100 to figure out where it goes and you'll find the matching sequence.

So let's say that number line is your elephant genome and then you've got your little 30 to four, your little 30 base pair piece. You can figure out where it goes. Now, mammoths and elephants are kind of different from each other. So there'll be some places where it doesn't match up exactly.

But if it's long enough, you can figure out the best place in that number line where your tiny little thing goes, because there'll be some common ground. So there are lots of computer algorithms that people use to do that and heuristic searching approaches that people use to do that. And this is possible. And how apparent is it what that piece, what function that thing served for the organism? Oh, function. Now this is something you're getting into another whole realm of issue here. We hadn't quite gotten there yet. Oh, if it's not time to get there,

we don't need to get there yet. We could totally get there. So this is a great question. We have very little idea what parts of genomes do. We have algorithms that help us to find genes. Remember, genes are not the only thing that are in our genomes. There's also lots of non-coding stuff.

There's positional stuff. There's lots of viruses that have gotten in there and made copies of themselves and moved around. There are repeat elements. There are all these kinds of things called like alu elements and stuff like that. There's just, our genomes are chock full of other stuff that's not genes.

And that other stuff might be important and it might not, right? This is true for every animal, every organism that's not genes. And that other stuff might be important and it might not, right? Yeah. This is true for every animal, every organism that's out there. So, today, we have, people are saying we have complete genome sequences or we have genome sequences available for lots of different species. It's true, we have genome sequences available for lots of different species, but there are very few species that we know very much about. And those that we do know a lot about tend to be the ones that we study a lot. So things like

humans, because we care a lot about humans, and lab organisms like mice and rats and drosophila, fruit flies, things that people use to manipulate experimentally in the lab. Other things, any wildlife, you pick a wildlife that isn't a domestic, agriculturally important species, we know very little about. And we guess. We guess the function. So, we find a gene that we believe is the same gene as something that we know that if you turn off in a mouse, changes the color of their eyes. I'm just making that up, right? And then we can say, aha, that gene in the mammoth was probably associated with something like that. We have no idea, right? Really? Well, we have some idea. That's kind of unfair. We have some, we've educated guesses about the functions of genes

based on learning something about functions of genes in a very different animal that was living in a lab. Does that make sense? Okay. So, for example, if we want to know what genes are associated with cold tolerance in an elephant, we might look at what people have written, published about cold tolerance or subcutaneous fat or hair development or things like that in mice or in humans and then say, hmm, what's the same gene that we found in this mammoth genome sequence?

That's probably the function of that gene. So we have an educated guess, but we don't know for sure. Did elephants, were they, like they were in equatorial areas, like pre-mammoth. Yes. And the mammoth was like a northward. Yes. It wasn't the other way around.

Right. So another thing that we can do to figure out so he was fit like they were figured out like asian elephants existed no no no as mammoths were figuring out how to deal with the cold yes so they had a common ancestor that was probably tropically adapted right and then they dive that common ancestor diverged into elephants and mammoths asian elephants and mammoths yeah it's of like, you know, we didn't evolve from chimpanzees and chimpanzees didn't evolve from us. The two species evolved from a common ancestor

that was neither a chimpanzee nor a human, right? The same thing is true for Asian elephants and mammoths. Some people say, we didn't come from monkeys. I'm always like, I don't know if anybody's saying you came from a monkey. Well, great ape, some sort of great ape. And prior to that, monkeys. Or maybe they diverged. Anyway, I digress into parts of human evolutionary history

that I'm not confident in. Yeah, don't do that. There's enough you are confident with. We don't need to do what you're not confident with. I'm not saying I'm not confident that we came from great apes. We certainly evolved from great apes. Anyway, where was I?

Function, mammoths. Oh, yeah. You were talking about finding things that would allow cold tolerance and understanding where those things are. Right. And I interrupted you to make sure that mammoths moved northwards instead of-

Oh, that's right. So another way that we can try to identify things that are potentially important to making a mammoth look and act like a mammoth instead of like the common ancestor of the Asian elephant is to use evolution, to use what we know about evolution. So we have African elephant genome sequence,

which we know diverged prior to the divergence between Asian elephants and mammoths. And so we kind of know what that ancestor between Asian elephants and mammoths. And so we kind of know what that ancestor of Asian elephants and mammoths looked like. And then we can use the genome sequences and what we know about how evolution works to identify the mutations that happened just along the mammoth lineage.

And we can think maybe those are some of the things that are really important to making a mammoth look and act like a mammoth. You're getting to the finding the cold tolerant stuff. Right. Well, how we find it. Yeah, I mean, you just think about the way you can look along these lineages,

these evolutionary lineages and ask what things are fixed, what things are all the same in mammoths. So we know that there are a lot of places in our genomes where you and I will differ. And those are probably not fundamentally important to making us human. If they were, we wouldn't differ. We would be the same as each other, but different from our closest living relative, chimpanzee. So that's similar to what we're doing with mammoths. If we sequence a whole bunch of mammoths, we can look and see where there's variation in mammoths and say, that's

probably not that important to making a mammoth look and act like a mammoth. But we can also find places where mammoths are all the same as each other, but also all different from all elephants. And we can say, aha, there is likely to be some evolutionary difference, some change that happened along that lineage to making mammoths look and act like mammoths rather than like the ancestral elephant that they were. And we can then target those as something that we might need to change if we were going to turn an elephant into a mammoth. That section of the genome.

That one letter. Oh, that's a one letter part. One letter, one letter, yeah. So that's the thing, you know, you're talking about, you know, you have 4 billion bases that are different between between Asian elephant and a woolly mammoth. And there are 4 billion bases total in a woolly mammoth genome and about one and a half million differences, right? And they're going to be spread randomly throughout the genome because mutations happen randomly.

And only some of them are going to be really important to making a mammoth a mammoth and an elephant an elephant, right? So the goal is to use what we know about where genes are and the way evolution works to try to figure out which of those million and a half differences really are fundamentally important. And if we're only interested in creating specific traits or moving specific mammoth-like traits into elephants. We got to figure out somehow which of those differences that we've decided are important

differences, making mammoths different, are actually important differences in making them different in that very specific way that we're interested in them being different, you know, in the case of cold tolerance, which would further limit the number of changes that you would have to make if you were going to make an elephant that had that particular trait. But this is hard. This is something that, you know, we kind of have some idea about how to do, but we don't know enough about the way genomes function or the way a mammoth genome in particular functions to know exactly what the right decision would be. So, what year was it when there was the announcement that they had mapped the human genome? That was 2001. And the person who led that, the public effort for the Human Genome Consortium,

is in that building right there behind you. Through the trees. Yeah, through the trees. What percent of the mammoth genome is complete? Well, can I answer the question about the human genome first? You told me 2001. 2001, we said we had mapped the human genome. About 99% of the human genome is known now. Oh, I got you. Now, 16 years later. We still don't have the whole thing. Oh, well, why was it? Well, you know, to be fair. The definition changed? Well, no. I mean, the genome is a big and complicated place, right?

And there are parts of our genome toward the centromeres, the middle of the genome, and toward the end of the telomeres that are just made up of these really tightly wrapped repeat sequences that there is no existing sequencing technology that we can get through. There's no way to sequence through these things right now. There's no way to do it. And in fact, a big challenge that genome scientists are often thinking about is who is going to actually finish the complete human genome.

This would be a really cool thing to be able to do. To be fair, we know most of the genome that actually has genes in it that's doing stuff. And the parts that we don't know is very small compared to that yeah but we don't know all of it yet and we certainly don't know the entire genome sequence for something that is not human where we haven't spent billions and billions and billions of dollars so i'm guessing you're not going to tell me that you're almost there on the mammoth no and a harder thing about something like a mammoth or something that's something that's extinct is that, remember I said,

we don't have long sequences. So the only way to get through these repeat fragments or these regions of the genome that are just the same thing repeated over and over and over and over again

is to be able to sequence these long strands of DNA. We're never going to have that for something that's extinct. And so we're always going to have to take these broken fragments and map them to an existing genome sequence. We can't do what's called a de novo genome assembly,

where you don't have anything, which is what impressively these teams managed to do for the human genome. We had no map. We had no puzzle top, right? They just did it. They took these long fragments and used sophisticated computer algorithms to piece these long fragments together. And the more data they get, the more they have to realize they got some parts wrong. They can rearrange it and try to figure out what the real sequence is. It's very hard to put together these de novo genomes where all you have is just good quality tissue and you don't want to use any map. The reason you don't want to use any map is that the map might be wrong. And this is particularly important when something is extinct and doesn't have any close relatives. Think, for example, of the Moa, where the closest living relative is the Tinamu.

And they diverged, I can't remember exactly how many, but more than 30 million years between these two lineages. So there's a lot of opportunity for parts of the genome to move around, for chromosomes to break and move around. Probably doesn't happen so much in birds, but in mammals, we know that chromosomes rearrange all the time. And if your map, your living thing,

the tinamou, is really different from the ancient sequence, ancient genome you're trying to map where you only have your 30s and 40s, there might be big chunks of the genome that you just never get. They'll never be recovered, no matter how many bones are... Because you don't have those long fragments, which is what you would need to be able to extend off the ends of these sequences. So this is a hard thing for ancient genomics. And for many species, we might be forever restricted to just being able to use

the stuff that doesn't change so quickly. And maybe this is a bad thing, right? And this goes back to whether you can bring back a species that's extinct. If the most important parts are the most divergent parts, and therefore the parts that you actually can't sequence or put together, how are you ever going to know what they are? Yeah. So if a fellow wanted to go make a mammoth. Right. Okay.

All right. Like walk me through- And there are some of those fellows, right? Yes. Yes. Well, that's the thing you talked about is there was someone who was hopeful. I don't want to dwell on things

that just aren't going to happen, but just as an example, there was someone who was hopeful that you talked about who would find semen. Right. So there are two teams that are out there that are looking either for semen or for cells, just frozen cells that are in good condition.

And they want to clone a mammoth. This is most common word that you hear when you think about bringing things back. Like Jurassic Park type clone a mammoth. Yeah, clone. Well, see, even bringing up Jurassic Park kind of calls all this into question. Because then you got to talk about

how many journalists have asked you to explain why amber is not actually good for DNA? How many journalists are there? It's a good question though. I mean, to be fair, this is what people think about ancient DNA is, oh, look, we can find things preserved in amber. We're gonna be able to bring dinosaurs back to life.

It was a shitty medium. It makes sense. It does, it does. When you see a piece of amber, you see a fly in it, you're like, well, of course, you just cut that thing open. And it was inspired by reality. So Michael of amber, you see a fly in it, you're like, well, of course, you just cut that thing open.

And it was inspired by reality. So Michael Crichton, when he wrote his book, actually wrote in the acknowledgements that he was grateful to the Extinct Species Working Group at UC Berkeley, Alan Wilson's lab. The Extinct Species Working Group. Because they were talking about ancient DNA and that was what inspired him. And then his movie book inspired people

to see if they could actually recover DNA from insects in amber. And people published papers saying that they had. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you are and how you feel about these things, there is this ubiquitous source of DNA that's everywhere that gets into everything. And I could extract DNA from anything and get some DNA. That doesn't mean that it's DNA from that thing. Amber is very porous. It's formed in a very hot environment. It turns out that it is a terrible, terrible preserver for DNA, which is very sad. There's these beautiful skeletons or exoskeletons of things that you

see in amber, but there isn't any DNA that is from those animals that's in there. There was a group of scientists in London at the Natural History Museum in London in the late 90s who tried to replicate some of these experiments by going into their collection. And they recovered pieces of amber and copal. Copal is the recent precursor to amber. First it's copal and then it hardens and becomes amber. And these were only decades old.

We know we can recover decade old DNA. And some of these things had bugs in them and some of them didn't. They extracted DNA from all of these different pieces of amber, saying if it doesn't have an insect, we shouldn't be able to get DNA. If it does, we should be able to get DNA. And therefore, this is some sort of test of the hypothesis of whether amber preserves DNA. And they were able to recover DNA from their pieces of copal and amber, but there was no correlation between their ability to recover DNA and whether there were

insects there. And it turns out they were just recovering insect DNA because there's insect DNA everywhere. I mean, I could take a swab off this tabletop here and get insect DNA off of it, and probably your DNA as well, because you've been sitting here and breathing on the table for a while. That doesn't mean. It's already there. It's already there. Yes. Yes.

Yes. So I could go to the toy store and get a dinosaur and extract DNA and show that I have recovered dinosaur DNA, but really it's just going to be chopped up pieces of human and cockroach DNA, right? You know? Yeah,

I got you. I got you. So the early days of ancient DNA were filled with some of these spectacular claims, none of which have been able to be shown to be true. The oldest DNA that we've recovered that's reliable is that 700,000 year old horse bone from the Arctic because it was frozen, right? And that's why it was recovered.

Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. There is no frozen dirt that's 65 million years old. There is no DNA in dinosaurs. And talk about this, you don't need to dwell on it, but the sperm path to a mammoth. Cloning. Let's do cells and then sperm. So the idea with sperm, I guess I'll start with sperm, would be that you could find frozen sperm and then you could get an elephant egg cell and you could use it to fertilize the elephant egg cell so you would have something that's half mammoth,

half elephant. Like you'd surrogate. You'd surrogate, you'd like impregnate a female Asian elephant with this frozen sperm and get a half mammoth. And then do it again and get a three quarter mammoth. And they're fired up about that because I think you should explain that

and you did in your book that they found that old frozen sperm is still viable. Right. So that gives them hope. But not old, old. Right. Right. Is that a term you guys use? Old, old?

That's like alternative old. Yeah. No. So when an animal dies, and i think i've already said this the dna in its cell starts to degrade immediately and the cells start to degrade immediately so this requires that you were able to be fine you would able you would be able to find frozen viable cells or frozen viable oh i got you so the same problem i hadn't really put that together right yeah the sperm has yeah I got you. So the same problem, I hadn't really put that together. Right. Yeah, same problem. Yeah, I got you. It's destroyed everywhere.

So it had to be that sperm was, it's like sperm's not some special holder that makes it not. So the special holder actually probably would be the testicles, right? And this is what I read when I was doing my research for this, is that because the testicles were outside of the body, they would get frozen faster and that would protect the sperm. It turns out they're not outside of the body in a mammoth, which is probably for good reason, right? If you think about the environment where they lived.

So yeah, they're not, no, it's not a viable pathway. That was an interesting thing I heard about mammoths. You talk about the cold tolerance and fur, but a thing that Asian and African elephants have big ears and mammoths had small ears because imagine that thin flap. Yeah, freeze. What would happen to it in cold temperatures?

Right, and the elephants have big ears for heat dissipation, right? So yeah, you don't want to dissipate your heat if you're living at 40 below. Okay, so now that I understand the sperm thing, that it is, it's like- It's just like the cell thing. Yeah. Yeah, it just doesn't.

And so when people say cloning, cloning, what you really mean, and we say this with cloning dinosaurs and dinosaur parrots, you say cloning mammoths. What you really mean when you say cloning is an actual scientific process where you take a cell and that's already a particular type of cell,

like a skin cell or, okay, so here we go. Who's the most famous clone? Dolly or- Dolly the sheep, that's already a particular type of cell, like a skin cell. Okay, so here we go. Who's the most famous clone? Dolly. Dolly the sheep, that's right. So Dolly was a clone and she was a clone of a mammary cell from another female sheep, right? So what you do in cloning is you take an egg cell that is viable, ripe egg cell, and you suck out the nucleus, the stuff that has the nuclear DNA, all the stuff that is going to code for the genes that make the animal look and act like it does. That normally in an egg cell would be fertilized by sperm. That would make everything diploid. You'd have mom's DNA and dad's DNA. And then that would cause this process of differentiation because that fertilized cell is a stem cell. It's called totipotent. It has the capacity to become every type of cell that's necessary to create an organism.

It doesn't yet have any instructions that say be a heart cell, be a mammary cell, be a lung cell, but it will begin to divide and differentiate. And as it does, those cells will gradually get the instructions that are necessary to be different types of cells. You don't need the same genes turned on to be a heart cell as you do to be a liver cell, for example. So this process of differentiation just turns genes on and off as necessary to create different functions. So the idea of cloning is that you have a cell

that's already way down that path. It already has exactly the genes turned on and off to be that particular type of cell. In Dolly's case, it was a mammary cell. And you have to somehow trick it into forgetting those instructions and resetting itself into one of those types of cells that can begin this process of dividing and differentiation. This reprogramming is really important in cloning. So you take that egg cell and there's some magic in that egg cell. And that is that the proteins that are in that egg cell can cause that reprogramming to happen.

So you take the egg cell, suck out the nucleus, and then you take this tissue cell that you want to clone and you stress it out. You starve it of nutrients and put it in a state where it's super stressed, right? And then you can suck the nucleus out of that cell, inject it into the egg cell, zap it with a bit of electricity, some magic happens that causes the proteins in that egg cell to reset that cell, causing it to forget all the instructions to be a memory cell and start that process of dividing

and differentiating. That, it turns out, is really hard and still is really inefficient. If the cell is not entirely reprogrammed, reset, completely to scratch, then it won't work. It won't divide correctly. It'll go wrong at some point. And that's why cloning of animals remains really inefficient. I mean, it's gotten better than it was in Dolly's time, but it still isn't, you know, it's not like every time you do it, it works.

What you need, though, is for that cell, that tissue cell to be alive. There can't be anything wrong with it. If there's anything wrong with it, it won't be programmed. Like a live, like miracle of life alive. Like it's able to divide in a dish. It has to be, you know, it can't be broken. It can't be turned off. The DNA can't be chopped up. It has to be capable of resetting itself. And as we've already established, once an animal dies, all of its cells start to break up and die. The enzymes chop up the DNA. It can't replicate itself anymore. And because that is true, one will never find a living mammoth cell. The most recently alive mammoths were alive 3,500 years ago. They have no living cells remaining. And so- Just end of story.

End of story. One will never be able to clone a mammoth. Despite, really. Sorry. Or dinosaur. And that's, see, it's a particularly bold statement coming from someone in your position. Is it? It's a statement I've been making for a very long time. But, but, but, okay. I've seen the DNA. You're already operating.

You live and operate in the world of the impossible. Do I? Yes. Because things that, things that would have been regarded, things that a decade ago or two decades ago would have been regarded as no. Huh? That won't happen. Right.

Okay. How do you know that you're not, but, don't doubt that you are, but you're not worried about becoming the laughingstock. You know what? If somebody finds a living mammoth cell, it will be so freaking exciting that I won't mind being a laughingstock. The chances of that happening- That'll outweigh your embarrassment. Exactly. Okay. It'll be a net win. All I'm saying is that the likelihood of this happening is very, very, very close to zero. So close to zero that I'm willing to say it's never going to happen. And is that, I don't want to dwell on it, but is that sort of like the consensus among your peers? Yes. Okay. So if that's the case, let's move on to what might work. Well, this is why we get to moving genes.

So we know that we can come up with these DNA sequences if we can identify using a computer, which parts of those genomes are important to making something look and act like a mammoth. Then we can take an elephant cell that is alive, right? That's living in a dish that's able to replicate itself and turn into two cells or whatever from an Asian elephant. And we can then cut and paste using genome editing technologies.

The elephant DNA sequences can be cut out and paste into their place, the parts of the mammoth genome sequence that are there. So then you have a living cell that's an elephant cell that has some mammoth DNA sequences in it, right? Yeah. But that is not the same thing as having a mammoth cell. No, yeah, I'm with you. Right. And what are the things that you would be, let's just make, let's assume for a minute

that this is all right and you could do it. Can we finish why that cell is not ever going to be the exact same thing as a mammoth person? If you're not ready to all ready and you could do it. Can we finish why that cell is not ever going to be the exact same thing as a mammoth? If you're not ready to move on, let's do it. Because this was the question you asked me at the very beginning and we kind of gone down a lot of different rabbit holes here, but let's see. So let's say you somehow managed to identify all the places where mammoths and elephants are different and Okay. And you managed to make all of those changes, cut and paste one and a half million different letters in that cell that's growing in a dish in a lab.

So now you have a genome sequence that looks, as far as you can tell, like a mammoth genome sequence, right? Why wouldn't that turn into a mammoth? Well, the main reason is that we are more, every organism is more than the sequence of the A's, C's, G's, and T's that make up our DNA. I got you. That there are things that happen during development that change the way our genes express.

Our mom's diet, whether she gets sick, what she's exposed to, how stressed she is, etc. All those things will change the way our genes are expressing. Some of the developmental things that happen in utero are caused by hormonal changes in mom, which are coded for by her genome, which is an elephant at this point, right? And then the animal is born and it consumes an elephant's diet and it's taught how to behave like an elephant. And it has gut microbes that are like an elephant. And we're gut microbes that are like an elephant. And we're just beginning to learn how important the things that live in our gut are to-

Yeah, you're talking about that they will, that a lot of animals I know do this, but they'll eat like fecal matter of the mother to colonize their gut with what it needs. That's right. And so those organisms living in its gut are going to be expressing different chemicals and etc. And those are going to affect the way the genes are expressed. And so this thing that is born might

have mammoth DNA, but it's not going to be 100% identical to a mammoth that used to be alive. And that's because mammoths aren't here anymore. You would need a family of mammoths and a mammoth habitat and mammoth gut microbes and etc. If you were going to make something that's 100% identical to a mammoth, which is why it can't happen. But I think the people who are proponents of using this sort of technology as a way of preserving biodiversity or replacing

parts of ecosystems that are missing because of an extinction don't really care that you're not creating something that's 100% identical to something that's there. What they really want is to create an ecological proxy, to create something that can fill the components of that niche that are missing and therefore somehow threatening

either the stability of the ecosystem in the given, in the existing climate or phenomena, or threatening other species from going extinct. Now, I'm not sure that this is necessarily true for mammoths. I think that there are people who are interested in bringing mammoths back because it's phenomenal. Like how cool would it be to have a mammoth that's back? Yeah, like, can you hold that thought

and like touch on why mammoths? Is it because they're crazy enough, but recent, they're crazy enough to have attention, but recent enough to be in the realm of supposed possibility? I think it kind of boils down to that. My personal opinion about why people have focused on mammoths, and my book is about mammoths as well, even though I don't personally work on mammoths in my lab, but it is the thing that people talk about. I think people think of mammoths as soon as they realize that they can't bring back dinosaurs. Gotcha.

I just think it's like the second most spectacular thing. So like T-Rex is out, but mammoth is in. Right, right. It's also less scary. But it is because it's like- Sabertooth cats, let's bring them back or arctodus this giant short-faced bear that we made extinct because it would stand up and would be 14 feet tall and we didn't like that when we were trying to let our kids run around outside

you know that was uh um so mammoths they seem well they're huge they're spectacular they're definitely gone um but they probably wouldn't kill us. Yeah, there's something like kind of snuggly about them. But it's nothing else. It's nothing other than just those like sort of issues of charisma. And then maybe it's in the realm of possibility because they're coming up out of the ice all the time. I think this is the reason that we see a lot of popular attention to it. Now, there are people who make ecological arguments for bringing mammoths back to life.

There's a father-son team that live in northeastern Siberia, the Zimov, Sergei Zimov and his son Nikita. They have this place called Pleistocene Park where they're trying to bring enough big herbivores back that they can reestablish this rich grassland that used to be in the Siberian tundra during the Ice Age. And they have imported bison from Canada and they have a couple of different species of deer and they have horses, et cetera. And they have been able to show that having these animals on the landscape

sort of increases the production of this grassland. So they move things around, they're recycling nutrients, they're chewing stuff up. And they've even made the argument that because these animals are there and they're feeding during the winter, they're pulling away the snow and creating these exposed bits of soil.

And this would have happened during the ice age where the snow would have been removed and the soil was exposed. And in doing so, they're actually causing the sediment that is in the area to warm up less quickly than it does when the snow is on top. And this is a little bit counterintuitive. So if you think about it, if the average temperature of the soil, sorry, if the soil temperature is really the average annual ambient temperature, right? Then during the summer, it's, you know, 60, 70 degrees up there.

During the winter, it's 40 below. So the soil temperature can be very cold as long as there's not snow sitting on top of it because snow is a really efficient insulator. And what the snow sitting on top of the soil does is it keeps that summer heat in the soil and actually causes the soil to warm up faster. Whereas if you can pull that snow away, the bare earth is exposed to the really cold Siberian winter and cools down that sediment. And so they have made the argument that if we could

get rid of a lot of the snow, which we could do by having really big herbivores like mammoths wandering around, we could slow the rate of permafrost warming and slow the rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere that's coming from permafrost warming. So they are making an ecological argument for why we should have these animals back on the landscape. That's something I hadn't heard of because I know that the area,

like the Arctic and what was the Bering land bridge at the time when people talk about where there were horses up there, there was like an American lion. There was everything, lots of cool things. It was a grassland. It was like step grasslands. Right. And now it's toxic tundra.

It's tundra. I'd never heard the idea that that, I had always heard that transition explained as a climate issue. I'd never heard it explained as perhaps related to grazing habits. Yeah. Do you buy that? I do.

Things don't happen in isolation. Obviously, ecosystems change. Ecosystems are dynamic. But if you remove grazing herbivores from a landscape, the landscape changes. You can see that in the desert southwest. There's this little thing called the kangaroo rat, and it kind of makes these little tunnels. I saw one the other day.

Did you? Cool. They're pretty cool, huh? And, but once they disappear and they are disappearing, it takes, you know, half a year and the entire landscape has changed because that animal was doing a lot to maintain this different type of habitat. It changes, other species move in, some other species will disappear, but having that little guy there really type of habitat. It changes. Other species move in. Some other

species will disappear. But having that little guy there really maintained that habitat. And there's little doubt to my mind that having these herbivores on the landscape in the high Arctic will have had an impact on the grasslands. I mean, they were consuming things. They were favoring some plants over others. They were moving nutrients around all over the place. They were churning the soil by walking over things. We know that when mammoths and other large mammals disappeared from the southern part of North America, in California, for example, they would have actually kept the trees at bay, these mammoths. And so there would have been an enormous change to the ecosystem that happened with the extinction of mammoths. And so there would have been an enormous change to the ecosystem that happened with the extinction of mammoths. And it's probably the change that caused Native Americans who lived

there to start using fire instead of these large animals to try to keep the trees at bay so that other things would grow there. So yeah, I mean, the animals that live in a habitat definitely have some feedback into what habitat is there. Now, you have the chicken and egg problem. What happened first? Did the landscape change so much that it couldn't support the animals or did the animals disappear so that the landscape disappeared?

Probably these things happen together. So the abiotic changes, the climate changes associated with warming probably fed into the disappearance of some of these animals that then fed into more changes that were happening to the landscape. So remember that,

you know, when you think about the ecology of a system, you're not thinking about one animal or just the vegetation. You really have to think about how everything interacts with each other, which is one of the arguments for potentially thinking about using this genome engineering technology to try to preserve some components of ecosystems. Because as components disappear, ecosystems change. However proximate. However proximate. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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the, uh, what might the mammoth in quotes, I'm making quotes, what might the mammoth be and look like? I have no idea. It would depend on what genes were changed. You know, it would really depend on what, what scientists

who are interested in doing this were trying to select. Probably if it was something that wanted to live in the high Arctic, it would be something that was hairier than an elephant because it needs to be able to protect itself from the cold. Smaller ears.

Probably smaller ears. But, you know, it's, these are, it's fluid, you know. But it has to be something you've thought about a great deal. I haven't. fluid, you know? But it has to be something you've thought about a great deal. I haven't. You know, if I had to pick species that I think we should use this technology on, I

don't think the mammoth would be high up on my list. Yeah, your lab has the greatest connection of collection of passenger pigeon. Also not high up on my list for species that I think we should bring back to life, but a species that I think is fascinating, which is why we have this collection. I am- So you're not gunning to bring back a billion passenger pigeons? I don't think that's a good idea. I think that when you think about bringing a species back to life, there are technical hurdles, there are ethical hurdles, and there are ecological hurdles to doing this. In this case, for a passenger pigeon, there are technical hurdles. One can't clone birds. So the

point where you have a living cell that you edited, that you then clone using regular cloning technologies, we can't do that with birds because we can't get to the egg cells at the time in their reproductive cycle where they're actually ripe, They're ready to have that little magical thing that happens that reprograms the cells. We can't do that. So in order to clone or genetically modify birds, we need entirely new technology. And there are some technologies that are under development, but they're really not as far advanced as I think. So there's technical hurdle. Ethically, now with mammoths, there are many ethical hurdles. I mean, elephants in captivity don't do well.

We need to know a lot more about how to, you know, keep them psychologically and physically healthy if they're going to be in captivity. Obviously, this would be a captive breeding experiment. I think elephants should be allowed to make more elephants rather than to be used in experiments to do this. I think there are a lot of sort of moral, ethical questions involved with,

and also they're very highly social creatures. Why would you bring one back? You'd need to do this over the course of many, many generations. Elephants have 14 to 18 year, 18 year generation times in the wild, but not generation times. That's how old they are when they first

have their first babies. This is a long time. And then have a two year gestation. And two year gestation, yeah. So there are technical and to my mind, a lot of ethical problems with mammoths. So has your feeling about this matured over time? I think as I've learned more about the technical hurdles, I think I've thought more about, I don't know, I guess obviously your feelings about anything that you're learning a lot about mature as you learn more about them. But I don't think I've ever really been in favor of

mammoths for these ethical reasons. What I try to do when I think about what species might be good for this is I try to think through these questions first. What are the technical hurdles? What are the ethical hurdles? What are the ecological implications? And if we get to passenger pigeons, I mean, where would they live? This is a species that flocked in the billions, one big flock of billions of individuals that would move through forests, just destroying forests in their way. We don't even have those forests anymore. So where would they go? Maybe they didn't need to live in such big flocks. We have some genomic evidence now that suggests that they might have been genetically adapted to living in large flocks. So maybe they did. Yeah. That's been explained to me that with some things like passenger pigeons, it would be that you might have to have many to have any because those mass

groupings of birds trigger reproductive behaviors. Yeah, well, this is actually my fascination with passenger pigeons and why we've been interested in studying their DNA. It is amazing to me that a bird could be that abundant. And even with the amount of hunting and human use of these birds that went on, how did they actually disappear? How is it that no tiny little pockets of these birds survived somewhere? That there was no long autumn.

Right. There must have been something about them that made them adapted to living in these large flocks. And that's why we've been studying them. I'm fascinated to understand why, how something could evolve to be adapted to living in such big populations and why that extinction would have happened.

And you said you have not found small pockets. No, no one's ever found small pockets of passenger pigeons surviving. They, in 40 years, they went from millions to billions of individuals to extinct. So what are, if those two are out, like what is a good candidate speech?

I mean, I know that you like, you professionally, like you don't separate plausibility with the ethics right like you have the conversations at the same time right there's no sense in doing this big ethical exploration of something that just isn't going to happen right so you're doing these in tandem right yeah as you do them in tandem considering the technology and the ethics where would be a place that maybe not even in your generation, but in the next generation of people in your field,

where would be a place where you might picture? If you were able to make an edict now. I think this is going to disappoint you, but I think that this technology has its most potential. I'm already disappointed because you're not shooting for the stars here. I think this technology has the most potential as a tool for conserving species, preserving species that are still alive today. I think that we should think about this technology,

and obviously people like this sort of spectacular nature of thinking about bringing things that are extinct back to life, but we should think about how we might use DNA sequences from individuals from the same or related species that used to be alive to increase the diversity, decrease vulnerability of species that are in danger of going extinct today. And whether that means woolly rhinos or kangaroo rats or black-footed ferrets, I don't care, right? But what I worry about is that the kind of spectacular nature of thinking about bringing extinct species back might make people less likely to think about some of the real benefits that this technology could have to species that are still alive. There's, you know, this thought among conservation groups that this excitement about de-extinction is taking away resources that would otherwise go to

protecting species that are alive. And I don't think that's true. I don't think that people who care about preserving polar bears or care about preserving woodpeckers are all of a sudden going to stop caring about that because some far off possibility of bringing mammoths back to life might be there.

But the money thing seems real. Unless you feel that no money would really, was headed in one direction and then goes off in a different direction. I think that where de-extinction is right now, which is in this, let's see how the mammoth genome looks, or let's see that, any money that goes into that is going to be new money. It's going to be- Like it wasn't going to the Eastern Bluebird Society. No. But later, if you actually have an animal, you would need to figure out how to regulate it,

how to rear it, where it goes. And that, I think, would come into conflict with some of the money that's going into conservation, which is why I think that we need to have more realistic conversations about where this technology can go and bring people together to think about how we about where this technology can go and bring people together to think about how we might develop this technology as a new weapon in what I really feel should be

a growing arsenal in ways that we are thinking about combating the extinctions that are happening today, the crises of biodiversity loss that are real, where wildlife is disappearing. And what can we do? How can we think about modern technologies in a way that is conducive to collaboration with people who are interested in conservation rather than conflict? I think some of the more spectacular, also there's this fear that there's a lot of money going to de-extinction, which is not true. You don't think it's true? I know it's not true. I know that there are some people who care very much about particular species who have been generous in thinking about,

so there are people who care about prairie chickens, for example, and who are very interested in helping to think about ways that we can use this technology to increase diversity and the robustness of prairie chickens, including maybe thinking about what is the heath hen, which is a prairie chicken that used to live on Martha's Vineyard. And can we find out the differences between heath hens and other species and maybe think about using this as a technology

to bring heath hens back. And there've been people who've been generous in donating small amounts of money to do sequencing of heath hen remains and then some analyses to figure out what we might do there. The mammoth funding stuff, George Church is doing a lot of that work at his lab in Harvard.

He might have some specific donors who haven't given him money to do that. I'm not sure there's zero public funding going to this. Is that right? Zero. So that is a big- I believe because that's a checkable thing. Big number, yes. In fact, I think when I was doing

my book, I actually looked at places like World Wildlife Fund and conservation organizations and to figure out exactly how much money had gone into de-extinction related projects. And the number when I was writing this book was zero. So let me throw two hypotheticals at you. And you can pick which one you like. In what you're talking about with that you would prevent, that the technology would be applicable in preventing extinctions, what might be imminent extinctions. Right. And I'll throw two cases at you.

So one you have, we spent a long time having a conversation with someone about the Mexican gray wolf. Now they were down to seven, all in captivity. They've got them up to around a hundred living in the wild. They're the barrier to recovery is that they're inconvenient to have around. It's not a habitat issue. It's not an animal issue. It's just-

People don't like predators. They're inconvenient. Right. Right. I don't know how to quite break it out but 50 of that 50 of the inconvenience argument comes from hunters who want more deer and elk particularly elk on the ground they can hunt and eat and enjoy right 50 of it it, and again, I'm not sure on the percentage, is livestock producers who these wolves are affecting their ability to make a living. Let's say, would it be the kind of thing you're talking about?

Could you ever imagine that you would make a gray wolf? That doesn't eat elk. No, no, let's rule that out. Manipulate a gray wolf that you would find in them. Like, what is it about lives? Cattle. Yeah.

You can pick from that one or you can pick from this one. Okay. Why is the greater sage grouse so persnickety about where it lives? Okay. Which of those is better if you're going to look at some way to explore

like what you're talking about with helping species? Because here we have two species. Sage-grouse. And the reason is because- You like the sage-grouse one. Well, just because behavior, trying to understand the behavior of a predator, that's not going to be one gene or 10 genes or 100 genes.

This is going to be a gene environment, heredity interaction thing that's going to be extremely difficult to understand. Okay. So you're never going to suss out like, why do these things eat cows? No, but you might be able to do experiments with sage grouse that were able to identify individuals that were capable of living in different habitats. And then you could hone in on whatever genes are associated with the capacity to eat something. Yeah, like why is this one okay with breeding, with nesting next to an oil rig? Right. Yeah. And just as happy and productive. So that would be not easy, right? Because you're

still talking about behavior and you're still talking, but there are other things about sage grouse. They have shorter generation times. It's an easier thing to think about. You're talking about nesting habitat preference, which is something that you could select for. You could do artificial selection for individuals that want to nest in particular places. Whereas, you know, trying to teach a wolf not to be a wolf, that's a tough one, right? So is there one, like I gave you two, is there one that you really love, like a scenario that you think is like ripe for exploration? I, you know, I, I would like a low hanging fruit, um, like the black-footed ferret project. So is there, yeah. So something where there's a particular trait that you can hone in

on that's not caused by too many different genes that is missing in a population or that one population has, but another one doesn't. And that'd be the disease resistance. Yeah, so, well, this isn't a wildlife question, but it's kind of easier to wrap your head around. There are, we know that oceans are becoming more acidic. And if you could identify populations of fish, and there was a paper recently where they identified a particular population

of particular species of fish that was capable of surviving and producing more offspring in an environment of higher acidity than other populations. If you could figure out what genes caused that, you could move those genes into other fish, then maybe we would have a way of safeguarding fish against some of the acidity increases happening in the oceans while we try to figure out a way to stop that as well. I'm not saying we should do this instead. This is important. But, you know, these changes, some of these anthropogenic changes to our climate are happening too quickly for evolution

to sort it out on its own. And if there are these scenarios where we could find genes and move them around, another thing is heat tolerance in corals. So if you could find corals that are able to survive in higher temperature environments and you could figure out what genes are associated with that, could you then move those genes into different species of coral

so we could stop all the corals from dying? These are hard, like probably really hard, maybe impossible questions to answer. But they're things where you can imagine targeting, coming up with a way of figuring it out. Now, you know, there's, as I said, there's little, very little money going into this because, you know, public funding these days, we only like to fund things that we know are going to work, which mostly means you have to already have done the experiment using your own money to do it.

Or it has to have immediate impact on human health. And there has as yet to be a recognition, enough of a recognition of how important healthy, diverse habitats are to maintaining healthy humans. But this is something that I think is going to become more and more apparent, hopefully. Hold on. You're saying that we're like connected to the natural world? Yeah. Don't tell Congress or tell them actually. Yeah, we are. Can I ask you two more questions though? Okay, two questions. Okay. Question number one. You're sensitive about the idea that people would accuse people in your field

of promoting this idea that we could just say, screw it, we'll fix it later. Yeah, because we can't. We cannot fix it. Once something is gone, it is gone. Even if we create proxies of that thing so that we can try to have other things not disappear, it's not the same thing as saving it in the first place.

And I don't think that, people have made that argument to me before. I tend to be more of an optimist than that. I think that, you know, people have made that argument to me before. I tend to be more of an optimist than that. I think that it thinks, that assumes two things about people that are both kind of awful. Actually, one of them, maybe I'm not being too optimistic about, I think the first thing it assumes is that people in general care about extinction. And I think maybe they don't. I think maybe most people, in as much as it doesn't actually affect them personally, don't care. And maybe by talking about things that are extinct and what we're missing, we can get more people to actually

care about things going extinct in the first place. Will it make these people feel more comfortable about stuff going extinct? Maybe. And that is something we have to work against by not letting this report that mammoths are going to be cloned in two years, continue to go through the news cycle because they're not, we can never bring a mammoth back. And it's really important that we don't falsely say that we can because this, or what I could see happening is that someone creates a hairy elephant and he's in a park

and then all of a sudden there's a story about how, you know, however they want to pitch it at that time and people will go, oh yeah, see? That might be the thing that happens first. We're a very far way away though from creating any sort of manipulated elephant. Is that right?

We can't actually do any of that reproductive technology for elephants yet. So there's, you know, there's a lot of technical stuff that we didn't talk about that's in between today and having edited mammoths back. But the other thing that it assumes is that people who do care about extinction, people like me, and hopefully people like you and people listening to this podcast, are all of a sudden not going to do so because some far off crazy thing happens and a mammoth-like thing comes back. I think people are still going to care about losing the animals that are in their backyard that they care about having there. And that like some idea that maybe someday

in the future, someone might be able to bring them back won't stop them from worrying that they're not going to be there next week or in 10 years or when their kids want to go out and hunt or play with these animals that are in the backyard. I think people who care will continue to care. I hope that people who don't care will care even less. And that's the fear. Well, sort of the argument, like someone with a big trust fund, right? Doesn't develop a sort of aggressiveness in an opportunistic sense because they always know that no matter what they do they're going to be okay yeah down the road but here's my here's my second my second last question all right do you feel like the the that the people in i don't know how to put it like

your peers what do you call your community that's like it's not your community who are the you know my peers my colleagues yeah your colleagues who deal in this world. How much are you guys sort of like a jockey looking for a horse? Okay, so obviously it was like a love of the technology that drew many of your peers into this field. Have you had to try to become a little bit elastic in how you apply it or talk about applying it in order to make it palatable? just to like turn the technology toward a discussion about de-extinction or saving nearly extinct species because it just is a good way to sell it.

I think that it's a big group of people and we're actually, we have a big community and a listserv and it's very active and people are talking about it. People have different motivations for being interested in this. And there are some people who really want to bring a particular species back.

Like there's the group in the Netherlands that want the aurochs, which is the ancestor of domestic cattle. They want to bring this back and are trying to do this by breeding together different breeds of cattle that have different characteristics of the ancestor to eventually come up with some new breed that has a cluster of characteristics. So their work was initiated by the desire to see, like by the desire to make the orcs. Because they want to be able to have this orcs in these habitats that they're trying to rewild. And so they think that in order to bring wildlife back to these parts of Europe, that where all the trees were cut down

and it went to pasture, et cetera, they need to have some of these animals back because they want to reestablish that. And so their desire is to see wildlife in its natural state. And they think that in order to do that, they need to bring back something that is like an aurochs. And so that's what's motivating that. There's a group in Australia that are trying to- So there's like the wildlife to biochem path. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. there are people who are interested in gastric brooding frogs.

There are people who are interested in moas for the sake of moas. There are, you know, George is interested in using this technology to come up with ways to cure, I think it's herpes in elephants and, you know, other things. And also then there's the Zmovs who really want to reestablish tundra in Siberia. So I would say that the motivations for

this range from conservation to ecological to just really being astounded and impressed by the technology to really wanting to bring a particular species back. And obviously people are flexible in the way that they talk about this. And as people learn more about different motivations and different opportunities and different technical and ethical and ecological challenges, we change the way we are thinking about these things. We grow, we learn and adapt. And that's not a bad thing. No, and it's not like you're, as you pointed out,

it's not like you're like chasing the money because right now there is- There isn't any money to chase. Yeah, it's not like you're trying to like human longevity. I imagine there's a budget there. In fact, if anyone would like to donate. Yeah, no, if we were studying aging or human diseases,

then there's pockets of money out there for that. But as people who are involved with conservation, no, there's not enough money going around in conservation. I don't want to compete with people who are trying to conserve species that are alive today. What I'd like to do is collaborate with them. I'd like to create opportunities for us to work together so that our motivations, my desire to see this technology develop so that it can be a useful tool for conservation happens along with someone who's

really trying to conserve a particular species. And in that way, I guess I am kind of a jockey looking for a horse. I want to find people who have a question, a problem that they're trying to solve that this technology might help to solve. And I want to work with them, not against them, because I do see that there's tremendous potential in this technology,

as long as we're not too scared of it to try it. Real quick, so your own book, Beth Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth, The Science of De-extinction. Where else might people go if they wanna, if they're curious about this? Are there some good? There's lots of videos on YouTube.

There was an event that our community, de-extinction community held at National Geographic several years ago that you can find a TEDx de-extinction. So there's lots of different talks from ethicists and conservation biologists, both for and against. Some of the technology in there is a bit out of date now, but it's a nice place to start.

Good resource for finding out about the way that people are thinking about this now. Is your book 95% current? Yeah, yep. The technology moves slowly. Okay. All right, well, thanks so much for talking to us, man. This is great stuff.

And yeah, I want to schedule another talk for one decade from now. Okay, I'll put it on my calendar. Yeah, and we'll somehow come up with the funding to have you for a whole day. I feel like we could have talked a lot longer. Thank you. Yeah, thank we'll somehow come up with the funding to have you for a whole day. I feel like we could have talked a lot longer. Thank you very much.

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