Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

BEN LAMM: If people don’t know what a dire wolf was, it wasn’t just in Game of Thrones. They’re a wolf that existed in North America, and they went extinct about 12,500 years ago, until recently. We took a 13,000 year-old tooth and a 72,000-year old skull, and then through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, aka cloning, you get an embryo, you put it into a domestic dog, 60 days later we had our first dire wolf pups.

BOB SAFIAN: What do you say to people who say like, “Oh, it’s wrong to mess with nature, it’s playing God?”

LAMM: I think that given that we’re going to lose up to 50% of biodiversity between now and 2050, we have a moral obligation to do something.

SAFIAN: That’s Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the start-up behind the recent viral return of the formerly extinct dire wolf. The story has garnered a lot of excitement, but equally sparked a debate about whether these dire wolves are the real thing and whether it’s ethical to birth and rewild extinct animals.

I asked Ben about all of this, plus how the start-up attracted a roster of celebrity investors and what other animals Colossal is working on bringing back next. Whether it’s lessons from Jurassic Park, cutting-edge genetic science, or the need to build your own ethical framework, Ben is provocative and compelling. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian, I’m here with Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. Ben, thanks for being here.

LAMM: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Copy LinkResurrecting the dire wolf

SAFIAN: So, Colossal first came onto my radar through news about trying to resurrect the Woolly Mammoth. Colossal managed to produce some Woolly Mammoth traits in a mouse, that was dubbed the Woolly Mouse, but nothing has gotten attention like the announcement that you’ve brought back the long extinct dire wolf. Now, for people who aren’t fans of Game of Thrones or Dungeons & Dragons or thought dire wolves only existed in fantasy, what is a dire wolf? And of all the creatures that have disappeared, why did you focus on this one?

LAMM: The dire wolf just kind of happened. Most people know us about the Woolly Mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the Dodo, and we still are pursuing those. We give updates probably every half a year — we give a big update on what we’re doing on those projects. But if people don’t know what a dire wolf was, it wasn’t just in Game of Thrones. They weren’t the size of cars. They’re a wolf that existed in North America, only in North America, with 90% of the fossil record being found here in the continental United States. They were about 20-25% bigger than existing gray wolves. They had a thicker jaw, they had a stronger kind of cranial facial structure. They were also heavier from a weight perspective, at least from what we expect from the bone density, and they went extinct about 12,500 years ago, until recently.

SAFIAN: You obtained/found sort of ancient 12,000-year-old DNA that you bred these creatures from. Can you walk me through how you undertook this?

LAMM: Yeah, so Colossal focuses on what we call functional de-extinction, right? It’s not possible to clone an extinct species. There’s no living cells. It’s not possible to completely just take a cell, like you do with all the sheep, and just clone. That is part of the process, but you actually have to start with something, right? And so we’ve actually identified that dire wolves’ closest living relatives were gray wolves.

And so the process of functional de-extinction is you do a lot of AI and computer analysis of the ancient genomes, and we took a 13,000-year old tooth and a 72,000-year old skull, and we took that, we took all the ancient DNA that we could find out of that, and a lot of times it comes up empty. We put it into a machine, it gives us a genome, and we compare it to that closest living relative, being the gray wolf. And with that, we can actually identify what genes really made a dire wolf, a dire wolf in terms of their physical attributes or phenotypes that existed.

And with that, we then use a combination of genome engineering tools to take those genes, engineer that DNA into the closest living cells, which are gray wolves, and then through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, aka cloning, you get an embryo, you put it into a domestic dog, 60 days later, we had our first dire wolf puppies.

SAFIAN: So, it’s not that everything comes from the DNA that you found in these bones, it’s that you’re sort of tweaking the DNA of existing gray wolves to more closely mimic or mirror the DNA that you found in these ancient bones. Am I explaining that the right way?

LAMM: Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty close. It gets super nuanced, right? Because gray wolves are 99.5% dire wolves already. So, you don’t mess with any of that. It’s the same body plan, same canids lineage, same reproductive organs, same placental types. All of that is the exact same. So, you just kind of leave that alone because you know it produces a wolf.

Very much like Jurassic Park. A lot of people have seen Jurassic Park. When people see Jurassic Park, it’s very similar. They took ancient DNA, they took bird DNA in some movies, frog DNA in the later movies, they put everything in the kitchen sink in it to essentially bring back these phenotypes. But just like in the movie, it’s not possible to clone a dinosaur. Those were genetically modified birds with dinosaur alleles. That’s the same thing with our dire wolves. That’s the same thing with the mammoths we’re working on and everything.

And so it is the closest approximation, but it isn’t just engineered to look like a dire wolf. It’s actually using the dire wolf specific genes that drove those traits. And so, one of the things that’s pretty cool is that we had no idea that dire wolves were white until we got all this ancient DNA. People thought that they were red or orange or some kind of khaki color because they’ve seen paleo art that depicts them of that color.

But in reality, based on the data that we got from the genome, they were white. And so that was pretty cool. So, we learned a lot of stuff from the genome that people didn’t even know about dire wolves to begin with.

Copy LinkDebate over species authenticity

SAFIAN: There’s been some controversy, right, about whether these are truly dire wolves rather than gray wolves that have been sort of genetically engineered to share some dire-like traits. Are those criticisms reasonable? Because it does sound a little bit like it’s a new species, right?

LAMM: It’s not really a new species. So, I’m a big believer in personal choice and freedom. And so people are like, “Doesn’t it bother you that some of the scientific community has pushed back?” And I was like, “No.” I was like, “That’s the beauty of science, right?” And some people though are quite mad about it.

But the reality is that we’ve done things in this project that no one’s ever done. No one’s ever taken and edited 15 genes with ancient genomes that have been lost to time for 12,000 years. No one’s ever done that. And so the problem with the argument — one, it doesn’t bother me, but my issue with it — is I think it overshadows the incredible science of the women and men that have done this, right? They took 12,000-year old DNA and made puppies. That’s incredible. That’s the moon landing of genetics.

And so my argument is that if people want to call them dire wolves, call them dire wolves. If they want to call them Colossal dire wolves, call them Colossal dire wolves; if they want to call them genetically-modified wolves, call them that. But it’s still amazing. It’s like if you go to Jurassic Park and you believe that movie is about dinosaurs, then our dire wolves are dire wolves. If you go to Jurassic Park and say, “Those are genetically-modified birds with dinosaur alleles and frog DNA.” Well, then ours are genetically modified wolves with dire wolf alleles to it. And so it’s really a semantics issue.

But what’s crazy, and I didn’t know this because I’m not a biologist or a scientist, is that there’s actually over 30 ways to classify a species. And while some of the scientific community pushed back, we have over 95 of some of the top scientific minds in the world. We’ve got people like George Church, and Luis Vidal, and Tom Gilbert and Andrew Pask, and Beth Shapiro, who’s arguably the number one ancient DNA expert in the world, who wrote a book saying how to clone a mammoth, and it ends with, “You can’t,” because you cannot clone an extinct species, but you can engineer one. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

We’re trying to rebuild extinct species for today using data from the past. And the only thing that annoyed me about the argument was it’s a semantic argument, and it’s a semantic argument that overshadowed a lot of the great scientists, that people put their blood, sweat, and tears in. And I think over time, that’ll die down and people will just look at the science, which is truly amazing in what it can do for not just human healthcare, but also for endangered species.

Copy LinkBuilding a business out of de-extinction

SAFIAN: You mentioned that you’re not a scientist. Your background is not in bioscience. You’ve been a tech entrepreneur, and you got excited about this idea because of the business opportunities? I mean, Colossal is a for-profit business, right?

LAMM: Yes. We are a for-profit business. The reality is I had built a handful of software companies. I liked building technology businesses. I didn’t mean to start this business. I reached out to George Church. He’s the number one geneticist in the world, maybe of all time, at Harvard, and he’s definitely the father of synthetic biology. And I reached out to him, and I just asked him, “With the proliferation of access to compute, AI automation, synthetic biology, what are the opportunities? Is there opportunity to build software for synthetic biology and directed evolution? What are the opportunities?” And I asked him if he had one project with unlimited capital that he thought could change the world, what would it be? And it was this one.

I’m not a biologist, but I like to learn new things, and I know how to build teams of women and men much smarter than me. And I thought this would be something that’s cool. And now that I have a nine-month-old son, I’m pretty stoked that we’re working on something that could have a huge application to conservation as well as advance science. And it’s also something that can inspire generations. And we don’t get a lot of credit for this. And I think it’s our fault. We don’t do a good job.

But every single week we get pictures from kids talking about their favorite animals, and we have whole classrooms that send us thank you videos and stuff. And so it’s cool, right? Yes, there’s a conservation element. Yes, there’s a deep science element. But there’s this kind of cool inspiration element to it. And so I can just go build another software company, but to what end? To make a little bit better of a chat platform? To make a little bit better of a defense software? To make more money? At some point, I think there’s got to be more to it. And this is something that I was really passionate about.

Copy LinkThe 3 societal benefits behind de-extinction

SAFIAN: And this de-extinction, is the idea that bringing back these species puts our environment into better balance? Or is it just like they’re cool to have these creatures around?

LAMM: Well, it’s kind of threefold, right? It is cool. If a kid sees that using genetics, you could make a Woolly Mammoth, I do think that inspires kids. I know a lot of scientists that don’t want to make dinosaurs, but they saw Jurassic Park and they became geneticists because they thought it was cool. So, there is a cool factor to your point.

Secondly is conservation. It’s forecasted that we’re going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050, if we don’t do anything about it. We know conservation works. This is not a substitute for conservation. It just doesn’t work at the speed of which we’re eradicating species and changing our planet. So, we need new tools; In all of the technology that Colossal makes on the path to de-extinction that has an application to conservation, we make available for free to our conservation partners. And if that wasn’t enough, we then went and raised $50 million separate of our business to start the Colossal Foundation to fund even other academics working on technologies that could help conservation.

And then the third thing is, and this will take time, is once you get enough species, our goal is to work with indigenous people, groups, private landowners, governments, ecologists to rewild those species because certain species could have a tremendous impact on the environment.

Copy LinkInside Colossal’s business model

SAFIAN: You mentioned sort of sharing your research and your software with others. Colossal’s only been around a few years. It is a private company.

LAMM: Now we’re three years, yeah.

SAFIAN: It’s valued at $10 billion. I mean, you don’t sell a product, do you? Do you have revenue—

LAMM: No, we have no revenue, and we’re really good at losing money, because science is hard and expensive. Most people don’t realize this, but for research and development, it’s a giant R, but very little of it makes it into development. So, it’s a little D, right? And so we’ve spun out three companies. One is called Form Bio, which is a computational biology platform. Surprise, a bunch of software people built a software platform that could be used specifically for manufacturability of drugs, understanding where different products fail in the drug discovery market using CRISPR and AI. And so we spun that company out. It’s worth over $100 million today.

We spun out a second company, which is called Breaking. And the reason we named it Breaking is it’s actually breaking the chemical bonds of plastic and just producing biomass. And so even if we change hearts and minds tomorrow about plastic use or single plastic use, we still have a lot of plastic. We still have to figure out how we deal with this. So, we’re very interested in that. And then we have a third one that we have not announced publicly that is worth over $100 million as well.

SAFIAN: So, is the business model, the research that you’re doing, is going to throw off ideas that will then be able to be used for things that you don’t even know what they are yet?

LAMM: Well, that’s one, right? The second one is actually in long-term rewilding. And so you’ve probably heard about carbon credits. You’ve probably heard about there’s a newer thing called biodiversity credits. It’s much more valuable to keep an elephant alive than to sell its location to poachers because of the application of what it does to the environment and the carbon store.

So, now you actually have entire markets. And like a lot of these newer markets like crypto, everything, it takes a while for them to mature. We do believe that the long-term rewilding impacts of species back into their natural habitats will create a combination of government subsidies, carbon credits, biodiversity credits. But think about that, making species, putting them back, helping the environment and then getting long-term annuities for them is also pretty interesting when you think about the long scale. So, you kind of have short-term technology development and longer-term applications to rewilding.

SAFIAN: And a $10 billion valuation. Wow. I mean, in three years is pretty good.

LAMM: I think we’re massively undervalued. I think we’re a $100 billion company, but we are where we are today.

SAFIAN: Whether or not Colossal is really undervalued at $10 billion, it’s impressive how Ben has managed to reach substantive results in just a few years, including Colossal’s spun out businesses. So, might Colossal’s tech be used one day to revolutionize human health? We’ll talk about that plus Colossal’s roster of celebrity investors and more, after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

SAFIAN: Before the break, Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm shared the story behind the company’s highly publicized resurrection of dire wolves. Now, he talks about helping extinct species versus endangered species, how new genetic tools could impact human reproduction, and why he wishes Colossal had a thousand more competitors. Plus, he shares details on the company’s roster of celebrity investors and more. Let’s dive back in.

Copy LinkWhere the dire wolves are currently living

So, you’ve got a few of these dire wolves. I understand you spent some time with these creatures. Were you scared when you met them?

LAMM: Well, I mean, I met Romulus when he was this big, so I wasn’t very scared. I bottle-fed Romulus as a pup. We have them in a 2,000-acre secure, expansive ecological preserve. And then a subset of that’s about six and a half acres where we have an advanced storm shelter in case something were bad to happen, we can put them in. We’ve got an animal hospital on site that we built, and we have an animal husbandry where we can feed them to check up on them and stuff like that.

And so I was actually in that six-acre preserve with them, I guess three or four weeks, no, four weeks ago. And Remus came out to me, and I saw — actually, pet — Remus, because remember, they’re not dogs. They’re wolves, and they’re starting to become more and more like wolves every day. I thought, “Yeah, this is probably the last time I’m going to put myself in the preserve.”

Where we go from here is we’re certified by American Humane Society, so we constantly give them updates to do vet checks. I think the goal from here is to monitor them, take care of them. We’ll probably make another three to five more because we want to get the right pack dynamics. We’re not going to breed them.

Now, I will say that we do have really close indigenous partners that they have a connection to the dire wolf, and several of them think it could have been the great wolf in some of their oral traditions. And so there could be a season where, or a time, when we actually rewild them back into secure, expansive ecological reserves, or even larger, on indigenous land in collaboration with them. But that’ll take a long time.

Copy LinkWhat else Colossal is working on

SAFIAN: So, what creatures are we likely to see next from Colossal? Woolly Mammoths, as I understand, there’s a lot of science still to be done, long gestation periods.

LAMM: Yeah, long gestation. So, 22 months gestation, but we’re in the editing phase. So, we think it’s about 85 genes. So, more edits than obviously the dire wolves. We’ve edited about 25 of those. We’re doing quite well. I will say though, that one of the things that we care a lot about is the system. And so we try to parallel path these things.

So, we are working on Elephant IDF, we’re working on Rhino IDF. We’re the exclusive genetic partner for the Northern White Rhino Project, which is pretty cool. And so we’re trying to develop new, what’s called, assisted reproductive technologies that anyone can use to help save species. That’s pretty awesome.

I think that what’s next, it’s hard to guess, but mammoth, Thylacine and Dodo are all chugging along. They’re kind of all generally on track, and somewhere a little ahead of schedule. And then I think you’ll also be able to see big conservation wins. Many people aren’t talking about this, but the most endangered wolf in the world is the red wolf. It’s an American wolf. There’s only 15 left in the wild from 12 founder lines, and we actually made four. We actually made more red wolves than we did dire wolves. But because they’re not in Game of Thrones and movie stars, they’re not getting as much feedback.

But we actually developed a new technique to clone from blood. And so typical cloning, you have to sometimes anesthetize the animal. You’ve got to take skin biopsies, ear punches, you got to do a lot of stuff. And from an animal welfare perspective, this is now just simply a blood draw. And you can isolate these specific cells in the blood and then clone from them. And they’re pretty cloning efficient. And so I think most likely what you’ll see is more endangered species being worked on from Colossal, probably before you see the next extinct species.

SAFIAN: I see. So, not necessarily de-extinction, but maintaining species that are dwindling.

LAMM: Yeah. We think de-extinction goes hand-in-hand with species preservation.

Copy LinkCelebrity investments and media attention

SAFIAN: It sounds a little bit like the animals you choose to focus on for de-extinction, sort of, it’s in part science and in part on cultural appeal. You want attention, right? I mean, you’ve got celebrity investors, Tom Brady, Peter Jackson, and so on. Is all that a strategic plan to try to make the science more sexy, more glamorous, more accessible?

LAMM: I don’t know how the science could be more sexy, and we didn’t reach out to Tom Brady. We didn’t reach out to Peter Jackson. These people reached out to us. And so we aren’t out there pursuing Hollywood. Hollywood’s been pursuing us. Peter Jackson got excited about it. When he was a kid, he read comic books and sci-fi novels, and he thought we’d be vacationing on Venus, and we got flying cars. And he’s like, “None of that happened.” He literally says that the reason why he invested in Colossal was it was the first time you saw a company trying to do something that, as a kid, sparked his imagination and whatnot in sci-fi.

We don’t look for attention. Every time we announce a cell edit, we get a lot of attention. We believe that science is for everyone. I think that the celebrity partners that we have and investors we have definitely gets more people excited about it. My hope is that there’s one less influencer and there’s one more scientist in the world. And so we do put content out on TikTok and Instagram and everywhere else because we think it’s cool, and we’re not asking people to think it’s cool, but it’s not our job to persuade anyone. It’s just our job to be transparent and educate people.

Copy LinkAddressing ethical concerns

SAFIAN: I mean, with any work like this, there’s always going to be ethical debate. I’m sure you expect that.

LAMM: Yeah.

SAFIAN: What do you say to people who say like, “Oh, it’s wrong to mess with nature. It’s playing God. What you’re doing is playing God?”

LAMM: Well, so first of all, what people don’t remember about Colossal is that one of our biggest critics when we launched was Beth Shapiro. She’s our chief science officer. We have this history of running towards critics, not away from critics. We want to hear from them. What can we be doing better? What can we be doing different?

But ethics is something that we take very, very seriously, and we want to have these conversations. But I think that given that we’re going to lose up to 50% of biodiversity between now and 2050, we have a moral obligation to do something. What we are doing is not going to solve the extinction crisis. We need a thousand companies like Colossal, maybe some in de-extinction, some in cryopreservation, some in advanced Gametogenesis to create egg and sperm cells from tissues. We need a thousand companies like this. This is a huge existential crisis.

So, I think that we have a moral obligation to do it, personally. And I also think that we play God every day, that we over-fish the ocean or eradicate a species. We’re deforesting the planet at a massive rate. And so I think that if we are the apex predator on this planet and we have technology is our beacon of humanity, then we should use it for good. And so this is what we are doing. We’re not asking people to subscribe to it, but go do something.

It’s funny, some of our biggest critics around the mammoth project have actually spent zero money on elephant conservation. If you feel so passionately about elephant conservation, quit your job, move to Africa, and I can give you the… We fund the top 10 conservation groups in elephants. We will happily get you a placement there and fund you to leave your job and go help elephants, if that’s what you really want to do. But the reality is a lot of people want to just talk about these things. They don’t want to put their money where their mouth is, and we’re trying to put substantial money towards what we’re saying.

SAFIAN: And do you worry that people will care less about protecting endangered animals if any species can be resurrected?

LAMM: Man, resurrecting species is hard, and they’re not direct clones, right? They’re expensive, they’re hard. We make that very, very clear to everyone. Some of the work that we’re doing, like EEHV in elephants, the general public didn’t know that the vast majority of elephant deaths is not from poaching. It’s from a disease called EEHV, a herpes virus. And we are working with AZA partner zoos as well as Dr. Paul Ling at the Baylor College of Medicine to advance this research. And we actually have those vaccines being tested right now in elephants to save elephants. If it continues to work and it confers resistance to all this, we will save more elephants than all of human elephant conservation combined, right?

SAFIAN: You have a lot of different things going on. I mean, when you talk about vaccines for elephants, that’s far afield from trying to create a dire wolf.

LAMM: Yeah. But if a mammoth, which is 99.6% the same genetically as an Asian elephant. Mammoths are closer to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants, that’s kind crazy. And it’s crazy to think about, but that’s just genetically true. But what’s interesting about that is they are susceptible to EEHV. So, we spend all this time to bring back this herd of elephants that we reintroduce into the Arctic, and then they get EEHV and die, that seems like a bad idea, right?

And so we always try to talk about that functional de-extinction should be about engineering and rebuilding extinct species for today. And so if we know that we can cure this EEHV or prevent it from causing death, we should engineer that into our mammoth species as well.

SAFIAN: So, you’re also working on an artificial womb, what you call Exo-Dev, exogenous development. You don’t need a surrogate animal to basically grow and carry a developing creature.

LAMM: That’s the goal, right? We’re not there yet. If things go well in the next two years, maybe we will be able to birth a small mammal like a mouse, fully ex-utero. We have a 17-person team on it. I mentioned the North White Rhino Project, right? There’s two females left. They’re functionally extinct. But imagine a world where we engineer a genetic diversity into 200 northern white rhinos. We grow them all in a lab, fully ex-utero. It never has to bother an existing rhino. And then we work with teams on the ground to rewild that species back into the environment.

Copy LinkFuture implications and technological boundaries

SAFIAN: And this Exo-Dev development, I mean, I realize it’s a long way from here, but could it have implications for human uses?

LAMM: It’s a great question. The answer is yes. I think the vast majority of our technologies can. We don’t do anything with humans or even non-human primates, so we don’t want to get anywhere near that world. We really want to stay focused on conservation and species preservation and de-extinction. So, if there are applications to it, we can spin those out and let other teams with different capital and different mandates go pursue that.

We’ve actually been able to make healthier embryos and grow them longer. And so that piece could be something that could be used to replace morphological grading in like human IVF clinics, right? I just went through IVF, looking at embryos through just a grading scale seems moderately archaic to me, compared to the technologies we have today. And so I think even just some of the pieces to these larger systems that are like exogenous development systems could have application to IVF today, which is pretty cool.

SAFIAN: No, I mean, as I hear you, the science fiction say that a future where we can custom-make creatures, family members, I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like you think the science is that far away.

LAMM: I don’t think the science is far. I think that you need to be really thoughtful on the regulation, on the ethics. I think it’s much harder to grow an elephant fully ex-utero, physiologically, than a human. I do. I think it would be much easier to grow a human fully ex-utero than an elephant.

But I think you have moral, ethical, religious, and regulatory hurdles that someone, if they want to do that should go do that. We don’t want to do that for many, many reasons. But I do think that from a science, to your question, the science is there. We are at the doorstep of a lot of these breakthroughs.

Copy LinkThe powerful pairing of synthetic biology and AI

SAFIAN: The area of AI where your background is, and obviously you’re passionate about also, there’s conversation about: What are the rules, what are the guardrails that we should put up around AI one way or the other? Do you see yourself playing a role like that for synthetic biology? What and where do the guardrails come from for a technology like this that’s out there?

LAMM: Yeah, I think synthetic biology, especially paired with AI, is one of the most powerful things that humanity’s ever discovered or invented. I think over time, probably certain disease states that are inherited diseases could be eradicated and be passed on, which I don’t think is a bad thing. It’s just that’s not going to be us that does that, right? We’re very focused on species. We’ve kind of drawn our own framework, right? We’ve said, “We’re not going to work on animals that are in the non-human primate category. We’re not going to work on things like Neanderthal. We’re not going to work on anything like that. Every species that we work on has to have a tie back to saving an existing endangered species.”

So, we built our own kind of ethical framework. I don’t know if I’m qualified to be at the table. A much smarter scientist than — I’m not a scientist, so much smarter people than me that are scientists around synthetic biology and what we should be doing with it. If there ever is a consortium of people, they should have people like Beth and George and really smart people to set those guidelines.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for the future of conservation?

SAFIAN: So, what’s at stake right now for you in the choices you make, the science you develop for Colossal, but also for the rest of us, for the future?

LAMM: Yeah. I think the biggest thing at stake is conservation, right? It’s like we are losing species at an alarming rate, and I think part of that is, I think it’s less on the science, honestly. I think that’s more on adoption, on federal funding and support of incredible partners in the conservation field. People ask how they can help Colossal: donate to conservation, donate to people that are in the field actually doing the work, and then trying to get these technologies more well-known.

Like I said, the saddest part of the last week for me is that people didn’t focus at all on the red wolves, and that to me is a bigger story than the dire wolves. But that’s on us, right? We’re doing big stuff. Those things are exciting. If at least a percentage of those people trickle down into conservation, then hopefully we’ve done something right.

SAFIAN: Well, Ben, this was great. Thanks so much for talking with me.

LAMM: Yeah, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

SAFIAN: There are so many things from Ben’s talk running through my head. Can synthetic biology solve our conservation problems? Are we close to being able to grow humans ex-utero? Are we ignoring crucial lessons from Jurassic Park? Whether you believe Colossal’s wolf pups are really dire wolves, the advances in gene editing are just flat out amazing. And yes, a little scary, too. It’s clear that the buzz around Colossal’s breakthrough is inspiring more than sci-fi fans and celebrities. Hopefully, that will include ethicists as well.

Am I personally going to rush to pet the next dire wolf pup or Woolly Mouse? Probably not. But the fact that scientists are unlocking so much possibility, it does get my heart racing. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.