Beth Shapiro
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
This is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction projects is really going to work.
This is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction projects is really going to work.
This is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction projects is really going to work.
We ask, where are all of the mammoths the same as each other, but different from an elephant? So this is narrowing down the focus on the genes that make mammoths mammoths instead of elephants.
We ask, where are all of the mammoths the same as each other, but different from an elephant? So this is narrowing down the focus on the genes that make mammoths mammoths instead of elephants.
Here's a difference in a letter in a long string of A's and C's and G's and T's. A genome of a mammoth that we've gotten out of a bone that was preserved in the permafrost in Siberia. It's hard to test that in an elephant because an elephant is pregnant for 22 months and then it takes another decade to 14 years for that elephant to be able to have a baby. Mm-hmm.
Here's a difference in a letter in a long string of A's and C's and G's and T's. A genome of a mammoth that we've gotten out of a bone that was preserved in the permafrost in Siberia. It's hard to test that in an elephant because an elephant is pregnant for 22 months and then it takes another decade to 14 years for that elephant to be able to have a baby. Mm-hmm.
with a mouse model, we can really rapidly test these hypotheses and learn whether this change might be responsible for making the animal woolly. And now I can add that to the list of things that I want to change when I'm editing that elephant cell so that I can have an elephant someday give birth to something that looks more like a mammoth.
with a mouse model, we can really rapidly test these hypotheses and learn whether this change might be responsible for making the animal woolly. And now I can add that to the list of things that I want to change when I'm editing that elephant cell so that I can have an elephant someday give birth to something that looks more like a mammoth.
We look in the mouse for those same genes and instances where those genes have been involved with making a woolly coat or longer hair or changing the color of the hair.
We look in the mouse for those same genes and instances where those genes have been involved with making a woolly coat or longer hair or changing the color of the hair.
We ended up with some absolutely adorable mice that have longer, woolly, golden-colored coats.
We ended up with some absolutely adorable mice that have longer, woolly, golden-colored coats.
For us, it's an incredibly big deal. I mean, this is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction projects is really going to work.
For us, it's an incredibly big deal. I mean, this is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction projects is really going to work.
Our intention is to recreate these extinct species that played really important roles in ecosystems that are missing because they've become extinct. And that is our goal with our de-extinction projects.
Our intention is to recreate these extinct species that played really important roles in ecosystems that are missing because they've become extinct. And that is our goal with our de-extinction projects.
We ask, where are all of the mammoths the same as each other, but different from an elephant? So this is narrowing down the focus on the genes that make mammoths mammoths instead of elephants.
Here's a difference in a letter in a long string of A's and C's and G's and T's. A genome of a mammoth that we've gotten out of a bone that was preserved in the permafrost in Siberia. It's hard to test that in an elephant because an elephant is pregnant for 22 months and then it takes another decade to 14 years for that elephant to be able to have a baby. Mm-hmm.
with a mouse model, we can really rapidly test these hypotheses and learn whether this change might be responsible for making the animal woolly. And now I can add that to the list of things that I want to change when I'm editing that elephant cell so that I can have an elephant someday give birth to something that looks more like a mammoth.
We look in the mouse for those same genes and instances where those genes have been involved with making a woolly coat or longer hair or changing the color of the hair.
We ended up with some absolutely adorable mice that have longer, woolly, golden-colored coats.
For us, it's an incredibly big deal. I mean, this is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction projects is really going to work.
Our intention is to recreate these extinct species that played really important roles in ecosystems that are missing because they've become extinct. And that is our goal with our de-extinction projects.
Or you'd be sitting there looking at something and suddenly the Zodiac would take off because whoever was in charge had seen something he wanted to shoot at in the distance.
Yeah, I think we can agree that it's a mess, right?
But there 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.
Because 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 just going to get worse.
I don't know why I'm telling this story.
We're there for, I don't know, maybe it was two or three days looking around.
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?
There is a country that is investing in science.
And it was about two o'clock in the morning.
And this leads people to be kind of negative about everything.
Yeah, and... We don't have anything like that.
No, and we're fighting about the amount of money that we should invest into very basic infrastructure.
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.
Is it also this scarcity mindset?
Like, I can't agree with this person because they once said this thing.
I mean, why can't we have just a normal conversation like you and I are having right now?
And it was a big mesh tent to keep the mosquitoes out so that we didn't have to have anything.
So they can't actually do any science.
But is it the same biological?
And everybody is just staring off into the distance glumly.
The medical ethanol was gone.
And we're focused on something else.
We're focused on, yeah.
The thing is the foundation for what we're doing, all of the stuff from sequencing ancient DNA to gene editing technologies to learning how do we link certain DNA sequence changes to the way something looks.
We were going to be for the next five weeks.
This stuff is all out there anyway, right?
We were going to be stuck in this place where we weren't going to be able to find what we were.
Like CRISPR technology exists.
We're not working on humans, but other companies are openly, right?
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.
But he was trying to make, trying to use gene editing tools to...
to make these babies have a particular mutation that we know is protective against HIV.
And then all of a sudden, these three dudes show up outside of our tent with machine guns.
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.
He had like 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.
But 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.
And I'm thinking, everybody's thinking.
But it didn't end up even being the right gene.
So the reason that this 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.
Like we just flew forever in a helicopter over nothing at all.
They knew that at the time.
Yeah, but they don't know because they haven't been able to measure anything with these.
I mean, they're guessing that would have affected their brains at this point.
This is what makes us smart.
It's been a thing that people have been trying to solve for a long time.
We're always looking for the one or two genes that figure out this.
Very few traits are encoded by one or two genes.
There are some hair traits.
Whether your lobes are attached or not, that's one gene that you can change.
Do you know what's interesting about the efforts that have gone on to try to figure out genes that make people smart is that they can find associations between what we're classifying as smart.
Nothing except for this French family that we picked up randomly along the way.
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?
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?
That's going to be too hard.
I mean, what do you mean when you say is this thing?
And so you have to define that first.
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,
And everybody's looking around and there's this real moment of what the hell are we going to do?
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 –
And then the guy who was the expedition leader recognizes these two dudes and he's like, oh, friends.
specific picture in their mind of what that means, that's not the same picture that the Chinese government has in mind.
It's not the same picture that I have in mind, right?
And that's why I don't fear it as much, I think, just 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 like completely abhorrent and you absolutely can't do it will be the only ethical solution.
That is how we get there.
If I say that that's good, then that means that the thing that I want to do probably isn't going to get that money.
You should come to the lab.
I know you got to see.
I think the rest of my Siberia story is in there, including the part at the end where I got arrested.
Did you do an audio book?
I read the audio book for that.
Well, I asked if I could read it because my first book, How to Clone a Mammoth, I didn't read.
And I heard the audio book and I write in first person and I tell stories and I try to make it funny.
And I'm thinking, what's going to happen?
And I was like, that's not how it should be read.
So I wrote to them and I said, can I read this book?
And they said, oh, you're going to have to audition.
And I was like, audition for your own book.
What if I am not good enough to read my own audio book?
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 era.
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.
They were disappointed that we didn't have any alcohol, obviously.
Or if you get attention, that means I can't get attention.
And it leads to this negativity that I think stifles innovation.
It was Russia, so it's a fair theme.
But the French couple...
This is just, you're not going to believe me when I say this, right?
The French couple said, I got this.
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.
Like a massive Gouda and a massive brie.
And so we cut the cheese and shared the cheese with our Dolgon 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 and
Because the mosquitoes didn't care about me around those animals.
It was really impressive.
They were after the animals.
And they really left us alone.
Yeah, more natural than – there's more of them there.
Maybe they're larger, but it was – They're probably accustomed to it, right?
I've spent my whole life working on this.
Yeah, I think about that, though.
But I think about that poor moose from Alaska who was also clearly bothered by the mosquitoes.
I imagine the reindeer were as well.
And it was pretty cool.
Therefore, I am the only expert.
In fact, I got to – they put me up there and showed me how I could ride the reindeer.
Yeah, I was there during the summer, though, so there wasn't snow on the ground.
It was all just a very grassy, wet, super wet grassy, and the moisture in the ground is probably why there are so many mosquitoes.
And if anybody says something that disagrees with what I believe to be true, they're just wrong.
I mean, they're great, right?
Animals have always been a really great storage mechanism.
That's one of the hypotheses about animal domestication.
Why did this take place?
If we had plants, but there are going to be years where there's plenty to eat and years where there's not enough to eat.
But in those years where there's plenty, if you store some of that nutrition in animals, then in the years where there's less, you can eat those animals.
I'm not even going to think about it.
So it's a very safe way of storing what you can grow.
I think that about a lot of domestic animals.
I also think that about milk.
Who was the first person who decided?
I can have a go at that, you know?
Yeah, some of them are trying to tell you, though, by being like bright red or bright purple.
So we're like bright red.
Those particular individuals have, yeah, but I think they have a long history.
The culture has a long history there.
And I mean, we're still, I think, we're still learning about how humans have dispersed around the world and how they got to be the places where they are today.
But I really think it's impressive that there are people who are hanging on to that culture.
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 Communist Party.
And we have so much to learn from them.
I mean, obviously, that's such a cool job, 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.
By the most sophisticated hunting animal out there.
How did he get out of this?
There are going to be people, there are going to be colleagues of mine that are angry with me that I have come here to talk to you.
And that is part of the problem.
We have a history of this.
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.
All of us working in ancient DNA, we are constantly answering the same question from the media, which is, when are we going to bring dinosaurs back to life?
And people say, people actually say that my field was spawned by Jurassic Park.
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
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.
I actually started in broadcast journalism.
That was actually from a quagga, which is a type of zebra.
Well, in Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the quagga.
Yeah, it's better that way, but it's kind of bad for the microphone, probably gross.
I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right?
So they sound like that.
Anyway, 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 myosin-aged leaf.
I was convinced that I wanted to work in broadcast journalism.
In fact, 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.
I got a job working at the local TV station.
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.
It's like greasy fingers on your dinosaur fossils.
And look, now we have ancient DNA.
I grew up in Rome, Georgia, northwest corner of Georgia.
That would be the early 90s.
Well, the idea of DNA is much older than that.
But it was really the idea.
What really helped this field along was the invention of PCR.
It's an acronym for polymerase chain reaction.
It's a way of Kerry Mullis, who discovered the idea of PCR while he was high on a road trip.
We should all do LSD, I think, because clearly you have your best ideas when you're high.
And I got a job at the TV station where I was first operating the camera and helping people write copy.
Yeah, I think I probably would not have good ideas on LSD, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
A good scientist always wants to know.
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.
When an animal dies or 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, 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...
You no longer have the energy for that to work.
And then I got to be on air.
And so these damaged parts of DNA accumulate.
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.
I auditioned for a spot in the morning where I would do local cut-ins on headline news in the
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.
So ancient DNA is in really crap condition.
And it's also mixed with stuff.
So if I extract DNA from a mammoth.
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.
like 24 and 54 after the hour.
But I had to wake up really early in the morning and go to work.
Go to work, write the script, go on TV, learn to read the teleprompter.
And I was convinced that this is what I wanted to do with my career.
Yeah, or dropping an eyelash.
Went in my lab at Santa Cruz and in ancient DNA labs around the world.
We have these really, 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 hair net and we're totally covered and we bleach everything.
It's not because we're afraid of those bones.
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.
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.
I went to the University of Georgia.
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 field.
They have a fantastic broadcast journalism school.
Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize a few years ago for this.
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.
I started off as the news director at one of the local radio stations.
But then they, 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, right?
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 history.
And that's pretty recently, right?
And it just highlights how much we don't know, right?
How every, especially in paleoanthropology, and this is a field where, you know, people will take like, yeah.
Let's just say wasn't particularly compatible with being a freshman in college.
And so if they were able to breed with humans, they probably did.
And they probably bred with Neanderthals and they probably bred with Denisovans because, you know, that's what we do.
No one has still been able to get DNA from those samples now.
Sponte's team has tried.
A lot of people have attempted.
It's just they're too degraded.
They're from a hot place.
All of those things that degrade DNA, it happens faster in hot places.
There was 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.
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.
There are it's hard to know exactly what bits of changes in your DNA code for making you big or small.
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 just are at the extreme of all the things we already know.
It's just a small population on an island.
Different alleles go to fixation.
And yes, I mean, weird things happen on islands.
Yeah, but dodos, dodos got bigger.
They dwarf or they get bigger?
That's one of the scariest animals.
You're like, I'm going to watch.
And had to go to work to write the news and then be on this broadcast radio station.
I think I've seen that one.
I do think I've seen that one.
Anyway, how did I move from there to science?
Maybe that's what she planned, the ex.
I wouldn't have thought white socks.
Yeah, it's just missing his face.
I took this amazing class.
Wait, he was in the feeding cage?
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.
This sounds like someone did a dumb thing.
Or in the feeding cage at a zoo.
But there are places where there are big things, like dodos, that are amazing and probably not going to kill you.
I've been told that a giraffe is the dumbest animal.
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 at 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.
And we started off on the East Coast.
There's nothing going on in there.
Sounds a little dangerous to me, though.
If they are genuinely stupid, will they accidentally at some point take that baby's hand?
We learned about rocks and how to identify minerals.
And then they have huge, strong necks.
But this is, I don't know.
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.
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.
I mean, otherwise, that's how evolution works.
There's a wire I can get my neck stuck in.
Did you hear that, James?
Talking to my 15-year-old.
It's about like planes and things that you build and then fight.
That is an interesting question.
What would we do if we could bring a Neanderthal or a Denisovan back, de-extinct one of them?
Drove up the West Coast, drove back around the country.
We are not doing that at Colossal.
We cannot ask them for consent to do this.
We're not working on them.
I think it's a bad idea, but if they do, I would like to know... Well, there's a lot of people that think bringing dire wolves back is a bad idea.
Well, I mean, what did you think of the dire wolves?
And I thought to myself while I was there, this is the story that I want to tell.
I work in a crazy field called ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics.
And you can see they're bigger, they're more muscular.
And you see that, that coat, the dire wolf coat.
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.
And she is like a puppy right now.
You were able to hold her?
I'm glad you got to see the boys before.
They were probably already a little bit standoffish.
Especially compared to Khaleesi.
Marking their territory.
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.
But it was just such a...
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.
People don't often have an opportunity to feel genuine awe about something.
And this is one of the things that people get about going out, going hunting, get out and, you know, going and spending time in the woods or going and experiencing something that they wouldn't normally experience is 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 the next morning I woke up and there were like 150 text messages on my phone from Ben going, what the fuck are you doing?
So I thought, I'll get a degree in science because I know how to do broadcast journalism.
Why are you not responding?
Oh, my God, I've missed this moment.
So I made sure that I was there present for for Khaleesi.
And I'm glad I was because what a what an amazing I'm glad you got to see them.
You know, the ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something.
Did you see that there is a competition every year to go out and kill as many as they can?
And there's a monetary reward for people who kill.
I think it's the most or maybe the biggest or something like this.
People kill, and during this competition, they kill hundreds, maybe thousands of these snakes, and it doesn't even touch them.
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.
Thank goodness, because alligators are doing great.
That's one thing I don't mind them doing.
We need something that's hunting alligators.
And they used to be on the endangered species list.
One of the class of 1967, right?
The first species to be officially listed.
Because they were almost gone at that point.
I've written a couple of popular books, which is still me trying to reach back out.
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.
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.
I want to be a communicator, but I also want to be a scientist because it's so much fun.
And he climbed over a fence that he shouldn't have climbed over and went for a swim in a lake and then had an alligator bit off his arm.
I remember there was a guy who, what I, I mean, I don't know.
There's probably hundreds of stories like this, but 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.
And he was like, okay, mom, I'll do that.
It was blood loss at that point.
The show was about something that happened years ago, years enough ago for them to be able to make it.
But yeah, I mean, how many people in Florida?
I bet it happens all the time.
Now they're in Georgia too, right?
How did I pick a field working in ancient DNA?
You're out there playing golf.
You're like, you see that guy, and you know that they can run fast.
This is something I had no idea about.
Maybe they're going to do that, too.
I mean... I'm sure they probably do.
I ended up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get and not getting into the university that I wanted to get into.
And they're terrible for birds, too.
But this is exactly why we need these technologies that we're trying to develop a colossal.
It means we go out into the world, we dig shit up, and we extract DNA from it.
We're not just bringing species back to life, right?
We're a species preservation company.
But birds, whenever I think about birds, I think of this, right?
We know that there are things that we can do to help mammals to adapt to rapid changes in their habitat.
We can do things like the Florida panthers.
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.
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.
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 had a disorder called cryptorchidism where their testicles wouldn't descend or only one would descend.
They had all sorts of heart problems.
They had because there's a small breeding population because there were very few of them.
And so no genetic diversity.
The choice was to mate with your family.
And things want to survive, so they do.
So you get these highly inbred populations, and people fixed it by moving an animal from one population to another, introducing new genetic diversity.
It's called genetic rescue, right?
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 species.
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 of things.
You know, look at this cool, crazy thing that I think I found.
You shouldn't just discount it.
I mean, I'm the person who has tested insulation that somebody told me Bigfoot peed on and participated in it.
Because 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 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?
And 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 by picking who's going to pair with who to keep all that diversity there.
But it's still just a few individuals.
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 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.
Because we have never, as a species, humans, introduced a thing to try to control a thing.
And that thing that we introduced just went horribly wrong.
We've never done that before.
And in Hawaii, they have these giant African land snails.
That they introduced this thing called a rosy wolf snail that they were going to get to eat the giant African land snails.
But instead, the rosy wolf snail prefers the taste of native endemic Hawaiian snails.
And so the rosy wolf snail is leaving the giant snails alone there.
Have you seen one of those?
A giant African land snail.
I think people introduced them for some reason that I can't remember what it was.
So we have a good history of doing this kind of thing.
I think people can eat them probably, but they eat everything from all of the vegetation to the other snails.
They'll eat their way through infrastructure that people have built.
So we introduced these little things, rosy wolf snails, to try to control them, but instead they're killing all the endemic snails.
So we had one of these labs and I thought, well, that's kind of cool because I was interested in geology.
I remember when my kids were little watching the Wild Kratts.
There was a Wild Kratts episode about honey badgers, how they were all cute when they were babies because they were hiding in camouflage.
I was interested in human history.
I think they look very cute.
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.
So have people been able to understand better antivenom properties from studying them?
That pattern on the coat is really beautiful.
And what is fantastic about that is it's being a modern-day explorer.
Have you heard about the hippo solution in the early 20th century?
This is a great sort of American history story because our country is replete with people with brilliant ideas, right?
And in the early 20th century, when the land in the West was not doing so well, been overgrazed, there were too many cattle and there was this thing called the meat question.
It was the thing of the day, the meat question.
People were talking about how are we going to survive?
There's not enough cattle.
Maybe we're going to have to eat our dogs.
And at the same time, there was a problem in the Mississippi and other places where the, I think it was the World Fair.
People had brought New Orleans, who was the host city of the, I think in Japan, they brought New Orleans this water hyacinth, this water, little, tiny, beautiful flower as a gift.
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 they planted it everywhere.
And it just grew like absolute crazy and was choking up the river.
Like ships couldn't get through because of this like matted river.
People were like putting oil on it to get it to sink.
and trying to light it on fire and nothing would happen.
And this team of people that included a congressman from Louisiana came up with a solution for both problems at once.
And that was that they were going to import hippos from Africa into Louisiana to live on the bayous.
They would eat the plant, this water hyacinth thing, and then we could eat them.
And that was going to be the perfect solution to both of these problems.
And so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure.
So it's actually a fun story.
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.
And Alan said, well, you know, it'd be cool.
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 they could...
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 it's really important.
And it was really important part of the way we we got conservation legislation in the U.S.,
So he was excited about this.
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.
Plus, if you join my lab, you can go to Siberia.
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 tamed?
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.
Just everybody was like, yeah, awesome.
Even the New York Times was completely behind it.
They published an editorial talking about they called the hippos Lake Cow Bacon.
Yeah, everybody was like, this is it.
Yeah, Teddy Roosevelt was behind it.
Yeah, well, it didn't go up for a vote.
I mean, this is such a, it's so funny.
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.
So near miss on the hippos.
Well, and now we know that they're good at becoming invasive.
You saw there's hippos that live now in Colombia because of Pablo Escobar.
Nobody knew what to do with them.
And they started off with just a handful of them.
And now there's like dozens of them down there.
I think they keep rounding them up and putting them back on his property.
I don't know the answer to that.
He took them there on purpose, though, just like we wanted to bring them here.
Can you imagine how bad that would be, though?
And I mean, do people eat hippos?
Well, I mean, I have had several not amazing experiences in Siberia, but overall, it's been fun.
We did have wild pigs around the U.S.
Probably not the same thing, right?
Weren't there wild pigs?
That's a good question.
We don't see them in Alaska, Yukon, where we find all these big stashes of bones coming out of permafrost.
So it's probably not that they came over like that.
We find bison and horses and mammoths.
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.
I've been a couple of times.
And normally things are domesticated around where they were.
I mean, this is the way evolution works, right?
You know, something has a particular suite of traits.
Were they the most delicious pigs?
There were North American camels that were here during the ice ages.
So the first time I went, it was for a meeting.
So this is a guy who worked for, I guess, what became the USDA.
But he was in charge of apples.
But he was really dedicated to trying to solve this meat problem.
And he saw importing African animals and animals from other places as the real solution to this.
We used to have so many cool animals here that all went extinct at the end of the Ice Age.
And I spent some time in Moscow first as a guest of one of my Russian collaborators.
I mean, we had mammoths.
Why shouldn't we have elephants?
Is it invasive, though, if it used to live here?
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 then we went out to this meeting in Yakutsk.
What I learned about Siberia is that everything goes wrong.
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 what they imagined was.
There's no bit of infrastructure that functions the way it's supposed to function.
Oh, so they already had a taste.
It's so important to actually talk to wildlife biologists and ecologists.
I mean, we can see from Yellowstone.
And I learned that initially.
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.
We ended up on this boat that was two hours late.
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 harder than you might imagine.
And their midterm exam was a debate.
And the topic of the debate was that wolves should be introduced into California.
And there are so many mosquitoes.
One of the times I was out in Taimyr, the north central Taimyr 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 off of our face because you always have to wear a hood.
But what's interesting, this class that I took, it was a debate that I taught.
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?
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.
But everybody's going to vote.
Otherwise, you'll be breathing mosquitoes.
Well, they're biology, right?
They're making decisions on where they can find their next meal.
We're not planning on rewilding dire wolves, just to put that out there.
Plus, you've met Khaleesi.
I don't think she would be...
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.
She kind of freaks me out already when you look at her.
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 that you were talking about.
The plan is not to let them breed.
Well, at the moment, they're separated.
But we'll probably use subcutaneous, you know, you can put a...
hormonal contraceptive.
There's been some ideas of maybe, so we don't want to castrate them, which would obviously be a way to stop it, but because we want them to be able to reach their full size, because we want to know what that would be.
And one time I killed something like 35 mosquitoes in one clap.
And we want them to be able to have the hormones to be able to do that.
But they will be controlled.
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, and we know exactly what's going on with them.
I've seen that scene, yes.
Do I sound like the scientist?
I kind of do, actually.
I'm the chief scientist, right?
So I'm a good guy for now.
But he becomes a bad guy in the future, right?
So I'm looking forward to my evil transition.
We're not making dinosaurs.
But, you know, there were other cool animals that we have DNA for.
I heard you talking about the American cheetah.
So we have two high-quality genome sequences from American cheetah.
We want them back to help with our population problems.
They are dire wolves 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 bring those traits back in Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, that are three dire wolves that are alive now.
And that has created these animals that you saw that are bigger and they're stronger and they have that dire wolf coat.
Well, it depends the time of year.
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.
And early in the season, they're really big and you can catch them fast.
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 reddy brown.
And that's because so many other animals seem to be reddy 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.
And I get to fight with people a lot.
And then they get different species come out that are smaller and smaller.
But both of these two animals that we had higher coverage DNA from had gene variants in genes that are associated with pigmentation, how our 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 toward the end of the season, they're really tiny.
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 coat, but it must have been a predominant color in the population.
Once I was up in the north of Alaska on the Ickpickpuck River, we were floating down the river looking for mammoth bones and tusks and things like that.
Both of these animals were from northern part of their range where it would have been colder.
They did live through previous interglacial periods.
125,000 years ago, it was as warm as it is today or even warmer with predicted to be no ice at the poles.
And also we know dire wolves were really common around the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles.
We haven't been able to get any DNA out of anything from La Brea.
That would be an amazing discovery.
Don't know if it destroys it or if it gets into the bone in a way that we can't get the DNA out.
So somehow inhibiting the recovery of the DNA.
I mean, someday we'll we'll figure it out.
And that's going to open up a lot of really cool.
And because I love to fight...
Yeah, they have, their hair is long and it's clear.
That's why polar bears, have you seen those pictures of bears in zoos where they look, polar bears in zoos where they look green?
It grows in the, the hair is hollow.
And so if they're too wet and not cold enough, they can turn, it's this like weird.
And it had been windy for the first few days, so it was fine.
We did some work in my academic lab where we discovered that polar bears and brown bears hybridize with each other.
This is one of those funny stories about academia with a scarcity mindset there where we submit a grant proposal and we say, hey, we have this.
And this was my first time out in the field, actually.
really cool observation that polar bears and brown bears hybridized during the last ice age when they overlap with each other.
And it gets rejected because they're like, that's dumb.
We know that doesn't happen.
And then we found another hybrid polar bear from the previous interglacial.
And then there's evidence that they're hybridizing today.
Yeah, they find them today.
So whenever they overlap geographically, they breed.
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 territory to scavenge for food.
And I was like, these mosquitoes.
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.
People keep telling me there's mosquitoes.
So the male comes up to her and will mate her.
The other way around, if a polar bear 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?
There's no mosquitoes out here.
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.
And his hypothesis is straightforward that they can't successfully hunt seals if they don't have that white fur.
Then the wind dies down.
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.
And then it's like, oh, fuck.
But they also hybridize just given the chance to do so, right?
Because biology doesn't recognize species concepts, right?
Biology doesn't care that that animal is called a brown bear by us and that animal is called a polder bear.
They run into each other.
They're like, cool, just like our Neanderthal ancestors.
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.
I recently quit my academic job and moved to become the chief science officer at Colossal, the company that has just made those direwolves.
There was a moose that was ahead of us for a while.
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 this poor animal, we were following the river.
And so they hybridized there.
And all brown bears in North America today...
have ancestry from that admixture with polar bears geez wow that's so fascinating yeah it's just like how we all have ancestry from mixing with neanderthals and is that from the german zoo because there's a couple of bears at it but that really looks like a hybrid doesn't it yeah it looks like there's a lot of traits of both of them yeah it's impressive
And he would every few steps, he would just totally submerge his body in this frozen water and then come back up like the mosquitoes are just, yeah, something else.
It's kind of that, but it's also that we haven't agreed, right?
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.
But that is... 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.
We have come up with, you know, dozens of different species concepts, and they're all for a particular purpose.
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.
I saw you had a bison priscus, I'm going to say, skull out there.
Yeah, step bison, bison priscus.
Bison crassicornis, bison occidentalis, bison alaskensis, bison, I could go on forever I, you know, this is, the naming of bison was like sport in the 18th, 19th centuries, mostly 19th century.
I don't think I've been to his.
I didn't go with Ben, but I've been working up in that part of the world for 30 years.
We spend a lot of time working at gold mines outside of Dawson City.
Have you been to Dawson City?
It's an old-timey gold town, dirt roads, wooden sidewalks.
The buildings are all crooked because the fire is burned at one end and it melts the permafrost underneath.
It's where I learned what you're supposed to do when a fight breaks out in the bar that you've gone into.
Otherwise your beer's going to get knocked over.
There's mosquitoes outside.
No, it's... I would tell you to leave.
But this is... It's Canada, so less likely for that to happen than in Alaska.
But this is... There have been weird things happen there.
And, you know, there's...
You go out to the bars in Dawson City.
Why am I telling these stories?
You go to the bars in Dawson City and they still have this thing where there's the bell.
And if you ring the bell, the person who's rung the bell is buying a round for everybody who's in the bar.
And you learn after you've been there for a while that a person is only ringing that bell because he wants the right to talk to everybody who's in there because he wants to fight with somebody.
This is somebody who's like a diamond driller who's just got paid in cash for the first time.
And he's like, now I want to fuck somebody up.
That's what they want to do when they get paid?
Rings the bell and then goes from table to table sitting around with people.
And we, the nerdy scientist, paleogeneticist sitting in the corner are trying to just be super nice Canadians talking to these people.
Yeah, just looking to fight.
It's a weird part of the world.
It's a fun place to work.
There's gold mines like the site outside Fairbanks that are super productive like this.
And every one of the miners out there has like 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.
And I heard those great stories about how he donated material to the American Museum.
Do you know what I think is great about that story?
I really like it, right?
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 collection at the AMNH.
But a lot of it is crap.
You know, 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 it?
Now, they shouldn't have dumped it in the river.
Obviously, that's dumb.
But he is going to get the last laugh.
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?
Yeah, I'm sure it's there.
And they probably didn't mean anything terrible by it.
Probably around the 50s.
That was when most of the collection came from.
There was a ton of gold mining activity in the 50s and 60s around Fairbanks.
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 plaster 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.
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?
Like, yeah, that's a mammoth tooth.
That's what I brought to you, yeah.
This is from South Carolina.
You can see it's fossilized.
That has... Oh, that's your logo on it.
Of course it's branded.
It's colossal, you know.
But yeah, mammoths, do you know the story about our founding fathers and mammoths?
So Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mammoths.
So they were probably mastodons because it was these teeth that were melting out of the salt lakes and things like that in the part of the United States.
But he was obsessed with them.
He was getting his friends to mail him teeth that he was finding.
And he was, this is a funny story.
Let me see if I can get it right.
You should look this up too because it's hilarious.
How mammoths made America great before.
And now when we bring our mammoth back, we're going to do it again.
So there was a guy in France who was writing a series of books.
He was like Comte Buffon.
Comte Buffon, I think, was his name.
I'm terrible with French, so I probably did it wrong.
But he was writing a series of books about natural history.
And the fifth, I think, of his books was called...
In time era, I remember we would walk along the grass, this tall grass with little flowers in it, exactly the kind of place you can imagine mammoths roaming and being like the kings of the universe there.
The theory of American degeneracy and what it was essentially about how all American animals were more shit than animals from everywhere else in the world.
And it was during the War of Independence.
And so it was really popular to hate on American stuff.
And so he couldn't have pissed off Thomas Jefferson more if he tried.
He didn't know anything about Thomas Jefferson.
He was busy fighting with Linnaeus and Linnaeus was busy classifying things.
And this guy was like, there's no more than 200 species of animals anywhere.
So why would you bother with that sort of academic silliness rather than think about like how the animals got this way in the first place?
In his mind, like discovering why American animals were so shit was the right way to be spending your time.
But this pissed Teddy Roosevelt off.
And so he was trying to figure out how he could prove to this guy that American animals were actually better, bigger.
So he was getting his friends to compile lists of things about how American bears are bigger than European bears.
American wolves are bigger than European wolves.
That it isn't that you come to America, like this guy said, and you suddenly get weaker and your blood gets watery.
That's what they thought?
And it was a bestseller, apparently.
They were probably imagining, I guess when people came over, 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 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.
Nobody really knew about the idea of extinction.
But as you were walking, you would kick up the grass and they would just emerge off of the needles of grass.
He was convinced that Lewis and Clark were going to find them, that people were going to find these mammoths still there.
And that was going to prove.
What I don't understand about this is how a person who is a scientist can look at how everything has changed in a couple hundred years or in 20 years when it comes to genetics and still say, oh, we know everything.
It was just really awful.
Then they didn't go extinct.
Oh, no, the Tasmanian tiger was definitely real.
But Gigantopithecus is really old.
And I learned, actually, because I was curious about this.
And would have changed until today.
I mean, I told you, I have tested.
People send me all kinds of crazy things.
The insulation was one of my favorites.
This is something that I got while I was still doing my PhD.
People would send us all sorts of crazy things.
Yeah, it was from a guy somewhere.
They didn't say it was fur.
No, it was better than that.
How do they survive if there are so few red blood—because mosquitoes mostly, they only take—it's only the females that take a blood meal, and they only take a blood meal when they're making eggs or making a brood.
Yeah, he he was from somewhere in the Carolinas.
I can't remember where.
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.
He's emailing you from his trip club.
It was a written letter.
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.
I didn't get any gigantopithecus DNA.
There was some human DNA on it.
I think that's the story.
I think that's the story.
Well, most things from paleoanthropology are, you know, I'm going to rewrite human history because I found a partial jawbone with three worn teeth.
They take it to reproduce.
Otherwise, they feed on nectar.
This is one of the super fun things about ancient DNA, right?
So how do these how does so many mosquitoes survive in the Arctic if there's so few animals there?
So I think, I don't know, remember who it was who said this, but we don't have any idea if your bone, you paleoanthropologist, if your bone has descendants, right?
But I know that my DNA has ancestors.
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, turns out you were wrong about that.
Oh, Neanderthals and humans didn't interbreed.
Oh, turns out you were wrong about that.
And it turns out those mosquitoes are adapted to this climate and they don't need a blood meal to reproduce, but they do better if they get one.
And now we know that they did.
And we've been able to learn so many cool things about humans from studying this Neanderthal genome.
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 that we have somewhere between 2% and 5% Neanderthal DNA in our genomes.
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.
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 pulling together people who are alive today, that's just a fun philosophical question.
Second is, what the hell is going on in that other 7%, right?
So they're after you, but they don't need you.
And if we want to know what it is that makes us human, that's where we look, right?
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 genes, we think, less than 100 mutations in genes now that have evolved since that split that most people that are alive today have.
I don't really like to fight with people.
It kind of makes it worse, right?
And that is what makes us human.
It makes sense, though.
We want to have a conversation.
And if we want to talk about something, we have to call it something.
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 the same conversation.
If I am in charge of delineating species because I'm trying to figure out which agency is going to care for this endangered species, 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 developed in the middle part of the 20th century called the biological species concept, which says you're a species if you can breed and if your offspring are fertile.
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 a way less of an extent than we thought that they did.
This is actually a cool story.
Do you know what a beefalo is?
No, a beefalo is a breed of hybrid that is five-eighths cattle and three-eighths bison that supposedly has better meat.
Yes, it was one of these breeds that they tried to make.
My boss was so funny, too.
Turns out it barely works at all.
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.
So I've spent a lot of time being interested in this sort of 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?
And so I wanted to look at these different species pairs.
And we knew about beefalo because people have 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 animals.
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.
I just felt like it was the right thing to say at this minute.
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.
You know, there's problems here.
And so then people kept trying to do it because they really wanted to do this.
Look at me at my natural.
And then there was this guy called, I can't remember the name of the person who actually did it, who claimed that he had been able to create this animal that was three-eighths bison and five-eighths cattle.
And we're out there and the wind dries down, the mosquitoes come and I'm with my DEET.
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.
to a farmer in Canada for $2.5 million, 1975.
It's still the most expensive single animal that has ever been sold, right?
$2.5 million, 1975 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.
I'm like, you know, your natural repellent.
We were reaching out to people, reaching out to ranches and saying, can we have a piece of your pieces, 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 sequenced 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...
He's going, did you bring the DEET?
this $2.5 million 1975 individual.
And we've done a lot of work on bison and cattle throughout the last 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.
It was an aborted animal because it's very hard to make a hybrid.
He fell right in between them, in the middle, where you expect him to be.
So now we know exactly where we think our beefalo should be.
eights cattle three eights bison they should fall out closer to cattle but still up here and so you plot them and they're all just cattle 100 they're just cattle it was fake so did they use like highland cattle or something like that that have those crazy furs there's some evidence that they used zebu so it's a that's a different type of cattle it's the one that came from asia they have them in brazil because they have a hump so it makes it look a little bit more like bison oh if you look at it if you look at the pictures of the beefalo of the week you look at them and you're like you know those are cattle
Oh, just look up beefalo.
To look at historic beefalo, you can see the pictures of historical beefalo.
We just published the paper like a few months ago.
And he sold it back to Basolo for some of the money getting back.
I mean, I think there was a thing going on there.
They're hybrid with something.
They're mixed with a little bit of zebu.
Some of them have a little bit of bison in them, but this is a... They're just cows.
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 talked to Steve Rinella about this.
I know that he's a friend of his.
He was like, that's hilarious.
I mean, they were trying to do that, right?
And we can engineer everything.
But that's not what they did.
I mean, a chihuahua looks different from a Great Dane, but their DNA is a lot the same.
I think it, well, this is me speculating at this point.
I think he had to know.
And there was at one point there was a test, a blood test that they had done where they were looking for markers in the blood.
And there were five different markers and they tested about 150 different animals.
And they published a paper saying, oh, look, we tested all these animals.
None of them have all of the markers.
One of them has one of the markers.
And we just think the test is bad.
I don't remember what we were talking about.
Diverged from Neanderthals.
Just limited, just like everything else in paleoanthropology.
There was a really cool—this is just about how we don't know anything.
We can actually get DNA directly from sediments.
And this has been a relatively recent revelation.
It's 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.
But there are a lot of Native American cultures who believe that they have a long history of the horse and that the horse has survived.
And it's just dismissed because we don't have evidence for it.
But until we find DNA directly in dirt, I mean, this is just showing us how much we don't know, how much we have to be really willing to...
You know, obviously we have a model of the way the world works and we don't just throw away the model with new data, but we have to incorporate the new data.
But survived elsewhere.
Eohippus, the very first horses are from 50 million years ago.
They're found in Wyoming, in the fossil deposits in Wyoming.
Those are the little house cat sized horses.
But, you know, this is early horses around the same time as we have the first primates and the first of the other things that we know.
Yeah, they did that to Jacques Saint-Germain 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.
And now everybody accepts that as it's true.
Well, that would be interesting.
Yeah, I don't know anything about this.
It doesn't match any of the other known indigenous populations.
Yeah, this is I mean, I have no doubt that this is true.
I mean, how many of these human settlements are are gone now?
And so we don't have any evidence of them.
And they're all lineages that they all go back to humans originating in Africa at some point.
But we haven't seen all of them.
We haven't seen all of the pattern.
We don't know even what questions we should be asking.
So those x-rays are from the things themselves.
I think I've seen some of these before.
I've seen some of the reports.
This is the thing that was presented to the Mexican government at some point.
What's that on the neck?
I mean, you would still have to ask their permission.
It looks like a person.
Have people tried to do DNA work or protein work on these things?
There are the three-toed and three-fingers thing is interesting.
I wonder if there's a genetic mutation that will lead to that.
It would be fascinating to see if there's any DNA that could be recovered or proteins.
I'll run it by Ben, see what he thinks.
Was it in Asia, though?
Like Bigfoot is supposed to be in North America.
Yeah, so it could have come across.
Early to middle Pleistocene in China.
Well, you can see that in the increased rates of obesity, increased rates of diabetes.
That was super interesting.
And I wonder, you know, if these populations were there, they're there at the same time as Denisovans were there and Neanderthals were there.
If they could have hybridized with humans, they probably would.
Well, it was thought for a long time that orangutans were our closest living relative as well.
Learning and being able to communicate is one of the ways that we got the advantage over everything else, right?
Because I don't have to evolve the ability to cook dinner.
I can learn from my mom.
And you don't have to learn because there's DoorDash.
You don't need sentient AI to do that.
You know, we're actually working with teams of people that are external to Colossal to put together the rewilding plans and that sort of thing for each of the different species.
We're not planning to rewild the dire wolves, but we still have done this.
We've put together a plan of what the potential impacts would be, but we deliberately keep that outside and hire people to put this together for us.
And we haven't been delivered this yet, so we'll see what it says when we get it.
They are not going to kill everything because they're not going to be very wild.
It is being used for conservation.
When we were up there in Timer, we'd flown for a couple days in this really awful Russian helicopter that took off the third time it tried to because, you know, infrastructure doesn't work in Siberia.
You're going to say that one thing forever.
I mean, this is going to be like, oh, congratulations.
I think that this idea that the technology that we are developing is something that we shouldn't be developing because it's wrong.
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.
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 the males or leave the juveniles or some way of maintaining that population so that you knew you could go back to the hunt the next year and they would be there again.
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 evolve the way that it should be.
Like, we decide how many animals live, where they get to live, what they get to eat, how many they get to eat.
We call 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.
It's a repeated theme from... You got a Siberian helicopter to play with.
These technologies are not exactly the same as the technologies that our ancestors had because we are directly changing DNA sequences, right?
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 to allow ourselves the space that we need to figure out what we can do with these technologies matters.
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.
And it was in a place called Khatanga, which is where we were based while we were trying to get out into.
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 resistant to avian malaria, which we introduced by introducing mosquitoes into their habitat and save them from becoming extinct?
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 like.
You know, 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.
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.
And they kept loading all of our gear into this.
And it's mostly these massive gas tanks.
And you load all the gear into the gas tanks.
Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about, right?
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 then all of the people, we had a dog, Pasha, who was with us, who did not want to get in that helicopter.
And people came together and mounted this incredible, like, 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.
And it was such a rush, you know.
But 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.
I think the dog was the smartest person.
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.
and our expedition team.
Obviously, there are risks associated with using technologies that we don't fully understand, but we're not taking those risks.
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're very carefully evaluating every single one of the edits that we make.
We are, in every case, interested in making the fewest number of changes possible to still bring those animals back.
Well, we have announced, obviously, the mammoth and the thylacine.
That's the Tasmanian tiger.
And the dodo, which is my favorite.
But we have DNA from lots of different animals.
So, you know, you never know.
Where are we going to put mammoths?
We would go back to the places we were staying and then they would tinker with it and fix it.
Eventually, that is the goal, to have animals that live in wild habitats.
But this will be a very long process.
No, we won't be reintroducing direwolves.
Well, I mean, we don't currently have any plans to bring cheetahs or saber-toothed cats back to life.
But we know also from looking at the cheetahs that we have that they didn't only eat pronghorns.
We got in the helicopter finally.
They were eating lots of things in their habitat.
They had to eat something else.
Otherwise they would die.
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?
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 for these animals.
Well, right now we're not focusing on Russia because issues.
So probably it would be somewhere in North America.
Isn't Greenland filled with ice?
I mean, mammoths really need a lot of lush.
But, you know, there's plenty of space in Alaska, right?
Or northern Canada or even around the plains.
I mean, mammoths lived through warm periods and cold periods.
They're cold adapted because they're big and furry.
And I'm not worried about the mammoth population getting out of control.
I mean, these are animals that take 10 to 14 years to reach reproductive maturity.
They have a two year pregnancy.
It's not like they're suddenly going to be a thousand mammoths.
This will be a very slow and deliberate and careful process.
And like with the dire wolves, 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.
Yes, Wrangell Island off the coast of Siberia, but now maybe even in mainland North America based on that environmental DNA data.
We're sitting on the gas tanks, right?
Right, because we're not going to find the last fossils of something.
In this helicopter that we already think...
It's really hard to know, right?
And because the taphonomy, which means like how things are going to preserve, differs so much depending on where you are in the world.
Like when things die in Alaska and you have this glacial silt that preserves things really quickly, we're probably finding a lot of things, right?
But we've never found woolly rhinos in North America.
So the hypothesis is they never made it across the Bering.
When the sea level was lower, the Bering Strait was not a sea level.
Instead, it was what they called Beringia.
Animals walked across that land bridge, including people walked across the land bridge to come into North America.
Fortunately, the helicopter had some missing windows.
I love the short-faced bear.
You know what I like the most about it is because I think it's so dumb that it's called the short-faced bear.
Who was giving it that common name?
Then they're like, oh, here's a bear that if it stands up, it's 12 feet tall.
I'm going to call it the short-faced bear.
So, you know, there was... Oh, boy.
Have you seen the long-horned bison, this bison that lived 120,000, 150,000 years ago?
There's a great photo that's somewhere on the internet of one of a skull on the ground and a scientist laying that one.
Yeah, wouldn't that be cool?
I think that's also the end of the Ice Age.
It wasn't in North America.
This whole... This particular expedition was particularly insane compared to other things of it.
There were also camels in North America.
There was a camel called Camelops.
And a giant beaver, like a five foot tall beaver, which.
Especially a five-foot beaver.
People have found logs that have been chewed on by this thing.
We lost so many big things.
I wonder if they moved as slowly as the small ones did.
I can't imagine that they could have or they would have been really easily eaten by the giant short-faced bear.
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.
Or the American cheetah or the smilodon.
Yeah, but if that thing was moving super slowly, you could just hack at it for a while.
Don't they move so slowly that stuff grows on them?
So would you want the big cats that were here to come back?
And I think about mountain lions, too.
When I go running, you know, in the woods, in the red woods, I live in Santa Cruz.
I go running and I'm thinking, oh, mountain lions.
I think they're afraid of dogs.
I have a 75-pound Labrador retriever.
Oh, friend, can we play?
yikes yeah i don't know they're spooky they're cool but they're spooky you know i don't know how many you want around and there are a lot of 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 oh really his name is monarch we actually sequenced his genome too it's
So we're flying out there.
And we start to land, and I'm thinking, great, we're there.
It's named after the guy.
I wonder if it's worth it to him.
I get out of this crazy firebomb in the air that I'm in.
Well, by the time I think it was on the flag, it was already on their way out.
You know, we showed recently using DNA that they're really closely related to the bears that are in Yellowstone right now.
So if we really want bears in California, you can just bring those guys over.
No, no, we did not get off.
Monarch had a miserable life, though.
He was mostly in a cage.
He was being fed the wrong diet for a brown bear, just mostly meat.
So right now he's on display.
Instead, we picked up a random family that had been out there on their own.
He's not on display, actually.
He is in the basement in a fridge at the Cal Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
But his post-cranial skeleton, everything except his head, is at Berkeley in the museum.
We've sampled it for DNA.
But they were just giving him meat.
I imagine he was just really uncomfortable all the time.
Can you imagine if you just ate only meat?
You need a little bit of fiber to help your digestive system.
When I lived in Colorado – Just like people, not us, would have been.
Like they're involved in the world of scarcity where you eat the stuff that's in front of you.
I love the fat bear week competition.
Yeah, it was two parents and a child, and they had a backpack with their gear and a massive cooler.
It's around the time when they come out there, 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.
Humans probably make a terrible snack, though, right?
I mean, we're bony or fatty.
That salmon is absolutely a delicious source of protein, right?
That's the bear that I would want to run into in the field.
They speak French to the team that's there.
I've never been out there.
People are having a conversation in Russian.
I have to look at that.
And then we take off again.
I can't imagine that as a good way to go.
It's not a good way to go.
There's a woman who's worked in my lab for a long time.
She works on mountain lions or mountain lion genetics.
And she said when it's her time, she wants to go.
And eat you while you're still alive.
Just there was a lack of communication.
And it just looked like a man.
Like a man walking on two legs.
But whatever, the helicopter took off twice and then it landed and everybody unloaded and we set up the tent, the camp.
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.
If that picture was just a little bit blurrier, it would be Bigfoot.
And we discovered over the course of the next few days, you know, we built these cool boats, the Zodiacs.
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.
You blow them up and you bring out the outboard and you put them on the lake and we're looking around.
And perhaps it would have come really far north, though, to get across the Bering land bridge, because that was really far.
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.
That was all glaciated and cold.
So it would have to be something that was adapted to living in warmer climates like where it was found, as well as being able to survive.
It's not like a week of a walk across the land bridge.
I think this is what I'm going for.
The more mosquitoes, the better.
Yeah, it's funny we talk about it as people are moving deliberately through this landscape, when clearly they weren't.
They're just trying to find food, like the Dolgon people.
They're going to places where there's still grass that their reindeer can graze on.
But somehow they're happier than us.
Oh, 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.
If you've done it successfully, do you say you de-extincted something?
I've already had pause at this.
Neanderthals and Denisovans, they were people.
And so I feel like that's not really a thing.
That's not somewhere we should go.
Host eagle, that's a cool one.
That's a cool one, yeah.
This was a massive, massive giant eagle that ate moa, which was a bird, an extinct bird.
And the Russian... We had a cook with us.
Well, the moa went extinct, and so they couldn't eat any moa anymore.
I mean, why did short-faced bears go extinct?
Probably because nobody wanted a bear that stood 12 feet high.
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.
I mean, maybe what they were doing is, you know, they would ambush mammoths and things like that.
So you hide around bluffs and you can have a group of people in different places and hit them all at once.
Maybe you wait until that bear is eating something else.
And then it's paused and you have time to...
Because these are people who relied on that.
They probably understand it better than people who aren't hunters today, right?
And is that something that you've been able to develop?
Could you smell the dire wolves?
Why would we bathe a dire wolf?
So they brought medical ethanol to drink.
Did they smell different?
We don't know which wolf.
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.
Well, you know, you can only take so much stuff with you.
The very first scientific paper that said when dogs were domesticated was
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.
Because it weighs less than alcohol.
And you only inherit 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.
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
We don't, but we do know now that dogs probably aren't that old.
I think it changes all the time, which is because we don't know everything.
And also probably because the first dogs were in warm parts of the world, and so we don't have the fossils.
You know, they decided it was safe.
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 gene flow, lots of hybridization between domestic dogs and wolves that have made this a really hard problem.
Anyway, by three days in, it's 24-hour sunlight.
But what's cool about this date, 15,000 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 we still don't know.
We're at 72 degrees latitude.
And maybe that was enough.
But, you know, if you think of domestication and scientists like to have names, we like to have ways of classifying things.
And so there was recently a couple of friends of mine of mine.
published a paper 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.
Yeah, there's a big, I think in academia in particular, there's this big scarcity mindset.
I tried the medical ethanol.
Stuff we don't know, right?
There's Mexican wolves.
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 of gray 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.
You water it down with a little bit of river water, and you have it with your freshly caught fish that you've filleted, and yeah, it's great.
Well, all of those, too, are probably Victorian, right?
All of the breeds that we think of today, whether it's cattle or bison, they're, you know, within the last couple hundred years.
That is really fast selection by humans.
So we are manipulating the DNA of the species that we surround ourselves with.
And we have been for 15,000 to 20,000 years and probably longer.
just not in a laboratory but you know is our backyard a laboratory 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 that's interesting right because we're thinking about science is only being done in a laboratory
We had fish and rice for the whole time.
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 and
We had to catch our food, yes.
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.
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.
So that is really cool science, 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.
So you just hear boom, boom.
Again, I think it's this negativity and it's this scarcity mindset that if they do this, then we can't do this.
Which is just, it's not the way we innovate.
It's not the way we make progress.