Beth Shapiro

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

Right.

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

Yeah.

It's amazing that the plants can survive that, that they don't go like, yo, that's not me.

Well, we're trying.

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.

Yeah.

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.

Again, I think it's this negativity and it's this scarcity mindset that if they do this, then we can't do this.