Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 075: Cloning Mammoths

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Ep. 075: Cloning Mammoths · The MeatEater Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
0:13
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
0:18
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. Okay, we're recording in the you see
0:27
Speaker 1: Santa Cruz, which is which I found I've been. I've
0:31
Speaker 1: been in a lot of campuses in my life. I
0:33
Speaker 1: guess I was gonna say I haven't been on many,
0:34
Speaker 1: but I've been on a ton of them. This is
0:35
Speaker 1: the most gorgeous campus I've ever been to. It's pretty amazing.
0:38
Speaker 1: Did you happen to see any e walks on your
0:40
Speaker 1: way out? No, but I was. It was like, It's
0:41
Speaker 1: funny because driving in here, I was thinking I was
0:46
Speaker 1: about to form the sentence to Janice that this is
0:49
Speaker 1: like a Star Wars set, and then yeah, like interrupted
0:52
Speaker 1: my thought to comment about a Star Wars set quality.
0:56
Speaker 1: My youngest child calls it the e walk for us.
0:57
Speaker 1: We come up and he goes, it's the book forest. Yeah,
1:02
Speaker 1: it's like it's got to be good for your brain
1:06
Speaker 1: to be around these trees. I feel like I could
1:08
Speaker 1: be hopeful about that. Yeah, all right, No, I think
1:11
Speaker 1: it is. Next time students come up here saying if
1:14
Speaker 1: this is a good place for them to come to school,
1:15
Speaker 1: and I'll try to give him that line. These trees
1:19
Speaker 1: are good for your brain. And you're hearing the voice
1:22
Speaker 1: of Dr Beth Shapiro. Who is who deal? Okay, I
1:29
Speaker 1: don't let her tell you what she is who. I
1:31
Speaker 1: know her from the fact that she deals with what's
1:35
Speaker 1: called ancient d n A. And if you follow wildlife
1:42
Speaker 1: conservation and wildlife politics, I think that you will in
1:46
Speaker 1: your lifetime here a lot you'll hear that term ancient
1:49
Speaker 1: d n A, And in surrounding conversations around it, you'll
1:53
Speaker 1: hear that progressively more and more, to the point where
1:59
Speaker 1: when you grow old and die, it might just be
2:01
Speaker 1: like a fact of life that it may be transformed
2:04
Speaker 1: our understanding of That's really great. I'm really intrigued to
2:09
Speaker 1: hear you say that you know ancient DNA isn't isn't
2:13
Speaker 1: something that most people have heard of. And while my
2:16
Speaker 1: motivation for doing this is to be able to learn
2:18
Speaker 1: something that's useful for conservation by a diversity conservation, I
2:22
Speaker 1: think a lot of times people think of it as
2:24
Speaker 1: a way to learn about history, particularly human history. I'm
2:27
Speaker 1: most interested in animals, but I'm pleased to hear you
2:30
Speaker 1: say that you think there's a place for this, and yeah,
2:32
Speaker 1: well maybe let me let me let me all to that.
2:34
Speaker 1: Because let's say that that you have a technology, and
2:37
Speaker 1: you have a technology like the internal combustion engine. Now
2:40
Speaker 1: no one talks about the internal combustion engine, but they
2:43
Speaker 1: most definitely talk about the creations built around that, right, Okay,
2:49
Speaker 1: So um, instead of building it all up and talking
2:53
Speaker 1: about how important it's going to wind up being, we
2:55
Speaker 1: should talk about what it is and can you you're
2:58
Speaker 1: probably good at this by now, can you like sketch
3:00
Speaker 1: out what ancient DNA is the fields where it's being applied, okay,
3:08
Speaker 1: particular to wildlife, and what are some things that's taught us,
3:13
Speaker 1: What are some things, what are some areas where the
3:17
Speaker 1: work done around ancient DNA has has challenged or added
3:22
Speaker 1: to our assumptions about our world? All right, there's a
3:27
Speaker 1: there's a lot there, and even me a lot of room.
3:29
Speaker 1: But I think what I'll start with is probably something
3:32
Speaker 1: that we can come back to later on. So I'm
3:33
Speaker 1: going to start with a teaser about what I hope
3:36
Speaker 1: ancient DNA can do for wildlife conservations, and then we
3:39
Speaker 1: can turn back around and go to the beginning and
3:41
Speaker 1: talk more about ancient DNA and the origins of the
3:43
Speaker 1: field and how it came about and what else has
3:45
Speaker 1: been applied to. So imagine that you are trying to
3:48
Speaker 1: protect the last of a particular species um and this
3:53
Speaker 1: species is not doing well because the habitat that it
3:56
Speaker 1: lives in is disappearing. The climate is changing. Maybe it's
3:58
Speaker 1: a bit too warm for it, or maybe it's getting
4:00
Speaker 1: a bit cold. Maybe there's just something different about today's
4:03
Speaker 1: climate that is affecting this animal and the animals in
4:08
Speaker 1: particular trouble because its population has been small for a
4:11
Speaker 1: long time, and because it's been small for a long time,
4:14
Speaker 1: it's lost a lot of genetic diversity. A good example
4:17
Speaker 1: of this right now is the black footed ferret. So,
4:19
Speaker 1: the black footed ferret is a species that we thought
4:22
Speaker 1: was extinct, but then a population, the surviving population was discovered.
4:27
Speaker 1: It turned up on a rancher's doorstep and Matit Wyoming, Wyoming. Good.
4:32
Speaker 1: You know more about this than I do I know
4:34
Speaker 1: about the DNA. A guy, Yeah, guy in in Martz.
4:37
Speaker 1: A guy in Matitz, Wyoming. Um, As I understand it.
4:41
Speaker 1: One day, his dog is standing there with a black
4:44
Speaker 1: footed ferret that's amazing, and he went out to try
4:48
Speaker 1: to find what the animal was and it turned out
4:52
Speaker 1: that um, they were not in fact gone, They were
4:57
Speaker 1: not gone, so but they are in trouble. And this
5:01
Speaker 1: is a problem with black footed farets. So they were
5:03
Speaker 1: very small population for quite a long time, and they
5:05
Speaker 1: have almost no genetic diversity, and they're threatened in the
5:08
Speaker 1: wild today because while they can breathe them, there are
5:12
Speaker 1: nice captive breeding facilities that can produce lots of black
5:14
Speaker 1: footed farets. As soon as they've released them into the wild,
5:16
Speaker 1: they get sick and they die. Can can you just
5:19
Speaker 1: a whole because when you hear I think people often say,
5:22
Speaker 1: like no genetic diversity, But is there a way to
5:23
Speaker 1: put it? Is there a way to put it in
5:26
Speaker 1: human terms where you imagine is it as bad as
5:29
Speaker 1: if you only had one family? Yes, like you had
5:33
Speaker 1: a mother, father, two daughters, two sons, and they needed
5:39
Speaker 1: to recolonize and that was it. And then the daughters
5:42
Speaker 1: had to breed with their brothers or with their fathers
5:44
Speaker 1: literally like literally literally siblings breeding with siblings or extreme inbreeding,
5:49
Speaker 1: extreme inbreeding, and it's bad for the population. And and
5:52
Speaker 1: you know this population is doing okay, and that it
5:56
Speaker 1: can survive in captive environments where it's not exposed to
5:59
Speaker 1: any sort of allunges. But as soon as they're released
6:01
Speaker 1: into the wild, this inbreeding shows up as something that
6:05
Speaker 1: causes them to not be able to survive. It shows
6:08
Speaker 1: up behaviorally, it shows up behaviorally probably, but in the
6:13
Speaker 1: case of the blackfooted ferrets, it shows up because they
6:15
Speaker 1: have no resistance to the diseases that are actually circulating
6:18
Speaker 1: in a wild, so they're they're not able to survive
6:21
Speaker 1: as they get infected. So one of the most diverse
6:23
Speaker 1: parts of our genome of any species genome, is what's
6:26
Speaker 1: called the major histamine complex NHC. It creates the proteins
6:31
Speaker 1: and enzymes in our body that allow us to fight diseases.
6:34
Speaker 1: And we're very different. Everybody is very different. We have
6:36
Speaker 1: lots of different circulating alleles or variants in our population,
6:40
Speaker 1: and this is so that you know, the more diversity
6:43
Speaker 1: we have, the more um diversity of diseases that we
6:47
Speaker 1: are potentially able to fight off. And so it's good
6:51
Speaker 1: for a population and for an individual to have lots
6:53
Speaker 1: of diversity at these alleles, and these black footed ferrets
6:56
Speaker 1: and other species that go through these what's called population
6:59
Speaker 1: bottle X, where you have a very small population size
7:02
Speaker 1: for a long time and you lose a lot of
7:03
Speaker 1: your diversity, become um completely lacking in diversity at this
7:07
Speaker 1: really important part of the genome. So here's where I'm
7:10
Speaker 1: going with ancient DNA. Imagine that you could find a
7:14
Speaker 1: bone or some tissue from blackfooted ferrets that lived before
7:19
Speaker 1: they went through this population bottleneck. So these would have
7:22
Speaker 1: been individuals that are no longer alive. Maybe they lived
7:25
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, maybe they lived thousands of years ago,
7:28
Speaker 1: but they have diversity in their genome that used to
7:31
Speaker 1: be there, that used to be able to help this
7:33
Speaker 1: population to fight disease. If we could get that information
7:38
Speaker 1: sequence their DNA, grind up a bit of that bone
7:41
Speaker 1: and extract the DNA sequences that are preserved in that bone,
7:45
Speaker 1: or in the case of blackfooted ferrets, that are actually
7:47
Speaker 1: preserved tissue specimens from individuals that lived a couple of
7:51
Speaker 1: decades ago that are in what's called the frozen Zoo
7:53
Speaker 1: in San Diego. So we can a couple of decades.
7:57
Speaker 1: A couple of decades ago in this case is enough.
7:59
Speaker 1: In other species, it depend some when your bottleneck was
8:01
Speaker 1: So for blackfooted ferrets, the bottleneck was relatively recently. For
8:04
Speaker 1: American buffalo the bottleneck was thirteen thousand years ago. So
8:07
Speaker 1: you would need older individuals to be able to see
8:11
Speaker 1: what the diversity in the past look like, because that's
8:15
Speaker 1: that's surprising to hear. But I know you're interested in bison.
8:21
Speaker 1: But so we can go back and we can sequence
8:24
Speaker 1: the DNA from these older individuals that have this diversity,
8:28
Speaker 1: learn what that diversity used to look like, and then
8:31
Speaker 1: use genome engineering technologies to cut and paste the no
8:35
Speaker 1: diversity region of individuals genomes today living individuals and paste
8:40
Speaker 1: in its place, uh synthetic version of the sequences that
8:44
Speaker 1: used to exist in that population. And in doing so,
8:47
Speaker 1: you have modified the genomes of a living organism in
8:50
Speaker 1: a way that gives them a fighting chance to survive. Today.
8:53
Speaker 1: You haven't brought back the extinct thing. You have used
8:56
Speaker 1: gene sequences that are extinct from the same species to
9:01
Speaker 1: bolster the immunity or potentially help this species to survive.
9:05
Speaker 1: And this this is one example, but this is where
9:09
Speaker 1: I really see the power and the potential of this
9:11
Speaker 1: sort of technology. The idea that we can look at
9:15
Speaker 1: DNA sequences in the past. Let's say we want to
9:18
Speaker 1: create an animal that's more able to survive somewhere cold
9:20
Speaker 1: or somewhere hot if we can identify an extinct species
9:23
Speaker 1: or a close relative that used to be alive, that
9:26
Speaker 1: has a gene sequence that might be able to cause,
9:29
Speaker 1: for example, the idea of bringing mammoths back to life.
9:33
Speaker 1: And you and you, I'll point out, you have a
9:35
Speaker 1: book how to Clone a Mammoth. Yes, so this is
9:37
Speaker 1: something that I've been thinking about a lot, and a
9:40
Speaker 1: sub doesn't A subtitle could be how to clone a mammoth?
9:44
Speaker 1: Um all the reasons why you might want to and
9:48
Speaker 1: might might not want to. I think the subtitle is
9:52
Speaker 1: actually this science of de extinction or something. But I
9:55
Speaker 1: have been suggested several several better subtitles. I think my
9:59
Speaker 1: favorite was, um, why cloning a mammoth? Or why how
10:05
Speaker 1: cloning a mammoth? Might be? No, I'm trying to think
10:08
Speaker 1: of what the best one was that was suggested with
10:09
Speaker 1: my friend of mine. It was like, if you have
10:12
Speaker 1: limited ethics, a billion dollars and a mammoth, that that
10:18
Speaker 1: opens it up. That always what I was trying to
10:20
Speaker 1: what I was trying to suggest about it. But but anyway,
10:23
Speaker 1: they I mean, we can talk about this later, but
10:26
Speaker 1: I'm going to use it as an example because I mean,
10:27
Speaker 1: it's very easy to think through. So if you have
10:29
Speaker 1: an elephant, this is something that's adapted to living in
10:31
Speaker 1: the tropics. Um. The tropics is not a place that's
10:34
Speaker 1: really conducive to elephants living right now. Let's say we
10:37
Speaker 1: wanted to create an elephant that is able to survive
10:40
Speaker 1: somewhere colder, not conducive for human reasons, for human reasons,
10:44
Speaker 1: because of because of rampant poaching development, yeah, influx of
10:49
Speaker 1: a like pastoral agriculturalists. Right. And and I should say
10:54
Speaker 1: right up front that I am not advocating creating mammoths
10:57
Speaker 1: that can live in the cold as an alternative to
11:00
Speaker 1: trying to fix the terrible situation that Asian elephants and
11:04
Speaker 1: African elephants are in right now. I think that this
11:07
Speaker 1: is just an alternate pathway that potentially should be followed
11:10
Speaker 1: at the same time as existing conservation efforts. UM, But
11:14
Speaker 1: it is something that I think we should consider. It's
11:16
Speaker 1: not possible to do it yet, but there's no reason
11:20
Speaker 1: to turn to say no to a technology before we
11:23
Speaker 1: know what's actually feasible because we're a little bit scared
11:26
Speaker 1: about the ecological and ethical consequences of of doing it.
11:30
Speaker 1: These are things that we need to think through very clearly. However,
11:33
Speaker 1: stepping away from the ethics and of and morality of
11:37
Speaker 1: this right now, and we will come back to this,
11:39
Speaker 1: but I'm just trying to explain the technology here. Let's
11:41
Speaker 1: say we can go and sequence the genome of a mammoth.
11:44
Speaker 1: Mammoths and Asian elephants are very closely related to each other.
11:48
Speaker 1: They shared a common ancestors sometime in the last five
11:50
Speaker 1: million years, so that really closely related to each other.
11:53
Speaker 1: You pointed out that there's, uh, there's a the difference
11:57
Speaker 1: between an Asian elephant in a wooly man ammoth is
12:01
Speaker 1: about are similar to the difference between humans and chimps.
12:05
Speaker 1: That's right, About one percent of the genome sequence is different.
12:09
Speaker 1: I told that to your friend and he said, uh, yeah,
12:12
Speaker 1: but that's the that's the percent that gave us Mozart.
12:16
Speaker 1: It's probably true, and that's the one percent that we're
12:19
Speaker 1: thinking about the difference between mammoths and elephants. If what
12:24
Speaker 1: we want to do is figure out what it is
12:25
Speaker 1: that made mammoths which is an elephant able to survive
12:29
Speaker 1: in the cold, and we want to be able to
12:31
Speaker 1: create an elephant that that is able to survive in
12:33
Speaker 1: a colder environment. If we could identify those important parts
12:37
Speaker 1: of mammoth that are different and then cut and paste
12:39
Speaker 1: those into an elephant genome, could we create not a mammoth,
12:43
Speaker 1: but an elephant that can live somewhere that's colder, that
12:46
Speaker 1: can eat this same diet, that can somehow protect itself
12:49
Speaker 1: from these cold winters, so that we can potentially find
12:52
Speaker 1: a place to put elephants while we are trying to
12:56
Speaker 1: solve the problems that are that are ongoing in there
12:59
Speaker 1: exists environment. Can I pause you there to have you
13:01
Speaker 1: explained a couple of things real quick. Um, you're saying, though,
13:07
Speaker 1: like just based on even with some future projecting, you're saying,
13:11
Speaker 1: we will not no matter how journalist frame news that
13:15
Speaker 1: comes from your world, we will not make a mammoth.
13:19
Speaker 1: We will not bring back a living, breathing mammoth. Is
13:24
Speaker 1: just a continuation of the mammoths that we're there. I
13:27
Speaker 1: think that this is something that is really important for
13:30
Speaker 1: people to understand, is that once a species is extinct,
13:34
Speaker 1: it is gone. This is not a solution to the
13:37
Speaker 1: extinction crisis. De extinction this is the term that people
13:41
Speaker 1: are using too to refer to bringing something that's extinct
13:44
Speaker 1: back to life. Is it's an idea that is shaped
13:48
Speaker 1: more by imagination than by reality. It's very romantic to
13:52
Speaker 1: think of the I think that you might be able
13:54
Speaker 1: to bring something back that's been gone for a long time.
13:56
Speaker 1: But there are people who the scientific reality is there
14:00
Speaker 1: are ones that try to do it, who kick around
14:02
Speaker 1: ideas it's gone, the ideas. If you dig into these
14:06
Speaker 1: ideas though, it's it's not. It's not that. It's not
14:09
Speaker 1: that you're going to bring something back that is identical
14:12
Speaker 1: to something that's gone. It's that you're going to be
14:15
Speaker 1: able to recreate components of those organisms. You could bring
14:18
Speaker 1: back traits. You could move genes from a mammoth into
14:22
Speaker 1: an elephant. Potentially, we don't know how to do that yet.
14:25
Speaker 1: We can move genes from mammoth sequences that we generate
14:29
Speaker 1: from bones into cells of elephants that are growing in
14:32
Speaker 1: petrie dishes and labs, but we can't then turn those
14:36
Speaker 1: cells into some hybrid between a mammoth and an elephant.
14:40
Speaker 1: So what would you need if you were going to
14:41
Speaker 1: create an exact replica of a species that's extinct, you
14:45
Speaker 1: would need it's a DNA sequence. We can do that.
14:48
Speaker 1: For for a mammoth, there are incredibly well preserved bones.
14:53
Speaker 1: You mean that map its entire genome. Yeah. So the
14:56
Speaker 1: way we do that in angel DNA kind of getting
14:58
Speaker 1: back to this, is we collect these bones. The best
15:00
Speaker 1: preserved bones are frozen in the Arctic soil called parmafrost,
15:04
Speaker 1: and mostly they've been de fleshed, probably by something like
15:07
Speaker 1: a lion or a big bear, and so the bone
15:09
Speaker 1: doesn't have any tissue on it. It It gets buried in
15:11
Speaker 1: the soil and rapidly frozen. And you spend time including
15:15
Speaker 1: this that you spend some you spend field seasons up
15:20
Speaker 1: actually like physically look at like actually looking for bones
15:22
Speaker 1: sticking out of the ground. Yep, I do. It's good
15:25
Speaker 1: fun too. I recommend it. Yeah. Um. But you can
15:29
Speaker 1: take these bones and you can take a chunk out
15:32
Speaker 1: of them with a drum will drill or something like that,
15:33
Speaker 1: and you grind it up into a fine powder and
15:35
Speaker 1: then you can dissolve away all the components that aren't
15:38
Speaker 1: the DNA, so the tissue and the actual bone. You
15:40
Speaker 1: dissolve it away, and then you can chemically and somatically
15:43
Speaker 1: pull out the DNA. So the DNA that we get
15:46
Speaker 1: out of those bones is not in good shape. This
15:48
Speaker 1: is one of the important things to remember. If I
15:50
Speaker 1: were to take a swab Q tip in the inside
15:53
Speaker 1: of my cheek or spit in the tube like you
15:55
Speaker 1: do when you send something off to one of these
15:57
Speaker 1: companies that sends you your DNA sequence, you can get
16:00
Speaker 1: really long fragments of DNA. Our genomes have about three
16:04
Speaker 1: billion nucleotides bases, these A, C, S, G S, and
16:07
Speaker 1: T s that make up the the sequence that has
16:10
Speaker 1: the genes that make the proteins that make us look
16:12
Speaker 1: and act the way we do. And we can get
16:15
Speaker 1: millions of them, strings of millions in a row from
16:17
Speaker 1: a living person, of living piece of tissue. But the
16:20
Speaker 1: bones that we get out of the Arctic, the DNA
16:23
Speaker 1: in them is chopped up into tiny fragments. And this
16:26
Speaker 1: happens first because once an organism dies, there are enzymes
16:30
Speaker 1: in their own body that chop up DNA. These exist
16:33
Speaker 1: because if you eat a piece of meat, where you
16:35
Speaker 1: eat a leaf of a plant, you don't want that
16:37
Speaker 1: DNA to stay really big and long and powerful. In
16:39
Speaker 1: your body, you've get enzymes that chew that up and
16:41
Speaker 1: make it go away, and that happens to your own
16:43
Speaker 1: tissue when cells burst, When cells die, and life chops
16:46
Speaker 1: up your DNA so that you can get rid of it.
16:48
Speaker 1: That happens post mortem as well. And then there are
16:52
Speaker 1: things like bacteria and fung gui that will get into
16:56
Speaker 1: these bones and the tissue remains when they're decaying, and
16:58
Speaker 1: they will also chop up that DNA. They consume all
17:01
Speaker 1: this kind of carbon material for food. And then the sun.
17:05
Speaker 1: You know, you go outside and you're supposed to wear
17:07
Speaker 1: sun block, and that's because the ultra violet radiation will
17:10
Speaker 1: hit your cells and break your DNA. Now, when you're alive,
17:13
Speaker 1: you have proof reading enzymes that will go along and
17:15
Speaker 1: fix those those bits of damage that the UVY radiation
17:19
Speaker 1: causes so that you don't get skin cancer every time
17:22
Speaker 1: you walk outside. But once you're dead, those proofitting enzymes
17:26
Speaker 1: are not doing their job anymore, and the UV radiation
17:29
Speaker 1: and other sorts of radiation will continue to hit the
17:31
Speaker 1: cells and break down the DNA, so that the end
17:33
Speaker 1: result there is that pretty soon after death, the DNA
17:36
Speaker 1: is no longer in long strands. It's in really short,
17:39
Speaker 1: chopped up strands, and after time they just getting get
17:42
Speaker 1: smaller and smaller and smaller and small. And you say
17:43
Speaker 1: pretty soon after death, the first pretty soon means like
17:47
Speaker 1: within years. First pretty soon means within minutes, and the
17:51
Speaker 1: second pretty soon we're talking tens of thousands of years there.
17:54
Speaker 1: It depends on environment. So if something were to die
17:57
Speaker 1: and sit in the sun in Arizona today it's supposed
17:59
Speaker 1: to be hunter twenty degrees in Arizona, probably we would
18:02
Speaker 1: get no good recoverable DNA tomorrow, right, Um, but I
18:08
Speaker 1: don't all that because stuff decase. Also, you'll have really
18:11
Speaker 1: rapid microbial activity when it's things are rotting in the
18:14
Speaker 1: sun like that. So maybe you could get DNA tomorrow
18:16
Speaker 1: is probably an exaggeration, but certainly within a couple of days.
18:19
Speaker 1: It would be very hard to get recover good quality
18:21
Speaker 1: DNA from these things. If something dies, it's that volatile. Yeah, Well,
18:26
Speaker 1: it depends on microbial activity, so and also the sun
18:30
Speaker 1: and temperature. So things decay faster when it's hot, and
18:34
Speaker 1: when the temperature fluctuates, a lot of things decay. If
18:37
Speaker 1: you think about ideal temperatures for stuff to break stuff down.
18:42
Speaker 1: I mean when you want to when you're cooking something,
18:44
Speaker 1: you want to get it above a particular temperature, and
18:46
Speaker 1: that's not the temperature of like your normal ambient temperature
18:49
Speaker 1: and Phoenix, Arizona today, right, it's so you don't the
18:53
Speaker 1: all the microbes will just multiply at some point, can
18:56
Speaker 1: cause a lot of microbial life forms, and you get
18:58
Speaker 1: sick when you eat stuff. So you eat I wanted
19:00
Speaker 1: to stay cold and frozen, or you wanted to be
19:02
Speaker 1: really hot, like cooked. And if it's really hot and cooked,
19:05
Speaker 1: you're destroying all the DNA, all the living material. But
19:07
Speaker 1: if it's cold and frozen, then you're slowing down the decay,
19:10
Speaker 1: just like sticking your steak in the freezer so that
19:12
Speaker 1: it lasts for an extra couple of In those cases,
19:16
Speaker 1: like when you when you find a well preserved mammoth
19:20
Speaker 1: coming out of the permafrost, it probably so that thing
19:23
Speaker 1: probably died in sub freezing conditions. Yes, yes, uh maybe,
19:30
Speaker 1: I mean when when these animals died during the summer.
19:32
Speaker 1: In the summer in the Arctic, it can be you know,
19:34
Speaker 1: sixty seventy degrees during the day, but those ones and
19:37
Speaker 1: those ones could still potentially be preserved. Could be because
19:40
Speaker 1: the the sediment, the dirt in the ground is very cold,
19:45
Speaker 1: and if it gets buried right away in volcanic dust
19:48
Speaker 1: or whatever, then these the remains of these animals will
19:51
Speaker 1: will preserve for a long time. The oldest DNA that
19:53
Speaker 1: we've ever recovered was from a bone that we found
19:57
Speaker 1: in permafrost in the Yukon territory, and it was associated
20:02
Speaker 1: with a volcanic ash layer that we think is around
20:05
Speaker 1: seven hundred thousand years old. So we're estimating that that
20:08
Speaker 1: is the age of this horse bone. It's also the
20:10
Speaker 1: oldest frozen dirt that anyone has ever known. So that
20:14
Speaker 1: horse bone, that horse lived around seven hundred thousand years ago.
20:18
Speaker 1: It died, its bones were immediately buried and frozen, and
20:22
Speaker 1: we're kept in that freezer, that dirt freezer, for the
20:25
Speaker 1: last seven hundred thousand years, and that's the only reason
20:27
Speaker 1: we were able to recover DNA from that bone. And
20:30
Speaker 1: the DNA was in terrible condition. The longest fragments were
20:33
Speaker 1: thirty or forty letters long. Remember I said, so that's
20:36
Speaker 1: where you're going saying, we have them that are a million, millions,
20:39
Speaker 1: millions or millions or million long millions. Yes, we can
20:42
Speaker 1: do millions, but because you said three billion total. Yeah,
20:50
Speaker 1: so it depends you can get very large fragments of DNA.
20:54
Speaker 1: How large this depends on how good you are at
20:56
Speaker 1: extracting what's called high molecular weight DNA, and there are
21:00
Speaker 1: hits that you can purchase in different approaches you can
21:02
Speaker 1: use to get larger and larger fragments. Were limited by
21:04
Speaker 1: technology in living things rather than by the actual size
21:08
Speaker 1: of the DNA, whereas an ancient DNA you're limited by
21:11
Speaker 1: the actual size of the surviving fragments of DNA. Our
21:14
Speaker 1: technology would allow us to get larger fragments if they existed,
21:18
Speaker 1: they just don't. And why is this important? Why are
21:20
Speaker 1: we having such a long conversation about this. It's important
21:23
Speaker 1: because an elephant genome, a mammoth genome is about four
21:27
Speaker 1: billion letters long, and if we have thirty letter fragments,
21:31
Speaker 1: we it's kind of like having a trillion zillion piece
21:35
Speaker 1: puzzle and we don't know what a mammoth genome actually
21:40
Speaker 1: looks like. So we're taking these tiny little puzzle pieces
21:43
Speaker 1: and we're trying to figure out where in the elephant
21:46
Speaker 1: genome they go. So you've got your massive trillion piece puzzle,
21:51
Speaker 1: and the box top is actually not the picture of
21:55
Speaker 1: the puzzle that you're trying to put together. Some close
21:58
Speaker 1: but not exactly the right picture. And there's another problem,
22:02
Speaker 1: and that is that, remember I said that there were
22:03
Speaker 1: all these bacteria and fungui and things that were eating
22:06
Speaker 1: up the DNA. Their DNA is also in that bone.
22:10
Speaker 1: So when you extract DNA from these mammoth bones, you
22:14
Speaker 1: get loads of tiny pieces of mammoth DNA. Maybe about
22:17
Speaker 1: one to four percent of what you get is tiny
22:19
Speaker 1: pieces of mammoth DNA. The rest of it is tiny
22:22
Speaker 1: pieces of other types of DNA, and you don't know
22:25
Speaker 1: which is which. So you've got chillion piece puzzle that
22:28
Speaker 1: actually includes the pieces for about a hundred different puzzles,
22:31
Speaker 1: and you've got the wrong box top, right. Can you
22:33
Speaker 1: can you? Can you? When you talk about contaminants, can
22:37
Speaker 1: you include the anecdote about sheep contaminants in MOA bones?
22:44
Speaker 1: So yeah, so this wasn't MOA bones I think that
22:47
Speaker 1: you're talking about. This was from we were trying to
22:49
Speaker 1: get DNA directly from dirt in New Zealand. And so
22:53
Speaker 1: it is true that DNA is preserved in sentiment columns.
22:56
Speaker 1: This is really cool and it's something that people are
22:58
Speaker 1: just starting to focus on. I think that it's going
23:00
Speaker 1: to be really neat way of trying to figure out
23:03
Speaker 1: where stuff lives. You know, we there are species that
23:05
Speaker 1: are rare or whose ranges we don't know. It turns
23:08
Speaker 1: out you can just go out and you can get
23:09
Speaker 1: a bit of soil and you can extract DNA from
23:11
Speaker 1: that soil and you can ask, is this incredibly rare
23:13
Speaker 1: small mammal ever found in this location? And if their
23:16
Speaker 1: DNA is there? The answer is yes. So we wanted
23:18
Speaker 1: to know how far back in time we could do this,
23:20
Speaker 1: So we went to different caves in New Zealand where
23:23
Speaker 1: there are sandy environments and DNA will actually percolate through
23:26
Speaker 1: sands depending on what the sources of DNA is. And
23:29
Speaker 1: we knew that there should not be moa and sheep together,
23:34
Speaker 1: right because the moa went extinct before sheep were introduced,
23:38
Speaker 1: And means it like four pound birds that used to
23:40
Speaker 1: live in New Zealand and we're extrapated by humans, right
23:44
Speaker 1: or not not extra but driven to extinction by human Yes,
23:47
Speaker 1: like big enormous kisy. Yes, they were impressive birds, and
23:55
Speaker 1: they were preyed upon by an even more impressive bird.
23:58
Speaker 1: I digress here, but because this is an opportunity to
24:01
Speaker 1: talk about one of my favorite extinct species, Harper gourns
24:04
Speaker 1: the hosts eagle, the giant eagle that would swoop down
24:07
Speaker 1: and pick up these massive moa. So how big was
24:11
Speaker 1: the eagle? I can't say. I was top of my head.
24:13
Speaker 1: But somebody who has a computer in front of them
24:15
Speaker 1: can look this up on and figure it out right now,
24:18
Speaker 1: because it's you have to give me the here. I'll
24:21
Speaker 1: turn my phone here, I'll turn my phone A A
24:23
Speaker 1: st you need a connection, I can do it. H
24:28
Speaker 1: A s T alright, so continue, we'll get out of that.
24:32
Speaker 1: We'll find it. Yeah, anyway, so this is an amazing,
24:35
Speaker 1: amazing animal. Anyway, both of these things went extinct because
24:38
Speaker 1: you know, if you're a giant eagle and you thrive
24:41
Speaker 1: on eating these giant birds, and the the giant birds go extinct,
24:44
Speaker 1: and you're probably going to go extinct too. They went
24:45
Speaker 1: extinct several hundred years past, and sheep were introduced into
24:48
Speaker 1: New Zealand. So our idea was, if DNA is not
24:51
Speaker 1: moving up and down in these caves, we should find
24:54
Speaker 1: MOA DNA and then a layer where there's nothing, and
24:57
Speaker 1: then a layer where there's sheep dna. But in act,
25:00
Speaker 1: what we found was that there was sheep DNA intermingled
25:03
Speaker 1: with the MOA DNA. And this is probably because there
25:06
Speaker 1: were so many sheep that were wandering around and urinating,
25:10
Speaker 1: and of course the urine is a nice source of
25:12
Speaker 1: DNA and this was percolating through this sandy soil that
25:16
Speaker 1: the sheep DNA was getting down into the MOA DNA.
25:18
Speaker 1: And all this tells us is that in some soil
25:20
Speaker 1: environments you don't have this nice layering effect, and you
25:24
Speaker 1: have to really archaeologists always talk about and it exists
25:29
Speaker 1: in some places, for example in and the Arctic, where
25:33
Speaker 1: I said, you know, we found this horse bone and
25:34
Speaker 1: it associated with this volcanic eruption. You can see these
25:38
Speaker 1: volcanic ash layers, they call them tephra, and they go
25:40
Speaker 1: cleanly across this permafrost dirt. And you might not know
25:43
Speaker 1: anything about whether the layering is good below it or
25:46
Speaker 1: the layering is good above it, but if you can
25:48
Speaker 1: see this nice clean layer of thick ash, you know
25:51
Speaker 1: that there's not stuff moving above and below that ash
25:54
Speaker 1: and if we find a bone below it, we know
25:56
Speaker 1: it must be older. The bone must be older than
25:59
Speaker 1: that eruption. And if we find a bone above it,
26:01
Speaker 1: we know that it must be younger. So the bone
26:04
Speaker 1: doesn't migrate through the line. The bone won't move. You're
26:07
Speaker 1: saying that that's all stuff that ash was coming in from,
26:09
Speaker 1: like eruptions in the illusions. Uh, there are a couple
26:12
Speaker 1: of different volcanic um mountain chains that are up there
26:15
Speaker 1: that cause like the logo, there are a couple of
26:17
Speaker 1: different mountain chains up there that will erupt at different
26:19
Speaker 1: time points. And you can actually tell by the chemical
26:22
Speaker 1: composition of the ash which mountain it came from, and
26:25
Speaker 1: you can link eruptions together that you see the ash
26:28
Speaker 1: from in different places, and you can kind of learn
26:30
Speaker 1: something about the geologic history by studying these ash. So
26:33
Speaker 1: that's other cool thing that you can do when you're
26:35
Speaker 1: out there working in the tundra. Yeah, it's fascinating, like
26:39
Speaker 1: like little time stamps. Right, So where were we? We
26:43
Speaker 1: were talking about piecing together the mammoth genome real quick though,
26:47
Speaker 1: just everybody knows that how do you pronounce it? Host?
26:51
Speaker 1: Twenty six pounds. That's an average between the male and
26:53
Speaker 1: the female and uh ten ft to twelve foot wingspan.
26:58
Speaker 1: That's a big eagle. Yeah, twelve fan and its closest
27:05
Speaker 1: living relative, I believe, at least it was a while
27:07
Speaker 1: ago when we studied this UM when I was a
27:10
Speaker 1: grad student. Is something called the booted eagle from Australia,
27:13
Speaker 1: which is a tiny little thing. I think whenever we
27:15
Speaker 1: figure out that there these these enormous phenotypic differences between
27:19
Speaker 1: things that are really closely related to each other, it
27:21
Speaker 1: just astounds me. The power of evolution and genetic variation,
27:24
Speaker 1: and it has a lot to do right with um.
27:27
Speaker 1: Certain groups get to islands and they seem to get
27:33
Speaker 1: huge islands, they seem to get teeny And there's another
27:36
Speaker 1: And I like to talk about bison. So do you
27:39
Speaker 1: know about bison ladder frons um. This is an enormous bison,
27:44
Speaker 1: much bigger than the other bison that lived in North
27:47
Speaker 1: America at the time. We just were able to get
27:50
Speaker 1: DNA from a bison ladder frons that was found in
27:53
Speaker 1: snowmass Colorado, at this site that was found recently and
27:57
Speaker 1: it's about a hundred and twenty thousand years old. This
27:59
Speaker 1: particular remain based on the geological setting, and we were
28:03
Speaker 1: also able to get DNA from a step bison. This
28:06
Speaker 1: is the bison that lived at the same time in
28:08
Speaker 1: Alaska that was much smaller, about half the size, if
28:11
Speaker 1: not smaller, from bison ladder fronds, and they are the
28:14
Speaker 1: same yoetically are you familiar with Do you ever read
28:21
Speaker 1: the work of Valarious Geistes? Are you with his idea
28:25
Speaker 1: about it? Was that him that came up with the
28:27
Speaker 1: founding effect. The founder effect, we're like one of species
28:32
Speaker 1: colonized as a new era area, okay, and they have
28:36
Speaker 1: like unfettered like like they're in a non competitive environment
28:42
Speaker 1: that they will invest for a while. They invest a
28:45
Speaker 1: lot of energy into elaborate sexual display and have an
28:51
Speaker 1: experience like periods of very high fecundity and kind of
28:54
Speaker 1: have a good old days, and then things kind of
28:57
Speaker 1: catch up with themselves and they shrink. I think that
29:00
Speaker 1: he wrote about ladder Franz as being that it was
29:03
Speaker 1: colonizing areas in the wake of glaciers. Yeah, and got huge.
29:09
Speaker 1: That idea. Is that idea sound? You know? With bison,
29:11
Speaker 1: there's so many competing ideas about the history of these guys.
29:15
Speaker 1: You know, at one point there were more than fifty
29:17
Speaker 1: different name species of bison that supposedly lived in North
29:21
Speaker 1: America during the late licens scene, and I think probably
29:23
Speaker 1: there there was actually only one. It was just changing
29:26
Speaker 1: all the time depending on where it was, and there
29:28
Speaker 1: was a competition between paleontologists to name new species. This
29:31
Speaker 1: is a time where people would find these partial horn
29:34
Speaker 1: cores and they would turn them in different directions and
29:36
Speaker 1: they would measure the width and the length of the
29:38
Speaker 1: horn cores, which is a terrible marker because these things
29:42
Speaker 1: are they're manipulated by depending on what fights you get into,
29:45
Speaker 1: or how much you eat when you're growing up, et cetera.
29:47
Speaker 1: This is not a paleontologically equivocal trade. This is not
29:51
Speaker 1: something that you can say, ah, that definitely means this
29:53
Speaker 1: species or that species. And so people were naming new
29:56
Speaker 1: species right and left based on not very much information,
29:58
Speaker 1: but the genetic data that we've started to get from
30:01
Speaker 1: these bison bones. Um. We think the oldest bison in
30:04
Speaker 1: North America are around hundred and sixty years old. And
30:08
Speaker 1: that's when they showed up. That's when they showed up,
30:10
Speaker 1: came across the bearing strait um. And this is a
30:12
Speaker 1: paper that was published really recently that I worked on
30:14
Speaker 1: with a colleague collaborative of mine from University of Alberda,
30:17
Speaker 1: and it was kicked up in the New York Times. Yeah,
30:19
Speaker 1: and I wrote you an email, so I want to like,
30:24
Speaker 1: see we got We're actually having two discussions right now both.
30:27
Speaker 1: I want to come back to these animals. Okay, I
30:29
Speaker 1: want to come back to bison because just remember this
30:34
Speaker 1: because you hear people talk about and this, because we're
30:37
Speaker 1: gonna talk about extinction. You hear people say, like, an
30:39
Speaker 1: extinct form, Okay, the bison ladd of France, which had
30:43
Speaker 1: a six ft horn tips tip, huge horns, so six
30:49
Speaker 1: ft from tip to tip. People be like, it's an
30:52
Speaker 1: extinct one, but it's not. Nope, there's still bison around.
30:56
Speaker 1: It's just like it just as different than what we
30:58
Speaker 1: have now. But people used to dig this stuff up.
31:01
Speaker 1: And there's a there's one on display in in North
31:03
Speaker 1: Dakota that came out of the Missouri River that wants
31:05
Speaker 1: to look at a really nice skull and um, people
31:09
Speaker 1: would dig it up and they'd be like, well that's
31:11
Speaker 1: all kind that's not here anymore. Yeah, you know it's
31:16
Speaker 1: you know, this is a this is a tough thing. Right,
31:18
Speaker 1: I mean, and this is a I think it's an
31:20
Speaker 1: important question to people who care about wildlife. It's an
31:22
Speaker 1: important questions people who care about conservation is how do
31:25
Speaker 1: we define the thing that is worth protecting, the thing
31:29
Speaker 1: that we don't want to go extinct? Do we define
31:31
Speaker 1: it as a species, do we define it as a population?
31:34
Speaker 1: Do we find it as something that looks different from
31:37
Speaker 1: other things? Because a lot of fronts looked decidedly different
31:40
Speaker 1: from the step bison that lived in Alaska, which also
31:43
Speaker 1: looked different than the bison bison. The forms that exist today, Um,
31:48
Speaker 1: they're a continuum. They certainly are closely related to each other,
31:52
Speaker 1: but they aren't. They don't exist anymore. But the same
31:56
Speaker 1: thing could be said for you know, you look at
31:58
Speaker 1: wolf populations that are alive to day, and they are
32:01
Speaker 1: sometimes phenotypically or behaviorally different from each other, but they're
32:05
Speaker 1: all wolves. So where do you draw the line? Where
32:08
Speaker 1: do you decide what is the thing that you want
32:12
Speaker 1: to protect? And and traditionally people think about species, but
32:15
Speaker 1: the name species is something that is kind of arbitrary.
32:19
Speaker 1: Is something that we decided on and who is well,
32:22
Speaker 1: it depends on who's thinking about it and who's asking
32:24
Speaker 1: the question, and what the point of asking the question is. Um.
32:27
Speaker 1: There's a concept called the biological species concept, which says
32:31
Speaker 1: that species are defined as reproductively isolated units. So two
32:36
Speaker 1: things that can't make or if they do, they don't
32:39
Speaker 1: produce offspring, or if they do produce offspring, those offspring
32:42
Speaker 1: are not viable or also can't produce offering themselves. So
32:45
Speaker 1: donkeys and mules are distinct species. They can produce. Sorry, sorry,
32:48
Speaker 1: donkeys and horses are distinct species. They can produce offspring,
32:51
Speaker 1: but that offspring can't reproduce, So the biological species concept
32:54
Speaker 1: says they're different. But meanwhile, that definition would mean that
32:59
Speaker 1: all of are like mountain cariboo, woodland caribou, bar and
33:04
Speaker 1: ground caribou reindeer from Eurasia are just one species, and
33:11
Speaker 1: it would get rid of our discussions about the Mexican
33:13
Speaker 1: gray wolf and the gray wolf proper. But something I
33:17
Speaker 1: think a little bit closer to heart, right, it would
33:20
Speaker 1: say that humans and Neanderthals are the same species, because
33:24
Speaker 1: we were clearly different, behaviorally, physically different from each other.
33:28
Speaker 1: But after our ancestors moved out of Africa, they met
33:32
Speaker 1: with Neanderthals and they hybridized with them. And because of that,
33:35
Speaker 1: most of us have some component of Neanderthal DNA in
33:39
Speaker 1: our genomes. So the biological species concept would call humans
33:42
Speaker 1: and Neanderthals the same species. They would also call brown
33:45
Speaker 1: bears and polar bears the same species, despite that these
33:49
Speaker 1: two animals are behaviorally and physically and ecologically quite different
33:55
Speaker 1: from each other. Yeah, because you can see people would
33:57
Speaker 1: be like very resistant to the idea because of like,
34:00
Speaker 1: hold on right, and it only eats seals, and it swims,
34:06
Speaker 1: and it has different dentition and it doesn't hibernate, whereas
34:09
Speaker 1: the other one is incredibly different. But they mate and
34:11
Speaker 1: they produce offspring, and they do so in zoos, and
34:13
Speaker 1: they do so in nature viable viable offspring. All the
34:17
Speaker 1: bears on Alaska's Abc Islands are hybrids, all of them.
34:21
Speaker 1: They have up to eight percent polar bear ancestry. And
34:24
Speaker 1: that's because after the last ice Age, we believe that
34:27
Speaker 1: the ABC Islands were actually colonized, were actually just a
34:30
Speaker 1: home for polar bears, and then as the climate warmed up,
34:33
Speaker 1: brown bear boys because boys leave, and brown bears moved
34:36
Speaker 1: from the Alaska mainland onto the Abc Islands, where they
34:39
Speaker 1: met this population of polar bears and hybridized with them,
34:43
Speaker 1: and gradually this population was converted back to being brown
34:47
Speaker 1: bear like, more brown bear like, because brown bears kept
34:49
Speaker 1: coming over and mating with these these bears that lived there,
34:53
Speaker 1: but mitochondrially, which is only inherited from your mom. This
34:57
Speaker 1: is part of DNA and everyone of yourselves that only
34:59
Speaker 1: comes from your mom. They are polar bears. They are
35:01
Speaker 1: all polar bears with their mitochondrial DNA really and their
35:05
Speaker 1: X chromosomes, which come more from mom because Dad only
35:09
Speaker 1: has one copy of the X. The X chromosome has
35:11
Speaker 1: more polar bear DNA on it than the rest of
35:14
Speaker 1: their genome, which again is evidence that their mom's mom's
35:18
Speaker 1: mom's mom's mom, at some point in the past, probably
35:20
Speaker 1: twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, was a polar bear.
35:24
Speaker 1: And and that then jives what you said earlier that
35:26
Speaker 1: it was like colonizing males, which kind of fits in
35:30
Speaker 1: with just general brown bear behavior like well, like a
35:33
Speaker 1: lot of those, like a lot of big predators where
35:36
Speaker 1: when they turn up in weird places, not always, but
35:38
Speaker 1: so often it's a male turning up in a weird place. Yeah, well,
35:44
Speaker 1: many in many animals, like I mean mountain lions which
35:47
Speaker 1: we have out here, do this to The males are
35:48
Speaker 1: the ones that disperse. They're the ones that go out
35:50
Speaker 1: to try to find new territory. And so that that's
35:52
Speaker 1: what's going on in brown bears, is that juvenile, juvenile
35:55
Speaker 1: males move outside, whereas the females tend to stay with
35:58
Speaker 1: their mom. Is called maternal philopatrie. But you know that.
36:00
Speaker 1: But uh um, that's common in a lot of especially
36:03
Speaker 1: I think large predatory species. But okay, now I'm gonna
36:06
Speaker 1: back you way up to where you are. I don't
36:08
Speaker 1: even remember that you're finding little instead of the millions
36:15
Speaker 1: long DNA strands, you're finding little thirties and forties. And
36:20
Speaker 1: a problem with those little thirties and forties is that
36:24
Speaker 1: there in shitty condition, and their and finding them, figuring
36:30
Speaker 1: out where they go, how to line them, and they're
36:32
Speaker 1: corrupted because of part of the trickery of finding them
36:36
Speaker 1: is that they're corrupted with so much other stuff, right,
36:38
Speaker 1: And also they're corrupted themselves because all of these things
36:41
Speaker 1: like UVY radiation beating down on the DNA will actually
36:44
Speaker 1: cause the molecules to change, to become damaged in their
36:46
Speaker 1: own way. So ancient DNA has its own kind of damage.
36:49
Speaker 1: It's broken into tiny fragments, and it's mixed up with
36:51
Speaker 1: all sorts of other contaminants. And your job as an
36:54
Speaker 1: ancient DNA scientist is to take that little thirty and
36:58
Speaker 1: figure out where on that big four bill in genome
37:00
Speaker 1: that isn't actually the same genome it goes, and then
37:03
Speaker 1: to gradually piece this puzzle together. And we do that
37:06
Speaker 1: using computers. Um, you know, lots of DNA sequencing and
37:09
Speaker 1: lots of computers. Gradually pieces together and come up with
37:12
Speaker 1: what we believe the mammoth genome looked like. And you
37:16
Speaker 1: can only move it relative to other pieces you found. Yeah,
37:20
Speaker 1: so if you find one isolated piece, if you picture
37:23
Speaker 1: on a number line like one to a hundred, you
37:26
Speaker 1: have no idea where to place it until you find
37:28
Speaker 1: some other thing. Right, Well, what you have is a
37:30
Speaker 1: number line. Let's say you have a number line that's
37:33
Speaker 1: one to one, and you have a little thirty piece,
37:35
Speaker 1: and your thirty piece says so you can kind of
37:40
Speaker 1: scan along that one to one hundred to figure out
37:42
Speaker 1: where it goes, and you'll find the matching sequence. So
37:44
Speaker 1: let's say that number line is your elephant genome, and
37:47
Speaker 1: then you've got your little thirty to four, your little
37:49
Speaker 1: thirty base pair piece. You can figure out where it goes. Now,
37:52
Speaker 1: mammoths and elephants are kind of different from each other,
37:54
Speaker 1: so there'll be some places where it doesn't match up exactly.
37:57
Speaker 1: But if it's long enough, you can figure out the
37:59
Speaker 1: best ice in that number line where your tiny little
38:02
Speaker 1: thing goes, because there'll be some common ground. So there
38:04
Speaker 1: are lots of computer algorithms that people used to do that,
38:07
Speaker 1: and heuristic searching approaches that people used to do that,
38:10
Speaker 1: and and this is this is possible? And how apparent
38:12
Speaker 1: is it? What that piece? What function that things served
38:16
Speaker 1: for the organism function? Now this is something you're getting
38:20
Speaker 1: into another whole realm of issue here. We hadn't quite
38:23
Speaker 1: gotten there yet, but we can totally get there. So
38:27
Speaker 1: this is this is a great question. Um, we have
38:31
Speaker 1: very little idea what parts of genomes do. We have
38:35
Speaker 1: algorithms that help us to find genes. Genes are not
38:39
Speaker 1: the only thing that are in our genomes. There's also
38:41
Speaker 1: lots of noncoding stuff. There's positional stuff. There's lots of
38:45
Speaker 1: viruses that have gotten in there and made copies of
38:47
Speaker 1: themselves and moved around. There are repeat elements. There are
38:50
Speaker 1: all these kind of things called like allue elements and
38:52
Speaker 1: stuff like that. There's just our genomes are chock full
38:55
Speaker 1: of other stuff that's not genes, and that other stuff
38:59
Speaker 1: might be portant and it might not. Write. This is
39:02
Speaker 1: true for every animal, every organism that's out there. So
39:08
Speaker 1: today we have people are saying we have complete genome sequences,
39:11
Speaker 1: we have genome sequences available for lots of different species. Um,
39:14
Speaker 1: it's true, we have genome sequences available for lots of
39:17
Speaker 1: different species, but there are very few species that we
39:19
Speaker 1: know very much about, and those that we do know
39:21
Speaker 1: a lot about tend to be the ones that we
39:23
Speaker 1: study a lot. So things like humans because we care
39:27
Speaker 1: a lot about humans, and lab organisms like mice and
39:31
Speaker 1: rats and Drosophila fruit flies, things that people use to
39:35
Speaker 1: manipulate experimentally in the lab, other things. Any wildlife. You
39:39
Speaker 1: pick a wildlife that isn't a domestic, agriculturally important species
39:43
Speaker 1: we know very little about, and we guess, we guess
39:47
Speaker 1: the function. So we find a gene that we believe
39:50
Speaker 1: is the same gene as something that we know that
39:53
Speaker 1: if you turn off in a mouse changes the color
39:56
Speaker 1: of their eyes. I'm just making that up right, And
39:58
Speaker 1: then we can say, ah ha, that gene in the
40:00
Speaker 1: mammoth was probably associated with something like that. We have
40:03
Speaker 1: no idea, right really, but we have some idea. That's
40:07
Speaker 1: kind of unfair. We have some we've educated guesses about
40:10
Speaker 1: the functions of genes based on learning something about functions
40:14
Speaker 1: of genes in a very different animal that was living
40:17
Speaker 1: in a lab. That makes sense, okay. So for example,
40:21
Speaker 1: if we want to know what genes are associated with
40:23
Speaker 1: cold tolerance in an elephant, we might look at what
40:28
Speaker 1: people have written published about um cold tolerance or subcutaneous
40:32
Speaker 1: fat or hair development or things like that in mice
40:35
Speaker 1: or in humans, and then say, hmm, what's the same
40:38
Speaker 1: gene that we found in this mammoth genomesequence. That's probably
40:42
Speaker 1: the function of that gene. So we have an educated guess,
40:45
Speaker 1: but we don't know for sure. Did when when did elephants?
40:50
Speaker 1: Were they like they were in equatorial areas like pre
40:53
Speaker 1: mammoth and the mammoth was like a north word. Yes,
40:57
Speaker 1: it wasn't the other way around, right, So another the
41:00
Speaker 1: thing that we can do to figure out so he
41:02
Speaker 1: was like, they were figuring, like Asian elephants existed, No, No,
41:07
Speaker 1: as mammoths for figuring out how to deal with the cold. Yes,
41:10
Speaker 1: so they had a common ancestor that's probably tropically adapted, right,
41:14
Speaker 1: and then they dive. That common ancestor diverged into elephants
41:17
Speaker 1: and mammoths Asian elephants in mammos. Yeah, it's kind of
41:21
Speaker 1: like you know, um, we didn't evolve from chimpanzees, and
41:24
Speaker 1: chimpanzees didn't evolve from us. The two species evolved from
41:27
Speaker 1: a common ancestor that was neither a chimpanzee nor a human. Right.
41:31
Speaker 1: The same thing is true for Asian elephants in mammoth
41:33
Speaker 1: when people say we had come from monkeys, and I
41:35
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know if anybody is saying you
41:36
Speaker 1: came from a monkey, well, great ape, some sort of
41:39
Speaker 1: great ape. Yes, and prior to that monkeys or maybe
41:42
Speaker 1: they diverged. Anyway, I digress into parts of human evolutionary
41:47
Speaker 1: history that I'm not confident. Yeah, well, yeah, don't do that.
41:50
Speaker 1: There's enough you are confident with. We don't need to
41:52
Speaker 1: do what you're not confident with. I'm not saying I'm
41:54
Speaker 1: not confident that we came from great apes. We certainly
41:57
Speaker 1: evolved from great apes. Anyway, Um, where was I function mammoths? Yeah,
42:05
Speaker 1: you were talking about finding things that would um allow
42:10
Speaker 1: cold tolerance and understanding where those things are, and I
42:13
Speaker 1: interrupt you to make sure that that, uh, mammoths moved northwards.
42:20
Speaker 1: That's right. So another way that we can try to
42:22
Speaker 1: identify things that are potentially important to making a mammoth
42:25
Speaker 1: looking at like a mammoth instead of like the common
42:27
Speaker 1: ancestor of the Asian elephant is to use evolution to
42:31
Speaker 1: know what to learn to to use what we know
42:33
Speaker 1: about evolution. So we have um African elephant genome sequence,
42:36
Speaker 1: which we know diverged prior to the divergence between Asian
42:39
Speaker 1: elephants and mammoths, and so we kind of know what
42:42
Speaker 1: that ancestor of Asian elephants and mammoths looked like. And
42:45
Speaker 1: then we can use the genome sequences and what we
42:48
Speaker 1: know about how evolution works to identify the mutations that
42:51
Speaker 1: happened just along the mammoth lineage, and we can think,
42:54
Speaker 1: maybe those are some of the things that are really
42:56
Speaker 1: important to making a mammoth looking act like a mammoth.
42:59
Speaker 1: You'ring to the finding the cold tolerance stuff, right, Well,
43:05
Speaker 1: how we how we find it? Yeah? I mean you
43:08
Speaker 1: just think about the way you can look along these lineages,
43:12
Speaker 1: these evolutionary lineages, and ask what things are fixed, what
43:15
Speaker 1: things are all the same in mammoth. So we know
43:17
Speaker 1: that there are a lot of places in our genomes
43:20
Speaker 1: where you and I will differ, and those are probably
43:24
Speaker 1: not fundamentally important to making us human. If they were,
43:27
Speaker 1: we wouldn't differ. We would be the same as each other,
43:30
Speaker 1: but different from our closest living relative, chimpanzee. So that's
43:33
Speaker 1: similar to what we're doing with mammoths. If we sequence
43:36
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of mammoths, we can look and see
43:37
Speaker 1: where there's variation in mammoths and say that's probably not
43:40
Speaker 1: that important to making a mammoth look and act like
43:42
Speaker 1: a mammoth. But we can also find places where mammoths
43:45
Speaker 1: are all the same as each other, but also all
43:47
Speaker 1: different from all elephants, and we can say, ah ha,
43:51
Speaker 1: there is likely to be some evolutionary difference, some change
43:54
Speaker 1: that happened along that lineage to making mammoths look and
43:57
Speaker 1: act like mammoths rather than like the ancestral elephant that
44:00
Speaker 1: they were, and we can then target those as something
44:03
Speaker 1: that we might need to change if we were going
44:05
Speaker 1: to turn an elephant into a mammoth. That section of
44:10
Speaker 1: the that one one letter. Oh, that's a one letter part,
44:15
Speaker 1: one letter, one letter. Yeah, so that's the thing you know,
44:18
Speaker 1: or you're talking about. You know, you have four billion
44:20
Speaker 1: bases that are different between asian elephant and a wooly
44:24
Speaker 1: mammoth and they're four it, no, sorry, four billion basis
44:28
Speaker 1: total in a wooly mammoth genome and about one and
44:30
Speaker 1: a half million differences, right, and they're going to be
44:34
Speaker 1: spread randomly throughout the genome because mutations happen randomly, and
44:38
Speaker 1: only some of them are going to be really important
44:41
Speaker 1: to making a mammoth mammoth and an elephant an elephant. Right,
44:44
Speaker 1: So the goal is to use what we know about
44:47
Speaker 1: where genes are and the way evolution works to try
44:50
Speaker 1: to figure out which of those million and a half
44:52
Speaker 1: differences really are fundamentally important. And if we're only interested
44:56
Speaker 1: in in creating specific traits or moving specific mammoth like
45:01
Speaker 1: traits into elephants, we got to figure out somehow which
45:04
Speaker 1: of those differences that we've decided are important differences making
45:08
Speaker 1: mammoths different are actually important differences in making them different
45:11
Speaker 1: in that very specific way that we're interested in them
45:13
Speaker 1: being different, you know, in the case of cold tolerance,
45:16
Speaker 1: which would further limit the number of changes that you
45:18
Speaker 1: would have to make if you were going to make
45:20
Speaker 1: an elephant that had that particular trait. But this is hard.
45:23
Speaker 1: This is something that you know, we we we kind
45:25
Speaker 1: of have some idea about how to do, but we
45:27
Speaker 1: don't know enough about the way genomes function, or the
45:31
Speaker 1: way mammoth genome in particular functions, to to know exactly
45:34
Speaker 1: what the right what the right decision would be. So
45:37
Speaker 1: what what year was it when there was the announcement
45:41
Speaker 1: that they had mapped the human genome? That was two
45:44
Speaker 1: thousand and one, And the person who led that the
45:47
Speaker 1: public effort for the Human Genome Consortium is in that
45:50
Speaker 1: building right there behind you through the treats. What what
45:55
Speaker 1: percent of the mamoth genome is complete? Uh? Well, can
46:00
Speaker 1: I answer the question about the human genome? First? Two
46:03
Speaker 1: thousand and one we said we had mapped the human genome?
46:07
Speaker 1: About the human genome is known? Now? Oh yeah, Now
46:13
Speaker 1: sixteen years later, we still don't have the whole thing.
46:16
Speaker 1: Oh well, why was it? Well, you know, to be fair, well, no, there,
46:23
Speaker 1: I mean there are The genome is a big and
46:25
Speaker 1: complicated place, right and there are parts of our genome
46:30
Speaker 1: towards the centromeres the middle of the genome, and toward
46:32
Speaker 1: the end of the telomeres that are just made up
46:34
Speaker 1: of these really um tightly wrapped repeat sequences that there
46:40
Speaker 1: is no existing sequencing technology that we can get through. Um.
46:44
Speaker 1: There's no way to sequence through these things right now.
46:46
Speaker 1: There's no way to do it. And in fact, a
46:48
Speaker 1: big challenge that genome scientists are often thinking about it's
46:51
Speaker 1: who is going to actually finish the complete human genome?
46:53
Speaker 1: This would be a really cool thing to be able
46:55
Speaker 1: to do. To be fair, we know most of the
46:57
Speaker 1: genome that actually has genes in it that's doing stuff,
47:00
Speaker 1: and the parts that we don't know are is very
47:03
Speaker 1: small compared to that. But we don't know all of
47:05
Speaker 1: it yet, and we certainly don't know the entire genome
47:08
Speaker 1: sequence for something that is not human, where we haven't
47:11
Speaker 1: spent billions and billions and billions to tell me that
47:15
Speaker 1: you're almost there on the mammoth. No, and a harder
47:18
Speaker 1: thing about something like a mammoth. There's something that's something
47:20
Speaker 1: that's extinct. Is that, Remember I said, we don't we
47:24
Speaker 1: don't have long sequences. So the only way to get
47:27
Speaker 1: through these repeat fragments for these regions of the genome
47:29
Speaker 1: that are just the same thing, repeated over and over
47:31
Speaker 1: and over and over again is to be able to
47:33
Speaker 1: sequence these long strands of DNA. We're never going to
47:35
Speaker 1: have that for something that's extinct, and so we're always
47:39
Speaker 1: going to have to take these broken fragments and map
47:42
Speaker 1: them to an existing genome sequence. We can't do what's
47:45
Speaker 1: called a DiNovo genome assembly, where you don't have anything,
47:48
Speaker 1: which is what impressively these teams managed to do for
47:51
Speaker 1: the human genome. We had no map, we had no puzzle,
47:54
Speaker 1: top right. They just did it. They took these long
47:56
Speaker 1: fragments and used sophisticated computer algorithms to piece these these
48:00
Speaker 1: long fragments together. And the more data they get, so
48:03
Speaker 1: the more they have to realize they got some parts wrong.
48:05
Speaker 1: They can rearrange it and and and try to figure
48:08
Speaker 1: out what the real sequence is. It's very hard to
48:10
Speaker 1: put together these denovo genomes where all you have is
48:13
Speaker 1: just good quality tissue and you don't want to use
48:15
Speaker 1: any map. The reason you don't want to use any
48:17
Speaker 1: map is that the map might be wrong, and this
48:20
Speaker 1: is particularly important when something is extinct and doesn't have
48:24
Speaker 1: any close relatives. Um think, for example, of the moa,
48:30
Speaker 1: where the closest living relative is the tinamou, and they diverged.
48:34
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly how many, but more than thirty
48:36
Speaker 1: million years of between these two lineages, so there's a
48:41
Speaker 1: lot of opportunity for parts of the genome to move around,
48:45
Speaker 1: for chromosomes to break and move around. Probably doesn't happen
48:48
Speaker 1: so much in birds, but in in mammals we know
48:51
Speaker 1: that chromosomes rearrange all the time. And if your map
48:54
Speaker 1: your living thing, the tinamou is really different from the
48:58
Speaker 1: ancient sequence ancient genome you're trying to map, where you
49:00
Speaker 1: only have your thirties and forties, there might be big
49:03
Speaker 1: chunks the genome that you just never get. They'll never recover,
49:07
Speaker 1: no matter how many bones are because you don't have
49:09
Speaker 1: those long fragments, which is what you would need to
49:11
Speaker 1: be able to extend off the ends of these sequences.
49:14
Speaker 1: So this is a hard thing for ancient genomics and
49:17
Speaker 1: for many species. We might be forever restricted to just
49:21
Speaker 1: being able to use this stuff that doesn't change so quickly,
49:24
Speaker 1: and maybe this is a bad thing, right right, And
49:27
Speaker 1: this goes back to um whether you can bring back
49:30
Speaker 1: a species that's extinct If the most important parts are
49:34
Speaker 1: the most divergent parts, and therefore the parts that you
49:37
Speaker 1: actually can't sequence or put together, how are you ever
49:40
Speaker 1: going to know what they are? So if if a
49:47
Speaker 1: fellow wanted to go make a mammoth, right, okay, all right,
49:53
Speaker 1: like and there are some of those fellas, right, Well,
49:57
Speaker 1: that's the thing you talked about is there was someone
50:01
Speaker 1: who was hopeful. I don't want to dwell on things
50:04
Speaker 1: that just aren't going to happen, But just as an example,
50:06
Speaker 1: there was someone who is hopeful, um that you talked about,
50:09
Speaker 1: who would find semen. Right, So, there are two teams
50:13
Speaker 1: that are out there that are looking either for semen
50:16
Speaker 1: or for cells, just frozen cells that are in good condition,
50:19
Speaker 1: and they want to clone a mammoth. This is most
50:22
Speaker 1: common word that you hear when you think about Jurassic
50:25
Speaker 1: Park type clone of mammoth. Yeah. Clone. Well, you see,
50:29
Speaker 1: even bringing up Jurassic Park kind of calls all this
50:32
Speaker 1: into questions because then you got to talk about how
50:33
Speaker 1: many journalists have asked you to explain why amber it's
50:38
Speaker 1: not actually good for DNA. How many journalists are there.
50:44
Speaker 1: It's a good question, though, I mean to be fair.
50:47
Speaker 1: This is this is what people think about ancient DNA
50:49
Speaker 1: is is, Oh, look we can find things preserved and amber.
50:52
Speaker 1: We're gonna able to bring dinosaurs back to life. Medium
50:55
Speaker 1: It makes sense. It does. It does. When you see
50:57
Speaker 1: a piece of amber, you see a fly in it,
50:59
Speaker 1: you're like, well of And it was inspired by reality.
51:04
Speaker 1: So Michael Crichton, when he wrote his book actually wrote
51:06
Speaker 1: in the acknowledgments UM that he was grateful to the
51:09
Speaker 1: Extinct Species Working Group at you see Berkeley Allen Will
51:13
Speaker 1: because they were talking about ancient DNA and that was
51:15
Speaker 1: what inspired him. And then his movie book inspired people
51:19
Speaker 1: to see if they could actually recover DNA from insights
51:22
Speaker 1: in amber, and people published papers saying that they had
51:25
Speaker 1: um Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you are and
51:29
Speaker 1: how you feel about these things. There is this ubiquitous,
51:35
Speaker 1: uh source of DNA that's everywhere, that gets into everything,
51:39
Speaker 1: and I could extract DNA from anything and get some DNA.
51:43
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that it's DNA from that thing. Amber
51:46
Speaker 1: is very porous, it's formed a very hot environment. It
51:48
Speaker 1: turns out that it is a terrible, terrible preserver for DNA,
51:52
Speaker 1: which is very sad that there's these beautiful skeletons or
51:55
Speaker 1: exo skeletons of things that you see in amber, but
51:57
Speaker 1: there isn't any DNA that is from those animals that's
52:01
Speaker 1: in there. There was a a group of scientists in
52:04
Speaker 1: in London at the Natural Museum in London in the
52:06
Speaker 1: late nineties who tried to replicate some of these experiments
52:09
Speaker 1: by going into their collection, and they were They recovered
52:12
Speaker 1: pieces of amber and copal. Copal is the recent precursor
52:16
Speaker 1: to amble. Amber. First it's copeal and then it hardens
52:18
Speaker 1: and becomes amber. And these were only decades old. We
52:20
Speaker 1: know we can recover decade old DNA. And some of
52:23
Speaker 1: these things had bugs in them and some of them didn't.
52:25
Speaker 1: They extracted DNA from all of these different pieces of amber, saying,
52:28
Speaker 1: if it doesn't have an insect, we shouldn't be able
52:30
Speaker 1: to get DNA. If it does, we should be able
52:32
Speaker 1: to get DNA. And therefore this is some sort of
52:34
Speaker 1: test of the hypothesis of whether amber preserves DNA, and
52:37
Speaker 1: they were able to recover DNA from their pieces of
52:40
Speaker 1: copal and amber, but there was no correlation between their
52:44
Speaker 1: ability to recover DNA and whether there were insects there.
52:47
Speaker 1: And it turns out they were just recovering insect DNA
52:50
Speaker 1: because there's insect DNA everywhere. I mean, I could take
52:54
Speaker 1: a swab off this tabletop here and get insect DNA
52:57
Speaker 1: off of it, and probably your DNA as well, because
53:00
Speaker 1: you've been sitting here and breathing on the table for
53:01
Speaker 1: a while. That doesn't mean it's already there. Yes, yes,
53:07
Speaker 1: So I could go to the toy store and get
53:09
Speaker 1: a dinosaur and extract DNA and show that I have
53:12
Speaker 1: recovered dinosaur DNA, but really it's just going to be
53:14
Speaker 1: chopped up pieces of human and cockroach DNA, right, you know.
53:17
Speaker 1: So the early days of ancient DNA were filled with
53:22
Speaker 1: some of these spectacular claims, none of which have been
53:24
Speaker 1: able to be shown to be true. The oldest DNA
53:26
Speaker 1: that we've recovered as reliable is that seven hundred thousand
53:29
Speaker 1: year old horse bone from the Arctic because it was frozen, right,
53:33
Speaker 1: and that's why it was recovered. Um Dinosaurs went extinct
53:36
Speaker 1: sixty five million years ago. There is no frozen dirt
53:39
Speaker 1: that's sixty five million years old. There is no DNA
53:43
Speaker 1: and dinosaurs and talk about the um. You don't need
53:47
Speaker 1: to dwell on it. But the sperm path to a
53:49
Speaker 1: mammoth cloning. Uh, let's do cells and then sperm. Right,
53:52
Speaker 1: So the idea with sperm, I guess I'll start with sperm,
53:54
Speaker 1: would be that you could find frozen sperm and then
53:56
Speaker 1: you could you could get an elephant egg cell and
53:59
Speaker 1: you could use it to fertilize the elephant egg cell,
54:02
Speaker 1: so you would have something that's half mammoth half elephant.
54:04
Speaker 1: Um like you surrogate, surrogate, you'd like impregnate a female
54:09
Speaker 1: Asian elephant with this frozen sperm and get a half mammoth,
54:14
Speaker 1: and then do it again and get a three quarter
54:15
Speaker 1: mammoth's And they're fired up about that because I think
54:18
Speaker 1: you should explained that. And you get in your book
54:20
Speaker 1: that they found that old frozen sperm is still viable.
54:26
Speaker 1: That gives him whole We're not old old right, right,
54:30
Speaker 1: but just the term you guys use old old, it's
54:34
Speaker 1: like alternative old. Yeah. Uh no, So when an animal
54:43
Speaker 1: dies and I think I've already said this. The DNA
54:45
Speaker 1: and IT cell starts to degrade immediately, and the cells
54:48
Speaker 1: started to grade immediately. So this requires that you were
54:50
Speaker 1: able to be fine, you would able you would be
54:52
Speaker 1: able to find frozen viable cells or frozen viables. Oh,
54:56
Speaker 1: I got you, So the same problem. I hadn't really
54:59
Speaker 1: put that together, right, Yeah, the sperm has Yeah, I
55:02
Speaker 1: got you. It's destroyed everywhere, and so it had to
55:04
Speaker 1: be that sperm was It's like sperms that some special holders,
55:08
Speaker 1: so that makes it a special holder. Actually probably would
55:11
Speaker 1: be the testicles, right, And this is what I read
55:13
Speaker 1: when I was doing my research for this, is that
55:15
Speaker 1: because the testicles were outside of the body, they would
55:17
Speaker 1: get frozen faster and that would protect the sperm. It
55:20
Speaker 1: turns out they're not outside of the body in a mammoth,
55:22
Speaker 1: which is probably you know, for good reason, right if
55:25
Speaker 1: you think about the environment where they lived, So yeah,
55:28
Speaker 1: they're not then no, it's not a viable pathway. That
55:31
Speaker 1: was the interesting thing I heard about mammoth um. You
55:33
Speaker 1: talk about the cold tolerance for but a thing that
55:37
Speaker 1: Asian and African elephants have big ears, and mammoths had
55:42
Speaker 1: small ears because imagine that thin flat Yeah, what would
55:48
Speaker 1: happen to it in cold temperatures? Right? And the elephants
55:51
Speaker 1: have big ears for heat this patient, right, so um, yeah,
55:54
Speaker 1: you don't want to dissipate your heat if you're living
55:56
Speaker 1: at forty below. Okay, So now that I understand the
55:58
Speaker 1: sperm thing that it is, it's it's just like the
56:00
Speaker 1: cell thing. Yeah. And and so when when people say
56:04
Speaker 1: cloning cloning, what what you really mean? And we say
56:08
Speaker 1: this cloning dinosaurs and dinosaur bar you say cloning mammoths,
56:11
Speaker 1: What you really mean when you say cloning is an
56:13
Speaker 1: actual scientific process where you take a cell and that's
56:18
Speaker 1: already a particular type of cell, like a skin cell
56:20
Speaker 1: or Okay, so here we go. Who's the most famous clone? Dolly,
56:25
Speaker 1: Dolly the sheep. That's so, Dolly was a clone and
56:29
Speaker 1: she was a clone of a mammary cell from another
56:32
Speaker 1: female sheep. Right, So what you do in cloning is
56:36
Speaker 1: you take an egg cell that is viable, ripe egg cell,
56:40
Speaker 1: and you suck out the nucleus, the stuff that has
56:42
Speaker 1: the nuclear DNA, the all the stuff that is going
56:45
Speaker 1: to code for the genes that make the animal look
56:47
Speaker 1: and act like it does that normally, in an egg
56:49
Speaker 1: cell would be fertilized by sperm that would make everything
56:52
Speaker 1: diploid ut of Mom's DNA and Dad's DNA, and then
56:55
Speaker 1: that would um cause this process of differentiation. Because that
57:00
Speaker 1: fertilized cell is is a stem cell. It has the
57:05
Speaker 1: it's called tote potent. It has the capacity to become
57:07
Speaker 1: every type of cell that's necessary to create an organism.
57:11
Speaker 1: Um it doesn't yet have any instructions that say, be
57:14
Speaker 1: heart cell, be a memory cell, be a lung cell,
57:16
Speaker 1: but it will begin to divide and differentiate, and as
57:18
Speaker 1: it does, those cells will gradually get the instructions that
57:21
Speaker 1: are necessary to be different types of cells. You don't
57:23
Speaker 1: need the same genes turned on to be a heart
57:25
Speaker 1: cell as you do to be a liver cell, for example.
57:28
Speaker 1: So this process of differentiation just turns genes on and
57:31
Speaker 1: off as necessary to create different functions. So the idea
57:34
Speaker 1: of cloning is that you have a cell that's already
57:37
Speaker 1: way down that path. It already has exactly the genes
57:40
Speaker 1: turned on and off to be that particular type of cell.
57:43
Speaker 1: In Golly's case, it was a mamory cell. And you
57:45
Speaker 1: have to somehow trick it into forgetting those instructions and
57:49
Speaker 1: resetting itself into one of those types of cells that
57:53
Speaker 1: can begin this process of dividing and differentiation. This reprogramming
57:57
Speaker 1: is really important in cloning. So you take that egg
58:01
Speaker 1: cell and there's some magic in that egg cell, and
58:04
Speaker 1: that is that the proteins that are in that egg
58:06
Speaker 1: cell can cause that reprogramming to happen. So you take
58:10
Speaker 1: the excel, suck out of the nucleus, and then you
58:12
Speaker 1: you take this tissue cell that you want to clone,
58:15
Speaker 1: and you stress it out. You starve it if nutrients
58:17
Speaker 1: and put it in a state where super stressed, right,
58:20
Speaker 1: and then you can suck the nucleus out of that cell,
58:22
Speaker 1: injected into the egg cell, zap it with a bit
58:24
Speaker 1: of electricity. Some magic happens that causes the proteins in
58:27
Speaker 1: that egg cell to reset that cell, causing it to
58:31
Speaker 1: forget all the instructions to be a memory cell and
58:33
Speaker 1: start that process of dividing and differentiating. That, it turns out,
58:37
Speaker 1: is really hard and still is really inefficient. This if
58:40
Speaker 1: the cell is not entirely reprogrammed, reset it completely to scratch,
58:45
Speaker 1: then it won't work. It won't divide correctly. It'll go
58:48
Speaker 1: wrong at some point, and that's why cloning of animals
58:51
Speaker 1: remains um really inefficient. It's gotten better than than it
58:55
Speaker 1: was in Dolly's time, but it still isn't you know.
58:57
Speaker 1: It's not like every time you do it it works.
59:00
Speaker 1: You need, though, is for that cell, that tissue cell
59:03
Speaker 1: to be alive. There can't be anything wrong with it.
59:07
Speaker 1: If there's anything wrong with it, miracle of life alive,
59:11
Speaker 1: like is able to divide in a in a dish,
59:13
Speaker 1: it has to be, you know. It can't be broken,
59:15
Speaker 1: It can't be turned off. The DNA can't be chopped up.
59:18
Speaker 1: It has to be capable of resetting itself. And as
59:21
Speaker 1: we've already established, once an animal dies, all of its
59:24
Speaker 1: cells start to break up and die, the enzymes chop
59:29
Speaker 1: up the DNA, it can't replicate itself anymore. And because
59:32
Speaker 1: that is true, one will never find a living mammoth cell.
59:36
Speaker 1: The most recently live mammoths were live years ago. They
59:40
Speaker 1: have no living cells remaining, and end of story, one
59:45
Speaker 1: will never be able to clone a mammoth, really sorry,
59:53
Speaker 1: or dinosaur. And that's that's a particular particularly bold statement
59:57
Speaker 1: comes from someone in your position. It it's a statement
1:00:01
Speaker 1: I've been making for very but just but okay, I've
1:00:04
Speaker 1: seen the deal, the operating You live and operate in
1:00:08
Speaker 1: the world of the impossible, do I? Yes? Because things
1:00:12
Speaker 1: that things that would have been regarded things that a
1:00:15
Speaker 1: decade ago or two decades ago would have been regarded
1:00:18
Speaker 1: as No, that won't happen, right, Okay, how do you
1:00:22
Speaker 1: know that you're not? But I don't. I don't doubt
1:00:25
Speaker 1: that you are. But you're not worried about becoming the
1:00:28
Speaker 1: laughing stock. You know what, if somebody finds a living
1:00:32
Speaker 1: mammoth cell, it will be so freaking exciting that I
1:00:35
Speaker 1: won't mind being a laughing stock. The chances that'll outweigh
1:00:39
Speaker 1: your embarrassment. Exactly is that the likelihood of this happening
1:00:44
Speaker 1: is very, very very close to zero, so close to
1:00:48
Speaker 1: zero that I'm willing to say it's never going to happen.
1:00:50
Speaker 1: And is that is that? Um? I don't want dwell,
1:00:53
Speaker 1: But is that like sort of like the consensus among
1:00:55
Speaker 1: your peers. Yes, So if that's the case, let's move
1:00:59
Speaker 1: on to what might work. Well, this is why we
1:01:03
Speaker 1: get to moving genes, so we know that we can
1:01:05
Speaker 1: come up with these DNA sequences if we can identify
1:01:08
Speaker 1: using a computer which parts of those genomes are important
1:01:11
Speaker 1: to making something look an act like mammoth. Then we
1:01:14
Speaker 1: can take an elephant cell that is alive, right, that's
1:01:17
Speaker 1: living in a dish, that's able to replicate itself and
1:01:20
Speaker 1: turn into two cells whatever from an Asian elephant, and
1:01:25
Speaker 1: we can then cut and paste using geno mediting technologies,
1:01:29
Speaker 1: the elephant DNA sequences can be cut out and paste
1:01:32
Speaker 1: into their place the parts of the mammoth genome sequence
1:01:35
Speaker 1: that are there. So then you have a living cell
1:01:37
Speaker 1: as an elephant cell that has some mammoth DNA sequences
1:01:41
Speaker 1: in it, right, Yeah, but that is not the same
1:01:44
Speaker 1: thing as having a mammoth cell. No, yeah, I'm with you, right,
1:01:48
Speaker 1: And what are the things that you would be Let's
1:01:55
Speaker 1: just make let's assume for a menthy that this is
1:01:57
Speaker 1: already and you could do it. Can we can we
1:02:00
Speaker 1: finish why that cell is not ever going to be
1:02:02
Speaker 1: the exact same thing as a mamothy, because this was
1:02:06
Speaker 1: the question you asked me at the very beginning, and
1:02:08
Speaker 1: we kind of gone down a lot of different rabbit
1:02:10
Speaker 1: holes here. But let's see. So let's say you somehow
1:02:15
Speaker 1: managed to identify all the places where mamoths and elephants
1:02:18
Speaker 1: are different. And you managed to make all of those changes,
1:02:21
Speaker 1: cut and paste one and a half million different letters
1:02:24
Speaker 1: in that cell that's growing in additional lab So now
1:02:27
Speaker 1: you have a genome sequence that looks, as far as
1:02:29
Speaker 1: you can tell, like a mammoth genome sequence. Right, Why
1:02:33
Speaker 1: wouldn't that turn into a mammoth? Well, the main reason
1:02:37
Speaker 1: is that we are more. Every organism is more than
1:02:42
Speaker 1: the sequence of the A, C, S, G S, and
1:02:44
Speaker 1: T s that make up our d N A. That um.
1:02:47
Speaker 1: There are things that happened during development that change the
1:02:50
Speaker 1: way our genes expressed. Our mom's diet, whether she gets sick,
1:02:54
Speaker 1: what she's exposed to, how stressed she is, et cetera.
1:02:57
Speaker 1: All those things will change the way our genes are expressing.
1:03:00
Speaker 1: Some of the developmental things that happen in utero are
1:03:04
Speaker 1: caused by hormonal changes in mom, which are coded for
1:03:08
Speaker 1: by her genome, which is an elephant at this point, right.
1:03:11
Speaker 1: And then the animal is born and it consumes an
1:03:14
Speaker 1: elephants diet, and it's taught how to behave like an elephant,
1:03:17
Speaker 1: and it has a gut microbes that are like an elephant,
1:03:22
Speaker 1: and we're just beginning to learn how important the things
1:03:25
Speaker 1: that live in our gut are to a lot of
1:03:28
Speaker 1: animals I know do this, but they'll eat like fegal
1:03:31
Speaker 1: matter of the mother to colonize their guts what it needs.
1:03:34
Speaker 1: That's right. And so those organisms living in its gut
1:03:38
Speaker 1: are going to be expressing different chemicals and etcetera, and
1:03:41
Speaker 1: those are going to affect the way the genes are expressed.
1:03:44
Speaker 1: And so this thing that is born might have mammoth DNA,
1:03:47
Speaker 1: but it's not going to be a identical to a
1:03:49
Speaker 1: mammoth that used to be alive, and that's because mammoths
1:03:52
Speaker 1: aren't here anymore. You would need a family of mammoths
1:03:55
Speaker 1: and a mammoth habitat and and mammoth gut microbes and
1:03:58
Speaker 1: etcetera if you were going to make something that's identical
1:04:01
Speaker 1: to a mammoth, which is why it can't happen. But
1:04:04
Speaker 1: I think the people who are proponents of using this
1:04:07
Speaker 1: sort of technology as a way of preserving by a
1:04:10
Speaker 1: diversity or or replacing parts of ecosystems that are missing
1:04:15
Speaker 1: because of an extinction don't really care that you're not
1:04:18
Speaker 1: creating something that's identical to something that's there What they
1:04:21
Speaker 1: really want is to create an ecological proxy, to create
1:04:25
Speaker 1: something that can fill the components of that niche that
1:04:28
Speaker 1: are missing and therefore somehow threatening either the stability of
1:04:32
Speaker 1: the ecosystem in the given in the existing climate or
1:04:36
Speaker 1: or phenomena or threatening other species from going extinct. Now,
1:04:40
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that this is necessarily true for mammoths.
1:04:43
Speaker 1: I think that there are people who are interested in
1:04:45
Speaker 1: bringing mammoths back because it's phenomenal, Like, how cool would
1:04:49
Speaker 1: it be to have a mammoth that's back? Can you
1:04:52
Speaker 1: can you hold that thought like touch on why why mammoth?
1:04:57
Speaker 1: Is it because the person they're crazy enough, but RecA
1:05:01
Speaker 1: they're crazy enough to have attention, but recent enough to
1:05:04
Speaker 1: be in the realm of supposed possibility. I think kind
1:05:09
Speaker 1: of boils down to that. My personal opinion about why
1:05:12
Speaker 1: people have focused on mammoth's and my book is about
1:05:15
Speaker 1: mammoth's as well, even though I don't personally work on
1:05:18
Speaker 1: mammoths in my lab, but it is the thing that
1:05:20
Speaker 1: people talk about. I think people think of mammoths as
1:05:24
Speaker 1: soon as they realize that they can bring back dinosaurs.
1:05:28
Speaker 1: I just think it's like the second most spectacular things
1:05:32
Speaker 1: t rex is out but right right, it's also but
1:05:38
Speaker 1: it is because it's like saber tooth cats, let's bring
1:05:41
Speaker 1: them back. Or arc Todus giant short faced bear that
1:05:45
Speaker 1: we made extinct because it would stand up and would
1:05:47
Speaker 1: be fourteen feet tall and we didn't like that when
1:05:50
Speaker 1: we were trying to let our kids run around outside.
1:05:51
Speaker 1: You know, that was um. So mammoth they seem well,
1:05:54
Speaker 1: they're huge, they're spectacular, they're definitely gone. Um, but they
1:05:58
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't kill us. You know, there's some like kind
1:06:01
Speaker 1: of snuggly about them. But it's nothing else in that.
1:06:03
Speaker 1: It's nothing, it's it's nothing other than just those like
1:06:07
Speaker 1: sort of issues of charisma. And maybe it's in the
1:06:13
Speaker 1: realm of possibility because they're coming up out of the ice.
1:06:16
Speaker 1: And I think this is the reason that we see
1:06:18
Speaker 1: a lot of popular attention to it. Now. There are
1:06:19
Speaker 1: people who make ecological arguments for bringing mammoths back to life. Um.
1:06:25
Speaker 1: There's a father son team that live in northeastern Siberia,
1:06:29
Speaker 1: the Zimov Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita. They have
1:06:32
Speaker 1: this this place called Pleistocene park Um where they're trying
1:06:36
Speaker 1: to bring enough big herbivores back that they can re
1:06:40
Speaker 1: establish this rich grassland that used to be in the
1:06:43
Speaker 1: Siberian tundra during the ice age. And they have um
1:06:47
Speaker 1: imported bison from Canada, and they have a couple different
1:06:49
Speaker 1: species of deer, and they have horses, etcetera. And they
1:06:52
Speaker 1: have been able to show that having these animals on
1:06:55
Speaker 1: the landscape sort of increases the production of this grassland.
1:06:58
Speaker 1: So they move things around, the recycling nutrients, they're chewing
1:07:01
Speaker 1: stuff up. And they've even made the argument um that
1:07:06
Speaker 1: because these animals are there and they're feeding during the winter,
1:07:10
Speaker 1: they're pulling away the snow and creating these exposed bits
1:07:14
Speaker 1: of soil. And this would have happened during the ice age,
1:07:17
Speaker 1: where the snow would have been removed and the soil
1:07:20
Speaker 1: was exposed. And in doing so, they're actually causing the
1:07:24
Speaker 1: sediment that is in the area to warm up less
1:07:28
Speaker 1: quickly than it does when the snow is on top
1:07:30
Speaker 1: of this is a little bit counterintuitive. So if you
1:07:32
Speaker 1: think about it, if the average temperature of the soil,
1:07:36
Speaker 1: if the sorry, if the soil temperature is really the
1:07:39
Speaker 1: average annual ambient temperature, right then um, during the summer,
1:07:43
Speaker 1: it's you know, up there during the winter it's forty
1:07:46
Speaker 1: below So the soil temperature can be very cold as
1:07:49
Speaker 1: long as there's not snow sitting on top of it,
1:07:51
Speaker 1: because snow is a really efficient insulator. And what the
1:07:55
Speaker 1: snow sitting on top of this the soil does is
1:07:57
Speaker 1: it keeps that summer heat in the soil and actually
1:08:00
Speaker 1: causes the soil to warm up faster. Whereas if you
1:08:03
Speaker 1: can pull that snow away, the bare earth is exposed
1:08:06
Speaker 1: to the really cold Siberian winter and cools down that
1:08:11
Speaker 1: that sediment. And so they have made the argument that
1:08:13
Speaker 1: if we could get rid of a lot of the snow,
1:08:15
Speaker 1: which we could do by having really big herbivores like
1:08:18
Speaker 1: mammoth's wandering around, we could slow the rate of permafrost
1:08:21
Speaker 1: warming and slow the relate rate of release of carbon
1:08:25
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere that's coming from parmafrost warming. So they
1:08:27
Speaker 1: are making an ecological argument for why we should have
1:08:31
Speaker 1: these animals back on the landscape. That's something I hadn't
1:08:34
Speaker 1: heard of, because I know that um the the area
1:08:38
Speaker 1: like the Arctic and what was the Bearing land Bridge
1:08:42
Speaker 1: at the time when people talk about with their horses
1:08:44
Speaker 1: up there, there was like an American lion. Everything lots
1:08:48
Speaker 1: of cool things. There was a grassland, there was like
1:08:50
Speaker 1: step grasslands, and now it's tassi, it's tundra. I'd never
1:08:56
Speaker 1: heard the idea that that train. I had always heard
1:08:59
Speaker 1: that transition explained as a climate issue. I never heard
1:09:03
Speaker 1: it explained as perhaps related to grazing habits. Yeah, um,
1:09:09
Speaker 1: I do you know. Things don't have been in isolation. Obviously,
1:09:12
Speaker 1: ecosystems change. Ecosystems are dynamic. But if you remove grazing
1:09:16
Speaker 1: herbivores from a landscape, the landscape changes. You can see
1:09:19
Speaker 1: that in the desert southwest. There's this little thing called
1:09:21
Speaker 1: the kangaroo rat and it's kind of makes these little tons.
1:09:25
Speaker 1: They're pretty cool, huh. And but once they disappear, and
1:09:28
Speaker 1: they are disappearing, it takes you half a year, and
1:09:31
Speaker 1: the entire landscape has changed because that animal was doing
1:09:35
Speaker 1: a lot to maintain this different type of habitat. It changes,
1:09:39
Speaker 1: other species move in, some other species will disappear. But
1:09:43
Speaker 1: having that little guy there really maintained that habitat. And
1:09:46
Speaker 1: there's little doubt to my mind that having these herbivores
1:09:50
Speaker 1: on the landscape in the High Arctic will have had
1:09:53
Speaker 1: an impact on the the grasslands. I mean they were
1:09:56
Speaker 1: consuming things. They were favoring some plants over others. They
1:10:00
Speaker 1: were moving nutrients around all over the place. They were
1:10:03
Speaker 1: churning the soil by walking over things. Um, they were
1:10:06
Speaker 1: We know that when mammoths and other large mammals disappeared
1:10:10
Speaker 1: from the southern part of North America and California, for example,
1:10:14
Speaker 1: they would have actually kept the trees at bay, these mammoths,
1:10:17
Speaker 1: and so there would have been an enormous change to
1:10:19
Speaker 1: the ecosystem that happened with the extinction of mammoths. And
1:10:21
Speaker 1: it's probably the change that caused Native Americans who lived
1:10:25
Speaker 1: there to start using fire instead of these large animals
1:10:28
Speaker 1: to try to keep the trees at bay so that
1:10:29
Speaker 1: they other things would grow there. So yeah, I mean,
1:10:33
Speaker 1: the animals that live in a habitat definitely have some
1:10:36
Speaker 1: feedback into the what habitat is there? Now you know
1:10:40
Speaker 1: that you have the chicken and egg problem. What happened first?
1:10:42
Speaker 1: Did the landscape change so much that it couldn't support
1:10:44
Speaker 1: the animals, or did the animals disappears that the landscape disappeared.
1:10:47
Speaker 1: Probably these things happened together. So the a biotic changes,
1:10:51
Speaker 1: the climate changes associated with warming probably fed into the
1:10:55
Speaker 1: disappearances some of these animals that then fed into more
1:10:59
Speaker 1: changes that were being to the landscape. So remember that,
1:11:02
Speaker 1: you know, when you think about the ecology of a system,
1:11:05
Speaker 1: you're not thinking about one animal or just the vegetation.
1:11:08
Speaker 1: You really have to think about how everything interacts with
1:11:10
Speaker 1: each other, which is one of the arguments for UM
1:11:14
Speaker 1: potentially thinking about using this genome engineering technology to try
1:11:18
Speaker 1: to preserve some components of ecosystems, because as components disappear,
1:11:23
Speaker 1: ecosystems change. However, proximate, however proximate. Are you ready now?
1:11:30
Speaker 1: Can I now prompt you along to what the uh
1:11:35
Speaker 1: what might the mammoth? In quotes, I'm making quotes what
1:11:39
Speaker 1: might the mammoth be? And look like I have no idea.
1:11:43
Speaker 1: It would depend on what genes were changed, you know,
1:11:46
Speaker 1: it would really depend on what what sciencests were interested
1:11:49
Speaker 1: in doing this. We're trying to select. Probably if it
1:11:51
Speaker 1: was something that wanted to live in the high Arctic,
1:11:53
Speaker 1: it would be something that was harriier than an elephant,
1:11:55
Speaker 1: because it needs to be able to protect itself from
1:11:57
Speaker 1: the cold. Um, so our ears probably smaller ears, but
1:12:03
Speaker 1: you know it's a these are it's fluid. You know,
1:12:07
Speaker 1: there has to be so that you thought about a
1:12:08
Speaker 1: great deal. I haven't. I you know, I if I
1:12:13
Speaker 1: had to pick species that I think we should use
1:12:16
Speaker 1: this technology on, I don't think the mammoth would be
1:12:19
Speaker 1: high up on my list. Yeah, is it your Your
1:12:22
Speaker 1: lab has the greatest connection of collection of passenger pigeon
1:12:26
Speaker 1: also not high up on my list for a species
1:12:28
Speaker 1: we should bring back to life, but a species that
1:12:31
Speaker 1: I think is fascinating, which is why we have this collection.
1:12:34
Speaker 1: I am so you're you're not gonning for to bring
1:12:38
Speaker 1: back a billion passenger pigeons. I don't think that's a
1:12:40
Speaker 1: good idea. I think that. You know, when you think
1:12:42
Speaker 1: about bringing a species back to life, there are there
1:12:45
Speaker 1: are technical hurdles, there are ethical hurdles, and there are
1:12:48
Speaker 1: ecological hurdles to doing this. In this case for passenger pigeon,
1:12:52
Speaker 1: there are technical hurdles. One can't clone birds. So the
1:12:55
Speaker 1: point where you have a living cell that you edited
1:12:58
Speaker 1: that you then clone using regular cloning technologies. We can
1:13:01
Speaker 1: do that with birds because we can't get to the
1:13:03
Speaker 1: egg cells at the time in their reproductive cycle where
1:13:06
Speaker 1: they're actually um ripe. They're ready to ready to have
1:13:09
Speaker 1: that little magical thing that happens that reprograms the cells.
1:13:12
Speaker 1: We can't do that. So in order to clone or
1:13:14
Speaker 1: genetically modify birds, we need entirely new technology. And there
1:13:18
Speaker 1: are some technologies that are under development, but they're really
1:13:20
Speaker 1: not as far advanced as I think. So there's technical hurdle. Um. Ethically, uh,
1:13:24
Speaker 1: now with mammoths, there are many ethical hurdles. I mean,
1:13:28
Speaker 1: I elephants in captivity don't do well. We need to
1:13:31
Speaker 1: know a lot more about how to you know, keep
1:13:34
Speaker 1: them psychologically and physically healthy if they're going to be
1:13:37
Speaker 1: in captivity. Obviously this would be a captive breading experiment. Um.
1:13:40
Speaker 1: I think elephants should be allowed to make more elephants
1:13:42
Speaker 1: rather than to be used in experiments to do this.
1:13:45
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of sort of moral
1:13:46
Speaker 1: ethical questions involved with and also they're very highly social creatures.
1:13:50
Speaker 1: Why would you bring one back? You'd need to do
1:13:52
Speaker 1: this over the course of you know, many many generations.
1:13:56
Speaker 1: Elephants have fourteen to eighteen year um eighteen years generate
1:14:00
Speaker 1: times in the wild. Generation times that's how old they
1:14:02
Speaker 1: are when they first have their first babies. This is
1:14:04
Speaker 1: a long and I have a two year gestation, And
1:14:06
Speaker 1: to your gestation, yeah, so there there are technical and
1:14:09
Speaker 1: to my mind a lot of ethical problems with mammoths.
1:14:12
Speaker 1: So has your feeling about this matured over time? I
1:14:17
Speaker 1: think as I've learned more about the technical hurdles, I
1:14:20
Speaker 1: think I've thought more about Um. I don't know. I
1:14:25
Speaker 1: guess obviously your feelings about anything that you're learning a
1:14:28
Speaker 1: lot about mature as you learn more about them. But
1:14:31
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever really been in favor of
1:14:33
Speaker 1: mammoths for for these ethical reasons. UM. What I try
1:14:37
Speaker 1: to do when I think about what species might be
1:14:40
Speaker 1: good for this is I try to think through these questions. First,
1:14:43
Speaker 1: what are the technical hurdles, what are the ethical hurdles,
1:14:46
Speaker 1: what are the ecological implications? And if we get to
1:14:49
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons, I mean, where would they live? But this
1:14:53
Speaker 1: is a species that flocked in the billions, one big
1:14:57
Speaker 1: flock of billions of individuals that would move through forests,
1:15:02
Speaker 1: just destroying forests in their way. We don't even have
1:15:04
Speaker 1: those forests anymore, so where would they go? Maybe they
1:15:07
Speaker 1: didn't need to live in such big flocks. We have
1:15:09
Speaker 1: some genomic evidence now that suggests that they might have
1:15:12
Speaker 1: been genetically adapted to living in large flock, So maybe
1:15:14
Speaker 1: they did that. Yeah, that's that's been explained to me
1:15:17
Speaker 1: that with some things like passenger pigeons, it would be
1:15:20
Speaker 1: that you might have to have many to have any
1:15:26
Speaker 1: because those mass groupings of birds trigger Yeah. Well, this
1:15:31
Speaker 1: is actually fascination with passenger pigeons and why we've been
1:15:34
Speaker 1: interested in studying their their d n A. It is
1:15:36
Speaker 1: amazing to me that a bird could be that abundant,
1:15:40
Speaker 1: and even with the amount of hunting and you know,
1:15:42
Speaker 1: human use of these birds that went on, how did
1:15:45
Speaker 1: they actually disappear? How is it that no tiny little
1:15:48
Speaker 1: pockets of these birds survived. There's no long autumn, right.
1:15:52
Speaker 1: There must have been something about them that made them
1:15:54
Speaker 1: adapted to living in these large flocks, and that's why
1:15:57
Speaker 1: we've been studying them. I'm I'm fascinated to one standard,
1:16:00
Speaker 1: why how something could evolve to be adapted to living
1:16:03
Speaker 1: in such big populations, and why that extinction would have happened.
1:16:06
Speaker 1: And you say you have not found small pockets. No,
1:16:09
Speaker 1: no one ever found small pockets of passenger pigeons surviving.
1:16:12
Speaker 1: They in forty years, they went from millions to billions
1:16:16
Speaker 1: of individuals to extinct, So what are what are if
1:16:21
Speaker 1: those two are out? Like, what is a good candidate? Spees?
1:16:24
Speaker 1: I mean, I know that you like you professionally, like
1:16:27
Speaker 1: I I you don't separate plausibility with the ethics, right
1:16:32
Speaker 1: like you have the conversations at the same time, and
1:16:35
Speaker 1: there's no sense in doing this big ethical exploration of
1:16:37
Speaker 1: something that just isn't going to happen. So you're doing
1:16:40
Speaker 1: these in tandem. As you do them in tandem, considering
1:16:44
Speaker 1: the technology and the ethics, where would be a place
1:16:48
Speaker 1: that maybe not even in your generation, but in the
1:16:50
Speaker 1: next generation of people in your field, where would be
1:16:53
Speaker 1: a place where you might picture if you were able
1:16:56
Speaker 1: to make an edict? Now, I think this is going
1:16:57
Speaker 1: to disappoint you, but I think that this technology has
1:17:00
Speaker 1: its most I'm already disappointed because you're not You're not
1:17:03
Speaker 1: shooting for You're not shooting for the stars here. I
1:17:06
Speaker 1: think this technology has the most potential as a tool
1:17:09
Speaker 1: for conserving species, preserving species that are still alive today.
1:17:14
Speaker 1: I think that we should think about this technology, and
1:17:17
Speaker 1: obviously people like this sort of spectacular nature of thinking
1:17:20
Speaker 1: about bringing things that are extinct back to life. But
1:17:22
Speaker 1: we should think about how we might use DNA sequences
1:17:25
Speaker 1: from individuals from the same or related species that used
1:17:28
Speaker 1: to be alive to increase the diversity decrease vulnerability of
1:17:33
Speaker 1: species that are in danger of going extinct today. And
1:17:35
Speaker 1: whether that means wooly rhinos or kangaroo rats or blackfooted ferrets,
1:17:40
Speaker 1: I don't care, right but I I what I worry
1:17:43
Speaker 1: about is that the kind of spectacular nature of thinking
1:17:47
Speaker 1: about bringing extinct species back might make people less likely
1:17:53
Speaker 1: to think about some of the real benefits of this technology.
1:17:56
Speaker 1: Could have two species that are still alive. There's you
1:17:58
Speaker 1: know this, this thoughts among conservation groups that um, this
1:18:04
Speaker 1: excitement about the extinction is taking away resources that would
1:18:07
Speaker 1: otherwise go to protecting species that are alive. And and
1:18:10
Speaker 1: I don't think that's true. Um. I don't think that
1:18:14
Speaker 1: people who care about preserving polar bears or care about
1:18:18
Speaker 1: preserving woodpeckers are all of a sudden going to stop
1:18:21
Speaker 1: caring about that because some far off possibility of bringing
1:18:24
Speaker 1: mammoths back to life might be there. The money thing
1:18:26
Speaker 1: seems real unless you feel that no money would really
1:18:29
Speaker 1: was headed in one direction and goes off in a
1:18:31
Speaker 1: different direction. I think that where the extinction is right now,
1:18:35
Speaker 1: which is in this let's see how the mammoth genome looks,
1:18:39
Speaker 1: or let's see that Any money that goes into that
1:18:41
Speaker 1: is going to be new money. It's gonna be it.
1:18:44
Speaker 1: There wasn't going to the Eastern Bluebird Society now, but
1:18:47
Speaker 1: you know later if if you actually have an animal,
1:18:51
Speaker 1: you would need to figure out how to regulate it,
1:18:54
Speaker 1: how to rear it, where it goes, and that I
1:18:56
Speaker 1: think would come into conflict with some of the money
1:18:59
Speaker 1: that's going into conservation UM, which is why I think
1:19:02
Speaker 1: that we need to have more realistic conversations about where
1:19:07
Speaker 1: this technology can go and bring people together to think
1:19:09
Speaker 1: about how we might develop this technology as a new
1:19:14
Speaker 1: weapon in what I really feel should be a growing
1:19:17
Speaker 1: arsenal in ways that we are thinking about combating UM
1:19:21
Speaker 1: the extinctions that are happening today, the crises that of
1:19:25
Speaker 1: biodiversity loss that are real UM where wildlife is disappearing,
1:19:29
Speaker 1: and what can we do what what? How can we
1:19:32
Speaker 1: think about modern technologies in a way that is conducive
1:19:35
Speaker 1: to collaboration with people who are interested in conservation rather
1:19:38
Speaker 1: than conflict. I think some of the more spectacle also
1:19:42
Speaker 1: there's this this fear that there's a lot of money
1:19:44
Speaker 1: going to the extinction, which is not true. I know
1:19:49
Speaker 1: it's not true. I know that there are some people
1:19:52
Speaker 1: who care very much about particular species who have been
1:19:55
Speaker 1: who have been generous in thinking about so there are
1:19:57
Speaker 1: people who care about prairie chickens, for example, and are
1:20:00
Speaker 1: very interested in helping to UM to think about ways
1:20:03
Speaker 1: that we can use this technology to increase diversity and
1:20:06
Speaker 1: the robustness of prairie chickens. UM including maybe thinking about
1:20:10
Speaker 1: what is the heathen, which is a prairie chicken that
1:20:14
Speaker 1: used to live on Martha's vineyard, and can we find
1:20:16
Speaker 1: out the differences between heath hens and other species and
1:20:19
Speaker 1: maybe think about using this as a technology to bring
1:20:21
Speaker 1: heathens back. And there have been some people who have
1:20:22
Speaker 1: been generous and donating small amounts of money to do
1:20:25
Speaker 1: sequencing of heathen remains and then some analyzes to figure
1:20:28
Speaker 1: out what we might do there UM the mammoth funding stuff. UM.
1:20:32
Speaker 1: You know, George Church is doing a lot of that
1:20:34
Speaker 1: work at his lab and Harvard. He might have some
1:20:38
Speaker 1: UM specific donors who have been given him money to
1:20:40
Speaker 1: do that. I'm not sure there's zero public funding going
1:20:43
Speaker 1: to this zero. So that's a checkable big number. Yes. Um.
1:20:51
Speaker 1: In fact, I think when I assume my book, I
1:20:52
Speaker 1: actually looked at places like World Wildlife Fund and conservation
1:20:56
Speaker 1: organizations and to figure out exactly how much money had
1:20:58
Speaker 1: gone into de extinction projects, and the number when I
1:21:01
Speaker 1: was writing this book was it was zero. So so
1:21:05
Speaker 1: let me throw two hypotheticals that you if you don't,
1:21:07
Speaker 1: and you can pick which one you like, but I'm
1:21:10
Speaker 1: talk in what you're talking about with that you would
1:21:12
Speaker 1: prevent the technology would be applicable in preventing extinctions, what
1:21:18
Speaker 1: might be imminent extinctions. And I'll throw two cases at you,
1:21:21
Speaker 1: so one you have. We spent a long time having
1:21:24
Speaker 1: a conversation with someone about Mexican the Mexican gray wolf.
1:21:28
Speaker 1: Now they were down to seven all in captivity. They've
1:21:31
Speaker 1: got them up to around a hundred living in the wild.
1:21:36
Speaker 1: They're the barrier to recovery is that they're inconvenient to
1:21:42
Speaker 1: have around. Okay, that's it's like, it's not a habitat issue,
1:21:46
Speaker 1: it's not an animal issue. It's just people don't like
1:21:49
Speaker 1: predators that they're inconvenient. Right, I don't know how to
1:21:53
Speaker 1: quite break it. Out, But fifty of that fifty of
1:21:57
Speaker 1: the inconvenience argument comes from hunters who want more dear
1:22:01
Speaker 1: and out, particularly out on the ground that they can
1:22:04
Speaker 1: hunt and eat and enjoy. And again I'm not sure
1:22:09
Speaker 1: on the percentage is livestock producers who don't these wolves
1:22:12
Speaker 1: are affecting their ability to make a living. Let's say, like,
1:22:18
Speaker 1: would it be the kind of thing you're talking about,
1:22:20
Speaker 1: could you ever imagine that you would make a gray
1:22:24
Speaker 1: wolf that doesn't eat? No, no, let's rule that out
1:22:29
Speaker 1: manipulated gray wolf that you would find in them? Like
1:22:32
Speaker 1: what is it about lives cattle? That's you can pick
1:22:37
Speaker 1: from that one or you can pick from this one.
1:22:40
Speaker 1: Why are why is the greater sage grouse? So per
1:22:46
Speaker 1: snickitty about where it lives? Which of those is better?
1:22:50
Speaker 1: If you're gonna look at some way to explore like
1:22:53
Speaker 1: what you're talking about with helping species, because we have
1:22:55
Speaker 1: two species sage grouse and the reason, well, just because behavior.
1:23:01
Speaker 1: Trying to to understand the behavior of a predator that's
1:23:04
Speaker 1: not going to be one gene or ten genes or
1:23:07
Speaker 1: hunter genes. This is going to be a gene environment,
1:23:09
Speaker 1: heredity interaction thing that's going to be extremely difficult to understand,
1:23:13
Speaker 1: so you're never going to suss out like why do
1:23:15
Speaker 1: these things? But you might be able to do experiments
1:23:19
Speaker 1: with sage grouse that we're able to identify individuals that
1:23:23
Speaker 1: were capable of living in different habitats um, and and
1:23:26
Speaker 1: then you could hone in on whatever genes are associated
1:23:29
Speaker 1: with the why is this? Why is this one? Okay?
1:23:31
Speaker 1: With being with breeding, with nesting next to an oil rig, Yeah,
1:23:36
Speaker 1: and just as happy and productive. So that would be
1:23:39
Speaker 1: It's not easy, right because you're still talking about behavior
1:23:42
Speaker 1: and you're still talking, but there are other things about
1:23:44
Speaker 1: stage grouse. They have shorter generation times, it's an easier
1:23:47
Speaker 1: thing to think about. Um, you're talking about nesting habitat preference,
1:23:51
Speaker 1: which is something that you could select for. You could
1:23:53
Speaker 1: do artificial selection for individuals that want to nest in
1:23:55
Speaker 1: particular places. Whereas trying to teach a wolf not to
1:23:59
Speaker 1: be a wolf. That's a tough one, right. So is
1:24:03
Speaker 1: there a one like I gave you two? Is there
1:24:05
Speaker 1: one that you really love, like a scenario that you
1:24:08
Speaker 1: think is like right for exploration? I you know, I
1:24:11
Speaker 1: would like a low hanging fruit um, like the black
1:24:16
Speaker 1: footed ferret, so is there Yeah, so something where there's
1:24:20
Speaker 1: a particular trait that you can hone in on that's
1:24:23
Speaker 1: not caused by too many different genes that is missing
1:24:26
Speaker 1: in a population, or that one population has but another
1:24:28
Speaker 1: one doesn't, and that would be like that would be
1:24:30
Speaker 1: the disease resistance. Yeah. So, well this isn't a wildlife question,
1:24:33
Speaker 1: but it's kind of easier to get your get your
1:24:36
Speaker 1: wrap your head around. Um, there are we know that
1:24:39
Speaker 1: oceans are becoming more cidic, and if you could identify
1:24:43
Speaker 1: populations of fish and there there was a paper recently
1:24:45
Speaker 1: where they identified a picular population of particular species of
1:24:48
Speaker 1: fish that was capable of surviving and producing more offspring
1:24:51
Speaker 1: in an environment of higher acidity than other populations. If
1:24:55
Speaker 1: you could figure out what genes cause that, you could
1:24:57
Speaker 1: move those genes into other fish, then maybe we would
1:25:00
Speaker 1: have a way of of safeguarding fish against some of
1:25:02
Speaker 1: the acidity increases happening in the oceans while we try
1:25:05
Speaker 1: to figure out a way to stop that as well.
1:25:07
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we should do this instead. This is important,
1:25:10
Speaker 1: but you know these changes, some of these anthrogenic changes
1:25:12
Speaker 1: to our our climate are happening too quickly for evolution
1:25:15
Speaker 1: to sort it out on its own, and if there
1:25:17
Speaker 1: are these scenarios where we could find genes and move
1:25:20
Speaker 1: them around. Another thing is heat tolerance and corals. So
1:25:23
Speaker 1: if you could find corals that are able to survive
1:25:25
Speaker 1: and higher temperature environments, and you could figure out what
1:25:27
Speaker 1: genes are associated with that, could you then move those
1:25:30
Speaker 1: genes into different species of corals so we could stop
1:25:32
Speaker 1: all the corals from dying. These are hard, like probably
1:25:36
Speaker 1: really hard, maybe impossible questions to answer, but there are
1:25:40
Speaker 1: things where you can imagine targeting coming up with a
1:25:43
Speaker 1: way of figuring it out. Now, you know, there's, as
1:25:46
Speaker 1: I said, there's little, very little money going into this
1:25:49
Speaker 1: because you know, public funding these days, we only like
1:25:52
Speaker 1: to fund things that we know are going to work,
1:25:53
Speaker 1: which mostly means you have to already have done the
1:25:55
Speaker 1: experiments using your own money in order to do it,
1:25:59
Speaker 1: or it has to have immediate impact on human health.
1:26:01
Speaker 1: And there has as yet to be a recognition enough
1:26:05
Speaker 1: of a recognition of how important healthy, diverse habitats are
1:26:09
Speaker 1: to maintaining healthy humans. Um but this is something that
1:26:13
Speaker 1: I think is going to become more and more apparent. Hopefully,
1:26:15
Speaker 1: hold on, you're saying that we're like connected to the
1:26:17
Speaker 1: natural world. Um. Yeah, don't don't tell Congress, but tell them.
1:26:24
Speaker 1: Actually A questions. Two questions. Question number one, Um, you're
1:26:32
Speaker 1: sensitive about Uh, you're sensitive about the idea that people
1:26:38
Speaker 1: would accuse people in your field of promoting this idea
1:26:42
Speaker 1: that we could just say screw it, will fix it later. Yeah,
1:26:46
Speaker 1: because we can't. We cannot fix it. Once something is gone,
1:26:52
Speaker 1: it is gone. Even if we create proxies of that
1:26:55
Speaker 1: thing so that we can try to have other things
1:26:57
Speaker 1: not disappear, it's not the same thing as say, eavning
1:27:00
Speaker 1: it in the first place. And you know that I
1:27:04
Speaker 1: don't think that you know, people have made that argument
1:27:08
Speaker 1: to me before. I tend to be more of an
1:27:10
Speaker 1: optimist than that. I think that it thinks that assumes
1:27:13
Speaker 1: two things about people that are both kind of awful. Um.
1:27:18
Speaker 1: Actually one of them maybe I'm not being too optimistic
1:27:21
Speaker 1: about I think the first thing is it assumes is
1:27:23
Speaker 1: that people in general care about extinction. Um. And I
1:27:29
Speaker 1: think maybe they don't. I think maybe most people, inasmuch
1:27:32
Speaker 1: as it doesn't actually affect them personally, don't care. And
1:27:36
Speaker 1: maybe by talking about things that are extinct and what
1:27:40
Speaker 1: we're missing we can get more people to actually care
1:27:42
Speaker 1: about things going extinct in the first place. Will it
1:27:45
Speaker 1: make these people feel more comfortable about stuff going extinct? Maybe,
1:27:49
Speaker 1: And that is something we have to work against by
1:27:51
Speaker 1: not letting this report that mommoths are going to be
1:27:55
Speaker 1: cloned in two years continue to go through the news
1:27:57
Speaker 1: cycle because they're not. We can never bring a mammoth back,
1:28:00
Speaker 1: and it's really important that we don't falsely say that
1:28:04
Speaker 1: we can, because this or what I could see happening,
1:28:08
Speaker 1: is that someone creates a hairy elephant and he's in
1:28:12
Speaker 1: a part and then all of a sudden there's a
1:28:14
Speaker 1: story about how you know, however they want to pitch
1:28:16
Speaker 1: at that time, and we'll go, oh, yes, that might
1:28:19
Speaker 1: be the thing that happens. First, we're a very far
1:28:22
Speaker 1: away away from from creating any sort of manipulated elephants.
1:28:25
Speaker 1: We can't we can't actually do any of that reproductive
1:28:27
Speaker 1: technology for elephants yet. So there's you know, there's a
1:28:30
Speaker 1: lot of technical stuff that we didn't talk about that's
1:28:32
Speaker 1: in the in between you know, today and having edited
1:28:35
Speaker 1: Mammoth's Mammoth's Back. But the other thing that it assumes
1:28:39
Speaker 1: is that people who do care about extinction, people like
1:28:42
Speaker 1: me and hopefully people like you and people listening to
1:28:44
Speaker 1: this podcast, are all of a sudden not going to
1:28:47
Speaker 1: do so because some far off crazy thing happens and
1:28:51
Speaker 1: a mammoth like thing comes back. I think people are
1:28:54
Speaker 1: still going to care about losing the animals that are
1:28:56
Speaker 1: in their backyard that they care about having there, and
1:28:59
Speaker 1: that like some idea that maybe someday in the future
1:29:02
Speaker 1: someone might be able to bring them back, won't stop
1:29:04
Speaker 1: them from worrying that they're not going to be there
1:29:06
Speaker 1: next week or in ten years or when their kids
1:29:09
Speaker 1: want to go out and and hunt or play with
1:29:11
Speaker 1: these animals that are in the backyard. I think people
1:29:13
Speaker 1: who care will continue to care. I hope that people
1:29:17
Speaker 1: who don't care will care even less. And that's that's
1:29:20
Speaker 1: the fear well sort of the argument. Like someone with
1:29:22
Speaker 1: a big trust fund right doesn't develop a sort of
1:29:26
Speaker 1: aggressiveness in an opportunistic sense because they always know that
1:29:30
Speaker 1: no matter what they do, they're going to be okay
1:29:32
Speaker 1: down the road. But here's my here's my second last question.
1:29:36
Speaker 1: Do you feel like the that the people in I
1:29:40
Speaker 1: don't know how to put it, like your peers, what
1:29:42
Speaker 1: do you call your community. That's like, it's not your community.
1:29:44
Speaker 1: Who are the you know, my peers, my colleague, Yeah,
1:29:47
Speaker 1: your colleagues who who deal in this world? How much
1:29:50
Speaker 1: are you guys? Sort of um, like a jockey looking
1:29:54
Speaker 1: for a horse. Okay. So obviously it was like a
1:29:59
Speaker 1: love of the technology that drew many of many of
1:30:03
Speaker 1: your peers into this field. Have you had to try
1:30:06
Speaker 1: to become a little bit elastic in how you apply
1:30:10
Speaker 1: it or talk about applying it in order to make
1:30:13
Speaker 1: it palatable like this to sort of steer the conversation about,
1:30:18
Speaker 1: you know, playing god. As you pointed out a criticism
1:30:21
Speaker 1: in your book that that you found that it's advantageous
1:30:24
Speaker 1: to like turn the technology towards a discussion about de
1:30:30
Speaker 1: extinction or saving nearly extinct species, because it just is
1:30:34
Speaker 1: a good way to sell it. I think that, um,
1:30:37
Speaker 1: it's a it's a big group of people and were
1:30:39
Speaker 1: actually a UM, we have a big community and a
1:30:42
Speaker 1: list serve and it's very active and people are talking
1:30:44
Speaker 1: about people have different motivations for being interested in this,
1:30:47
Speaker 1: and there are some people who really want to bring
1:30:49
Speaker 1: a particular species back, Like there's the group in the
1:30:51
Speaker 1: Netherlands that want the ROCs, which is the ancestor of
1:30:54
Speaker 1: domestic cattle. They want to bring this back and are
1:30:56
Speaker 1: trying to do this by breeding together different breeds of
1:31:00
Speaker 1: all that have different characteristics of the ancestor to eventually
1:31:03
Speaker 1: come up with some new breed that has, you know,
1:31:05
Speaker 1: a cluster of characteristics. Their work was initiated by the
1:31:10
Speaker 1: desire to see like by the desire to make the orcs,
1:31:15
Speaker 1: because they want to be able to have this ORACX
1:31:18
Speaker 1: in these habitats that they're trying to rewild. And so
1:31:22
Speaker 1: they think that in order to bring um wildlife back
1:31:25
Speaker 1: to these parts of Europe that where all all the
1:31:27
Speaker 1: trees were cut down and went to pasture, it said,
1:31:29
Speaker 1: they need to have some of these animals back because
1:31:31
Speaker 1: they want to re establish it. And so their desire
1:31:33
Speaker 1: is to see wildlife in its natural state and they
1:31:36
Speaker 1: think in order to do that, they need to bring
1:31:39
Speaker 1: back something that is like an orox. And so that's
1:31:42
Speaker 1: what's motivating that there's a group in Australia that there's
1:31:45
Speaker 1: there's like the wildlife to biochem path Yeah, yeah, yeah,
1:31:49
Speaker 1: there's you know, there are people who are interested in
1:31:50
Speaker 1: gastric brooding frogs that people who are interested in MOA's
1:31:53
Speaker 1: for the sake of MOA's there are you know, George
1:31:55
Speaker 1: is interested in using this technology to come up with
1:31:57
Speaker 1: ways to cure um. I think it's her peace in
1:32:00
Speaker 1: elephants and and you know other things. And also then
1:32:04
Speaker 1: there's the Zimovs who really want to to re establish
1:32:07
Speaker 1: tundra in Siberia. So I would say that the motivations
1:32:10
Speaker 1: for this range from conservation to ecological to just really
1:32:15
Speaker 1: being astounded and impressed by the technology, to really wanting
1:32:18
Speaker 1: to bring a particular species back. And obviously people are
1:32:21
Speaker 1: flexible in the way that they talk about this, and
1:32:23
Speaker 1: as people learn more about different motivations and different opportunities
1:32:27
Speaker 1: and different technical and ethical ecological challenges, we change the
1:32:31
Speaker 1: way we are thinking about these things. We grow, we
1:32:33
Speaker 1: learn and adapt, and that's that's not a bad thing. No,
1:32:37
Speaker 1: And it's not like you're and as you pointed out,
1:32:39
Speaker 1: it's not like you're like chasing the money because right
1:32:41
Speaker 1: now there isn't any money change. It's not like you're
1:32:44
Speaker 1: trying to like like human longevity. I imagine there's a
1:32:47
Speaker 1: budget there. In fact, if anyone would like to donate, Yeah, no,
1:32:54
Speaker 1: if we were studying aging or you know, human diseases.
1:32:58
Speaker 1: Then there's there's pockets and money out there for that.
1:33:00
Speaker 1: But as people who are involved with conservation, no, there's
1:33:03
Speaker 1: there's not enough money going around in conservation. I don't
1:33:06
Speaker 1: want to compete with people who are trying to conserve
1:33:09
Speaker 1: species um that are alive today. What I'd like to
1:33:12
Speaker 1: do is collaborate with them. I'd like to create opportunities
1:33:16
Speaker 1: for us to work together so that our motivations, my
1:33:20
Speaker 1: desire to see this technology developed so that it can
1:33:23
Speaker 1: be a useful tool for conservation, happens along with someone
1:33:27
Speaker 1: who's really trying to conserve a particular species. And in
1:33:29
Speaker 1: that way, I guess I am kind of a jockey
1:33:32
Speaker 1: looking for a horse. I want to find people who
1:33:35
Speaker 1: have a question, a problem that they're trying to solve
1:33:38
Speaker 1: that this technology might help to solve, and I want
1:33:42
Speaker 1: to work with them, not against them, because I do
1:33:45
Speaker 1: see that there's tremendous potential in this technology as long
1:33:48
Speaker 1: as we're not too scared of it to try it
1:33:52
Speaker 1: real quick. Um. So your own book, uh, Beth Shapiro,
1:33:56
Speaker 1: How to Clone a Mammoth The Science of de Extinction. Um?
1:34:00
Speaker 1: Where else might people go if they want to if
1:34:03
Speaker 1: they're curious about this, are there's some good There's lots
1:34:06
Speaker 1: of videos on YouTube. There is UM. There was an
1:34:08
Speaker 1: event that's our Community de Extinction community held at National
1:34:11
Speaker 1: Geographic several years ago that you can find a ted
1:34:14
Speaker 1: x D extinction. So there's lots of different talks from
1:34:16
Speaker 1: ethicists and conservation biologists, both for and against UM some
1:34:20
Speaker 1: of the technology, and there is a bit out at
1:34:22
Speaker 1: a date now, but it's a nice place to start,
1:34:24
Speaker 1: a good resource for finding out about the way that
1:34:26
Speaker 1: people are thinking about this. Now is your book current? Yeah, yep.
1:34:31
Speaker 1: The technology moves slowly. All right, Well, thanks so much
1:34:35
Speaker 1: for talking to this man. This is great stuff. And yeah,
1:34:39
Speaker 1: I want I want to schedule another talk for one
1:34:41
Speaker 1: decade from now. Okay, I'll put it on my calendar. Yeah,
1:34:46
Speaker 1: and then and we'll we'll send up come up with
1:34:48
Speaker 1: the funding to have you for a whole day. I
1:34:50
Speaker 1: feel like we could have talked a lot longer. Thank you,
1:34:53
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Thank you asssssssssssssssssssssss