Latest / Luke's English Podcast / De-mything the hype around de-extinction

Transcript

De-mything the hype around de-extinction · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Hey, Tim. Hey, how are you doing?
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, good, thanks. Sorry for just calling you out the blue,
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: but given your expertise about wolves and I just, yeah,
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: I've been seeing all this stuff about Colossal. It's all
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: over my, you know, all over my blue sky feed
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: on Insta and this idea of, yeah, what they're saying
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: about dire wolves coming back. What are your thoughts?
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Well, first of all, Colossal's a company that's, I think
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: it was valued at something like 8 million pounds earlier
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: in the year in January, 8 billion, sorry, 8 billion.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: And it got a lot of investment, believe it or not,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: from Hollywood when they came out from, and they, what
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: their plan was, what they, they kind of, their, their
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: aim was to do what's called de-extinction. So that's, that's
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: bringing animals back from the dead. And I have to admit,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I kind of thought when I heard about it, I
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: thought what, what the sort of thing they were planning
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: on doing is, is every now and again, you'll find
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: actually quite, you know, quite well preserved animals like mammoths
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: have died and have been frozen in permafrost. And then
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: they come up to the surface, you know, as it
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: melts or just kind of by, by the movement of soil.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: And sometimes you even hear about like wolves, modern day
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: wolves stumbling across an old mammoth and, Eating them, they're
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: so well preserved. So you can get DNA out of
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: them and you can do some pretty good deep sequencing,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: deep read sequencing. So I always thought their aim had
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: been to try and put together a genome of... mammoths
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: and then put it into something like an elephant egg
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: and then gestate that in an elephant. That was always
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: going to be hard because still the DNA would have fractured.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: You know, we talked to those Oxford-Neneport people and getting
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the long reads would be hard. But I thought that
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: was kind of one of the things they're aiming to do.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: But what they've kind of announced today is a little
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: bit or yesterday is a little bit different. So do
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: you want me to go and kind of talk you
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: through that?
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because it's your area of expertise. And I'm,
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: you know, as a chemist, I'm a bit lost with
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: it also. Yeah, thank you.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: So what they've been able to do is they have
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: been able to get some, you know, do sequencing of
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: remains of dire wolves. So dire wolves were a species
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: that separated from modern day wolves, grey wolves, about eight
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: million years ago, six to eight million years ago, something
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: like that. And they evolved from a type of dog.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: So they're not particularly closely related to wolves, but they
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: they they're a little bit larger and they looked similar.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: So it's a case of convergent evolution where, you know,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: evolution's kind of produced two things that look pretty similar.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: And a lot of canid species, so a lot of
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: dog species, and I think Gregor talked about this on
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: the domestication podcast, they'll actually hybridize with one another. And
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: so the idea is that if you were able to
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: take some genes from a dire wolf and spice them
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: into a dog, with any luck, the resulting embryos would
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: be viable and would survive. And so what Colossal have
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: done is they.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: Have the characteristics of then both both the parents and
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: that would be passed on to to the offspring.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's exactly the the hope. I mean, we
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: need to see how selection would operate on that novel
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: genetic variation. So what they've done is they've been able
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: to get they've been able to get some handful of genes,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: a small number of genes that were in dire wolves. But,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: you know, weren't in, you know, weren't found or genetic
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: variants that weren't found in gray wolves and they've been
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: able to splice them in. And they're sort of looking
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: at skull morphology and coat color. These are the things
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: they've been playing with. And so they've been able to
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: do that. And it's quite clever technology, really, to be
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: able to take a gene from an extinct animal and
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: to be able to put it into the genome of
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: a living animal, the gray wolf. And then, so it's
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: genetic engineering in that sense. And then to be able
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: to produce an offspring. And there's, I think, three pups
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: that have been born and survived. They're being kept somewhere
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: secret in the US. The photos have been released. But
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: they're what's I think, you know, and so that's quite
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: a clever thing to have done. They've brought some extinct
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: genes back. Whether they should do it or not is
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: another question. And we'll talk to people.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: Have they not watched Jurassic Park?
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, exactly. But of course, we do do genetic
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: engineering of plants and bacteria. And so normally we're just
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: taking a gene from one organism and putting it into another.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: What's novel here is they're taking a gene from an
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: extinct organism and put it into a living one. And
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: these animals do have some characteristics of dire wolves. So
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: they deliberately targeted genes. And this is the clever bit,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: genes that they've worked out how they will influence the
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: way the organism develops. So they've They've done that, and
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: these things do look a little bit like dire wolves,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: but they're not dire wolves. I mean, they're clearly not
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: dire wolves. They're grey wolves that have been modified to
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: look a little bit like dire wolves looked.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so basically, genetically, they're largely, they're almost completely grey wolf,
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: and then they have a few genes in them from
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: dire wolves. And I guess that then sort of, in
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: a way, opens up the question of at what point...
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: You know, what's the crossover point? At what point is
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: it a, you know, how much of dire wolf genes
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: would it have to incorporate for us to then say
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: that now that's more dire wolf than grey wolf?
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Well, presumably you need to find out all of those
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: places in the genome where there are differences, because obviously
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: they'll share a lot of their genome. And then to
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: have it more of those variable loci, you probably need
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: 50% dire wolf ones or more to be able to
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: say it's more dire wolf than grey wolf. And actually,
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: one of the people that, you know, we'll try and
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: talk to some people next week who've got some expertise
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: on that, and we'll see if we can find someone
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: who's been working in this area. But I think the argument,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: so I think there's what's happened and kind of what's
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: all over social media at the moment is, One, it's
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: a remarkable thing that they've done. There's no doubt about that. Two,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: they're overselling it to my mind. They're not dire wolves.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: They're clearly not dire wolves. They're grey wolves that look
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: a little bit like dire wolves. The question is, do
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: they sort of fulfill the ecological function that dire wolves fill?
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: So perhaps they're a little bit better. Perhaps they would
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: be a little bit better at killing large animals like
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: bison than, say, grey wolves are or something along those lines.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: So you're creating something that might have an ecological function.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: And is that something we should be doing, um, or,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: or not? The other side of the argument is that creating,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: they're making freaks of nature. And, um, And I suppose
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I think we know how to do it. And one
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: of these quotes, you'll see this quote from Jurassic Park
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: that's going around. It's like, you know, you were too
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: focused on can we do it rather than should we
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: do it? I think that was Jeff Goldblum's character. And
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: I don't think that discussion has necessarily happened yet. So
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: it's a really interesting breakthrough. And I'm looking, hopefully we'll
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: try and get some people on next week and we'll
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: do a deeper dive.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Great. Thanks, Tim. That's really helped, actually. Yeah. And as always,
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: nice to hear from you. And to get some, yeah,
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: I really do struggle with the sort of bigger biology.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: So thank you.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: What would be interesting is to know what the proteins
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: are and what they look like and how they fold.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: You know, all of the science stuff that we kind
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: of talk about is kind of linked, which is kind
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: of fun, isn't it?
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're beginning to link all the bits all from
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: molecules all the way to organisms and then, you know,
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: to ecology. It's exciting.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Cool. Well, have a good day. I better get
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: back to work. And nice to see you. And we'll
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: talk soon.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: Take care. Bye. Bye.