Ben Lamm
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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 is 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, it's killing baby elephants.
It's pretty awful.
And so what's interesting is that it's solvable by creating a vaccine.
But there's no, from a financial perspective, there's no total addressable market for curing elephant herpes.
Yeah, there's no ROI on that.
Yeah, exactly.
But if you're spending eight figures, nine figures making mammoths, well, I don't want 20% of our mammoths to have the ability to get this
terrible disease that would kill them, right?
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.