Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Ben Lamm: Colossal Bioscience Chief Executive discusses plans to bring back the Moa from extinction

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Ben Lamm: Colossal Bioscience Chief Executive discusses plans to bring back the Moa from extinction · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

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  Speaker 1: You remember the American biotech outfit that wants to bring
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  Speaker 1: them More back to life here in New Zealand. It's
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  Speaker 1: called Colossal Bioscience. They're in Dallas. They did the dire
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  Speaker 1: Wolf pups. They use ancient DNA and then they use
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  Speaker 1: gene editing and Huila, they're back to life. They say
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  Speaker 1: they want to do the same with the Mare and
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  Speaker 1: Sir Peter Jackson. Ben Lamb is the chief executive and
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  Speaker 1: co founder. Morning Ben, Hey, how's it going very well?
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  Speaker 1: Thank you? So are you really going to bring back
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  Speaker 1: the More or are you going to bring back something
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  Speaker 1: that's kind of like the More but not quite the More?
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  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, yeah, we're going to bring back the More,
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  Speaker 2: just like we brought back the dire Wolves, and we're
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  Speaker 2: working on Mamamos and Dodos as well.
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  Speaker 1: But they're not You're not actually bringing back the mall,
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  Speaker 1: aren't you. Like with the wolves, it's a gray wolf
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  Speaker 1: that has some characteristics of what.
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  Speaker 2: Has the genes, So it has the genes that are
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  Speaker 2: specific to that of the Direwolf that made a Darwolf Darrewolf,
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  Speaker 2: and so there's about sixty thousand years of genetic divergence
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  Speaker 2: between our two darwl samples and we have about five
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  Speaker 2: hundred times more data than anyone's ever had on dar wolves.
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  Speaker 2: And so what we do at KLAS, because we're a
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  Speaker 2: geno engineering company, is think of us about think of
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  Speaker 2: it as like rebuilding extinct species for today. Right. So,
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  Speaker 2: I don't know if you've seen Jurassic Park. We occasionally
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  Speaker 2: get that reference, but it's just like Jurassic Park that
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  Speaker 2: in that regard. So we identify the core genes that
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  Speaker 2: make some mammo at, the mammoth, the Maha moa, direwolf, darwolf,
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  Speaker 2: and we engineer them into their closest living relatives. There's
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  Speaker 2: actually more genetic distance between our two dire wolves than
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  Speaker 2: there are from our most recent direwolf, which was Tallved
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  Speaker 2: one thousand, five hundred years ago and today's modern wolf.
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  Speaker 2: And so that's how evolution works. There's a lot of
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  Speaker 2: things that are called fixed mutations that drive core phenotypes
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  Speaker 2: or physical attributes, and those are the things that.
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  Speaker 1: We identifyin when we picture a moa, I'm picturing it,
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  Speaker 1: you know, a seven major total giant bird running through
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  Speaker 1: the night of forest of New Zealand. Is that what
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  Speaker 1: we'll get?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, So, I mean it will have all the core
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  Speaker 2: phenom types that are driven by the core genes that
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  Speaker 2: made a moha moa. Now there's as you probably know,
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  Speaker 2: there's nine species of.
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  Speaker 1: Moa A small one yeah.
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  Speaker 2: No, no, no, we're focusing on the South Island giant moa.
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  Speaker 2: So the first one, which was the biggest puh. So
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  Speaker 2: that's the one that we're starting with. And then if
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  Speaker 2: the you know, New Zealand people, other groups of the
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  Speaker 2: Malory people as well as the government want us to
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  Speaker 2: work on other moa species, we'd be open to it.
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  Speaker 2: But right now we're working at the Knightahu Research Center
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  Speaker 2: and specifically the South Island.
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  Speaker 1: Gianmo okay, and how long before we could see it
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  Speaker 1: running around the bush again.
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  Speaker 2: So I think it'll be a ten year project. It's
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  Speaker 2: a hard project. It's not quite as hard as some
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  Speaker 2: of our other projects, but it is a very hard project.
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  Speaker 2: You know, there's not great DNA, there's not been great samples.
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  Speaker 2: We've now gone through and sampled, you know, over one
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  Speaker 2: hundred different bones or sorry, two hundred different bones, and
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  Speaker 2: so we're now collecting those additional samples. And the first
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  Speaker 2: thing that we do is to collect the ancient DNA
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  Speaker 2: and then we have to map it all. We have
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  Speaker 2: to do genetic reconstruction of the ancient genos and then
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  Speaker 2: map it to the close little relatives in a different
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  Speaker 2: and we do a ton of genome sequencing, like in
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  Speaker 2: the case the dire wolves, people mistakenly thought the dire
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  Speaker 2: wolves were close related to jackals than they were wolves.
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  Speaker 2: Once we go through the process of understanding the genomes,
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  Speaker 2: we can actually understand specifically where they fall filo genetically.
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  Speaker 2: So there's a lot of really great data that comes
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  Speaker 2: out of this from an educational perspective in terms of
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  Speaker 2: like where animals actually sit in this this tree of life.
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  Speaker 2: And so that is the phase that we're into the project. Now.
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  Speaker 2: As we get through that phase, will then identify kind
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  Speaker 2: of like what the genetic donor will be and then
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  Speaker 2: so who were we start from an editing perspective, and
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  Speaker 2: then we'll start editing from there.
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  Speaker 1: All right, being sounds like you've got a lot on
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  Speaker 1: your hands, we'll let you get into it. That's been
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  Speaker 1: Lamb from Colossal Bioscience. That's the CEO and co founder for.
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  Speaker 2: More fam Early edition with Ryan Bridge. Listen live to
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