The Man Bringing Extinct Creatures Back To Life - Ben Lamm

Ben Lamm is an entrepreneur, CEO of Colossal and a founder. What if Jurassic Park's dream of bringing extinct creatures back to life was possible? Well it kind of is. And Ben's company is forging ahead in the new frontier of de-extinction, starting with some of the most legendary animals from history. Expect to learn why Ben is bringing Wooly Mammoths back to life, how you give birth to an animal that died out thousands of years ago, where Ben gets the genetic material from, how bringing back Mammoths could fix climate change, whether artificial wombs will actually work, if we can make humans as strong as Neanderthals using their DNA, why we should bring back the Dodo bird and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at https://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #extinction #mammoth #jurassicpark - 00:00 Ben’s Wild Plan to Fix Global Warming 02:46 How to Extract Ancient DNA 09:40 Making a Mammoth a Reality from DNA 22:55 What Could Go Wrong? 30:55 What Else Would Ben Like to Bring Back? 37:37 Why Mammoths Went Extinct 42:50 How Mammoths Are Useful to the Planet 52:07 Can Genetically-Created Mammoths Reproduce Naturally? 54:10 What Does this Mean for Human Advancement? 58:52 The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement 1:09:20 Where to Find Ben - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Just as a headline here, you're trying to fix global warming by bringing woolly mammoths back to life amongst a number of other extinct creatures, right?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think that one company can fix global warming. I think that we are at the, you know, brink of a major biodiversity crisis, which will lead to ecosystem collapse. And restoring ecosystems like the Arctic tundra is something that, you know, we're very focused on. So I hope that we are one of many people working on biodiversity loss and combating climate change. But I think it's maybe a little bold to say that we're, we are solving it ourselves.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Okay. So somebody comes up to you at a cocktail party and says, what do you do? What is your answer for your day to day work?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  So my, my general answer is I say I'm in technology. If they dive deeper, I'm like, well, I'm in biotechnology. If they dive deeper, I tell them that we're working to bring back extinct species and preserve all life on earth. And then it, and then it kind of unravels from there.

• 1:06Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. Talk to me about de-extinction then. Like what, what even is that?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So de-extinction is not necessarily, not necessarily a new concept. Other, everything from books and movies and some other movements through in the world have talked about the concept of de-extinction. And the way we view de-extinction is the de-extinction of core genes to build proxy species for genetics that have been lost to time, whether that was, you know, due to solely, you know, climate change events or towards, or do the fact that man's implications, right? And so fundamentally, we are de-extincting the core genes that make all of these species, those unique species. And so recently I was

• 1:55Speaker 01

  on a podcast where someone wanted to debate semantics over the dodo and they're like, but Shredodo is just going to be a silly looking pigeon. And I hated to inform them that a dodo was a silly looking pigeon. Dodos were pigeons. And so the things that made it a different flightless pigeon were the genes that were de-extincting. And so it definitely brings out, you know, different groups have different perspectives on the work that we're doing. But fundamentally, we're bringing back these lost species to increase biodiversity. And then we're using all those technologies for conservation, which is pretty cool.

• 2:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Nuts and bolts. How the fuck do you bring a dead animal back to life?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  So you can't, you can't clone a, a, a, a dead animal. Uh, you, you don't have living cells. So what you have to do is you have to look for its closest living relative. So in the case of the mammoth, that's the Asian elephant. Mammoths are actually closer related to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants. Which is like, like that blew my mind when I learned that. Cause I, I, I was also the first to de-extinction when I was working on this. And what was interesting is you actually have then go look at the DNA sequences. And so we actually had to assemble 54 mammoth genomes to build out kind of a reference genome that we could do all the comparative genomics to that of the Asian elephant. And they're about 99.6% the same genetically.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  And so then, and then in that difference of 0.4% in so much genes, we then started to isolate, what are the genes that really made a mammoth a mammoth? You know, the dumb cranium, the curved tusks, the shaggy coat, these extra fat layer, how they produce oxygen at sub-freezing temperatures. And so we, we didn't have to spend a lot of time doing computational analysis to really understand that. And then we take and engineer those genes into that of an Asian elephant cell. Then we go through the cloning process, kind of like what they did with Dolly the sheep back in the nineties. Only it's way more efficient now and it uses like lasers and stuff like that versus back in the nineties, they were kind of just jamming stuff together, which is weird. Uh, but it kind of worked then. Now it actually really works because it's, it's way more precise.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Uh, and then you, and then you actually implant that embryo into the closest living relative, being the Asian elephant, uh, from a serendipity perspective.

• 4:18Chris Williamson?

  Where do you get the genomics of a animal that's not, when did they, when was the last woolly mammoth alive?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  So, so the last ones actually were about 3,500 B.C. So they were up in Wrangell Island. So they've been extinct for, for quite some time. Ironically though, during the, the building of the pyramids, the last mammoths were still alive. So it's kind of, kind of weird. It kind of blows people's minds. A lot of people think that, that mammoths were like around the time of the dinosaurs. And so they're like, that's 65 million years old. It's not. And, and a lot of the DNA comes from the permafrost because animals will die up there. They will instantly start to freeze, layers of snow and ice, layers of snow and ice. And so there's tons of preserved species up in the permafrost. And so, you know, over the last 15 years, there's been incredible researchers like George

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Church and Lou Vidalin and Ben Shapiro and, and teams that we work, these teams that we work with, that have actually gone on expeditions to the permafrost to extract ancient DNA. So it's a little bit of science fiction in Jurassic Parky. It's a little bit of Indiana Jones. It's, it's really interesting how it kind of all comes together in, in the extinction science today.

• 5:32Chris Williamson?

  So you have, is it entire animals? Or is it, is it bones of animal? What's preserved? Because, you know, lots of shit can get preserved in, in frost, right?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, lots of shit can be preserved in frost. But, but it depends. So in the case of the dodo bird, some of the, some of it is just in, some of the DNA is actually just taken from the bone or the inner beak that they've actually drilled into. In the case of the thylacine, you know, which went extinct only in 1936, hunters actually preserved one of the pups that they killed in, in alcohol that ended up being in the museum. And so that was a really well preserved. In the case of the permafrost with mammoths, you know, sometimes you get actual flesh. Sometimes you get actual, you know, hairs. Sometimes you get actual meat. It's very old and very disgusting. It's got lots of bacteria, so I wouldn't recommend eating it. Some people have, which is crazy.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  But a great place to get ancient DNA is, you, you mentioned it, is teeth. So some teeth do a great job of preserving it. And there's an inner ear bone called the petrous bone, where you actually get great DNA from species that are 10,000 years or older.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say great DNA? Is this a, an area where it's, but it's not, it's not degraded over time? There's a high density of it?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  It's, there's a high density of it. There's massive, there's, there is, you know, things like heat and sun and radiation are all very, very bad for DNA. And so DNA starts to degrade the minutes outside of your body. So it is definitely degraded DNA, but you can get more and more of it if it's in these well preserved spots like teeth, like the petrous bone or really well frozen. And we, and we've gotten all of it over the, over the times. And we're actually doing a project right now with the University of Alaska. Um, and, and this group, uh, this, this program that we put together called Adopt a Mammoth, where we're actually taking teeth samples and we're giving them from the, from universities uh, or from the museums in Alaska, giving them and loading them to, uh, school kids,

• 7:37Speaker 01

  showing them how you extract ancient DNA. And we're doing a whole, both, uh, radiocarbon dating and, uh, population genomic study in sequencing all of these Alaskan mammoths. So it's a way to bring kids into it, bring, it's a way to promote education, you know, cause D6 is pretty fucking cool, right? Um, but then also it's, it's an incredible way, uh, for us to get tons of data that we can use to understand populations of American mammoths. Because a lot of the mammoths that we have are actually from Siberia. So the Russian mammoths.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  Oh, interesting. And you mentioned 53, uh, different, uh, samples that was taken and all of those are combined. Presumably the goal here is if we have, uh, you know, like 98% degradation of the genome, but we get tons of them, like 50 of them, we can build that up over time and hopefully we get somewhere close to actually seeing a full sequence.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  You'll never get to fully a hundred percent. I mean, you just won't, right? And so in some of this stuff happens in the regulatory regions, some of this happens in the non-regulatory regions. So you don't even really need as, as much as, as you may think. Uh, there's an area that I, I learned about when we started working on this, uh, about kind of DNA coverage and the number of reads that the system does. Cause even these sequencers aren't perfect. Right? So they're they're basically giving you a probabilistic a probability score of what that letter is on in in terms of the the individual nucleotides in the in the in the DNA sequence. And so what's interesting is the more DNA you get, then the and the more reads you can do, the higher probability, right? Because if you can go to 20 to 50x coverage,

• 9:15Speaker 01

  that means that they've gone through the whole genome 20 to 50 times. So that means that that there's a higher likelihood they're going to be correct. The machines can be correct in telling you what that specific letter is. And so anytime you get 25 plus X up, sometimes as low as, you know, teens up, you you typically get enough of the genome that you can get pretty precise.

• 9:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so let's say that you now have compared the African elephant.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Asian elephant.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  Asian elephant. You've compared the Asian elephants to these 53 AI-enhanced sequence differences. There's this 0.4% or 0.6%, which is the difference. We've got this.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:57Chris Williamson?

  Now what? Now, like, what do you what do you what do you? You're going to 3D print a mammoth? Like, what are we doing here?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And just and just guess. No, you actually do molecular and functional assays and tests to understand what did those genes do? And what's interesting from both a convergent evolution and a general evolution perspective, you can start to see in different species, how certain hair, for example, grows. So we we know this about mammoths, which is really interesting. I always thought that mammoths just had long hair, right? They actually have five different types of hair. And so different genes and different pathways do that. And so one of the things that we're doing with with colossal, which we find interesting is we're not only looking at what were the genes in in the single gene and and additional genes that work together to produce that phenotype or physical attribute of that species, but we're also we have an entire

• 10:46Speaker 01

  genotype to phenotype team, our G to P team, that looks and leverages AI and some of these great newer newer technologies to actually under try to understand how do things like size? How do things like hair? How does that work across a million species, right? Even with different genes like. What are the different stages of development? So we're doing a lot of work in, in kind of general genotype to phenotype around big core things like, you know, everything from size to cranial facial shapes, uh, you know, to fat patterns, to, to patterns of the actual kind of fur. And then as well as, you know, looking at things like hair and fur length and, and different regulatory regions like that. So it's really interesting because for, from our, for our perspective, because we're working on multiple species,

• 11:29Speaker 01

  we have our individual teams that's trying to solve the individual, uh, challenge of each species. And then we've got this cross-functional team that's trying to look for trends that can be applied to other mammals. Right. And that can be really helpful for like, you know, drought resistant cattle and, and, and other species.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Moving forward, how do we make a mammoth?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, um, the, the way you do is go through that computational analysis first. You get the DNA that you symbolize the DNA, then you actually, uh, do that computational analysis. And once you have your targeted gene list, you then go through the actual process of editing Asian elephant cells, right? Cause they're the closest living. So we did, you mentioned African elephants. We did a, uh, work with the vertebrate genome project to do a full reference genome of the African elephant. More for conservation than really for our project. We did find some interesting differences between mammoths, Asian elephants and African elephants that, that, uh, we are starting to explore. Um, but once you do that, you go through the process of understanding what that gene list is,

• 12:30Speaker 01

  you then start making edits and you start with looking for the edits that you think are going to be the highest impact. You then do a bunch of tests to make sure that those edits actually took. Uh, and then once you get to a point that you feel like you've got a cell with the edits that you feel comfortable with, you do sequencing, just like we did at the beginning on those cells to make sure that the edits are there. And they didn't create what's called off-target effects, meaning things that you didn't mean to break in the genome. Uh, and so once you feel like you're comfortable there, you then go into use a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer or cloning. And that's where we take the nucleus of a somatic cell and we put it into that of a germ cell.

• 13:07Chris Williamson?

  What's, what's, what's a somatic cell for the people that don't know?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  So, so, so somatic cells are basically all the cells in your body that are, or in an animal's body that are not sperm and egg. So those are, those are like skin cells, different types of tissue cells. So we take the nucleus or that brain out of a somatic cell and we put it into that of a germ cell or an egg cell. And then effectively you've got, you know, the basis of an embryo. You then use a process of slight electrification and some other media and then it starts to divide. And once you get to the right stage of division, you then implant that into a surrogate. In the case of the woolly mammoth, that's the Asian elephant. So that's how it works in mammals.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  How it works in birds is slightly different. It's a little bit different of a process, but it's a much easier gestation process. So if that's interesting for dodos, I could talk about that.

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I want to know how, I want to know how a bird.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  So birds are even, what's interesting to me about birds is the gestational side, because we're not going through the somatic cell nuclear transfer or that cloning step in birds. Birds are harder on the front end, but they're so much easier currently on the back end, right? Because we don't have to work, we don't have to go work on the serenity side. You don't have to do the embryo transfer. You don't have to do the nucleus transfer. So what's great about birds is you, while we can't clone birds currently in the world, meaning that we can't find the nucleus at the right time of development to move it. So you can't clone birds yet. Maybe one day you can. There's debate on whether it's possible, but you know, everything was impossible till it's not, right?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  And so, but what's interesting is what we are doing is we're actually using chickens as our host. And so this blew my mind, kind of like how close mammoths and Asian elephants were. When you take, if you can cultivate what's called primordial germ cells, so the precursors to egg and sperm, right? And then you edit those. You can then use that and build an edited chicken with these edited primordial germ cells. So this is where it gets crazy. I mean, at least for me, being in the extinction. You can then have edited primordial germ cells, chicken A, and edited primordial germ cell, chicken B. Those chickens can fall in love and depending on your worldviews, they get married or whatever.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  And then they have a baby and they have an egg. When that egg hatches, it is based on what you put into the primordial germ cells. So they've done this and created transgenic, transgenic ducks, where they put edited duck cells, PGCs, primordial germ cells, in a chicken one. They've done it in chicken two. Uh, those chickens grow up, those chickens fall in love, they get married, whatever. They have a, they have a baby, uh, an egg, the egg hatches and it's a duck. And so what's amazing is that chickens, uh, will actually be the surrogates for our first dodos, which as we talked about briefly early, are pigeons. So, um, our, our, our, our state.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting world and it now we're even exploring, I don't know if it's possible, but I'm having to show you. We are exploring bird cloning, right? Cause we were told this is how you have to do it using these, uh, using these types of primordial germ cells. So that was the process that we followed. Uh, but then, you know, we were like, but why doesn't bird cloning work? And we got lots of feedback. They're like, huh, maybe we'll try that. So we are working on bird cloning. Not sure if it's going to work, uh, but if not, we'll go down this, uh, PGC route that seems, uh, pretty plausible.

• 16:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So getting back to the mammoth, there's an enclosed, there's an unclosed loop about that one. We have this Asian elephant, this unsuspecting mother Asian elephant, who is going to give birth to what? What will, what will ultimately come out of this elephant?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so it's a great question. Uh, it will, it will be our kind of mammoth one dot O's, right? So we take, it's an Asian elephant that has been edited. So I come from software. So I think of things like software. So our one dot O's will produce all the core phenotypes that we know and love in a woolly mammoth. So we're de-extincting all the core hair genes, the cranial facial shape that don't cranium, uh, the tusks, uh, uh, morphology in terms of the, the curved tusks, uh, as well as like shorter tails, smaller ears. And then there's some stuff that's kind of under the hood, like how, you know, how the, the, uh, mammoths are more cold tolerant with certain fat layers, with the ability for, uh, their nerve endings not to fry at sub freezing temperatures, the ability to produce hemoglobin and oxygen.

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  Laser eyes.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. There are no laser eyes, but that's, that's a, that's a, uh, we got asked if we could make a thylacine laser eyes. Um, so we, we get a lot of interesting requests, believe it or not.

• 18:03Chris Williamson?

  Right, so is it accurate to say that it's a mammoth? Or is it accurate to say that it's an entirely new species?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  It's really not. So the IUCN, in the Species Survival Commission, which is kind of like the UN Species, which is amazing, we work very closely with them, defines a new species as something that gave rise in nature. So it's not really a new species, at least how it's

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  But it's also not a mammoth, right?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Because it has all the core. So this goes in, I mentioned this earlier, right? You know, whether you think a dodo is a silly looking pigeon, or a mammoth is an elephant, a mammoth was an elephant. Like, that's just what they were. They're pachyderms. That's what they were. And so, I don't know, like, my dogs are mutts, right? And I would argue that most species are hybrids. And that's hybridization gives rise to newer species, right? And so, you know, if some people aren't happy unless we clone 100% of a mammoth, then I would argue that, you know, it's a cold-adjusted, genetically modified elephant with extinct mammoth alleles from a series of biodiversity gaps of, you know,

• 19:13Speaker 01

  3 to 5 or 10,000 years, right?

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  Much less sexy as a name.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if that's what you want to call it, that's what you want to call it. But I mean, for you and me, or at least for me, when I see it, and if we are successful, you know, it has all the core phenotypes, and it's cold-adapted. If we de-extincted the core genes that made a mammoth a mammoth, then to me, that's a mammoth, right? You know, our goal is not to create, there's a lot of infrastructure in the genome that's just, it doesn't produce any real effects. So, I mean, we could add thousands upon thousands of edits to our mammoths that don't have any, you know, true meaningful effect.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  But from a purist perspective, you, someone could say, oh, that's closer to a mammoth.

• 20:04Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, okay.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  You know, that's at least how we view it.

• 20:08Chris Williamson?

  Functionally, it's a mammoth, right?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  So it's a functional mammoth.

• 20:13Chris Williamson?

  Looks like a mammoth.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  It drives like a mammoth.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  At least that's, that's how we, how we think about it. We, there is a small percentage of folks that disagree with us, but you know.

• 20:25Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you mean the mammoth purists out there?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  If, if the mammoth purists want to go a step further, they can. And, and we, and we welcome them to.

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What about like gestation and stuff? Because I, there's got to be differences and, and into utero bullshit.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  There's, there's definitely intro bullshit. Um, the, uh, uh, so it's about 22 months of gestation. So it's a very long gestational cycle, right? Uh, which, you know, I come, I, I try to think of things from a systems design perspective, right? And so for me, that's one of the reasons why I love the thylacine. So if I can dumb down the process.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  What's, what's the thylacine?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Tasmanian tiger. It's a, it's a large car. It's the largest car in the universe marsupial.

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's all, it kind of looks like a wolf from a, it's not genetically related to a wolf, but it, but from a convergent evolution perspective, meaning that in the isolated population, it kind of looks like a wolf. Like if you look at a thylacine and a wolf skull, I'd say 99 out of 100 times, people would say, oh, that's the same. There's only one small difference, uh, in the inside. Uh, but what's really interesting is that through current conversion evolution almost looks like a wolf. But, but going back to your question, uh, from a gestational perspective, you've got 22 months with the mammoth. With the thylacine, you have 13 and a half days. Now, so that, that's the end of the process. The beginning of the process is computational biology, right? Like assembling the reference genome. With the mammoth, we had 54 mammoth genomes. You have to do a lot of work. To your point, it's very degraded. You have to do so much work on it.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  On the thylacine, we got over a 92% complete read on the first read, right? So that's easier. But then in the middle, on the editing, lots of more edits that are required in the thylacine than in the mammoth. So it's, it's like hard, easier, hard. Uh, and then this one was easy, harder, easy. So what's interesting from a systems perspective, looking at this is you can look at the entire kind of like system in mammalian de-extinction and build a system that kind of has to work for both. And so that's where we're spending a lot of time. I will say that it is a lot easier to just say the, the thylacine than the mammoth.

• 22:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I guess that one Asian elephant is looked at very, very carefully for 22 months. Like, do not let it out of your sight. If it goes missing, you're in trouble. All right, so what about, what could go wrong during this, this process? Are there any?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Well, anything, I mean, there's a, I mean, anytime we're doing something that's hard from a science perspective, things could go wrong, right? Like, you, you could not fully get all of the right edits made. You could, not only that, I mean, we, we can test for whether we made them, right? But do all of the edits produce the phenotypes or, or core physical attributes that we're looking for, right? How does the somatic cell transfer process work in elephant versus bovine versus pig versus dog versus mouse, right? And so there, there's still nuances to that, right? And then gestationally, you know, the, the, the thing that's really interesting is that I don't think there's been an, a,

• 23:38Speaker 01

  this whole concept of xenotransfer, right, of like, or xenotransplantation, of taking something from one species to another, you know, sounds like crazy, but we see it all the time. People get xenotransplantation pieces of pigs in their hearts and go live normal lives, right? We also see that, you know, we also see that, that species like a mammoth, which is closely related to an Asian elephant than it is to a, than an Asian elephant is to an African elephant. African elephants and Asian elephants can actually interbreed and produce viable offspring. And so these are two genetically distant species that are further apart than these two. And remember, to your point earlier, we're not making exactly this, we're making somewhere in between, right?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  So we're even closer to an Asian elephant. So we believe there's a high degree of confidence in that interspecies transfer and in that, in that surrogacy. But people ask me all the time, will the mammoth be the first species? Due to the 22-month gestation, I, I, I think it's highly likely there will be another species.

• 24:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's gonna get pipped at the, but it's gonna start off on the race first and it's gonna end up coming in last.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  It's got 22 months of gestation. I mean, that's just, that's, that's hard to, you know.

• 24:51Chris Williamson?

  It takes time to grow a mammoth.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, there, there are people, there's other species that could do a victory lap before.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got an entire army of those things that look like wolves. Uh, all right. What else? Actually, here's a question. So it seems to me with my extensive knowledge of how genomic sequencing works, that the main limiting factor is the quality of the DNA that you can get from whatever the sample is of the animal. Is that right?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I think that that's overcome. I don't think that's that's the the limited thing. I think that that the I'll get to limiting. I think that what you just said is overcome with more samples, right? And so we've got incredible partners like Luvadalin in Stockholm. It's, you know, Luvadalin's arguably one of the most knowledgeable people in the world of the genes that make a mammoth a mammoth. And he's constantly just finding and sequencing more mammoths. So I think that we can probabilistically get through what you just suggested. Um, I think that the biggest issue, and I think they're different per species, but you know, it's just editing, right? What's what's amazing is that we have a lot of incredible editing technologies. People kind of just club all genome editing is one thing, but there's a lot of different technologies.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  There's editing individual letters in kind of that twisted ladder, right? Each one of those runs, you can edit individual ones. You can knock out pieces of it. Uh, you can edit multiple things at the same time all over the genome. That's called multiplex editing. That's where we are spending a lot of time and we're trying to be the most innovative company in the world, being able to edit a lot of the parts of the genome at one time. So you don't have to be so precise. You can edit that same level of precision all over. And we've had, you know, over 90% efficacy already proven internally, which is amazing. For edits and we're trying to stack those. And then you come to to DNA synthesis where it's like to your, if you can get to your point earlier,

• 26:45Speaker 01

  if you can get that, that, that right amount of, you know, letters in the right order and you have a high degree of confidence in it, you could synthesize a big piece of that and then just swap it in. So in areas where there's lots of edits, instead of doing lots of edits, you know, either using kind of some of these individual editing tools or even editing multiplex, or even synthesizing pieces, full pieces of DNA and swapping in because that may have, you know, 20 different edits that we didn't have to make because we really only had to synthesize it and then swap it one. So, so I think that, that depending on how far we want to push editing, I think that in the, the rate at which editing.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  The rate at which editing technologies progress will probably be the limiting factor, not on our success, but on the number of edits that can be made.

• 27:36Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to other animals, if we were to try and get more exotic, I mean, the Jurassic Park memes write themselves with this, right?

• 27:44Speaker 01

  We've, we've heard that before.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. With those, what's the limiting factor there? Why is it the case that you, maybe you can, but why is it the, why is it the case that you can't do something which is a little bit more exotic?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I would argue that no one, to my knowledge, has seen a mammoth. So it's pretty exotic.

• 28:07Chris Williamson?

  More exotic, you know, older, older. Let's not, not call it more exotic. I'm not going to make a value judgment on your mammoth. Older.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, um, I mean, Castiles is pretty exotic. Um, Mauritius is a very exotic place. It's beautiful with dodos. Um, so, uh, you know, rate limiting, you know, you can't, you know, harvest DNA from bone, you know, Kenneth Lacavara, who's incredible. He's one of the top paleontologists in the world. He just, he discovered Dreadnautilus. He's also one of the most interesting people in the world, uh, the largest dinosaur ever, Dreadnautilus. Uh, he's actually been able to de-mineralize bones, uh, dinosaur bones, and get pieces of amino acids, right? But amino acids and even some proteins and some collagen, but that does not, that's not a big chunk of DNA, right? So, uh, we get the amber question, we get the dino DNA question.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  So I guess there is technically dinosaur collagen and dinosaur, uh, amino acids and maybe some proteins here and there, but that is so, so the, the pieces of confetti, you're now making pieces of confetti, of pieces of DNA confetti, of confetti to try and do it.

• 29:13Chris Williamson?

  Right. A dinosaur, it does not maketh.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  It, it, it does not. And so, so right now, we can go back about a million years. Uh, I haven't seen the latest in terms of what, what's been sequenced, but I know we've been able to sequence 700,000 to, to a million years and, and get viable DNA. But at some point. You know, and so, so that, that, there's a lot of exotic stuff between then and now. Um, uh, also, you know, uh, cold, uh, dry environments are great for DNA. Um, you know, hot, a lot of people love to talk about the La Brea tar pits. We get a lot of questions about the La Brea tar pits. And, uh, you know, hot acid filled places are not great for DNA. Um, there's been some really cool animals that have gone extinct in warm, wet climates that, you know,

• 30:01Speaker 01

  aren't great for DNA, uh, so you can't make those. We, a big fan favorite is the giant sloth. People would, there, there used to be a giant sloth that was the size of a tree, a giant ground sloth that would literally, and there's like some, I've read some stories about how they loved avocados and how they propagated avocados. I don't know if there's any truth to that. It's one of the recent things I've read about. Um, so, so there are lots of kind of, uh, different species that, you know, are interesting. I think that a lot of the Pleistocene species, late Pleistocene species make a lot of sense because there is great preser, or there is as, as great as preservation as you could probably get. Uh, because, you know, early, early humans weren't sticking them in, you know,

• 30:47Speaker 01

  some freezing temperature or freezing at the time.

• 30:49Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. What else from the last million years? If you were to have a, a hit list, a top of the pops, aside from your mammoth and your dodo, what else, what else is in there for I would like to bring this back?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think you have to have a, a reason, you know, why.

• 31:10Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, no, no, Ben, this is, we are completely liberated from resources, ethics, or a service of humanity. What do you want to bring back?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  I think it's hard to, to fully liberate ourselves from service of humanity or, or ethics. There, there's a couple of species that I find very interesting. Um, I think the great auk is really interesting. It was like the American penguin. It's super cool. I think that it's served a purpose. Um, I think that there is a whale sized, uh, manatee or dugong called. The stellar sea cow, we can't bring it back. We actually have DNA for it, but there's nothing to gesso it. It's too big unless we get extra, extra development devices to work, uh, which, which we do have a 17 person team working on. Um, uh, you know, a fan favorite is a saber tooth cat, uh, which there were, there were, there were several, but there were two

• 32:03Speaker 01

  that were, um, pretty prominent, one being home Ethereum and one being Spiled on Spiled on had the bigger tusk that, you know, the big canines that we think of. Um, so I, I think all of those are pretty interesting candidates. Uh, you know, I don't, we can't do the stellar sea cow, but I think that'd be incredible to see like, you know, blue whale sized, you know, manatee like you'd be like, and apparently they were like incredibly helpful to the Kelp Forest of the Pacific Northwest. And so, um, there are, there are also big carbon sinks like, like elephants. So, um, those are all really cool, uh, species. We're not working on any of them currently.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  All right. So what's aside from, aside from the mammoth, uh, the mammoth being a very useful one, and I want to get on to why it's particularly useful. And aside from these other ones that are like the sexy ones, um, what else would you consider to be?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  I just don't think a mammoth is sexy. I think a mammoth is just sexy.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  I'm not, I'm not a hairy, that much hair is too much for me. Um, what else is particularly useful from the last one million years? Uh, like I said, we have these very specific use cases for certain animals.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  So I'll hit the use cases of, of the nine, the, the two non mammoth species and then, and then kind of, I guess partly then the other species. But so specifically with the dodo, bringing back the dodo doesn't like fix the ecosystem of Mauritius. But bringing back the dodo, which is a symbol of man-caused extinction, will force us and the Mauritian government, who we're working very closely with, on removing the invasive species that actually led to the dodo's extinction. So, a lot of people love to just say that dodos were dumb and people just ate them.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  There's actually not as much data suggesting that as that because they were a ground-dwelling species of flightless bird and they laid their eggs on the ground one time a year, longer gestation cycles. When you bring in invasive species like pigs and rats and other things, they eat the stuff that's on the ground because they get contrives, right? For the most part. And so, the process of bringing back the dodo in collaboration with local people and governments and indigenous people groups and whatnot, if we do want to successfully rewild them in Mauritius and in the neighboring islands, then we actually have to do a process of ecosystem restoration.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  So it's forcing us to undo some of the sins of the past of introducing these invasive species, right? So, a lot of times people ask us about the dodo. It doesn't really solve a pure ecological impact besides forcing us to undo that, which also could help other species that are native to those islands. In the case of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, some people also call it Tasmanian wolf, but more commonly Tasmanian tiger. It was the largest apex predator in Tasmania and lower Australia. And what people don't realize is people just think, "Oh, predators, easy life, top of the food chain." It's like, no, those are actually the big herbivores. Those have easier lives because they are just eating grass.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  There's a lot of energy expenditure that happens in carnivores to go make a kill, right? And so if you're a carnivore and you're giant and you're or if you're an animal carnivore, I should say, and you're out in the field and you have to go actually like make a kill versus just get it from your local whole whole foods, uh, you actually have to go do the work. You're going to be very strategic. You're going to spend that energy, uh, that that energy expenditure very wisely. You're going to look for either the small, old, weak or sick animals to to pick them off. And so what people don't realize is that that a lot of these carnivores had tremendous help in in in in in kind of securing the balance of the ecosystem, not just because they're thinning

• 36:08Speaker 01

  herds, because they're also eating a lot of the stuff that that, you know, in in killing off the weak, the young or the sick. And so one of the animals that that Tasmanian tigers probably preyed on was the Tasmanian devil, the smaller in the in the stack. And now, due to this whole facial tumor disease, and they don't have any natural predators anymore, they are actually spreading this terrible facial tumor, uh, cancer to each other when they eat. I've been with Tasmanian devils in the wild and, um, it's, uh, it's very interesting. They're very aggressive. And, um, and so when they're doing that, they're fighting each other, clawing each other and whatnot. And they're, they actually get pretty beat up during that kind of feeding frenzy process. And they

• 36:49Speaker 01

  actually pass that disease. Well, if thylacine's around or or a larger, um, animal that preyed on them, they would most likely thin out a lot of those, uh, animals that can't walk very well or see very well due to the facial disease, right? So then there's less that can actually produce that. So that whole effect is called tropic downgrading when you, when you, uh, have a predator that actually can remove, uh, that from the wild. And and that helps balance the ecosystem, right? And so, you know, uh, Dr. Andrew Pass, who's one of our partners on the thylacine rewilding, uh, restoration or rewilding project, has been very, uh, adamant on on, uh, their demise has led to the potential demise of the devils, which is, which is terrible. Um, so those are,

• 37:31Speaker 01

  those are the non mammoth species impacts that we're hoping for too.

• 37:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so why, why the ma- like, the mammoth is kind of a...

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  It holds a particularly good cultural position. The dodo, I really like that thing about the dodo, that it's not about what it does functionally, but what it does symbolically. That, look, guys, we went through all of this effort to bring this thing back because of how topsy-turvy the ecology of this particular location went. You've got to fix this. I think that's, it's just a really, really smart way of playing with human psychology. The mammoth also kind of is symbolic in some regards. I don't know if we actually do know why it went extinct. Was it hunted to extinction? Was it whatever, whatever?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of different, it depends on who you ask, right? Like, there's, there are scientific peer-reviewed papers that say early man hunted them to extinction. There's other papers that show, and other research that shows that, you know, it was, it was climate, in the evolving climate that pushed them further north. And then there's genetic bottleneck in Randal Island, the last mammoth died of inbreeding. But most likely, what most people don't realize, and so I think there, I think the answer is somewhere in between. Because I think there's data, I mean, we have, you know, proof of early man hunting mammoths. We have, you know, there's, there's spear marks and stuff like that in some mammoths. There was actually mammoth tools that had been used, right?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  And so, so I do think that that were, that were designed and built at that time. I think more than likely, you know, with, with elephants specifically, you have 22 months gestation. Then you have about six years to get to the point that they are truly adult elephants, elephants. And then there's about a 12 to 13 year sexual maturity process. So if you want to kill all of it, you actually don't have to eradicate elephants. You don't have to eradicate all of them. You just have to eradicate enough of them because of that cycle. You know, you know, whether it's the environment or predators, someone will thin them off over time to get to extinction.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  From a reproduction perspective and from a fertility perspective, elephants generally are a fragile creature. Long gestation, long time as a relatively useless unprotected infant, still relatively useless sexually. Finally, we can do it. You know, it's just there's a lot of opportunity to be dead in that interim.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, before you get to the point to pass on your genes. One thing about elephants, though, and we are, we are working on this as it relates to mammoth, the extinction. We're not, we're not looking at it from a cancer perspective. But one of the things that's interesting about elephants, and I believe also blue whales, is they have an overexpression of this protein called P53. You and I and mice, we have about one expression of it. They have seven. And what's interesting is if you look at elephants for both body weight and both body weight and size and longevity of life, they get cancer a fraction of what they quote

• 40:35Speaker 01

  unquote should, based on like cancer and mutation curves of most mammals. And it is believed that a lot of that is due to P53, right? And it's just something that's not as well studied as it probably should be, because most people work in mice and in pigs. So one of the things that's interesting about what we're doing with colossal outside of the extinction or species preservation efforts, which I'd love to talk to at some point if it's, if it's an option. But, but finding, because we are working in so many non-microbial organisms, we're starting to see really interesting things and learning a lot about species that there's just not been enough research into, at least at the genetic level.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  And so I'm not saying that P53 or elephants have the cure to cancer, but they may. And so we are working, like for us to do our editing, think about that for us. For us to create what's called induced chlorophotent stem cells, the most naive state of stem cells that then you can reprogram into any type of tissue, which is very helpful for us, right, with what we're trying to do. You know, we've achieved that in our marsupial species, the fatality done our that that's our model or it's for for diolazine. But in in the case of the mammoth and the Asian elephants, we're very, very close. We haven't gotten there quite yet. We we've gotten to IPSCs, but we want to get to further differentiation of them so that we can really characterize them as as the most purest form of IPSCs

• 41:58Speaker 01

  is kind of like a grading scale. And we've achieved that kind of first step. And now we're kind of progressing. But we actually had to isolate and build a construct around P53 and learn how to regulate it. Because think about what do mutations look like? They look like cancer, right? And so when you're introducing mutations into the genome, it looks like it looks like a form of cancer. So so we're learning a lot about about, you know, how cellular regulation works around P53, which is really, really fascinating. One of our advisors, Fritz Volrath, is is one of the top P53 researchers has been very helpful to us. But but fundamentally, that's an area where some of these species, while

• 42:41Speaker 01

  not massively reproductive viable, as you said, as you as you suggested, could be really helpful if we understand more about their genetics.

• 42:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so dodo bird, symbolic, useful, not being gone for that long. Tasmanian tiger would be good to stop the Tasmanian devils from getting this face tumor.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Also symbolic because

• 43:04Chris Williamson?

  Also symbolic.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  They're only extinct because in because the the Australian government put a bounty on their heads and paid people to eradicate them. So also very symbolic. Hundred percent man caused the extinction or extinction.

• 43:19Chris Williamson?

  That, all of that being said, woolly mammoths functionally do some cool stuff. What cool stuff do they do? How do they help the planet?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So so may I so there's a group called Pleistocene Park that George has been working with for the last 10 years in northern Siberia. And what they found, and they've done this, and I think they published in eight different peer reviewed papers. If you can build, if you can do two things, if you can remove these, the, the, uh, these carnivorous trees, this taiga forest, uh, that is, uh, not the best carbon sink, they're also very dark bark, uh, they almost are like heat lightning rods that permeate, that permeate that heat down, uh, into the ground. If you remove those, and if you get to the right level of, of cold tolerant, dense, uh, uh, cold tolerant dense species, the right level of density, you can actually lower ground temperatures by up to eight degrees.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Now, why, and I'll talk about that here in a second, but why is that important? We always talk about this 1.5 degree tipping point. Well, there's more carbon and more methane, and methane's about 30 times worse in the atmosphere. I think that's what kind of Venus' atmosphere is predominantly made of. Um, there's more carbon and more methane stored in the permafrost, in that, in that tundra area than anywhere else on the planet. It's more than double what's been released in the atmosphere. It's over a trillion metric tons of carbon in methane, which is, which is terrible. It's more than even in the Amazon rainforest, right? Because the Amazon and the rainforest have a carbon oxygen cycle that, that just repeats, not in the Arctic. It freezes, something dies, freezes, dies, freezes, and just piles up, right? So there's, there's all this condensed biomass there,

• 44:56Speaker 01

  and, you know, if it relea-, if it releases, it could be pretty bad. I was actually with the Army Corps of Engineers up there, uh, outside of, uh, Fairbanks, in the permafrost research tunnels, and it, it, it's just, it's, it's, it's absolutely amazing, but also kind of terrifying if it does melt. And so what's interesting is, there's been studies shown about how effective elephants are, specifically forest elephants in Africa, at doing a couple of things. They actually make the ground temperatures cooler because they pack the ground and they let the wind actually come down and, and hit the ground, uh, uh, during the cooler months. So it actually makes the, the ground cooler, number one. Number two, elephants love knocking down trees. And I know that sounds like, but I

• 45:37Speaker 01

  thought trees were good. Does colossal have a war on trees? We do not have a war on trees. Uh, we just don't love the non-efficient carnivorous dark bark trees in the Arctic that are, that aren't helpful. Uh, the, the grasslands or the Arctic grasslands. Lands of that time were about two to three times more efficient at what's called the albedo effect at light reflection. So anything that wasn't absorbed for those grass, absorbed in those grasses is not only uh is reflected back to space about two to three times more efficient than trees. And as well as they're about six times more efficient at storing carbon down into their root structures. And so there's been a lot of really great modeling done that if you could return the Arctic back to

• 46:20Speaker 01

  a more biodiverse with these like Pleistocene creatures uh uh area where you have these natural herding animals during the winter, they'll pack the snow down deeper or or pack the snow down so that the winter months can actually like lower the temperatures. And we've seen that work in Siberia already. Mammoths like elephants are natural. They love knocking down trees, right? So then you don't have to use uh tractors and other uh equipment like they're doing in Siberia to knock down those trees. And then just building up that biodiversity in that area will lead to a better oxygen nitrogen cycle so that they, you know, with their defecation and whatnot, they'll plant more of the of the grasslands that are more efficient in the summer months, right?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  So so it's really interesting when you put the whole puzzles together outside of mammoths. It's about eight degrees lower, which is pretty important when we're looking at probably surpassing that one point five degrees that we talked about in the in the Paris Agreement, right? It's pretty important to keep all that that trapped in. And the the model is is that mammoths can be in a massive accelerant and can push those numbers even higher.

• 47:26Chris Williamson?

  Little hairy farmers, big hairy farmers, walking all over the place. So I I volunteered, when I went to Thailand seven years ago, I volunteered at a conservation center that was reclaiming land from monocrop, monoculture stuff, I want to say soybeans, maybe, do they do kind of aggressive? Yeah, anyway, it was somewhere that had been just one thing. And this guy that had bought tons and tons of hectares of land had also bought two elephants. He'd saved two elephants that had been carrying. Mother and daughter that had been carrying tourists up hills, one of those like classic like mistreated animal stories.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  And then brought them in. And I remember asking at the time, I was like, why would like, is the, is it just for fun or whatever? And they were like, oh, no. The elephants, they keep the trees to a certain level. They help to rotate the crops and the different ensure that manure from one side goes to another side. And then there's fertilizer and they do all this other stuff as well. And yeah, I realized that elephants are basically nature's farmers in a way.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're 100% spot on. And there was a study that came out that we can get just send to you if you find it interesting to read. I think you probably will. Where I think that they defined the in just forest elephants in Africa and Asia. Preserve the equivalent of half a trillion dollars of carbon credits. That's amazing. And so.

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  Breed more elephants, breed more elephants.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we want to, we, we want to do that, right? Like this part of our goals.

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  How do you, have you considered, I know that you haven't got one yet. What is the game plan upon, right? We can now produce elephants or we can produce mammoths at the pace of about one every 22 months. And then we can like scale it.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  What do you do? Fly them in? Fly them in on a, on a big, a big level, one of those C130 planes?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  C130, yeah. No, no, we work closely with the US government, but not, I don't know if they'll give a C130 for elephant transports. So, so the idea is kind of twofold. One, let me talk about scaling briefly and then we'll talk about rewilding. So on the scaling function, you know, to your point, breeding elephants is a long tedious process, right? You're not going to make thousands of mammoths the old fashioned way. It's just going to take a long time, right? But fundamentally, so we have a group and, and once again, what's so weird about my day to day life today is, is that de-extinction no longer seems like science fiction to me because I'm so close to it, right?

• 50:04Speaker 01

  It's like, I see where I see a lot more than the world sees. And we try to talk about everything we're doing as much as we can. But I see, I see how close some things are and set off our other things are. And so de-extinction to me doesn't seem like science fiction anymore. The science fiction part of my job is we have an exterior development or artificial womb team that we're really, you know, investing heavily in. And I do think that. There's no major science gates there. It's just engineering challenges, right? You have to know enough about the species. You have to build the right environment. You have to ensure that you have the right placental interface for the placenta. But you can really build out a exuter development and that's where you can get scale, right?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  And this is before we talk about where you, how do you put them back? But you know, our long-term goal is to be able to produce many, many mammoths in, you know, a facility, right? Like where you're not even using surrogates. And I think that interestingly enough, some of the work that we're doing for conservation is a game changer as we're building this de-extinction toolkit. But then separately, I think this artificial womb, if we are to be successful in it, it will have more an impact even than all this other work we're doing on species preservation. Because if you could think about it, if you could grow, you know, we talk about the northern white rhinos, there's only two left or functionally extinct because there are only two females. But if you could grow 100 northern white rhinos, different engineered in genetic diversity, and then work with three wilding teams to put them back into the wild, I mean, you'd

• 51:32Speaker 01

  change conservation forever, right? And so I do think there's some things that we're working on that are more science fiction. But if we are successful, have kind of the scale functions that you're talking about. But long-term, it's to actually have those breeding centers in the Arctic, in Alaska, in our allied nations, in the Arctic Circle, and actually, you know, do that work there and then work to rewild them there. You can do that in heated bars.

• 51:58Chris Williamson?

  Slap them, slap them on the ass.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  And send them out into the world.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Just give them a, give them a treat and hope for the best.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  There you go. Can mammoths produced by you, are you just allowed to let them have sex and proliferate? And then do you get mammoths out the other side or does something weird happen?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  You do get mammoths out the other side. And there's actually data to suggest that mammoths and Asian elephants did interbreed, which is interesting. But separate conversation. The, so we work very closely with every nation, every state has slightly different rules. We work very closely with the US government. We're working The Australian government, the Mauritian government, and then we're working with a couple of state governments. The US government's actually an investor in, in one of the groups is an investor at Colossal. And so for us, you know, it's really important to be inclusive, not when we get mammas and slap them on the button and, and hope for the best. It, it's important to do it now, right? So we spend a lot of time with the government. We spend a lot of time with different regulatory agencies.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  We spend a lot of time with indigenous people groups, private landowners. And, and that's important, right? Cause it's not just about government regulation and support, like the EPA and, and, and other equivalents. But you also have indigenous people groups, you have private landowners. So we've been, we've taken the, the stance that the rewilding process is going to be as long as the engineering process. Uh, so why don't we start that now? And so just because we, we don't want approval, we want true collaboration. And, and so that's, that's one thing that I think that we've done really right.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Um, we have a, a team that, that works with, with these governments and indigenous people groups and, and held public town hall forums to have conversations with local, with the local public, uh, both from an education and a, a feedback perspective, you know, you can, you can actually learn a lot from a critic if you listen. Um, and so I think, I think we've done a good job of taking a wide range of feedback that we've been given. You know, more so on the critical side, less so on the please make a dinosaur side.

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

  Understood. Rolling the clock forward, the next question evidently is, what does this mean for humans? Does this mean that we can change our DNA to survive spaceflight? Can we give us the strength of Neanderthals? Can we, can we do, do, I know you work with Chris Mason, he had that thought experiment in his book about if you were able to make humans, uh, do photosynthesis and you'd only need three tennis fields worth of skin. And you'd be able to survive just on the sun, like some crazy butterfly of space.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Plants are the original solar power.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, okay. So yeah.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  Roll the clock forward for me. What can we do for humans?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  So, so I think, so, so just to be transparent, we are not working in humans. We are working in mammals. I think a lot of the technologies that we're developing will have applications to, to humans. In the case that that occurs, we spin that out as a technology company. We did that last year with FormBio, our first AI-based computational biology platform. But I think as we get better at computational biology and as we get better at editing, I think the sky's the limit, right? And that's where you need to spend a lot of time on the ethics side of it. So, you know, I, I do believe that from a technology perspective, you know, it's not possible or it's not allowed to do germ light editing. So the editing that we are

• 55:33Speaker 01

  doing in currently with, with, uh, man, with colossal, you can't do that in humans. So it's not allowed. But I do think that as that changes, because I do think that it'll be a societal change over time with more and more strict policies and, and, and not, not pretty strict, but better regulation around gene editing. Cause right now it's like, sounds scary. We shouldn't, we should only do it in these limited cases, but, but it's incredible. So, so let me give you, let me give you a real world example today and then I'll tell you about tomorrow. So, uh, they're, they're, and I'm probably gonna screw it up because I'm not a biologist, but, uh, they found that like, I, you know, I don't know what your cholesterol is, right? But, um, my, my cholesterol is pretty great, but part of it is, it's because

• 56:14Speaker 01

  I've, I've actually, I actually use a drug that limit, that, that, that stops and blocks one of the genes in my body called PKS9. And so what's interesting is there's the, these PKS9 inhibitors, uh, PCPS9 inhibitors that, um, that literally block how your body produces LDL. So some people genetically, even if you're vegan, do everything right, run a thousand miles a day, you will produce too much LDL, right? It will build up in your system. And, this lowers it by, you know, 40 to 70%. It's incredible and it's not where I'm at. I have not edited my genome, but I take a drug

• 56:53Speaker 01

  that blocks that. So what about a world where we can edit out that gene where no one, you know, like, like I, I believe that diabetes and heart disease right now are a hundred percent curable. They're, they're, they're curable. And I'm not just talking about through lifestyle. I meant through medications that exist today, right? And so, uh, from, from a human perspective, we are, I, I take a shot twice a month in order to achieve that, right? To, to block that. But fundamentally, I do believe that, that that's something that could be gene edited at some point, right? And so I think in the near term, there will be applications of gene editing and gene therapies that, that cure that. I think in the long term, I don't think Chris Mason's

• 57:34Speaker 01

  wrong. I, I think that we can become more radiation tolerant and with more radiation tolerant, that people think about, oh, that allows us to be a face, a, a spacefaring species. It also allows less breakdown of our DNA and let's probably live longer on earth. Um, and so, um, you know, the sun is not always our best friend in that, right? And so, um, so I do think that, that from, you know, I, I, we already know about genes like myostatin. Myostatin, if you've seen the Belgian blue cows, you know, uh, we can double muscle mass. We, we can, that's one edit, right? It's one knockout. Like I'm not saying you should do it. Uh, some bodybuilder, I believe you should do it. But, uh, but fundamentally to, to, to

• 58:17Speaker 01

  your point, you know, I think that, you know, uh, we, we live in a really interesting time and, you know, from an ethical framework perspective and a regulation perspective, I think that we just have to be mindful of ethics, regulation. Um, but I, but I do think from a technology perspective, we are surpassing, uh, uh, the rate limits of, of regulation and, and in ethics in terms of what's possible. More is possible today than we as humans are allowed to do.

• 58:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I had a really interesting conversation with Jonathan Anomaly, who is out here in Austin and he is about to release at some point a company that has been ready for a long time, which does embryo selection. It does embryo selection based on risk for all manner of different things, but it also can select, it can also select for IQ. And it didn't select for IQ, but it gives you a risk profile.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so where does, where does eugenics start and stop, right?

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, not only that, not only, not only that, but with, I asked him this question. I think it's very interesting is what's the difference between embryo selection, which you could do right now, like you'd just be like, if you don't have the actual samples, you're like closing your eyes and going IVF number five or whatever, right? Um, what's the, is there a difference? Is there a fundamental ethical difference between embryo selection and genetic enhancement? Is there? And his argument-

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Is no, I would argue, I would argue that the answer is no, because people are like, but we can't create like GMOs or genetically modified organisms are bad. I'm like, we've been creating GMOs with crops for thousands of years. We've just been doing it very inefficiently. We've been cross breeding shit and crossing our fingers, right? And like that, we've been doing that with dogs. We have dogs that are all different shapes and sizes that aren't even very, some of them are genetically disposed of cancer because of the decisions that we have made through selective breeding, but selective breeding is a form of genetic engineering. And so I would argue, no, it's really not at its core. And so before, I don't know what exactly his tech is, but another company I'm not affiliated with,

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  but it's called Orchid Health, George also co-founded it. And they actually, you know, in, when couples have a baby, they'll get a, they'll get genetic testing to see if they're compatible. Some people do some tests, you know, for Down syndrome and other stuff in womb, right? Sometimes people feel like that's controversial, but people do it. And then what's interesting though, now to your IVF point is, once you have those embryos to your point, you can crush your, you know, close your eyes and pick one. But what's really interesting is now they're doing a risk score where they're saying this, you know, this may be like the absolute best looking gene or best looking embryo, but-

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  You know, we do full genome sequencing on it. Now we can tell you that, you know, it this has a predisposition to late-stage Alzheimer's, right?

• 1:01:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Do you even though, even though everything else about it's healthy? Do you want to insert that one? Or do you want to take the gamble that? And we're gonna.

• 1:01:25Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I mean, this is this, this ultimately is the most interesting part of what I learned from Jonathan, which is at the moment, what we do is we roll the dice, right? We roll the dice with whichever, whichever is the fastest sperm, whichever is the egg that was timed at the right time of the month or whatever, whatever, whatever, with the right particular month, that is rolling. And it seems like there are a number of defense mechanisms. I learned that around about 50% of all fertilized eggs are cast out of a woman's body without her realizing within the first fortnight, that it's just you wouldn't, you don't even miss anything at all. And there is, you know, you could imagine why that would be adaptive, that there's something that's not gone quite right here. Perhaps this is

• 1:02:10Chris Williamson?

  an early warning system that just ejects this particular egg.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Chris Williamson?

  Is that a miss? Is that a miscarriage? Yeah, well, if you weren't aware of it, kind of.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  And so they, so I, I don't know if this stats right, but I believe this is in the ballpark. I, I think George may have told me this, but natural birth is about an 8% success rate, which is kind of crazy because there's so many of these early-stage ejections that you don't even know about that, that, that, or that the woman does not, that the female doesn't know about. And so it's really interesting, you know, because like even IVF only gets shipped 50/50, right? And so like you're, it's crazy to me. And part of the reason why I think some of those are only 50/50 is because they are not doing full genome sequencing of the embryos. So you can have a, a developing embryo that,

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  that, that looks great in, in microscope, but it has a genetic defect that at a certain point will not work.

• 1:03:06Chris Williamson?

  The body just says, nope.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, so you, so you're starting to your point. It's, it takes like your, if you have this many embryos, you then go through a freezing process and you get to this, it keeps going down and down and down until you do it. But I think that what, what Jonathan's doing and what Work and Health are doing are really, really important. And, you know, but I also believe that, you know, personalized healthcare, everyone needs to take responsibility for that. They should get full genome sequencing. They should know what's, you know, fundamentally not active in your body.

• 1:03:37Chris Williamson?

  I, I had mine done the other, a couple of months ago. I got one copy of the C six, seven, seven T mutation. Not associated as a major driver of homocysteine levels. It's not as bad as this other one. Blah, blah, blah. Just make sure that you supplement, supplement with B vitamins and some methylated, some other bullshit. Anyway, I had that done. I also went and had a full body MRI, brain angiogram, heart angiogram, DEXA scan. Did you go to Fountain Life, Peter Diamandis?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  I didn't know. So Peter's a good friend. He's an advisor and investor in Colossal. No, I've done, I've just done a lot of that individually. I've, I've even done a CT cardiac angiogram scan, which gets you, which then uses this clearly analysis, this AI tool where they can tell more. Think about this, like a few years ago, they were like still doing, I think people still do. They do angiograms by sticking like a cath into your body and going into your heart and looking at it, right? Like that all can be now done with imaging and AI. So you can see like pre-plaque buildup. It's incredible. And so.

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  Did you have the, I, I got an image of, of the, whatever, the left ventricle first, first thing out. And they were like, oh, we've got like 0.5% or whatever. Did you do the thing where they IV you with that shit that makes your torso go really, really hot?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it makes you feel like you're going to pee. Yeah.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  Dude. That is the craziest feeling. Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the, that, uh, that's the contrast and makes you feel like, it makes me feel like and so I was like.

• 1:05:15Chris Williamson?

  It was insane. It's what, it's what I imagine being a dragon feels like.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Oh, oh yeah. A hundred percent. I know exactly the feeling, but, but interestingly enough, like this kind of goes to, I don't know what exactly the results were, but going back to like LDL, right? They've now shown that if you can get LDL down to 50 to 75, not only, well, some 100, it doesn't continue to accumulate, but, but 50 to 75, it actually reverses. And Dr. Osborne in Dallas, he's, he's incredible. Um, he's one of the pioneers in this field. And what's, what's, what's really crazy about it is, you know, if you can start to not just like, you can stop and prevent any buildup, but you can reverse any damage that's there. I mean, you're not going to die of heart attack stroke.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Like you, that is a mitigatable thing and you may have to not just change lifestyles. You may have to take a, a cocktail of drugs to it.

• 1:06:09Chris Williamson?

  For the rest of your life.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's, it's so, it's interesting. Um, I, I understand why people get icky and I maybe would have done, and if Jonathan, I'll send you the, the episode. You should check it out with him. I think.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  I would love to. I'd love to. Yeah.

• 1:06:22Chris Williamson?

  He, he really just very slowly walked me through step by step. All of the different ways that we make adjustments to ourselves and that we have done to other animals. We've done it through selective breeding. We've done it to get rid of the pips out of bananas and also to make them bigger and sweeter and all this sort of bullshit. And then we do it to ourselves. We modify ourselves with, I'm going to take this antibiotic. I'm going to take this particular type of painkiller. I'm going to take this particular statin. I'm going to take this whatever. And he goes, okay, so let's take this one step further. You are a person who has a predisposition to anxiety or depression and you go through,

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  embryo selection, and we can see on there, we could maybe do some sort of polygenic score and say, it seems based on our data, based on the AI, this particular embryo would have a predisposition towards a depression. Would it not? Like if you found as you with the person that had lived in your life.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Kids, you're going to put your kids in the best school, right? So why not start them off the best they can be?

• 1:07:19Chris Williamson?

  Correct. And then he said, well, you as a person who has depression. Figuratively hypothetically had depression. If you found out that your parents had the opportunity to step in and not give you depression, either through embryo selection, which actually technically would mean that you weren't here. So it kind of doesn't work, but we forget that bit or through gene enhancement and say, what you you cursed me with this thing. And as soon as you concede, or let's say that it was something really extreme, right? Like you're going to be born with like one foot or like some sort of deformity or you were going to whatever, whatever it's you could have given me, you could have taken this away from me as soon as you concede

• 1:08:02Chris Williamson?

  that that is a, and I think he's right, a moral thing to do to allow that to occur. It's off to the races, all the way down to maximizing IQ. Like it's the

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  And one of the things that that isn't talked enough about is like, you know, you know, other countries have different ethical views, right? Like, you know, BGI in China is Beijing Genomics Institute has said, we're sequencing everyone we can. And we're trying to find the smartest humans and we're going to use it, right? And so

• 1:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Assortive mating, baby. Just done by done by computer.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's just, it is one of those things that, you know, you know, there needs to be more work and effort in thoughtful regulation of these technologies because we can make the world better through gene editing. We can do that. I'm obviously, I mean, I work at colossal. So I do fundamentally believe that. But, you know, I do think that a deeper lens on healthcare, because I think that we could, we have the tools and technologies to make humanity better today.

• 1:09:12Chris Williamson?

  Ben Lamm, ladies and gentlemen, Ben, I appreciate the hell out of you. Your work's fascinating. I'm glad that it's not me having to turn up with this pressure on my shoulders every day, but I think they've chosen the right guy for the job. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Colossal.com.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Ben, I appreciate you. Thank you, man.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Awesome. Thank you.