Could Cloned Wooly Mammoths Help Stop Climate Change? | Joe Rogan and Forrest Galante

There are some efforts right now to try to de-extinct some animals. There are. Thank you. Yeah. Give me that new word. And like what is currently going on right now? They're calling it the dawn of de-extinction. And it's a lot of very, very intelligent genetic scientists that are trying to isolate specific genes that are specific to the animals that have been extinct and putting them into extant animals, animals that are still here, to basically make this Frankenstein animal. Because it'll never be the animal that's gone, right? It will look like it, it'll behave like it, it'll think like it, et cetera. But it will never actually be the animal that we've lost. At least not yet. We don't have that technology. Right now what we can do is isolate a genome, put it into an existing animal that gives birth to an animal that looks and acts very much like the extinct animal. But it's some degree different because it's like a mammoth, for instance. They would have to take some DNA from a mammoth that they would somehow or another get and introduce it to an embryo of an elephant. And then the elephant would give birth to a very hairy, very large tusk like these isolated genetic codes, elephant. And it would look like a mammoth, it would act like a mammoth, but the reality is it's a shaggy elephant with big tusks. Right. It would look like 23 and me on it. It would show, oh, it's mostly elephant, but it's a little bit of a mammoth. Yeah. I mean, if you think of a double helix, like a DNA strand, right? You have these little bars in the middle of it. So what they do is, this is a very crude way to explain it, but they pull out a bar from an elephant and they put in a bar from a mammoth. And then eventually you get this mammoth. And so this would be with gene editing tools like CRISPR or something on those lines? Exactly. Wow. How far away are they from doing this? I mean, it's been successfully done a couple of times. Really? Yep. They've given birth to a couple animals that are very, very close to the extinct animal. Most of the time there's problems, right? It's infertile. It has lung issues, whatever it is. There's a couple different cases. I'm not a geneticist. I'm a wildlife biologist, so I don't really understand it. But they've done it. They have successfully reproduced things that are gone, basically cloned things, and then the animal hasn't made it to adulthood. Man, that seems really, really like playing God, doesn't it? It is. It is absolutely like playing God. I feel like, I mean, are people doing it just because they can? Is it one of those things? Or is there a real valid scientific reason for trying to reintroduce these animals or de-extinct them? Well, the valid reason is to conserve the ecosystem, right? Like we talked about. Right. And then the analogy goes back to what we were saying half an hour ago, which is it's just that quest for knowledge, the can we do it, the innovation, right? Can we play God? Can we fix it? Can we take this thing that's gone and say, no, it's not? Like we have the tools to make it not gone. Yeah. There was some article that I read where they were talking about reintroducing the mammoth to Siberia, and that there would be some ecological benefit to reintroducing the mammoth because of the way they forage for food. Sure. And then there's sort of an effect on global warming. Sure. I mean. Do you know about that? I don't know about that specifically. So you can find that, Jamie. The reintroducing the mammoth to Siberia to benefit the environment. Look, whether that's accurate or not, until you put mammoths on the ground, how do we actually know? It's a great theory and that's what science is, right? It's coming up with hypotheses and then trying to prove them. And it sounds cool. Like, do I want to see a mammoth walking around Siberia? Fuck yeah. But does that mean it's actually good for the world? Hard to say. Whoa. Could bringing back mammoths help stop climate change? Scientists say creating hybrids of extinct bees could fix the Arctic tundra and stop greenhouse gas emissions. I don't understand that. I find it hard to believe, to be honest. Maybe it's just some scientist clever way of sneaking it in because he wants to play God. Like, yeah, we're going to fix everything. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking use coal. Who gives a shit? Yeah. We got mammoths. Yeah. Just give me the funding. Give me the funding. Exactly, man. Well, is it really? Oh, yeah. I mean, look, if you're a scientist, right? Right. You, Joe Rogan, is a scientist. How are you going to make your career? Are you going to make your career by raising money through being like, yeah, sure, like, I'll study cricket legs? Or are you going to be like, look, give me the money to stop global warming by bringing back fucking mammoths? Like, you know, like why you can make the outrageous claim if you think it's going to fund your research. Right. That's how you make your bones. Right. And that's that's one of the sad realities of some, certainly not all science.