Andrew Pask

But the end result is that you have a moa.

You will have that animal's DNA back as if it was when that species roamed the earth.

And so, yeah, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue at that point that we haven't actually recreated that animal.

Absolutely, every day.

I think we're able to make the huge amounts of edits now more than I think has ever been reported before in terms of doing genetic engineering.

These technologies now of being able to do this genetic engineering at mass and bringing back lost species or even just re-engineering lost genetics into living animals that are on the brink of extinction are things that we really have to think about embracing now as a planet.

We have pushed our species now beyond the point of repair.

We're in the middle of the mass six extinction.

We're seeing animals go extinct at a rate that's never before been reported on our planet.

And we just simply have to embrace these new technologies if we want to build really healthy, resilient ecosystems and help our planet survive.

Yeah, I think there's been a lot of studies now looking exactly into that.

How has this changed the perception of extinction?

But I think every single bit of research that's been done so far has shown that this has brought a lot more awareness of extinction and exactly why we don't want to let animals go extinct, why we need each and every one to help build these really resilient ecosystems.

And also how long and difficult it is to do these de-extinction projects.

You know, the preference is still always to save a species from going extinct rather than de-extinct it.

And so we work on both of those aspects in Colossal.

We're creating biobanks where we're freezing down living tissues from animals to make sure that we don't lose any other species.

And we certainly don't have to re-engineer them again.

Absolutely.

I mean, de-extinction science is about conservation.