The Man Bringing Extinct Creatures Back To Life - Ben Lamm

Just as a headline here, you're trying to fix global warming by bringing woolly mammoths back to life amongst a number of other extinct creatures, right?

(laughs) Well, I, I don't think that one company can fix global warming. I, I think that we are at the, you know, brink of a major biodiversity crisis, which will lead to ecosystem collapse, and, uh, restoring ecosystems like the Arctic tundra is something that, you know, we're very focused on. So, I hope that we are one of many people working on, uh, biodiversity loss and combating climate change, but, uh, I think it's maybe a little bold, uh, to say that we're, we are solving it ourselves.

I understand. Okay. So, somebody comes up to you at a cocktail party and says, "What do you do?" What is your answer for your day-to-day work?

So my, my general answer is, I say, "I'm in technology." If they dive deeper, I'm like, "Well, I'm in biotechnology." If they dive deeper, I, I tell 'em that we're working to bring back extinct species and preserve all life on Earth, and then it, and then it kind of unravels from there.

Right. Okay. Talk, talk to me about de-extinction, then. Like, what, what even is that?

Yeah, so de-extinction is, uh, not necess- not necessarily a new concept. Other, everything from books and movies and, and, and some other movements, uh, through, in the world have talked about the concept of de-extinction, and the way we view de-extinction is the de-extinction of core genes to build proxy species for, uh, genetics that have been lost, uh, to time, whether that was, you know, uh, due to solely, you know, climate change events, or towards, uh, or, or due to the fact of man's, uh, implications, right? And so, uh, fundamentally, we are de-extincting the core genes that make all of these species those unique species. And so recently, I was on a podcast where someone wanted to, uh, debate semantics over the dodo, and they, and they were like, "But sure, dodo is just gonna be a silly-looking pigeon," and I hated to inform them that a dodo was a silly-loo- looking pigeon. Dodos were pigeons, and so, uh, the things that made it a different flightless pigeon were the genes that were de-extincting. And so it, it definitely brings out, you know, different, uh, groups have different perspectives on, on the work that we're doing, but, but fundamentally, we're bringing back these lost species, uh, to, to increase biodiversity, and then we're using all those technologies for conservation, which is pretty cool.

Okay. Nuts and bolts, how the fuck do you bring a dead animal back to life? (laughs)

So you can't, you can't clone a, a, a, a, a dead animal. Uh, you, you don't have living cells. So what you have to do is you have to look for its closest living relative. So in the case of the mammoth, that's the Asian elephant. Mammoths are actually closer related to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants, which is like, like that blew my mind when, when I learned that, 'cause I, I, uh, I was also the first to de-extinction when I was working on this. And what was interesting is you actually have to then go look at the DNA sequences, and so we actually had to s- assemble 54 mammoth genomes to build out kind of a reference genome that we could do all the comparative genomics to that of the Asian elephant, and they're about 99.6% the same genetically. And so then, and then in that difference of 0.4%, so a lot of genes, we then started to isolate, what are the genes that really made a mammoth a mammoth? You know, the domed cranium, the curved tusk, the shaggy coat, this extra fat layer, how they produce oxygen in subfreezing temperatures. And so we, we then had to spend a lot of time doing computational analysis to really understand that, and then we take and engineer those genes into that of an Asian elephant cell, then we go through the cloning process, kind of like what they did with Dolly the sheep back in the '90s, only it's way more efficient now and it uses, like, lasers and stuff like that, versus back in the '90s, they were kind of just jamming stuff together, which is weird, uh, but it kind of worked then. Now it actually really works 'cause it's, it's way more precise. Uh, and then you, and then you actually implant that embryo into the closest living relative, being the Asian elephant, uh, from a surrogacy perspective.