Beth Shapiro, ancient DNA pioneer and Colossal’s chief science officer, details her shift from academia to de-extinction, including sequencing Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes while facing pushback over funding. Colossal’s dire wolf project revealed Ice Age traits like light coats, but ethical concerns persist—like Burmese pythons disrupting ecosystems or beefalo hybrids exposing flawed genetic marketing. Ancient DNA challenges extinction timelines (e.g., mammoths surviving 4,000 years ago in Canada) and species concepts, such as early human migration theories and mysterious Peruvian skeletons with three digits. Gene editing’s future hinges on balancing innovation with ethics, from CRISPR-modified organoids to potential pandemic-driven modifications, while U.S. scientific leadership risks eroding amid political gridlock and global competition like China’s aggressive biotech investments. [Automatically generated summary]
I work in a crazy field called ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics.
It means we go out into the world, we dig shit up, and we extract DNA from it.
And what is fantastic about that is it's being a modern-day explorer.
I get to go somewhere, I get to find out something new that completely rewrites what we thought we knew, and it's brilliant.
And I get to fight with people a lot.
And because I love to fight, I recently quit my academic job and moved to become the chief science officer at Colossal, the company that has just made those dire wolves.
I just felt like it was the right thing to say at this minute.
I end up fighting with people, though, not because I want to, but because I feel like I have to defend what I think is the way that we should be doing science.
I was convinced that I wanted to work in broadcast journalism.
I got a job working at the local TV station.
I grew up in Rome, Georgia, northwest corner of Georgia.
And I got a job at the TV station where I was first operating the camera and helping people write copy.
And then I got to be on air.
I auditioned for a spot in the morning where I would do local cut-ins on headline news in the 24 and 54 after the hour.
But I had to wake up.
I was in high school.
Go to work, write the script, go on TV, learn to read the teleprompter.
It was pretty fun.
And I was convinced that this is what I wanted to do with my career.
I went to the University of Georgia.
They have a fantastic broadcast journalism school.
I started off as the news director at one of the local radio stations.
And this job, let's just say, wasn't particularly compatible with being a freshman in college.
There were mornings when I was locked out of the bathroom, but I had only been asleep for one and a half hours after being out for too late at night doing things that I shouldn't have been doing because I was underage, right?
And had to go to work to write the news and then be on this broadcast radio station.
It was terrible.
Anyway, how did I move from there to science?
I took this amazing class.
It's similar to a class that I ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz recently, where it was a field.
Geology and archaeology program.
And we started off on the East Coast.
We learned about rocks and how to identify minerals.
And then we drove across the country and slept outside in national parks and learned about the history of North America, the geological history, the human history, everything, while being there in person.
Drove up the West Coast, drove back around the country.
It was nine weeks.
And I thought to myself while I was there, This is the story that I want to tell.
I want to show how people have changed this landscape over and over and over again and about the opportunities that we have to be able to become more creative controllers of this landscape.
So I thought, I'll get a degree in science because I know how to do broadcast journalism.
The ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something.
I know how to do that, so I'll just do this other thing.
And that's the history of it.
I just kind of got sucked into being the scientist.
I've written a couple of popular books, which is still me trying to reach back out.
I want to be a communicator, but I also want to be a scientist because it's so much fun.
I ended up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get and not getting into the university that I wanted to get into, but wandering around the halls of the university that I did get into.
And I met this guy called Alan Cooper.
Who was one of the few people in the world at the time, this was the late 1990s, who'd set up the special kind of lab that you need to be able to extract DNA from bones.
So this DNA is in terrible condition, so we have to have a purpose-built clean room to make sure that we don't spit in something or drop an eyelash in something, because then your DNA, which is in great condition, will be the thing that we amplify.
So we had one of these labs, and I thought, well, that's kind of cool, because I was interested in geology, I was interested in human history.
Maybe I can use this as a way of telling stories that haven't been told before or rewriting the stories that we keep telling.
This was a time where we were learning a lot about human history and human ancestry, and there was a lot more to be learned.
And so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure.
Like, one of the times I was out in Timir, the north central Timir Peninsula, and we had brought with us this weird tent that we'd set up so that we could go inside and take the masks, take the masks off of our face, because you always have to wear a hood otherwise.
Otherwise, you'll be breathing mosquitoes.
And we were going outside and playing this game where we would just clap our hands in front of our face and then count how many you killed.
And one time, I killed something like 35 mosquitoes in one clap.
Alan Cooper, the guy I went to work with, he was all, oh, I'm going to just wear this natural mosquito repellent and you don't need any of the stuff that actually has poisons in it.
Look at me at my natural.
And we're out there and the wind dries down and the mosquitoes come and I'm with my deet.
And it's all these subsistence people that are like fishing and trapping and they're living in these little cabins and they bring dogs with them everywhere.
They travel around on snowmobiles.
Really, what's amazing about it is the title, is Happy People.
They're all happy.
That's what's so weird.
It's like these people have a very hard life, but yet they're always smiling and they're having a good time.
And, you know, living this subsistence lifestyle somehow or another is like very fulfilling at like a, I don't want to say a genetic level, but like an internal level.
There's something about it that like this makes sense.
Whereas society like today You understand genes.
We essentially have the same genes that people have 10,000 years ago had.
When we were up there in Tymere, we'd flown for a couple of days in this really awful Russian helicopter that took off the third time it tried to because, you know, infrastructure infrastructure doesn't work in Siberia.
It's a repeated theme from It was in MI8, and it was in a place called Hatanga, which is where we were based while we were trying to get out into...
And it's mostly these massive gas tanks.
and you load all the gear into the gas tanks, and then all of the people I think the dog was the smartest person.
And our expedition team.
But they would load us up and they would try to start the helicopter and it wouldn't start and they would unload us.
We would go back to the places we were staying and then they would tinker with it and fix it.
Anyway, we flew out.
We got in the helicopter finally.
We got up into the air and then the Russian and French leaders of our expedition team decided that they were going to celebrate finally having taken off in this helicopter by smoking, right?
This particular expedition was particularly insane compared to other things like that.
Also, I'm going to get to the story eventually, but also in part of this, we were traveling forever out into this part of the time era where they had predicted that we would be able to find mammoth bones and woolly rhino bones and all the bones of the animals we're interested in.
So we're flying out there, and we start to land.
And I'm thinking, great, we're there.
I get out of this crazy firebomb in the air that I'm in.
No, no, we did not get off.
Instead, we picked up a random family that had been out there on their own.
Parents, a child.
Yeah, it was two parents and a child.
And they had a backpack with their gear and a massive cooler.
But whatever, the helicopter took off twice, and then it landed, and everybody unloaded, and we set up the tent, the camp.
And we discovered over the course of the next few days, you know, we built these cool boats, the Zodiacs.
You blow them up, and you bring out the outboard, and you put them on the lake, and we're looking around, and we discovered that we had landed in a place where we were going to be for six weeks that had been glaciated during the last ice age, which meant that our chances of finding what we wanted were really small.
Oh, no.
And the Russian...
The Russian cooks had brought medical ethanol because it weighed less per unit of alcohol than vodka, which they would normally bring on the helicopter.
Fish, and there were some geese and some ducks that they would try to shoot while we were on our zodiacs, normally without telling us that they were about to shoot.
We're there for, I don't know, maybe it was two or three days looking around, and it was about two o 'clock in the morning.
We were inside this little tent that we'd built so that we could eat in it, sort of the kitchen tent where we were.
And it was a big mesh tent to keep the mosquitoes out so we didn't have to have anything.
And everybody is just staring off into the distance, glumly.
The medical ethanol was gone.
You know, everybody was sober.
We were going to be for the next five weeks.
We were going to be stuck in this place where we weren't able to find what we were.
And then all of a sudden, these three dudes show up outside of our tent with machine guns.
Right.
And I'm thinking, everybody's thinking, what the fuck?
Like, we just flew forever in a helicopter over two years.
Nothing.
Except for this French family that we picked up randomly along the way.
And everybody's looking around and there's this real moment of, what the hell are we going to do?
And then the guy who was the expedition leader recognizes these two dudes and he's like, oh, friends, oh, good to see you, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm thinking, what's going to happen?
When they realize we don't have any more vodka, medical ethanol.
And it turns out that they are, they were members of the Dolgon community, which is an actual family of subsistence people that still live up on the time air.
They heard reindeer.
And they had seen the helicopter and had wondered what we were up to and just set out over the landscape that they normally live on to try to find us.
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And they get up and they go back to their little tent area that they'd set up in the middle of nowhere.
And they bring back their cooler.
And they open it up.
And inside is cheese.
Like a massive Gouda.
And a massive Brie.
Why?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Right?
But they had cheese.
And so we cut the cheese.
And shared the cheese with our doggone friends, and they were happy.
And the next day, we took them back with the Zodiacs to their community.
And you know what was most amazing about this experience?
Everything about it was cool.
We saw these people that were living in these tiny little huts in part of the world where it goes to 40 below.
And it doesn't matter if it's Fahrenheit or Celsius because they cross at that level, right?
It's 40 below during the winter for months and dark.
And they're herding reindeer.
And they're living in these tiny little things that they cut in half during the winter so that half of it is used for heating and half of it is used for the family to live in.
Everything that they own is on these things, on skids, that the reindeer drag across the tundra, across the permafrost.
In the snow or in the summer, trying to find the land for the animals to graze.
And this is how they live.
And that was the only time in that experience where I could take off the head net because the mosquitoes didn't care about me around those animals.
And we're still, I think, we're still learning about how humans have dispersed around the world and how they got there.
Absolutely.
And really able to, you know, they're trying now to relearn their native languages because during the communist era they were all forced to learn Russian and speak Russian the same way as everyone else.
Maybe they had to go to the squares like you see in Yakutsk and all these other places where they have the big squares with the speakers on the top where they would go for the daily admonishings or whatever from the communists.
And it would be, I mean, obviously that's such a cool job, how getting to go and actually try to communicate with people who haven't been talked to before.
But you kind of don't want to, because you don't want to ruin that.
Maybe they had a bad experience with some other person from some other Westerner and they decided, you know, we're done.
But they're rightly terrified of humans because when these...
There's horrific human rights violations that occur there where they just hire the worst people in the world to go in and wipe out these tribes because these tribes are resisting them taking over this land.
When the first settlers went there, when the first explorers went there, they talked about these incredible, sophisticated civilizations.
And then people went back 100 years and there was none of that, so they thought that they had just made it up.
It turns out the first people probably gave these folks horrible diseases, and it wiped out millions of people, and then the jungle just consumed whatever structures and houses.
and stuff that they had, and all that's left is these grids that you can see when you fly Yeah, that's so cool.
You can see those when you're flying over any part of the world, really.
I noticed that recently I was flying over Europe and you can see the old trellises from old, you know, I don't know how old, but it's just so cool how we can see remnants of civilizations and just makes you think.
What happened?
This is some of the coolest mysteries.
That's what's so cool about working in ancient DNA, too, is we can just go to places, get DNA from stuff, and learn something that we never knew before.
The whole idea that we could get DNA stuff, that's not true.
It was actually the other way around.
And Michael Crichton, when he wrote the book that became the movie, he credited a lab at Berkeley, Alan Wilson's group, the Extinct Species Study Group, which was the first group to show that you could get DNA in something after it died.
That was actually from a quagga, which is a type of zebra.
What a cool name.
In Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the kwaha.
They showed that you could get DNA from this skin.
And everybody was like, that is the coolest thing that I've heard in a long time.
That must mean we can bring dinosaurs back to life.
And everybody started racing to get the oldest and coolest DNA.
And so there were papers in the best journals of science that never published anything that's wrong ever, ever, that said, look, here's dinosaur DNA.
And look, here's DNA from a myocene-aged leaf.
And look, here's this.
And all of it is crap.
We now know.
The first dinosaur DNA sequences that were published, if you took them at the time and you typed them into the internet and you compared them to the earliest of what is today this big repository of all DNA sequences of everything that's ever been sequenced, what came back was a close match to a bird.
We now know, because there's more DNA sequences there, that it was a chicken, an exact match to a chicken, and some investigative work found that the excavation team who'd been working on those bones had Fried chicken for lunch every day.
Anyway, he discovered a way to photocopy DNA to make lots of copies of the same thing, which then made it possible to learn the sequence using the technologies of the day.
And that was what made it possible, really, for ancient DNA to take off, was this ability to photocopy.
Because when an animal dies, or a plant dies, the DNA in the cell starts to get chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces by things like UV, right?
We go out in the sun.
We put sunscreen on, and that stops the UV from breaking our DNA.
But it's not terrible to get some sunlight, as you probably just saw.
There was an article out saying, hey, dummies, you know, we need some sunlight in order to make vitamin D. But we have a repair mechanism so that when your DNA breaks, it doesn't stay that way.
we evolved this mechanism.
But once you're dead...
And also things like bacteria and microbes get in there and chew up the DNA to recycle the animal to the next generation or plant or whatever.
And so the DNA that we get in an old thing, like a mammoth bone, is really short fragments, like maybe 30 or 40 or 50 letters of DNA long.
In comparison, if I were to take a swab from my cheek and sequence that, I could get strings that are hundreds of millions of letters long.
This is living DNA.
So ancient DNA is in really crap condition.
And it's also mixed with stuff.
So if I extract DNA from...
I'll get some mammoth DNA, but I'll get a lot of those microbes that are in there chewing up DNA.
I'll probably get some of my DNA because I touched that mammoth bone.
I'll get DNA from whoever else touched that thing.
This has been a real problem in archaeology because we're trying to get DNA from humans, but we are humans, and so we touch these things, and then I don't know if it's my DNA or if that thing DNA.
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In my lab at Santa Cruz and in ancient DNA labs around the world, it's like working in a virus lab where you're scared of everything, but we turn it around.
So rather than having the air being sucked in, we're kind of trying to push the air out.
We don't want any air coming in.
We wear these suits where it looks like we're terrified, you know, with a face mask and a hairnet, and we're totally covered, and we bleach everything.
It's not because we're afraid of those.
We're afraid that we're going to get our DNA in that bone, and then we're not going to be able to do our work.
So it took that and the ability to amplify those tiny little pieces of DNA for us to really figure out that we could get DNA out of things.
For a long time, people thought we were never going to get DNA out of Neanderthal bones because of this problem.
we touch a bone, we're just going to get human DNA, and we're never going to be able to know the difference.
But then with PCR and with the ability to work in these clean labs and distinguish, we eventually got whole Neanderthal genomes, which I think is probably one of the crowning achievements of my career.
Bones.
Different bones.
The very first.
Neanderthal genome sequence was actually a mixture of several bones because, you know, there wasn't very much DNA in any of them, and they were able to pull it together.
Actually, my husband, who was on part of that team, who put together the first Neanderthal genome sequence.
But then the Denisovans, the Denisova people, that was just a tiny little piece of a finger bone that they had no idea was going to belong to a totally new species of human.
And they were able to get a really high coverage whole genome out of this tiny little finger bone that totally rewrote what we thought we knew about evolutionary.
And one thing that people have tested, actually this again was work that my husband did, was whether the people who live there today, the Rampasasa people, are related to them and they're not.
It seems like, because they're small as well.
And the question is, is there something weird about them?
This is actually really cool.
It was a really cool result.
It's hard to know exactly what bits of...
But clearly it's not just one thing because there's not just people my size and people normal size.
I'm only five feet tall, right?
We have a big spectrum of help.
So there's lots of different genes that are involved with this.
But we kind of have an idea of where those genes are in a genome and what they might be.
And with these people who are all small, the idea, the hypothesis was that there was some new thing in their DNA that led to them being small.
They think there's a lot of toxins in their mouth.
And I think there's also a venom.
I think they used to think it was just poison, just botulism and just various bacteria.
But now I believe they think it's a venom.
I watched another horrible video where they would bite this buffalo They just bite its hindquarters and then follow it while the the venom is slowly like taking its And then eventually the poor buffalo gets to the point where it can't move and they just start eating it alive.
Yeah, I didn't know this, and I wouldn't have suspected it because they're so gorgeous, and you wouldn't think that something that gorgeous would be so dumb.
But I have friends who are, Matt James, who's the chief animal officer at Colossal, he's worked with lots of different zoos throughout his career, and he's told me that there are multiple occasions where he has had to save a giraffe from accidentally killing itself because it's so dumb.
The ability to make inferences based on statistical information has so far been tested only on animals having large brains in relation to their body size, like primates and parrots.
They tested giraffes, despite having a smaller relative brain size, can rely on relative frequencies to predict sampling outcomes.
They presented them with two transparent containers filled with different quantities of highly liked food and less preferred food.
The experimenter covertly drew one piece of food from each container and let the giraffes choose between the two options.
In the first task, we varied the quantity and relative frequency of the highly liked and less preferred food pieces.
In the second task, we inserted a physical balance.
barrier in both containers, so giraffes only had to take into account the upper part of the container when predicting the outcome.
In both tasks, giraffes successfully selected the container more likely to provide highly liked food, integrating physical information to correctly predict sampling information.
But I also trust a person who has tried to keep giraffes from killing themselves by doing dumb things to tell me that a giraffe isn't always making the best decisions.
You know, like a kid that never leaves his parents' basement and plays Call of Duty until he's 35. You know, probably doesn't have, like, the best social intelligence.
Probably going to be pretty awkward when you get them out in the wild.
I was there for Khaleesi's birth, and people were asking me afterward, how did that feel?
And I just, you can't even describe it.
This moment when she was born, and then she screamed.
She had this cry, this scream.
I have it on my phone, actually.
I can play it for you.
But it was just such a, I don't know, it's this awe.
I think this is one of the best things about the de-extinction work and the species preservation work that Colossal is doing is that we live in such a crazy time.
And this is one of the things that people get about going out, going hunting, going and spending time in the woods or going and experiencing something that they wouldn't normally experience.
This way to feel genuine wonder and excitement and enthusiasm and Khaleesi's birth.
I wasn't there for the birth of the boys.
I was in the UK at a conference and it was very sad.
and I had COVID and I was asleep and trying to recover.
And the next morning I woke up and there were like 150 text messages on my phone from Ben going, Where are you?
Why are you not responding?
And I'm like, oh my God, I've missed this moment.
So I made sure that I was there, present for Khaleesi.
You know there's a show, I don't know where it's on, but it's a show that's called Florida Man.
I was watching it on a flight the other day.
Seriously.
And it goes through interactions that Florida men have, and one of them is about a dude who was kind of lost in his life, and he climbed over a fence that he shouldn't have climbed over and went for a swim in a lake.
In this video, and I was trying to sleep, so I'm probably wrong.
In this video, he laid on the side of the lake, like probably bleeding to death, when an alligator that was in the shape of his mom, I think, came up to him and told him he had to get his ass up and move or he was going to die.
But birds, whenever I think about birds, I think of this, right?
We know that there are are things that we can do to help mammals to adapt to rapid changes in their habitat, right?
We can do things like...
One of the things that we did to save Florida panthers from becoming extinct was we introduced panthers from Texas, which are the closest genetically and geographically to Florida panthers.
They were probably connected at some point until humans created stuff that meant that they couldn't go back and forth.
And when Texas Panthers were introduced in the mid-1990s, that population recovered.
They stopped.
They had a disorder called cryptorchidism, where their testicles wouldn't descend or only one would descend.
And that's a great way of bringing diversity back into a population.
It's what we're trying to do with our red wolf project.
Red wolves are one of the most endangered wolf species in the world.
They're the only endemic American wolf and they are nearly extinct.
There's a successful captive breeding program.
And a few years ago, some of the people that we work with at Colossal, a woman called Bridget von Holt, who's at Princeton, who's a friend of mine.
She was working and discovered because people were sending her photos.
See, this is why you have to pay attention to people who you think might be crazy when they send you pictures If it's real, I want to be the person who finds it, right?
So Bridget says this guy, who lives down in the coast of Louisiana, sent her a picture of an animal that she's like, that is not a wolf, and it is not a coyote, and I don't know what it is, and it's crazy.
And she looked at it and she goes, yeah.
It's not.
It's something else.
It's something in between those.
And so she tested it and found that it has a ton of DNA ancestry from red wolves.
And they're hybridized a little bit with coyotes, but all red wolves are hybridized a little bit with coyotes.
Canids are always hybridizing with each other.
We know that because there are wolves that are black because black gene for wolves got into the wolf population because a domestic dog.
Had his way with a wolf in heat, right?
That's how that allele got into that population.
So we know canids do this all the time.
And she was like, this is so cool, because this captive breeding population was established with just a few founder individuals.
And the team working with them are doing a great job trying to maximize genetic diversity.
Picking who's going to pair with who to keep all that diversity there.
But it's still just a few individuals.
So they are going to lose genetic diversity.
It's just how it works.
But if we can bring other individuals in from this population, that's a way of concentrating more diversity.
Better able to pick which parts are red wolf, either by breeding individuals or by editing their DNA, which is technology that we developed on the path to dire wolf, right?
And we can actually help this population to survive.
So there are ways that we can do this for mammals that are going to have really amazing consequences for the way we can protect biodiversity.
You should look it up and read the whole story because it involved these two guys.
One of them was the guy who was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America.
And another guy was like a con man who had worked as a pimp and a journalist and all these other things.
And they had actually been employed during the Boer Wars to kill each other.
But they came together on part of this congressman's team.
The scout thought it was a great idea.
He wanted people to bring in all sorts of animals from Africa and put them in national parks so that people would want to go to national parks because they could hunt them.
And that would, you know, have more reason for people to want to support the idea of national parks at the time, which is great.
like, you know, this utility of nature.
It seems weird compared to how we think of it now, but I think this is really interesting.
And then the congressman, when he was pulling together the team of people that he wanted to be on his side for this, he went to a show that this other guy, the sort of con man, traveling salesman, pimp, escape artist dude, was having about how he was an intrepid explorer.
And he was like, that guy is an expert as well.
He can also be on my team.
And they testified in front of Congress, and they asked questions like, You know, how do you know that they're safe?
How do you know that they're tame?
This con man, he was like, well, you know, there's plenty of evidence that you can even feed them from a baby's bottle with no evidence whatsoever, right?
And everybody was like, yeah, awesome.
Even the New York Times was completely behind it.
They published an editorial talking about, they called hippos lake cow bacon.
This is, I mean, But it's not fair to call it failed, because it didn't fail.
It never came up for a vote.
So they had testified in front of Congress too late for it to come up to a vote that year, and then just other shit happened, and people stopped paying attention.
I think, well, I have a friend who works on domestication of pigs, and they've published a bunch of different papers that are always contradicting each other.
He gave a hilarious talk at a meeting I was at last week about how he keeps saying something different as a way of, you know, keeping to publish more papers.
He was just being nice about how he's open to changing his mind with new data, which I think is a valued trait in a scientist.
But yeah, so Southeast Asia or around Asia, I think is the origin, or at least the domestication.
And normally things are domesticated around where they were.
I think there was something I read about that yesterday.
But the wolves that they've introduced to, like outside of Aspen in particular, I have a friend who has a ranch out there and I posted about it on Instagram.
He actually sent me some more pictures yesterday.
And I was going to post about it, but so much crazy stuff was happening in LA.
I'm like, this is not the time to talk about, like, wolf problems.
But they're just killing calves and eating their liver.
They're not even that hungry.
They're just eating the tasty parts and leaving these calves alone.
And these people are on a 24-hour run ragged, you know, they have these – And they're not allowed to shoot them, and, you know, they spent millions of dollars bringing them there, and they're just eating cattle.
Yeah, I imagine it's really devastating to see something like that happening and know that somebody else made this decision and that you, who actually experience it, weren't.
I mean, I imagine the people who voted for that, I wonder what they imagined.
You get a bunch of people that live in the cities that don't have a lot of experience in nature and wild ecosystems, and then you introduce this idea, we're going to bring wolves back to their native habitat.
Oh, that sounds amazing.
What they're not telling you is, like, what this rancher told me is that, first of all, the original wolves that were introduced into Colorado were wolves that were taken from Oregon because these wolves were preying on cattle.
And so then they brought them into Colorado where they And so then they moved them from this area where they were preying on cattle and put them outside of Aspen, where they start preying on cattle.
It's just stupid.
And again, it's not biologists.
It's not their idea.
It's ballot box biology.
And it's all being instigated by the Colorado governor.
It's so important to actually talk to wildlife biologists and ecologists.
I mean, we can see from Yellowstone how important having this keystone predator is in ecosystems where they can be and where there is space for them.
But the land is not the same as everywhere as it is in Yellowstone.
And we need to be able to make, you know, when I was at Santa Cruz, I taught an introductory biology class for non-majors where my goal was to give the students tools to be able to think on their own, which is amazing.
And their midterm exam was a debate, and the topic of the debate was that wolves should be introduced into California.
It's like when you're dealing with people that have cattle ranches, and this is their entire livelihood, and all they're doing now is just compensating them for the calves that get killed, and then so you have less output every year.
So it's like the whole thing is crazy.
They were already on their way to do a natural migration into Colorado.
Because I think there's also like some of the wolves that are being introduced.
They're introduced from British Columbia or they're being introduced from Alberta or somewhere up there.
I think that was the ones that came into Yellowstone.
Like the Yellowstone thing is cool, right?
It's been a few decades now.
People have kind of like come to this sort of – People recognize that there was an overpopulation of elk for sure.
They used to have these hunting seasons where they would hunt them in the snow in the winter because there were so many of them.
They wanted you to just be able to pick them out and just shoot them for meat because they really didn't have the resources because they didn't have the apex predators because a lion can only eat so many of them.
So mountain lions weren't really putting the dent in the population that a pack of intelligent hunting Cooperative animals like wolves could do.
So they brought it back, and it's relatively successful.
They've knocked the population of elk down more than 40%, but that's probably good.
But what's interesting, this class that I took, it was a debate that I taught.
Sorry.
It was a debate.
And what I made them do was assume roles of a rancher, a politician, a conservationist.
And I had several different roles.
And then I randomly assigned whether they were pro or con.
And they had a couple of weeks to figure out what their debate was going to be.
And I took a vote before the debate.
And as you might expect for...
18-year-olds in California.
You say at the beginning, "Should wolves be introduced?" 100% yes.
Right.
They do this debate, and I did it four years in a row, and every year, After they had to do this, after they had to put themselves in somebody else's shoes and think about it from their perspective, it would shift.
And the majority of people would be like, yeah, no, it's a bad idea.
I think if you give people the tools to be able to think, they can imagine themselves in a different scenario.
And we need to do that.
We need to be arming people with thoughtfulness rather than jumping to a conclusion.
Right, but you shouldn't be able to vote on things that you're not educated in.
It's like if you allow people to vote on things that have tremendous consequences to the ecosystem, like a reintroduction of an apex predator, and they don't understand those consequences, they just have this very utopian idea of what it means to bring back wolves.
Look, I love them.
I think they're amazing animals.
It's just like...
Putting them where people live.
They're going to eat pets.
They're going to eat a lot of things that are penned up, whether they're sheep or goats or whatever people have that they can get at easily.
Yeah, we've been putting together, not because we're not going to release them, the next step for their lives is to study them and see how they're changed by their DNA being modified, measure things like their gene expression, their growth, their health span, their lifespan, learn the consequences of the work that we're doing, learn how they interact with the habitat, introduce Khaleesi to her brothers and the next animals that we make into that pack, to make a small pack, but they will stay on that secure, expansive, ecological preserve.
But we'll probably use subcutaneous, you know, you can put a hormonal, So we don't want to castrate them, which would obviously be a way to stop it, because we want them to be able to reach their full size because we want to know what that would be.
And we want them to be able to have the hormones to be able to do that.
But they will be controlled.
We track them.
There's cameras on them all the time.
There's three separate layers of fencing to keep them in.
We know exactly where they are.
They couldn't get a splinter without a camera somewhere seeing it.
So let's get to the criticisms because there's people that are saying that these are not dire wolves, that what you've done is just manipulate the DNA of a great wolf.
They are direwolves because we have manipulated the DNA of gray wolves.
We took dire wolf genome sequences from animals, one animal that lived 72,000 years ago and one animal that lived 13,000 years ago.
And we lined them up next to each other and figured out what it is that makes a dire wolf a dire wolf.
And then we used the tools of genome engineering to...
And that has created these animals that you saw that are bigger and they're stronger and they have that direwolf coat.
And that's a cool thing too.
That coat, the light coat color that you see, was something that we absolutely could not have known without the ancient DNA because no one has ever seen.
A dire wolf.
When we published a paper before I joined Colossal many years ago that was about dire wolf evolution, we had a paleo artist reconstruct what dire wolves looked like, and they made them red, or red-y brown.
And that's because so many other animals seem to be red-y brown, like mammoths or Neanderthals seem to have had red hair, and so we thought, sure, why not?
We didn't know because we hadn't sequenced the part of their genome that we could use to see what color their coats were.
But both of these two animals that we had higher coverage DNA from had How are coats, the hair color and eye color and things like that.
That suggested they had light colored coats.
And so we thought that's cool.
We'll have that as one of our key dire wolf traits that we're bringing back.
And I'm sure there were different colors, but it's interesting to me that two animals that lived so far apart from each other in time and geography would both have this light color coat.
So maybe it wasn't that every dire wolf had a light.
So whenever they overlap geographically, But what's interesting about this is that we always find the hybrids living like brown bears, even though it's probably that the mom is a polar bear.
Because a brown bear boy will wake up from hibernation and go out onto polar bear.
to scavenge for food.
And a polar bear female is an induced ovulator, whereas brown bear females are seasonal.
So a polar bear female will ovulate in the presence of a male.
So the male comes up to her and will mate her.
The other way around, if a polar bear bear, brown male, had encountered a brown bear female, he's probably more likely to eat her than to mate her.
So why do we always find the hybrids living with brown bears instead of living with polar bears?
And the polar bear biologists who we've worked with, I've worked a lot of time with Ian Sterling, who's a fantastic polar bear biologist from Canadian Wildlife Research.
And his hypothesis is straightforward that they can't successfully hunt seals if they don't have that white fur.
But they hide in, I mean, they even have those things where they cover their nose with their hand, the black nose with their hand, because the black nose.
This is actually how we discovered it because we found that the place where brown bears hybridized with polar bears during the last ice age was probably the ABC Islands off the coast of Alaska because the ice was that far south at the peak of the last ice age.
And brown bear boys would move onto the islands as the habitat got better where they encountered these populations of polar bears that had been stranded there as the ice receded pretty much.
And so they hybridized there and all brown bears.
Polar bears in North America today have ancestry from that admixture with polar bears.
Is this part of the problem with the criticism of the science is that we are being very specific about what we're calling these things based on our own definitions that we've all agreed upon?
So there's this group of academic scientists who are trying to say, trying to grasp so tightly to this very precise definition of a species as having to do with DNA, how much DNA matches something else.
And it's interesting.
I think the reason that we keep having this conversation is because it's genuinely interesting to talk about species concepts.
Come up with, you know, dozens of different species concepts.
And they're all for a particular purpose.
You know, if I am wanting to have a conversation about dinosaur fossils or anything that's a fossil, I'm going to use the morphological species concept because that's all I've got.
I'm going to compare the shape of this bone with the shape of this bone.
And if they're similar enough to my trained eye, I'm going to call that a species.
Rings a bell and then goes from table to table sitting around with people and we, the nerdy scientists, paleogeneticists sitting in the corner are trying to just be super nice Canadians talking to these people.
There's gold mines like the site outside Fairbanks that are super productive like this, and every one of the miners out there has this cool collection.
Not any nearly as cool as his, but because he's got so much land, they've been collecting it for such a long time.
Oh, and I heard those great stories about how he donated material to the American Museum.
Because I'm sure it's true, because they have so much of that material at the American Museum.
When I started working on bison, and I've worked on bison for 30 years, right?
When I started working on bison, getting back to the species concept, I was trying to figure out if the DNA mapped to these species names, and they've got a fantastic There's so much bone there, broken pieces or other pieces, and you get to the point where you're like, what the hell am I going to do with this?
Now, they shouldn't have dumped it in the river, obviously.
That's dumb.
But he is going to get He won't know because he'll be long dead.
But in 10,000 years, when the paleontologists of the future are looking in that river, they're going to be like, what the fuck?
So what they have found on John's property that's so spectacular is that it's really only a few acres that he's getting all this stuff from, which makes you question, like, how did all these animals die off in mass in this very small area?
Where you've got warehouses filled with bones and tusks.
Near Dawson, it's called the Klondike region, you have this really fine glacial silt.
And that settles in different places in different quantities.
And it settles really quickly.
So you get this really fast, thick buildup of this really fine silt that preserves the bones really well.
So when we go, the gold miners, they're placer mining.
So they're taking these high-pressure water hoses and washing away this frozen dirt.
Then they let it thaw for a bit, and then they wash away the next layer.
They're trying to get to the gold-bearing gravel that's underneath.
But while they're doing that, literally thousands, tens of thousands of bones come out of there.
And in some places, it's more rich, more intense than others, but it's there.
I've taken students up there, and they're all mopey because of the mosquitoes, and they're mopey because they're 19. And they're like, oh, we're never going to find anything.
They jump out of the trucks, and they're like, holy shit, is that a mammoth tooth?
They were probably imagining, I guess when people came over, they did.
There were new diseases.
They probably did get sick.
And so there was probably something in it.
So Jefferson went so far as he had a moose sent to this guy's house on his doorstep, but it was like partly rotten when he'd gotten there and somebody put the wrong antlers on its head.
It was just really dumb.
But his main feature was mammoths, that he knew that this animal, he didn't think they were extinct at the time.
And nobody really knew about the idea of extinction.
He was convinced that Lewis and Clark were going to find them, that people were going to find these mammoths still there.
And he sent a letter, and it was a handwritten letter on his personal stationery, which had a naked girl dancing around a pole, which gave him, obviously, more credibility.
And he sent a couple of cuttings of insulation from his basement, telling me that the family of Bigfoots that lived in his basement, he had seen urinating on this insulation.
And so if I was going to get Bigfoot DNA, it was going to be from that insulation.
So we're essentially getting the tiniest little bits of information and we're trying to piece together this understanding of millions and millions and millions of years of creatures on this earth.
This is one of the super fun things about ancient DNA, right?
So I think...
So I can learn a ton by sequencing the DNA from the people that are around.
And if I am lucky enough to get it from these bones that I know is real about human history, and paleoanthropologists and archaeologists in the beginning of ancient DNA hated it because it was going in and going, oh no.
I mean, I know people get hung up on DNA and how you need lots of DNA to define a species, but we have been able now to look.
I think one of the coolest things that we've learned from the Neanderthal genome is that we all know We kind of get that now.
You can get your DNA tested at one of these DNA testing places, and they'll even tell you how much Neanderthal you are so you can have a competition with your brother and your cousins, right?
I'm more Neanderthal than you.
I'm amazing.
Less well-known, though, is that we all have a different 2% to 5% Neanderthal DNA.
And if you were to go around the world and collect all of the Neanderthal DNA sequences that are in people alive today, we could put together like 93% of the Neanderthal genome.
Are they actually extinct, if we can put together 93% of their genome by...
That's just a fun philosophical question.
Second is, what the hell is going on in that other 7%, right?
And if we want to know what it is that makes us human, that's where we look, right?
That's where we ask, what are the mutations that arose since we split from Neanderthals, that if a baby got that part of the Neanderthal DNA, it didn't survive.
It couldn't make it as a human.
That is the bit that is important to define us.
We've actually been able to narrow that down.
There's less than 100 I think I'm still fixated on what you said earlier because I think it's so important that we decided.
So we have species concepts that we designed that allow us to have a conversation and know what we're talking about.
So when I talk about, and I call this fossil a name, you and I know that we're having that same conversation.
If I am in charge of I might use geography to figure out what one species is and what another species is.
The species concept that we learn when we take our introductory biology course is a species concept that was very, But we know that lots of things violate that.
Brown bears and polar bears.
We just talked about how they're hybrids.
Humans and Neanderthals violate that.
Cattle and bison.
Violate that to way less of an extent than we thought that they did.
So I've spent a lot of time being interested in this.
Admixture history.
And so I was interested in brown bears and polar bears and humans and Neanderthals.
And what is it that suddenly makes a species not able to breed with another species?
What is it that causes that sort of last wall to go up and then suddenly you're the biological species?
Yeah.
What exactly is it?
Can we figure it out?
And so I wanted to look at these different species pairs.
And we knew about beefalo because people have, you know, beefalo ranches.
There's a beefalo of the week.
You should look that up because this is going to be like there's beefalo of the week competition where you see these.
Anyway, so people in the early 20th century decided that they wanted to make hybrid cattle and bison because they wanted animals that were as robust in the North American prairies as bison, but as tame and easy to deal with as cattle.
So they started breeding them together.
And we're just like, this isn't working.
You know, this is really hard.
When we get the F1s, that's first generation hybrids.
Often it's only the females and they're not reproductive.
No, there's problems here.
We can't do this.
And because the, yeah.
And so then people kept trying to do it because they really wanted to do this.
And then there was this guy called, That was three-eighths bison and five-eighths cattle.
And he sold his animal to a guy called Bud Basolo in California, who created this herd of 5,000 beefalo.
And it was announced with great fanfare, like front pages of newspapers.
He sold one animal to a farmer in Canada for $2.5 million, $1975.
It's still the most expensive single.
2.5 million, 1975 dollars for this animal.
And so we have this thing.
I was like, we're going to sample them.
We were working with collaborators from the USDA.
We were reaching out to people, reaching out to ranches and saying, can we have some of your stuff?
And they were like, not sure about research on this.
And so we started buying tongues.
Because if you buy steak, you just get the same animal over and over again.
But they all have one tongue.
So you can just buy tongues and then you get lots of different animals.
We sequence their genomes.
And then we got from the USDA their expired sperm straws that they have for the animals that they give away to start your beef.
I think we sequenced their genomes as well, including this $2.5 million 1975 individual.
And we've done a lot of work on bison and cattle throughout the last, you know.
30 years of my life.
And so we have this big plot that shows bison on one side and cattle on the other.
And we had made a hybrid so we could sequence their genomes.
He wasn't born.
It was an aborted animal because, you know, it's very hard to make a hybrid.
He fell right in between them, in the middle, where you expect them to be.
So now we know exactly where we think our beefalo should be.
You know, they're five-eighths cattle, three-eighths bison.
They should fall out closer to cattle, but still up here.
Super cool because it means that you can take a plug of dirt from the inside of a lake and you can reconstruct the whole ecosystem as it changes over time.
But recently there was a paper that was published by some colleagues of mine that had done this for sites in Canada.
They found mammoth DNA and horse DNA in Canada in these really well-preserved parts of the world where we've been working that date to probably around 4,000, 5,000 years ago.
So the model is, if you correct me if I'm wrong, that horses evolved in North America, but it went to other continents, but then eventually died off in North America.
We were talking about this the other day, the big debate that happened with Clovis first, that they used to think that human beings, they came over here at a very specific time We've got to rethink this.
And we're being forced to rethink this.
And there was another time where archaeologists were horrible to each other.
These scientists were horrible to each other because they attacked the guy who made the discovery.
Yeah, they did that to Jacques Sankmaris, who discovered the bones in Alaska, northern Canada, that had cut marks on them that were older than the accepted time of when humans could be there.
Their genetic signature reveals a distinct, now extinct lineage that may have descended from the earliest humans to reach South America, one that diverged early and remained genetically isolated for thousands of years.
You know what you guys really need to try to bring back?
Those little tridactyl skeletons they find in Peru.
That's like when we had Luke Caverns on and Jesse, when we had Jesse Michaels on the other day, who has an amazing YouTube show.
Both of them, great guys.
They were showing us these skeletons that they found in Peru that are very bizarre.
And people initially thought they were a hoax, but then they found these newer ones that they've discovered that they have three fingers and three toes, and they've done CAT scans on these things, and they seem to be human or human-like, these things.
Because the CAT scans, when they show the 3D CAT scan of the body, you're seeing all the areas where the cartilage is, but it doesn't look totally human because this is it.
They have three fingers and three toes.
It's really weird stuff.
There's layers of them as you go through a CAT scan.
Jamie, where it was like, yeah, like, when you see this thing, this guy's not, like, showing you the full body in this particular image.
Whatever the hell that thing is on the back of his head is weird.
The shape of its head is very weird, but it looks real.
Like, if you guys could find that that's real, I know you won't bring back Neanderthals, but why don't you bring back one of them little three-toed alien people?
The ones that look super fake look like something you'd buy in like a roadside stand.
They look totally bullshit.
This is how old these drawings are in these tapestries that show these weird three-toed, three-fingered Things that look like a little one of those things.
So was this another type of human that lived with us at some point in time?
But it's just, you know, when AI gets involved in this stuff, when we have sentient AI that you can use, Like, you know, that's where things get weird.
Like if we decide, okay, let's bring back the woolly mammoth.
Okay, what's going to be the negative impact of bringing back the woolly mammoth?
Well, obviously you guys are working with the red wolves and you plan to use which are normal native animals in North America that are threatened, which most people would agree is a good idea to give them a healthy population and release them.
And that's the best argument because there's a lot of people saying, oh, this work could be used for conservation.
I think that this idea that the technology that we are developing is something that we shouldn't be developing because it's wrong.
It's somehow playing God, yes.
I mean, people have been playing God for as long as we've existed as a lineage.
First by making species become extinct as we spread around the world.
Not intentionally initially, but we change the habitat.
We hunt things.
Then we figured out that we didn't have to make a species go extinct in order to feed our families.
And so we evolved domestication.
We figured out how to only take...
And we domesticated things.
And then we transformed to really authority over everything.
When we protect a species, people who think about conservation often think of this as super hands-off.
Like, I'm not doing anything.
Everything just gets to...
That's bullshit.
We decide how many animals live, where they get to live, what they get to eat, how many they get to eat.
We cull them when we want to.
We protect them if we want to.
We don't if we want to.
We are as gods, as Stuart Brand wrote in the whole Earth Catalog, right?
and we just better get good at it.
These technologies are not exactly the same as the technologies that our ancestors had because we are directly changing DNA sequences, but they are technologies that we can deploy to hopefully try to fix some of the things that we have fucked up already.
And I think the biggest challenge that I have is to show people that deciding not We're still operating within regulatory frameworks.
We're still operating within the bounds of biological reality.
There's a long way to go here.
But if we decide that that's too scary, that we don't trust ourselves, that we're always going to make the worst decision, first of all, it's that attitude of negativity, right?
It's the, I don't want to do it because it's too scary because I'm going to be bad.
Second of all, it's a decision.
And to think that that decision has no consequences is naive.
We know what the consequences are.
The rate of extinction today is thousands to tens of thousands times higher than it is across the history of the fossil record.
And a lot of that is because of us.
But we have the capacity to slow that rate.
We have the capacity to help species that are alive today adapt to the rapid changes in their habitat.
What if we could make Hawaiian honeycreepers resilient?
Or figure out how to transfer resistance to bleaching to corals around the world.
Or anything that we could do to save some of these habitats that we know are in trouble because of this combination of people expanding and natural change to the ecosystem that we just don't.
We don't want to see spruce forests disappearing because it's getting drier, and that means that they can't make enough resin to fight off the beetles, right?
We have the capacity to use these tools, or at least to think about how we might develop and deploy these tools, to have a future that is both filled with people and biodiverse.
I think what people are concerned with is the crude application of these techniques and this science when it's in its infancy.
And if you just take that and draw it out to its natural conclusion with improvements over time and innovation over time, it could be something that's of an enormous benefit to not just animal species, but humans.
I mean, having And I think we're getting gradually more accustomed to using these technologies to cure genetic diseases, like the baby that was in the news over the last couple of weeks, baby KJ, this boy who was born with a metabolic disease.
He had a genetic change, just a single mutation that meant that he couldn't digest protein.
And people came together and mounted this incredible collaborative effort to find a cure using the tools of genome engineering for this child.
And he went home from the hospital last week with CRISPR editing, having gone into his own body to cure this particular disease.
Wild.
It's amazing.
It's a really great example of personalized medicine that right now, obviously, this is slow.
But we start somewhere.
And we always have to start somewhere.
Like, yes, it took six months, and it's one baby, and it took a lot of people to do this.
But this is the beginning of how we can use these tools to cure your cancer, to figure out how we can engineer a fix for a baby who's born with cystic fibrosis.
Or if you get blood cancer, can we edit the blood cells to make that cancer mutation just go away?
This is the beginning of these tools.
And for de-extinction and conservation, this is also just the beginning.
We've figured out how to learn DNA sequences from the past and actually transform that into an animal that has That's bigger than a gray wolf, and it's more muscular than a gray wolf.
We've made dire wolves using dire wolf DNA and these amazing tools that we will have the potential to use to stop other species from becoming extinct.
I love it.
We're very carefully evaluating every single one of the edits that we make.
But if you did that, that would be where it would get sketchy.
If you reintroduce an animal that can run 60 miles an hour to the plains, those poor antelopes who've been living it up.
Because they evolved, you know that, pronghorn antelopes, the reason why they're so fast, they evolved to get away from these cheetahs that don't exist anymore.
I mean, for every species, there will be different work that has to be done to figure out whether and where is a good idea to reintroduce them.
And for each of the species that we're working with, we have councils that we've put together in the part of the world where we would bring them back together to have conversations about where they should go, whether they should go, how many there should be, and who is willing to be the long-term stewards.
This will be a very slow and deliberate and careful process.
And like with the direwolves, there will be a stage in between the first calf being born and understanding how they're able to thrive in whatever habitat they're in.
And these are really important parts of the de-extinction process.
Or he would just like tuck his tail and run, and just leave me there to defend myself.
But, you know, they know that like the ones that they get, the ones that are problem cats in Northern California, when they found them and they do these depredation tags, they found that 50% of their diet is dogs and cats.
Maybe it's because we don't have any of the other predators that used to be there.
I mean, the California golden bear.
There's another one that Hearst, I think Hearst collected one of the last ones of the California golden bear in Southern California, had him shipped up to San Francisco, and he became the bear that's the inspiration for the flag.
Because the thing about it is, once you have them in your area, you can't manage them.
because then people have decided that they're precious.
So once they become problems and once they become overpopulated, like Montana has a bit of an issue with that now, They would like people to be able to hunt them.
It's around the time when they come out and they're eating all the salmon because they have a competition between which is the best fat bear and you get to vote for them and then there's a fat bear that wins.
There was a paper that was published maybe a decade ago or so where people had done niche modeling, environmental niche modeling based on Bigfoot sightings.
Well, that's what this niche modeling or environmental modeling study found, is they looked at all the reported sightings of Bigfoot and then created what would be the environmental niche for a Bigfoot, and it pretty much just overlapped the niche for bears, for brown bears.
But the weird thing about it is the Native Americans, because Native Americans have a name for that creature, and they have many names for it in different tribes.
It's not like an isolated thing, but they don't have a lot of mythical animals.
have fake animals other than Sasquatch.
It's weird.
It is weird because if Beringa, as I was called, the Bering Land Bridge.
Beringia.
Beringia existed and we know that it did and we know that people during that time made their way across.
If Gigantopithecus lived alongside people, we don't know if it did, but it could have and if it did.
it would be in the same area.
It would be in the same area of Asia, and perhaps it would have been...
And it's just so weird to think that, you know, we live in houses and we have internet and we, you know, you drive an electric car to work and living in this sophisticated world.
But not all the people are living in this world.
And there's indigenous people that are living the same way they've lived, but now they have a snowmobile.
I mean, people have used the word de-extinction, which I kind of hate because I can't figure out how to conjugate it in a way that doesn't make me cringe.
I think dog domestication is one of those places where both we come to terms with what we don't know and the opportunity to discover new things.
The very first scientific paper that said when dogs were domesticated looked at a type of DNA that's only inherited from your mom called mitochondrial DNA.
Our cells have a nucleus that has the DNA in our chromosomes that make us look and act.
The way we do.
And then it has little cells that were once bacteria that we co-opted that make energy.
And you're only inherited them from your mom.
And there's a ton of them.
Like there's thousands of mitochondrial genomes in every cell and only one of your nuclear genomes.
So in ancient DNA, because there's way more, we started just with that.
It was the only thing we could recover.
And the first dog mitochondrial genomes that were recovered, people were like, dogs were domesticated in Asia 150,000 years ago.
Which is clearly wrong, right?
There weren't human populations, societies, which is kind of what you need for dog domestication because they're attracted to the garbage or the living around where people were.
So you need communities of people that are staying in place together for some time before you can have dog domestication.
And also probably because the first dogs were in warm parts of the world, and so we don't have the fossils.
We don't have the DNA, and the fossils just didn't preserve.
I think right now what people are happiest with is that it was probably sometime after the peak of the last ice age, sometime 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
And I'm not sure where, because again, probably in a warmer spot.
There's been lots of...
Lots of hybridization between domestic dogs and wolves that have made this a really hard problem.
But what's cool about this date, 15 to 20,000 years ago, is that most of these people are like, yeah, that's probably the date for dogs.
Which means if dogs only form when there are human communities that are together, groups of people that are living together in the same place for a long time, that they were around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
That is not what archaeologists think, right?
So these two weights of evidence are saying, you know, we still don't know.
And so there was recently, a couple of friends of mine have published a paper in which they've redefined how you consider something domestic.
And they say a domestic population is something that can only survive within a human environment, within a human niche.
And if you think of that as what our dogs are, right, they can only really survive and breed as dogs within this human niche, then you need a lot.
Of humans around, and you need a sort of steady stream of the crap that humans produce to do this.
That's still kind of early.
Like, it's still, yeah, maybe there were hunter-gatherer populations that were more, you know, established somewhere in the South where we don't have dog bones.
But we think that the closest living relative of dogs is gray wolves.
It's this gray wolf lineage.
But we don't know if dogs are outside of the diversity of gray wolves, so it's an extinct type of gray wolf that was the predator of dogs, or if they fall within the diversity of all the lineages.
Grey wolves that are around.
And that's just because there's been so much movement of DNA around that part of the tree.
I think it's a fascinating story that as we get more information, we're going to learn more about people as well.
Because it's so obvious that there's manipulation involved.
It's so obvious that through selective breeding and also getting these animals to get accustomed to people, getting close to the fire, feeding them so they don't have to hunt anymore, and then they bark when intruders come.
And we developed this sort of relationship where we worked together.
It's so interesting that they...
We see this weirdness, or now it's a border collie.
If I say, I like the way that dog looks, but I like the way that that one can swim in water.
And I bet if I breed them together, I can make one that has this double layer coat so they can go get in that frozen water, but they'll still have that, like, cute look or something.
I mean, when we graft plants together, I mean, that is like all of the vineyards in France, which are grafted onto American rootstocks because of the introduction of phylloxera, this aphid that came from North America that was going to completely devastate the wine industry.
Now they're all spliced onto American rootstocks that can survive this aphid.
I talked to a rancher in California, and they were telling me that I think it was either the It's amazing that the plants can survive that, that they don't go like, yo, that's not me.
Again, that's another cool thing that we can do with this gene editing technology is we can turn off the genes that would cause that rejection to happen.
So maybe someday we can use pig organs in the place of humans and save people from dying.
This thing called the organoids where you can actually grow in a dish in a lab a version of a little brain.
Something that approximates a brain or that approximates a heart or a kidney or something else.
We're using this at Colossal, for example, to test hypotheses about what Changes we might make to bring about, to resurrect, to de-extinct the phenotypes that we're interested in.
If we grow an organoid that grows hair, can we see what that hair looks like without having to make a mammoth in order to see what that change is going to do?
But it has really amazing potential for personalized medicine.
So I can take some of your cells, if you get a tumor, I can grow them in this dish, and I can challenge those cells with different drug cocktails to see what works before I put them in you.
This technology is so cool and really just beginning.
Because it's very gate-keeped even inside of academia, right?
You work for a university and you have to get the approval of all the other people and you have to be politically aligned with them and everyone has to say the right things on Twitter.
You know, it's like there's a lot of weirdness, a lot of groupthink that comes along with all that stuff.
And then you have to play politics in order to get funding.
You know, you can't be ostracized.
Even if you have tenure, you know, when you see this with certain scientists that have very outside-the-box ideas, they get pushed out and they can't get funding anymore.
Or if they don't agree with a certain narrative, what's being pushed, whether it's public health or the environment or anything, they get ostracized, even if they're actually talking about real data and science.
Yeah, I think, you know, we can agree that it's a mess, right?
It's a hot mess.
Is genuine, real science that comes out of the university system, of the academic system, that we need?
All the technology that led to MRIs, the early technology that gave us CRISPR, this gene editing platform, was developed using funding from the government in scientific labs by people who are willing to take risks and step outside of that box.
And then it's taken outside of there and it's turned into all of these cool things.
I mean, there has to be a place where we get both of these things.
There's some things that no one is ever going to build a business around until it exists.
And we need this public system in order to do that.
It's going to get harder, and we're going to fall behind, and we are going to lose the place that we have had as innovators.
And by we, I mean this country.
We are going to lose the place we have had innovators in biotechnology, innovators in physics, innovators in all of these technologies, because we've had such a robust system.
It's a balance.
You know, we clearly need both of these things, and right now, it's broken.
When I heard this the first time, and I've only heard about the first one, my first thought was, you know, is this deliberate or is this super naivete on the part of the student?
Yeah, just their drone technologies off the charts.
I was watching a documentary yesterday on the autonomous production of coal, and so they have these coal mines now that are done entirely with electric trucks, and everything's done with AI, and humans aren't involved at all.
So these trucks go, they dig, they mine, they fill the trucks, they bring the coal back, and then when they're low on batteries, they charge themselves.
Yeah, and they're running 24 hours a day around the clock.
I worry about that, like your information, the stuff that you guys are working on, if that stuff can be compromised, if someone can get a hold of it, and then they start doing This stuff is all out there anyway, right?
Like CRISPR technology exists.
We're not working on humans.
But other companies are openly, right?
It's not like there's a big scary thing.
I think maybe that was two separate stories because I know the story about Jiang Ke.
That's He Jiang Ke was the name of that scientist.
And he went to jail for three years.
He actually did some training in the U.S. His name is He.
But he was trying to use gene editing tools to...
It's the one that stops the HIV from entering the cells where it then kills the cells.
And I think this was a story that was broken by a guy at MIT Tech Review a couple of days before it was announced.
But he thought that he was going to be able to announce this to great fanfare in front of a community that was going to celebrate him for having done this.
And the story broke a few days early.
But he had set this up, a whole PR thing.
YouTube videos that were ready to go to explain what he had done.
He wasn't trying to do it in secret.
He thought he was going to be a hero.
People were like, holy shit, dude.
What the fuck?
Like, no.
We're not editing human germlines, the cells that will be passed on to the next generation.
There's still a moratorium against doing that work.
The baby that was just born, for example, they didn't edit any of his cells that would get passed on to the next generation.
It's only the cells in his body.
So those edits will only ever live in him.
And there's a difference between doing that.
And it's the second one that we're uncomfortable with.
So the reason that he got whatever ethical permission he did in China to do this is because they were children that were born by IVF because the dad had AIDS.
And so what they were trying to do was create, what he claimed he was trying to do was create an environment where they would never accidentally get it, I guess, if there's blood.
When you're saying smart, do you mean somebody who can have a conversation with another person and shut up so that you're actually listening to the other person?
Emotional intelligence.
Do you mean somebody who can solve a shitload of math problems and be a physicist or whatever?
Do you mean somebody who's just really fucking good looking, right?
I mean, what do you mean when you say, is this thing?
And so you have to define that.
And then once it's defined, if you look for associations between genes at high frequency with people who rank high on whatever your thing is that you're ranking them on, it's different depending on which human population you're studying.
And this makes total evolutionary sense.
Different things were under selection in different habitats at different times, and that made different people smarter in different ways for whatever that was.
I actually think this is not how we start editing ourselves because that's not how evolution works.
As soon as we edit everybody to be smart in that particular way and to be 5'10", blonde with blue eyes and perfect and never going to have diabetes, the most attractive thing out there is going to be the opposite of that.
So there will be – I just don't think – people are always thinking about we're going to get superhumans, but they have a specific picture in their mind of what that means.
That's not the same picture that the Chinese government has in mind.
I have in mind, right?
And that's why I don't fear it as much, I think, because that's not how it's going to happen.
How it will happen is there will be some massive pandemic and we discover that there is a particular mutation that means you're going to die.
And then suddenly this most unethical thing that is completely abhorrent and you absolutely can't do it will be the only ethical solution.