Ben Lamm: The Truth About Jurassic Park & Real De-Extinction | DSH #1586

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There is no dyno DNA because the Earth went through various heating periods since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Also, DNA, like right now, the oldest DNA we're working with is about 1.5 million years old. It's not 65 million years old.
That's a big jump. Like amber is a very porous material.

It develops in very hot places, wet places. That's not good for DNA storage.
So there is no amber DNA. There is no dyno DNA.

Okay, guys, we got Ben Lamb here. We are at AI4 conference.
He's speaking tomorrow. I bet you're revealing something exciting.

Yeah, well, I don't know if there's any big reveals, but I'm, you know, I'm pretty open books. So, and AI is critical to what we do at Colossal.
So I'm pretty stoked about tomorrow, yeah.

How are you using AI at Colossal mainly? Yeah, I mean, we use AI in every single part of the project. Most people don't realize that.

They think of us just being like, you know, in a lab, but there's a lot of field work. There's expeditions.
It's kind of weird. It's kind of like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones.

But then there's also this huge AI component that people don't realize. We're using AI for everything from like ancient DNA assembly to comparative genomics.

We've actually built some pretty cool models where, if we're looking at things like skull morphology, like for the dodo, we've actually scanned over a thousand different skulls from a bird beak morphology perspective from all these birds.

Then we've sequenced them.

Then we use AI to compare all of the actual images to that sequence data to then relevance rank, you know, the biggest gene variants that we think will drive kind of that morphology that made kind of the beak and cranial facial development of the dodo actually look like the dodo, right?

That was actually unique to them. And so we're using AI all the time.

Another thing that we're doing that's pretty cool with AI is that most people just use like, I think if it's like CRISPR, I think if it's like gene editing, it's kind of like a catch-all.

But really, we use a combination of tools. Sometimes it's like little edits to one genome.
Sometimes it's synthesizing an entire block. Sometimes it's like inserting that block.

Sometimes it's knocking out that block. And all these different technologies have different kind of off-target effects.
And we try to bundle them.

And that's what's called multiplex editing when we're editing multiple parts of the genome at the same time.

We've actually built an algorithm because we're creating so many cell lines and screening so much data that we then feed that back into this loop so that we can understand, you know, which types of edits make the highest efficiency for that type of effect without causing kind of this like disruption downstream in the genome.

And all that's using AI. So I'll tell you, these projects would take, you know, decades if we didn't have AI.
And I think some of them probably wouldn't even be able to be done. That's incredible.

Yeah, it's truly remarkable.

And what's interesting is like now with quantum just around the corner, it's going to be really, really interesting probably what the next like five years holds for us in terms of like how we can engineer more and more species and even fill in gaps of species that we don't have full DNA of.

Really? Wow. So how would quantum help with that process, I guess? Well, I mean, just being able to look at and run

to get to the point that we can actually run simulations of genome engineering, because we're not there yet from a compute perspective. We're not there from an AI or

a data perspective, but we're generating so much. From the Netflix series, Diop Jaws, get ready for mic apps.

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So much data that if we could actually run simulations in real time of all the possible variants and all the possible outcomes, I think you would at least give us some high degree of probability of like what that simulated outcome could be without us even having to do any of the wet lab experiment yourself.

Yeah. So, I mean, that we're not there yet because the tech's not there yet.
But I think that, you know, in the next five to 10 years, we'll, that's where we'll be.

It's like, there was some really interesting, there's a story that came out a couple of weeks ago and they weren't using quantum, but they actually did a mock, they called it a mock trial, like a mock clinical trial,

which I think it's a weird.

I think it kind of like almost belittles what they did, but they took all this data for cancer drugs, And then they actually found out that these drugs that are already approved by the FDA and being treating different types of cancers actually can help with Alzheimer's and these other conditions, right?

And so

we know those drugs are safe because they're already being deployed and they've already gone through the clinical trial process and they're being deployed by the and stamped by the FDA for safety and efficacy in humans, right?

They're just being used to treat another disease.

And so they use all the, this company used all this data to go back and say, oh, these same drugs could be used and have a higher degree of outcome to actually help with Alzheimer's and dementia, which is really interesting.

That's cute. And so, think about that.

You know, we are, we have so much data already that if we can start looking at, you know, using AI and then eventually using quantum plus AI, we can simulate so many different disease states and so many different potential editing outcomes and different drug trials that we probably have.

You know, it reminds me of that story where, I don't know if you read this like five years ago, where NASA like had already found like other exoplanets and it was just in the data, but they never had the compute power to go back and look through it.

Wow. And I think that exists probably for human healthcare as well.
So they already found other exoplanets? I didn't even know that. Yeah.
It's crazy. That is nuts.

Yeah, I'd imagine the simulation is going to be important as you start reintroducing these species back into the wild. Right.
And we're trying to, and that's another big data. It's a great question.

Most people don't think of that as a data problem, but like all the work that we do for Colossal that has an application to conservation, we open source for the world, right?

We try to work with our partners. We have about 60 different

conservation partners all around the world. But what's really interesting about that is that some of those projects, while they're helping to save existing species, like using AI for

understanding socialization and migratory patterns in elephants, well, that's helping elephants today from a conservation perspective.

But also, we're taking that same data and applying it to how do we then build synthetic herds for woolly mammoths, right? And so that's what's pretty cool is like the data that we learn from

the data that we garner today from

using these tools for Asian elephants and African elephants can then apply, build those kind of this base case model around how do we rewild mammoths long term. Yeah.

Yeah, you predicted mammoths by 2030. Is that still the timeline? So we said 2028, by end of 2028, that's 22-month gestation.
That means that we have to be at our embryos by the end of 2026.

And we're on track for that, which is amazing, right?

The thing that I think Colossal has done a really good job of is looking at

in running all of these experiments like they're almost like a software company. So trying to retrain scientists to work like in things like Smart Sheets and Jira is always fun and interesting.

But we try to look at this like a software product, right?

And so how do we actually ship products so that when we set expectations to the world, we can actually deliver and hopefully in cases like the Direwolf over deliver and deliver sooner than we expect.

Well, what's interesting about that is like we have to parallel path all these different projects along the way.

So for us,

on the path to the mammoth, like we didn't just wait till we got the all the DNA. We didn't just wait till we got all the genome sequences.

We started working and sequencing the elephant genome, started doing the comparative genomics. We try to parallel path everything.

So we have not successfully yet put embryos that are not edited into that of an elephant, but we're working on all the technologies.

And it's a category of science called assisted reproductive technologies, which is also really helpful for conservation.

So we're working on all those tools and technologies so that when we have that embryo, we'll be ready to put it in. Got it.
So you would put it into an elephant in Asian elephant, yeah.

Asian elephant, and that would turn into a mammoth. Yeah, and that's our, that's, that's kind of like all of our kind of 1.0 of these species, right? Long term, we want to use artificial wombs.

So we actually have numerous artificial womb projects going on at Colossal and with one of our partners at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

And so we're working on non-placental mammals, so things like marsupials, right? We're working on placental mammals, so we're starting with the mouse, right?

So it's like, how do we grow a mouse fully ex utero? That's only 23 days gestation versus 22 months. And when our first elephants will be born, they'll be 300 pounds.

So different challenges, but fundamental biology has to be solved, you know, for us to even scale from mouse to pig to then eventually species that grow into elephants, right? And then

we even have an artificial egg construct that we're working with, you know, so that we can grow eggs fully ex utero. Without the two animals mating? No, with the two animals mating

and then having the eggs so that we get kind of those core PGCs that are edited, but then extracting them and putting them in a,

so it's kind of a gen 2. The problem with some of the avian work is you kind of have two generations because you have to create these

first

genetically modified birds that are sterile, and then they have to mate to produce that first egg. But then from that, you can take those and then do everything else in a synthetic egg.
Holy cow.

So it won't get rid of the entire process, but it's huge. It'll get rid of half the process for gestation.
And it's also super helpful for scale, right?

So imagine a world where, you know, we don't have to breed, you know,

thousands of Gen 1 and Gen 2 dodos. We can do all of that in ex-utero eggs.
Wow. Who would have thought 10 years ago that an artificial womb would be possible this quick? Yeah.

And what's crazy is, I mean, we're not there yet. So we don't have one, but I do think that we're on path to have one in the next few years.
Wow.

Now, we're not going to be growing mammoths in the next few years in it, but I think you know, in the next five to 10, it's highly likely that we could. Nice.
What did mammoths eat back in the day?

Oh, just like they were foragers, right? So they took, they ate grasses and shrubs, and they even would not, if there were trees, they'd knock down trees in some of the locations

and take the foliage from the

from kind of that canopy structure. Okay.
Yeah. So they were mostly, you know, herbal.
So they didn't eat meat. No, they weren't, they did not eat meat.
Wow. Yeah.

And that was the main, was that the main reason you started the company? Was to bring them back to the company?

So my, so I'm, the, the reason I started the company was you know i i built a handful of software companies i love software uh and i met this guy george church who's arguably the father of synthetic biology but george was like you know we could bring back mammoths uh we can rewild mammoths and help the ecosystem All these tools can help elephants today and we can inspire the next generation.

And so given that I've got a little bit of ADD in me and, you know, I've got that kind of entrepreneurial spirit, I felt like this was a project that, you know, could create a lot of value, create a lot of impact,

and then also hopefully inspire that next generation right and so i was kind of getting in the phase where i was going to start having kids and so i just kind of thought it was like the perfect project and then if we're successful you know science and the world's never the same after that right and so you know i think it's one of those things that i think post-covid a lot of us uh you know uh was like do we just want to sit around watch netflix or do we want to do something more awesome right and so you see like spacex you see all these awesome companies that are inspiring people to go be engineers.

What if we could do that for biology? What if we get people really excited to say, I want to go be a genetic engineering major, or I want to go and be a biologist or a conservation biologist?

So it kind of was like the perfect project for me, even though I have no background in biology whatsoever. So that was the only gap in my life.

That's a smart way to get kids interested because every kid loves animals, right? Yeah, they love animals. Every week, we get like pictures of like mammoths and dodos.

Now we're actually getting dire wolves, which is pretty cool pictures

from parents and their kids and even from classrooms telling us how excited they are about what we're working on. Yeah.
How fulfilling was it to recreate that dire wolf publisher? Oh, it was awesome.

You know, the heart, some of the hard thing about us is like, we try to balance like full transparency, but also at the same in impact.

But at the same time, you know, we want to think about like how and when we message these things, right? And so for us, it was funny.

We launched the Woolly Mouse at South by Southwest. It kind of broke the internet.
And then we're like, man, people are going to get really excited about these dire wolves if that's the case

of what we saw with the mouse.

and so the hard thing is like you know the when we announced the wolves to the world you know they were you know four and five months old and so it was hard to like keep that project under wraps a secret because we were so excited about telling everyone about what we were working on so but but when we finally got it got to rip the bandaid off and show the world it was crazy like i feel like we could make a movie about just the first five days of launch because everything that could have happened did happen and that that that launch was insane i bet yeah there's probably a lot of uh fires behind the scenes i'd imagine oh yeah we had uh we had the new yorker break the embargo so we we had uh and then we had a lot of our press friendlies that we'd worked with for years call us and say you know why would you not tell us the biggest news and like no no no we were going to call you we're going to share it today and and then like our our scientific paper wasn't live so then people were arguing that dire wolves weren't close uh their closest living relatives wasn't wolves it was jackals it's like no no that paper's old we have new data and we were like we were trying to answer questions and like get a website.

Like, our website still had like, like, fucking Latin on it when we launched. Like, it's like, they were selling like people were like, you do realize that there's Latin on page 17 of your website.

I was like, okay, great. We'll go fix it.
It's like, but it was a, it was a crazy, it was a crazy five days. I mean, to me, that's a good sign because you're just so focused on the mission.

You're not worried about a website.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, I mean, I would have, you know, we want to be, you know, I think that we were pretty thoughtful in terms of like working, you know, with Indigenous people groups, conservation groups.

We were, everything we did is certified by american human society which is the oldest uh animal rights organization in the world uh you know we even took it to the federal government and got their like got their butt and then like what's funny is then like on day three that's when everyone that was like frustrated we didn't call them or whatever everyone wants to look at their other version of uh of the story everyone you know has the other side because you can't you can't do anything in this world where it's like just good right and so we thought we like cross every team and then People were like mad.

We talked to the administration. People were like, okay, you talked, you have five Indigenous tribes.

Why didn't didn't you have 10 it's like it's like okay you can please some of the people some of the time but it was crazy it was really really great but at the end of the day i think if you're not doing something that's like big and bold and like and getting that reaction well then you're probably not doing enough you're not doing something big enough right yeah what's the process for like i guess legally wise bringing back an extinct or endangered helping endangered animals like do you have to get approval like yeah so there's different approvals for different things right and so uh we have what's called a side ease and a coast permit so we've worked really closely with Fish and Wildlife.

We work with Department of Interior. And that allows us to import samples and like protect them in what in biobanks.

We're working on a new model around biobanking that's like tissue preservation because, you know, it's forecasted that we could lose up to 50% of all biodiversity in the next 25 years.

So, you know, while we need new tools and technologies for conservation, we need de-extinction tools and technologies. We also need to biobank everything.

It's a lot easier to bring something back if we lose it from like living cells than reconstruct it and rebuild as an extinct species for today, right? And so we work with them on that.

Then, separately, and this also creates all kinds of like weird,

we get weird articles about this, but Incutel, which is part of the federal government and they're most known for being related to the intelligence community,

they're investors in the business. So, we constantly brief them.
That also creates like crazy conspiracies where people are like, they're creating battle mammoths.

It's like, we're not creating battle mammoths. Let us just make mammoths first, right? And so,

and so it, it, it, so, so, we, we work very, very closely with the federal government we're closely with usda fish and wildlife uh uh fda and so it's really important just to be transparent because we're working in areas that you know not no one's ever done this no one's ever kind of worked through through all of the uh applications to synthetic biology as a whole but specifically like extinct species and so um i think the best thing that we do is is we work so closely with so many of these organizations just keeping them like in the loop that you know everyone feels comfortable with what we do yeah so you said we're projected to lose 50 of biodiversity that would affect the average person i'd imagine yeah it affects all of us right and so what people don't sometimes realize and i didn't before i ended this business is there's this concept of keystone species and so there are these species that are absolutely critical to the ecosystems right and so uh if those get removed well then it can lead to full degradation of the ecosystem and so we see that with large herbivores like mammoth and bison and others we see that with certain uh aquatic animals like blue whales.

We see that, you know, even in predators like wolves, right?

And so there's an awesome study about Yellowstone where when they removed the wolves from Yellowstone and called them in 1925, the park started to degrade.

Now, the park didn't go away, but what happened was all of these different herbivores, like the deer and elk and stuff like that, they started overgrazing. They started overpopulating.

They stopped migrating. They got sedentary.

And so they ate everything. The closest food source was along the river, and that's where all of the water was.
So they ate all there.

Well, then there's no beavers actually kind of work in this like really interesting kind of like circumference of where they built their dams.

Well, then there's nothing that the beavers could then go use that was mature enough from a tree perspective to go build dams. Yeah.
So it's crazy.

They've actually mapped that the reintroduction of wolves has actually re not only like increased biodiversity into Yellowstone, but it's also reshaped rivers in Yellowstone.

Yeah, it's crazy because when I think about it, when a river, when a beaver dams at the river, it actually starts to expand. It actually starts to erode the bottom.
It actually gets deeper.

There's actually cooler water deeper. And so there's actually different types of fish populations, frogs and other species of amphibians that can live in that.

So it has this entire trickle effect with just removing that keystone predator. That's so nice.
Yeah, so it's crazy. And nature is pretty awesome at fixing itself, right?

And so it's like, if we can just figure out how we work with technology and nature, then I think, you know, humanity will be fine.

Yeah, I can't believe that because you're introducing the apex predator of the area and it's actually helping the

there's been some really interesting studies on the Tasmanian tiger, another project that we're working on, where there's an awful disease that's a transmissible cancer, which is also just terrifying.

Like the words transmissible and cancer are the same thing. It stands for the cancer.
So there's a transmissible cancer in the Tasmanian devil population.

And so what happens is when they feed, they scratch and they bite each other. And they're pretty aggressive little cute animals.

Most people think of Tasmanian devils. They think of of like Looney Tunes and what it looks like, but they're actually pretty cool animals.
But they're pretty aggressive when they're feeding.

And what's interesting, though, is that when they scratch and bite each other, they'll transmit

this cancer, this facial tumor disease that eats away at the face. It's awful.
Don't Google it. It's terrifying.
Go up and die. It's like, that's the movie that someone needs to make, right?

It's the horror movie. It's terrifying.

Well, what's crazy about that, though, is that predators like wolves, or in this case, the thylacine, they mostly prey on the weak, the sick, and the old, right?

And so it's truly survival of of the fittest. And so I'm sure there's some luck in there, but when predators go out to make a kill, it's about energy expenditure, right?

So they're doing some type of internal calculus of, can I kill that animal, right?

Like they do, they, you see this in Africa with cheetahs is that if they miss so many preys, the likelihood that they're going to die is high because the energy expenditure to take down like a gazelle is quite high, right?

And so they have to be thoughtful and time it right. They have to sneak up right.

They got to learn all the right hunting behaviors, but then they also have to ensure that, you know, they're going after the right target to begin with, right?

And mostly it's the young, the sick, and the old, right? And so when you have an absence of a predator in an ecosystem, it actually has this effect where you get more sick animals. Wow.

And so they're actually doing a huge service to the entire ecosystem. Right.

And so it's forecasted that if the thylacine cell existed, that the Tasmanian devil's facial tumor disease wouldn't even be a thing anymore. How did they get wiped out?

Hunting, human hunting. Oh, humans.

So we as humans, not colossal, it's before our day, Um, I actually hunted them to extinction because the sheep farmers of Tasmania were stealing and killing each other's sheep.

And so, they then, you know, blamed it on the thiocene.

And so, what happened is the Australian government actually put a bounty on the thiolacine and they went and hunted them to extinction because they were getting paid by the federal government to kill them because they thought it was killing off the sheep.

But there's no data, if you go talk to actual like thylacine researchers, people that spent their whole life on it, like Dr.

Andrew Pasco on our team, like there's no data that ever shows that thylacine could have even killed it. It wasn't the size of prey that they would predate on anyway.

Makes you wonder how many Keystone species were wiped out from humans. Yeah, so there's interesting studies that show the rise.
It's 100%

inverse related. It's super interesting.
It's like the rise of early man and the rise of early man on a new landmass and the decline of megafauna is directly inversely related. Wow.
Yeah.

Like in like on every continent that you study, it's like, oh, wait, when did this species go extinct?

When did early man get there? Because early man, you know, went out and said, oh, we have to go out and, you know, same thing energy expenditure.

It's like, if we go take down big, slow-moving targets, right?

Well, or targets that we're scared of, like wolves, well, then, you know, that either gives us some degree of safety or a degree or it provides meat and furs and tusks and anything else that we can go utilize.

And so,

you know, we as humans have been pretty bad at eradicating keystone species for quite some time.

So are those the ones you want to focus on bringing back keystone species? Yeah, we want to focus on keystone species. We do want to focus on species that mankind had a role in their extinction.

It's actually a pretty, we don't like some people will ask us like, what were your top species and why? And it's really kind of a matrix. It's like,

is there an ability to do it, number one?

Is there a purpose in doing it, right? So maybe it's ecosystem restoration.

Maybe it's what science that we can then go apply to its most critically endangered species partner uh you know what are the cultural impacts right like indigenous like is there an indigenous component to this that people are excited about right like we just announced uh with the nai tahu research center which is part of the maori people in uh in new zealand about the moa right and so um that that is part of uh that species is part of that what's called the tonga or their sacred species.

And so we can't, we would never even think to go work on that species without getting their support and blessing because, you know, it's real, that was their land.

their people over time eradicated that species so is this something they even want to do and so so we think about that but then we also like with the dire wolves we also think about like the cult like while we had indigenous support here in the u.s um because of the you the dire wolves was predominantly a u.s based uh species we also think about like what are the applications to kids right and so it's like most people thought dire wolves were mythical creatures because they saw game of thrones or played uh you know dungeons and dragons or you know magic the gathering right but the reality uh they're they're also like wow and they're in a bunch of other things right but like ultimately you know uh when you when you if you can bridge science and pop culture then i think that's a good thing right it's like if we can get people interested in this and so one of my buddies uh jesse uh michaels i don't know if you know i've heard of him yeah so uh so he's he's an awesome guy super smart entrepreneur tech guy um uh he's got a youtube and a podcast now and he's working on these tridactyls have you have you gone tridactyls now have you gone in peruvian mummel mummies no have you gone down this route at all interesting, though.

You've got to go down this rabbit rabbit. Peruvian mummies.
So mummies actually existed back then? Yeah. So they're these mummified bodies, right?

That I think they, it's, I think it's like tridactyls.org or something. You can find it.
It's very easy to find.

And so like Jesse called me, right, and said, hey, you know, have you seen this tridactyl thing? And it's basically there are these humanoid figures that have been found in Peru.

And there's, there's a little bit of controversy and craziness around it, but they're these humanoid figures that have like, you know, three fingers

three toe versus like having what we have. They're shorter.
I mean, they look straight out of something out of like close encounters of, like, I mean, that, that's exactly what they look like, right?

And so, um, it's crazy. So there's all kinds of like conspiracies around it and whatnot, which is interesting.
But, you know, Jesse called me. He's like, man, I've done a lot of research on this.

I spent a lot of time and a lot of money. We've done MRI studies.
We've done all this stuff. It's like,

I, this is Jesse speaking. He's like, I believe they're real.
And I was like, well, yeah, like, Jesse's a smart dude, right? And like, I know him pretty well.

And so I was like, I was like, well look you know it's ancient DNA because they're they they think they're about 10,000 years old if they're real right I don't know if they're real I can't claim that because I haven't seen the data and I said well look if you can get the right permits to export them to us we'll totally like sequence them right and so this goes back to that pop culture thing it's like some people would be like oh no that that's controversial or that sounds like aliens and weird, like that, like you're a science company, why would you do that?

But I just believe that we don't know everything, right? And we learn new stuff every single day. And so I told Jesse, I was like, look, we have an ancient DNA lab.

We arguably have the number one computational biology lab in the entire world.

And so if you can get us the samples and bring them in the right way, because that's another issue with samples, right? You need to go through the right chain of custody.

You got to make sure that you have government support on both sides.

And if you can get that government support from the Peruvian government, because there's been some controversy around this, where they don't, we're like, not everyone that's taking samples out of Peru had that permission.

So as long as we have permission from the government, people want us to do it.

Sure, I'll go run it it on our, you know, we have the top ancient DNA because you know, one situation is it was it's something crazy, another situation is it's fake, another situation is it's some uh weird mutation around a uh a population of humans, but no matter what, that's still interesting and it's minimal work for us to do.

So, I'm a big believer in just looking at all that. Like, we get all kinds of crazy stuff.

We, um, yeah, uh, and I would, I shouldn't say it crazy, but I mean, I'd probably say weekly, we get like Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Yeti Yeti emails. It's like, I've got this.

Sample, can you sample it? You know, and, you know, we can't sample all of it, but it's something like Jesse, something like Jesse.

Yeah, yeah, it's a credible source. And like, we neither know them or it's had some level of scientific rigor.
We do it. So that's probably like a fraction of a fraction of 1% of what we do.

But that kind of goes back to just like, we're pretty open-minded at Colossal. We try to, and we, we, we take a different approach to all the sciences.
Respect, respect, honestly.

Have there been any animals that are like nearly impossible to recreate for you so far? So, so it's two, I guess that in two ways. One is we get the dinosaur question every single time.

Not like occasionally. We get the dinosaur, but we either get the like, have you, did you see Jurassic Park? And we get it in this like weird, condescending way, like that it was real.

Like it happened in like the 90s.

You know what happened. They don't say like what happened in Jurassic Park.
Like, you don't happen at Jurassic Park. We're like,

okay, that, like, yes, I'm very, very familiar with that happened in the movie. Yeah.
Um, but it is, so we get that question a lot.

And then, and then that leads to, well, can you bring back dinosaurs? Half the people want to bring back dinosaurs. Half the people say they, they just quote Jurassic Park, right? Yeah.

And so I actually made a shirt that said preoccupied because we always get the, the, you were preoccupied thinking of whether you should, you did, or could.

You never thought to think whether you should. So I actually made a preoccupied shirt and I got a lot of fly for wearing it on stage.

And then I wore an inj in shirt on stage once, and people did not think that was funny. I thought it was funny because we just get asked the question all the time.

But ultimately,

we get asked the dinosaur question, but there is no dino DNA, right?

I don't like to say impossible.

Neither does George Church, but I don't think it's likely that there is dino DNA because the earth went through various heating periods since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

And also DNA, just like right now, the oldest DNA we're working with is about 1.5 million years old. It's not 65 million years old.
That's a big jump. Yeah.

And like amber's a very porous material it develops in very hot places wet places that's not good for dna storage so so there is no amber dna so dinosaurs one there's other species that we cannot create today because there's nothing to gestate them and this is where artificial wombs come in and that's that's an area i'm excited about got it where there's specific species i'll get all two one is a giant uh have you seen the giant ground sloth no you got to go down this rabbit hole of like just google interesting extinct species right?

And here, I'll give you kind of four that are cool.

There's a giant ground slot that was a side, like, you know, like a slot that you see that are like slow moving.

Imagine one of those that is like, that can make caves because it's so big and it's got claws that can literally burrow caves.

We could walk in and it would literally eat trees because it was as big as a tree. Wow.

There's this thing called a glyptodon, which is if you take like an armadillo and make it the size of a Volkswagen beetle, that was awesome.

And we we have DNA for it, which is crazy.

One of my favorites is the stellar sea cow. It's actually really sad.
It was a species that the stellar sea cow was about, think of like a manatee

or dugong that's the size of bigger than a whale.

You know, slow moving, super nice,

you know, and it's one of those sad stories that it was like eradicated within like 30 or 60 years of ever being discovered. That's fast.
Because guess what?

It's like big, slow moving target, lots of blubber and fat, feeds, you know, colonies of people.

So that's, so that's cool. Those are, those are a couple.
Oh, there's also a giant beaver in America. Beaver.

There's a giant beaver, which I think may be the silliest species, unless you turn it into some weird sci-fi horror movie. But yeah.
So they were making some big dams.

Exactly. Why were those species so much larger back in the day? You know, there's lots of theories on that, right? So, you know, many people think that there was less environmental pressures.

Many people think there's like less human pressures, access to different food sources.

If you go back to even the dinosaur age, there's even people that think that it's based on the oxygen and nitrogen content. But the oxygen and nitrogen content

looks very, very different, you know, 12,000, 13,000, 50,000 years ago than it did 65 million years ago. So I don't really subscribe to that.

I think it was just like, you see this in like environmental locations like islands and whatnot, where you get different pressures that create different species and subspecies.

I saw you say on Rogan, you don't touch human and gene editing at all. No, we don't.
Now, a lot of the technologies do apply to humans.

And so part of our monetization model is we spin those technologies out, right? So if there's an application to conservation, we open source it for the world.

If there's an application for human healthcare or industrial use cases, we'll spin those out. Got it.

So we won't go use those technologies, but we'll go put those into a new company where colossal investors and shareholders can benefit from it. Yeah.

And then that company has needs different investors, needs different governance. I don't run those companies.

I will say it's tempting. You know, I plan on having kids and like I have the autism gene break.

So it's like, why risk that for my kids? So it's a little tempting, you know? So, so I did, so I just had my first kid.

He's awesome. He's 14 months.
It's super awesome.

And I actually have a gene mutation that creates a truncated protein off my heart, right? Rob the Titan gene, pretty big.

I think it's either the biggest gene or one of the biggest genes in the body and i didn't want to pass that on you know i'm healthy i still take some meds to control i didn't want to pass it on and so if you do typical embryo screening that doesn't show up right it doesn't show up in your your what i say standard and so i found this company Full disclosure, I'm an investor in the company, but I invested after I like I didn't invest in the,

but I always want to be transparent about when I have money in something and I talk about it. And so

I hired this company called Orchid Health.

And what they do is they do the next level of screening. So you do certain screening.
If you go through, we went through IBF.

So if you go through that, it does certain screening and you can learn certain things. But it doesn't screen for like specific variants like what I had, right? Got it.
So

I wanted to make sure I didn't pass that on.

So we went through this process where we extracted eggs, created embryos, and then we screened all the embryos. And it also does this poly, in addition to screening for specific variants, it also,

in specific gene mutations, it creates this like interesting kind of like polygenic kind of risk assessment that also says, hey, we know that some of these genes could lead to late-stage Alzheimer's or could lead to these different other disease states, right?

And so, you know,

while it's not an exact science because there's still environmental factors, you do know that there are some people that have a predisposition to diabetes, certain cancers, Alzheimer's, and whatnot.

And so we used this company called Orchid Health, and it was awesome. I was in so happy with the results and having a healthy kid.
I love it. I called them up and I was like, can I invest in you guys?

See, I love that. I think it gets tricky once we start producing these super athletes or these super high IQ people.
I agree. I agree.
It's hard. It's complex.

And the technology is moving faster than regulation.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, right? It just means that we need to be thoughtful about it. And so Colossal never wanted to be in that discussion.

So we said, okay, maybe like our genome engineering tools could be be applied to that. We're going to spin those out.

And that's, that's another company's headache to go work through the regulatory aspects of that. So we try to be that.
We also didn't want to create, there's always enough, there's enough kind of

excitement for what we do. And there's also enough conspiracy around what we do.
So I didn't want people to be like, oh,

in this lab, they're working on mammoths. In this lab, they're working on saber two tigers.
On this lab, they're working on dinosaurs. And in this lab, they're working on super soldiers.

That would be the, even though we're not working on any of those things besides BMS, that would be that linear kind of performance.

A lot of conspiracies these days. Yeah.
And so I want to be like, I want to, and yeah, some of them turned out to be true. And so

I wanted to be thoughtful of that in our process. But, but Orchid, like, they're not genome engineering.
They're just giving parents the data to make better decisions. Right.
And I'm a fan of that.

Yeah, I am too. I am too, because it's, I mean, obviously, because I did it with my kids, and then I obviously did it.
I also invested.

Like, if you have a certain cancer predisposition, why would you risk that for your kid, right? You know, well, well, think about it. It's like like you, you put, um,

you, you want your kids to go to the best schools.

You want your kids, you know, I think that generally speaking, most people want to provide a better life than what their, even though their parents did great, want to provide a better life.

You always want to try to be improving the world, improving the kids, improving society, right?

You know, the way that we, you know, everyone always talks about like, oh, the world's so weird right now.

Yeah, but 150 years ago, it was a lot weirder. Like,

it was like people were like, okay, doing like really weird stuff to other humans. People had like many certain groups of people didn't have rights.

It was a very different time, right? It's not perfect now, but it was pretty bad. There are a lot of really bad things that at least have been corrected, right?

And so when you think about this like linear societal progression, you know, if you want to send your kid to the best school, you want to send your best, like, why wouldn't you want to

choose the best opportunity for the kid from a health perspective? Absolutely. So that's where I fall.
Yeah. One of your tweets caught my attention.

First of all, I didn't know elephants could get herpes. Yeah.

It's actually the leading leading cause of death in elephants is EEHV. Yeah.
More than poaching, more than human elephant cow.

This disease, it kills about 20% of elephants every single year.

It's the number one killer of elephants. Herpes.
Yeah. And this type of herpes called EEHV, endothelial

herpes. And so what's interesting is,

and they get it, it's also terrible. It kills baby elephants.

So it kills them at the time of weaning, which is just awful, like when they're coming off their mother's milk and colostrum, which is just awful.

And so it's not only just killing elephants killing baby elephants it's pretty awful and so um uh and what's interesting is that it's solvable by creating a vaccine but there's no like you know for from a financial perspective there's no like total addressable market for like curing elephant herb yeah there's no roi on them yeah exactly but but if you're making if you're spending you know eight figures nine figures making mammoths well you know i don't want 20 of our mammoths to have the uh ability to get this terrible disease right that would kill them right it's like that's i mean that's not even a good ROI perspective, right?

And so, it's in our best interest to do that and then just open source it for the world. And so, we worked on it with Dr.

Paul Ling, Baylor College of Medicine, a handful of zoos, and a couple other conservation partners.

And we, we built an mRNA vaccine that's being tested already in elephants in less than two and a half years. Uh, and it's conferring resistance to the most deadly strand of uh EHV already.

Incredible, yeah. And so, so if Colossal does nothing else, right? I'm like, you know, because we, you know, there's a about 5% of our audience hates us.
And I think it's pretty good.

In today's world,

I'll take 5% all day long. I'm not like 30, I think, would be.

So I'm beating you.

And so

it's going to be interesting the Venn diagram of that 30 and 5, right? And so, but what's interesting is that like, like, if we just can get EEHV.

distributed mass produced and we get the top you know three to five different uh variants colossal will save more elephants than all of humankind working on elephant conservation for all of history.

Wow, that's incredible. With that one innovation, that's incredible.
That's already being deployed in the field. Well done.
Yeah. So it's hard.

So sometimes people get caught up and like, oh, but why not just save species? I was like, well, this is not an either or, or. This is an and.
Like we have the ability to do both.

It's like this idea that there's a finite supply of resources, a finite supply of money, a finite supply of attention is just crazy. That's how we were taught growing up.
Yeah, but it's just wrong.

It's just incorrect. We were also taught other stuff.
Like,

I don't know your exact age, but I was taught, like,

there was a period where they were like,

water, where they're like, water is the most amazing thing in the universe, and it's the rarest thing in the universe. And that's what makes Earth magic.

There's water now, and we don't know if we're ever going to find it again. There's water

in vapor on Venus. There's polar ice caps on

on Mars and on the moon. There's liquid water on Mars.
I mean, we didn't have, we had to go a stone's throw away, relatively speaking, in the solar system to find this mythical

ingredient of H2O, right? No, I remember that program. But it was like, it was like, but that was, that was what we were taught, right? And that was the thought process, right?

And so I just believe that there's an abundance.

Like people that got worried about AI, it's like, no, like there was a time where people are like, well, the printing press is going to take all of our jobs. And it's like, but it didn't, right?

It's just people evolved and created new opportunities.

You know, like, look at like all the chip manufacturers, look at all the programmers, like all these different kinds of waves of technology and innovation have just created more jobs.

Like, I think that Colossal will help usher in a world of synthetic biology where we're engineering animals and plants and everything to coexist better, right? Love that. Like coral.

Like, coral's fucked. Like, the oceans are fucked.
Coral's fucked. And, you know, heat and salinity and all these things are bad.

And they are going, they are changing the temperatures and the currents of the ocean.

And micro fragmentation, while a lot of great smart scientists are working on that, it's a way of breaking coral and growing in a way where it grows about 10 times faster.

But if the coral can't exist in where it's going, that doesn't really matter. So, you have to insert genome engineering into coral to truly save our coral reefs.

Yeah, because right now they're dwindling, right? They're dwindling, right? And there's lots of smart people doing like fragmentation, doing biobanking, all that stuff.

But if the vast majority of the Earth body of water is changing due to us well then we got to help we got to help we we have an opportunity and i'd argue a moral responsibility to step in right and so but think about this 25 years ago there wasn't someone that said i need to go get uh an understanding in genome engineering computational biology and marine biology that then diagram didn't exist right but it probably will exist tomorrow if we want to save corals yeah if coral reefs get wiped out what would happen would that destroy everything it's pretty bad i don't really i don't want to give the wrong stat stat but a large percentage of of marine life lives uh between 30 and 60 feet around coral reefs like the vast majority of the ocean is pretty empty yeah uh absent like photoplankton and and other microorganisms but when you think about like macro ecosystems uh most of them are around kind of those those things so so they're they're critical to you know a healthy coral leaf reef uh gives you know uh uh is is critical to the entire uh food supply chain would it be possible create those from scratch or would you need some?

Yeah, I think you can engineer. We have not done it.
We get asked the coral question quite frequently, and we're just busy. I'd love to start a company to do it.

I just, I'm limited on time right now, but I'd love to do that eventually. Yeah, because trees are another issue too, right? Yeah, because deforestation is a big problem in certain countries.

Deforestation, I'm very interested in plants. I have some ideas that I could go implement around plants, and maybe the next couple of years, I'll go pursue that.

And then hopefully maybe, you know, as Colossal progresses, as some of the artificial womb work progresses uh if i can get plants going well then maybe i'd start working on uh corals because i do think corals would be really really interesting yeah yeah i love them well dude this has been awesome i know you're busy so i'm gonna let you go but uh where can people support you and everything yeah i mean i'm on uh you know colossal is on uh twitter or x and colossal is on youtube so just watch our stuff go there i'm on all those channels well i'm just i think i'm just on x um but uh yeah you know if people are interested just engage with us that's the number one thing like like let us know comments feedback questions we have the craziest and greatest questions we get all day all over school thanks for talking about it yeah thanks yep see you guys thanks

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