Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life | Dr. Beth Shapiro

Resumen

Dr. Beth Shapiro, Chief Scientific Officer at Colossal Biosciences, discusses the science and ethics of de-extinction. She explains how genomic technology, originally developed to study ancient DNA, is now being used to restore extinct traits to living species like mammoths and direwolves. Rather than creating identical clones, the focus is on functional ecosystem restoration and using these engineering tools to save endangered species from extinction by increasing their resilience to environmental threats.

Temas tratados

• De-Extinction Strategy
• Species Concepts

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Extracto de la transcripción

So our direwolves, they have 20 edits that we picked and we sequenced genomes from fossil direwolves. We learned from those genomes what genetic changes made those animals bigger, more robust, light colored in coat and then we engineered those changes into a greywolf genome to recreate the direwolf. You know, I often get the question of why are you thinking about bringing extinct species back to life? Why aren't you thinking about helping living species not become extinct? And the answer is we are doing both. It is the same tools. It's the same technology. It's the same needs. And when we excite people with the idea of mammoths and dodos and thyloines, we get more engagement and enthusiasm and investment in developing the technology that we can use to stop living species from becoming extinct. >> Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for ev…