Beth Shapiro

I am pleased to be here.

I'm a scientist.

I work in a crazy field called ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics.

It means we go out into the world, we dig shit up, and we extract DNA from it.

And what is fantastic about that is it's being a modern-day explorer.

I get to go somewhere, I get to find out something new that completely rewrites what we thought we knew, and it's brilliant.

And I get to fight with people a lot.

And because I love to fight...

I recently quit my academic job and moved to become the chief science officer at Colossal, the company that has just made those direwolves.

I don't really like to fight with people.

I just felt like it was the right thing to say at this minute.

I end up fighting with people, though, not because I want to, but because I feel like I have to defend what I think is the way that we should be doing science.

Yeah, there's a big, I think in academia in particular, there's this big scarcity mindset.

And this leads people to be kind of negative about everything.

That's going to be too hard.

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.

Or if you get attention, that means I can't get attention.

And it leads to this negativity that I think stifles innovation.

Yeah.

I've spent my whole life working on this.