The Company Trying to Clone Woolly Mammoths

So I wanted to talk to you about this cloning and the rewilding of the mammoths and all that stuff. I'm going to Colossal tomorrow to learn a little bit more about it myself. Explain Colossal. Yeah, so Colossal Biosciences is this, if you ask me, incredible company, and they are, by their own declaration, a de-extinction company. So it's this guy Ben Lamb, and he's got George Church, who's a world leading cellular scientist. I don't know the specifics of de-extinction and cloning and CRISPR and so on and so forth. And they've come together and raised a ton of money, and they are de-extincting animals. And the science is there. Like it's done. All it took was the money basically behind it. And they've put together this incredible Rolodex of scientists and people, and it's real life Jurassic Park with purpose. Where are they going to put them? So there's a couple different things going on. So the first one they're working on is the woolly mammoth, right? And this isn't just for fun. This has real, like, important conservation implications, which is really fascinating. But they are planning on starting with I think a hundred mammoths and putting them in this place called Pleistocene Park. Something like that. This park in Siberia that they've been doing this experiment on as to what happens when you add megafauna back into the Arctic tundra to offset carbon emissions. And so they're using what DNA? They're using elephant DNA and mixing it with something else? So it's Indian elephant is the closest living relative to the woolly mammoth. And what does an Indian elephant look like? Is it similar to an elephant? Yeah, it's a smaller... So African elephants are bigger. They have the really big ears. Indian elephants are typically the ones you'd see at the circus, you know, with the red, the pink in the ears, the smaller triangular shaped ears. So just a different species of elephant. And so they're taking Indian elephants and they're using CRISPR technology and they're using existing mammoth DNA and they're making an embryo and then they're implanting it into the Indian elephant. And 22 months later, an Indian elephant gestation period, she will give birth to a mammoth. A real mammoth? A real mammoth. So it's not like a hybrid? That's okay. That's a good point. So it is in the sense of what they do is if you imagine like... If you imagine the DNA of an animal, right? And then you imagine the fragments that are broken out of it, right? What they're doing is they're taking that DNA of the... And I don't understand the cellular side of it very well. This is just my base level understanding of it. I can talk about the conservation side of it. But they're taking that double helix, that DNA, and all those pieces that are missing from the mammoth, they're putting in Indian elephant pieces. So you end up with an animal that is physically and morphologically identical to a mammoth but has used all of the DNA from the closest living relatives in order to get there. Oh boy. And this process, how long does this take? So I think they've been going for about five years on the science, but the science of de-extinction and cloning, I mean you remember Dolly the sheep, right? That was like a known thing. So that's been going on for a long time. Well you can get your cat cloned or your dog cloned. Exactly. For like 20 grand you can clone your dog. Yeah, so... It's kind of creepy. It is. It's bizarre. But the point is the science has been there for a while. There just hasn't really been the funding or the motivation for it. But what I think is so fascinating, the reason I'm so emotionally invested in it, is the conservation implications that it has. Because what this company is ultimately doing is rewilding species that humans have removed. And that's going to, in theory, in a lot of places, sort of fix the offset, the imbalance of the ecosystem. That's interesting. That's really interesting. There's a lot of debate about whether or not humans killed off the woolly mammoth though, isn't there? I think there is. Yeah, I think there is. And I can't really speak on that. But I do know that when the mammoths disappeared... So the Arctic used to be like the savannahs of Africa. It used to be big grasslands, right? It wasn't all covered in trees and things. And that's a recent adaptation since the mammoths went away 10, 20,000 years ago. And so that's what's happened is the permafrost up there is melting pretty rapidly, right? Underneath that permafrost is like one and a half trillion tons of carbon. And once that carbon enters the atmosphere, it heats things up like crazy. So by removing those mammoths, you're... And I can explain why the mammoths keep it colder. But by removing those mammoths, it's allowing that permafrost to melt much quicker and release more carbon. So the idea from like a financial standpoint of how they make money is the carbon offset of putting mammoths back into the environment. How do they make it colder? So it's a couple different things. It's basically when there's trees and shrubs, they take in more heat and that heat transfers into the ground. So in this Pleistocene Park, this park that they've been doing this experiment in Siberia for a while, they've put in a couple hundred animals that aren't mammoths, right? They've put in ox and reindeer and things like that. And they're knocking trees over with the tractors. And once they knock trees over and they simulate a mammoth knocking the trees and shrubs over, the other, the fleet grazers are able to keep the vegetation from regrowing. So when the vegetation doesn't regrow, you get all this grassland and the grassland has snowpack. The snowpack gets stumped, so there's no insulation. It reflects more light. It's like three or four different processes that make the ground, I think on average, it's like eight degrees colder. So it keeps things more frozen. So once we removed all the megafauna from the Arctic through hunting or maybe other means, regardless, once they were removed, the Arctic got warmer. The Siberia and Alaska got warmer. And so slowly we're getting more and more carbon emissions from up there. But by putting these animals back, and I just love the idea of going up to the Arctic and it looking like the African savannah, right? With all of these incredible animals. But by putting these animals back, it in theory will make the Arctic colder, slow down the melting of the permafrost, which will in turn trap the carbon for longer in the ground.