Digital Social Hour
Ben Lamm: The Truth About Jurassic Park & Real De-Extinction | DSH #1586
24 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: Why is there no dinosaur DNA available for recreation?
there is no dino dna because the earth went through various heating periods since extinction of the dinosaurs also dna like right now the oldest dna we're working with is about 1.5 million years old it's not 65 million years that's a big jump amber's a very porous material it develops in very hot places wet places that's not good for dna storage so there is no amber dna there is no dino dna
Okay, guys, we got Ben Lam here. We are at AI4 conference. He's speaking tomorrow. I bet you're revealing something exciting.
Chapter 2: How does AI contribute to the de-extinction of species?
Yeah, well, I don't know if there's any big reveals, but I'm, you know, I'm pretty open book.
Chapter 3: What is Colossal Biosciences' plan for reviving mammoths by 2028?
So an AI is critical to what we do at Colossal.
Chapter 4: How can artificial wombs aid in the revival of extinct species?
So I'm pretty stoked about tomorrow. Yeah. How are you using AI at Colossal mainly? Yeah, I mean, we use AI in every single part of the project.
Chapter 5: What challenges are faced when recreating certain extinct animals?
Most people don't realize that. They think of us just being like you know, in a lab, but there's a lot of field work, there's expeditions, it's kind of weird, it's kind of like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, but then there's also this huge AI component that people don't realize.
We're using AI for everything from like ancient DNA assembly to comparative genomics to, we've actually built some pretty cool models
Chapter 6: How does biodiversity loss impact ecosystems?
where if we're looking at things like skull morphology like for the dodo we've actually scanned over a thousand different uh skulls from from a bird beak morphology perspective from all these birds then we've sequenced them then we use ai to compare all of the actual images to that sequence data to then relevance rank you know the biggest uh gene variants that we think will drive kind of that morphology that made kind of the
beak and cranial facial development of the Dodo actually look like the Dodo, right? It was actually unique to them. And so we're using AI all the time. Another thing that we're doing that's pretty cool with AI is that most people just use like, think if it's like CRISPR or think if it's like gene editing, it's kind of like a catch-all. But really we use a combination of tools.
Sometimes it's like little edits to one genome. Sometimes it's synthesizing an entire block. Sometimes it's like inserting that block. Sometimes it's knocking out that block. And all these different technologies have different kind of off-target effects. And we try to bundle them. And that's what's called multiplex editing when we're editing multiple parts of the genome at the same time.
We've actually built an algorithm because we're creating so many cell lines and screening so much data that we then feed that back into this loop so that we can understand, you know, which types of edits make the highest efficiency for that type of effect without causing kind of this like disruption downstream in the genome and all that's using AI.
So I'll tell you, these projects would take, you know, decades if we didn't have AI.
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Chapter 7: What ethical considerations arise in extinction science?
And I think some of them probably wouldn't even be able to be done. That's incredible. Yeah, it's truly remarkable. And what's interesting is now with quantum just around the corner, it's going to be really, really interesting probably what the next five years holds for us in terms of how we can engineer more and more species and even fill in gaps of species that we don't have full DNA of.
Really? Wow. So how would quantum help with that process, I guess?
Well, I mean, just being able to look at and run to get to the point that we can actually run simulations of genome engineering, because we're not there yet from a compute perspective. We're not there that from an AI or
um a data perspective but we're generating so much data that if we could actually run simulations in real time of all the possible variants and all the possible outcomes i think you'd at least give us some high degree of probability of like what that simulated outcome could be without us even having to do any of the wet lab experiment wow himself yeah
So, I mean, we're not there yet because the tech's not there yet.
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Chapter 8: How does the conversation about conservation technology evolve?
But I think that, you know, in the next five to ten years, that's where we'll be. There's a story that came out a couple weeks ago, and they weren't using quantum, but they actually did a mock. They called it a mock trial, like a mock clinical trial, which I think is a weird term. I think it kind of like almost belittles what they did, but they took all this data for cancer drugs.
And then they actually found out that these drugs that are already approved by the FDA and being treating different types of cancers actually can help with Alzheimer's and these other conditions. Right.
And so we know those drugs are safe because they're already being deployed and they've already gone through the clinical trial process and they're being deployed by the and stamped by the FDA for safety and efficacy in humans. Right. There's being used to treat another disease.
And so this company used all this data to go back and say, oh, these same drugs could be used and have a higher degree of outcome to actually help with Alzheimer's and dementia, which is really interesting. That's huge. And so think about that. We have so much data already that if we can start looking at using AI and then eventually using quantum plus AI,
we can simulate so many different disease states and so many different potential editing outcomes and different drug trials that we probably have. It reminds me of that story where, I don't know if you read this like five years ago, where NASA had already found other exoplanets and it was just in the data, but they never had the compute power to go back and look through it.
And I think that exists probably for human healthcare as well.
So they already found other exoplanets? I didn't even know that. Yeah, it's crazy. That is nuts. Yeah, I'd imagine the simulation is going to be important as you start reintroducing these species back into the wild, right?
And we're trying to, and that's another big, this is a great question. Most people don't think of that as a data problem, but like all the work that we do for Colossal that has an application to conservation, we open source for the world, right? We try to work with our partners. We have about 60 different conservation partners all around the world.
But what's really interesting about that is that some of those projects that while they're helping to save existing species, like using AI for understanding socialization and migratory patterns in elephants. Well, that's helping elephants today from a conservation perspective, but also we're taking that same data and applying it to how do we then build synthetic herds for woolly mammoths, right?
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