So, you want to bring back the Woolly Mammoth. “Bring back Woolly Mammoths” Maybe you love
elephants, maybe you love science, or maybe you just want to make a lot of money. Either way,
we are remarkably close to being able to do it. And the opportunity here is a lot
bigger than most people think. Naturally, there are tons of skeptics: “Bad idea.
Did no one see Jurassic Park?” And sure, no one wants a group of massive Woolly Mammoth’s charging
around killing people. But this project could have a profoundly positive impact on the world,
so let’s dig into it and figure out how it would work, what the benefits are, and lastly,
how much money it could actually make. Genetic engineering is a complex issue and I don’t think
we should ignore the ethical questions: “Yeah, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether
or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” So let’s take Jeff Goldblum’s
advice and stop to think about whether or not we should actually resurrect the Woolly Mammoth.
First up is the why: these creatures have been dead for thousands of years. Do we really need
them? And could they even survive if we did bring them back? Well unlike the Dinosaurs,
which died-off millions of years ago. Mammoths and humans co-existed for millennia, at least,
until we killed them all. “Early man ate the woolly mammoth out of existence 12,000 years ago.
Most of them went extinct because we ate them.” So you could argue that humanity has some sort of
moral obligation to bring them back, since we were the ones responsible for their ultimate demise.
But there’s a bigger reason for bringing them back. And it’s a lot more selfish: bringing back
the Woolly Mammoth could actually help prevent climate change, and that benefits us directly.
See, the permafrost is melting and that’s a big problem for us. We need to keep these icy regions
frozen as long as possible, if we want to control carbon emissions: “And the reason we want lower
temperatures in the Tundra is that there are 14 hundred billion tons of carbon locked up, not
too far from the surface, in the icy soil and it’s melting very quickly.” Woolly Mammoths accomplish
several really important tasks up in the Tundra. They knock down trees and clear whole forests.
This is a bit counterintuitive, because we think of trees as generally important to environmental
protection, but up in the Arctic, clearer grasslands actually reflect more sunlight and stay
colder. As Mammoths walk around the Tundra, they pack down the snow and create sheets of ice that
actually keep the permafrost colder. There are bison up in the tundra, and they do a pretty good
job of clearing smaller shrubs, but they can’t knock down whole trees. So repopulating northern
Russia and Canada with Woolly Mammoths might actually be able to slow the permafrost melt and
buy us some extra time to fight climate change. It isn’t going to solve everything, but it seems
like it’s worth a shot. But there are other great reasons to support this project. It’s just plain
inspiring. I firmly believe that seeing astronauts go to space is incredibly inspirational. Any child
that sees a rocket launch immediately wants to learn more about the science and technology that
made it possible. That’s really important, since physics isn’t exactly the easiest subject. This
Woolly Mammoth project could do the same for the biological sciences. Seeing this ancient creature
reincarnated would undoubtedly inspire a new generation of biologists and they would go on to
do all sorts of great things. Some would work on curing cancer, others would help fight infectious
diseases, but all of these new scientists would help push humanity forward. We shouldn’t discount
the application of de-extinction technology more broadly though. The Woolly Mammoth is
fun to talk about because it’s such a striking creature. Everyone knows what a Woolly Mammoth
is and who doesn’t want to see one in real life? But the same genetic technology that will help
create a new Mammoth will also help restore other species on the brink of extinction. And this is
actually already happening. The black footed ferret is one great example. This species was
declared extinct in 1980, but just last year, scientists were able to clone a black footed
ferret that had died decades earlier to help bring the species back. And this happens all the time:
a particular species becomes so rare that there isn’t enough genetic diversity in the remaining
animals to continue reproducing. But cloning older animals can help prevent outright extinction.
Clearly there are risks to any cutting edge science, but we aren’t talking about resurrecting
deadly dinosaurs after all, these Woolly Mammoths are remarkably close to elephants. And elephants
have been outmatched by modern firearms for decades. But you’re probably asking yourself,
how would this even work? “Can you bring back the Woolly Mammoth? Because I would love to see
one. I would love a Woolly steak.” Well, if you’ve seen Jurassic Park, you’ll probably remember that
the original dinosaur DNA was found preserved in amber, and something remarkably similar happened
with the Woolly Mammoth. It’s basically impossible for us to find intact dinosaur DNA due to the
natural decay that occurs over millions of years. Even if blood was preserved in amber, radiation
would have ripped the DNA sequences to shreds over such a long period of time. But the Mammoths only
died off thousands, not millions of years ago. And many Mammoths were frozen in ice as soon as
they died, which preserved them remarkably well. And the story of how we found these incredible
specimens is actually pretty crazy too. Ivory is one of the most valuable materials in the world,
and the only way to get it is from elephants, or at least it used to be. With elephant populations
dwindling, governments started restricting the sale of elephant ivory. But Russian ivory hunters
figured out an alternative. “After embargo, for elephant, people start to sell Mammoth.”
There were no restrictions on digging up frozen Mammoths and selling the ivory from their tusks,
so a small industry started to flourish. “Life, uh, finds a way” And as these Mammoth hunters
dug deeper and deeper they started finding bodies that were so perfectly frozen, they appeared to
actually bleed when they were cut open. This was an incredibly promising breakthrough, since these
preserved specimens might have enough DNA left in them to piece together a complete sequence.
“This is the stuff that could possibly clone and bring back the mammoth from its extinction. So,
in other words, I’m literally holding a plot line from Jurassic Park in my hands.” Now, to be clear,
we haven’t found any living mammoth cells, just DNA fragments. And that’s an important
distinction. Scientists essentially need to piece together these fragments to understand what genes
produce the traits that allowed the Woolly Mammoth to thrive in such harsh environments. It would be
great if we could just relocate some African or Asian elephants to the tundra and call it a day,
but they wouldn’t last long up there. It’s just too cold. The Woolly Mammoth is
genetically similar to today’s elephants, but has a few key traits that allow it to survive
in low temperatures. Thick fur, extra layers of fat, and hemoglobin to carry oxygen in the
blood are all critical differentiators, but the DNA sequences that code for these genes
are pretty well understood now. “Right now, a team of geneticists at Harvard,
run by a narcoleptic, dyslexic genius, named Dr. George Church, are on the verge of bringing back
the Woolly Mammoth.” George Church is at the center of this project and just co-founded a
company named Colossal to commercialize the effort to clone a Woolly Mammoth. And he’s not just some
crazy scientist. Well, maybe he is a bit crazy, but he is definitely well respected within the
scientific community. In 1984, Church published the first direct genome sequencing method,
and played a critical role in the human genome project. He’s been working on this Mammoth project
for the last 6 years, and he clearly really believes in it: “This is real, not science
fiction, and potentially applicable to endangered and extinct species.” There are two major trends
that are simultaneously accelerating to make something like this a real possibility. First,
the cost of DNA sequencing is falling incredibly fast. Twenty years ago, sequencing a single genome
cost $100 million dollars, now, it costs less than $1 thousand dollars. Biology is becoming
drastically more accessible, and that’s opening up tons of new opportunities. The second major
trend is in gene editing technology. CRISPR is the latest development in this area, and the creators
just won the Nobel Prize for their work on it last year. You can think of these two developments like
reading and writing. In order to clone a Mammoth, we need to be able to read old Mammoth DNA and
then write that DNA into a new embryo. The cost of reading DNA has fallen precipitously, and now
the cost of writing DNA is also falling. But even with these advances, directly cloning a Mammoth is
still a bit out of reach. Luckily, scientists have found a workaround. Instead of trying to create a
perfect replica, they are just going to focus on adding those key genes I mentioned earlier
into an Asian elephant, essentially creating a hybrid. “Now, this wouldn’t be an exact replica,
because the short DNA fragments that I told you about will prevent us from building the exact
structure, but it would make something that looked and felt very much like a woolly mammoth did." And
this is a really key strategy. The team working on this project isn’t getting hung up on satisfying
some vague technical notion of what constitutes a Mammoth. They just want to make something that
will get the job done in the Tundra. But now, to the really vital part: the economic opportunity.
Church spun his research out into a full company, and they just raised $15 million dollars,
so they have to start thinking about turning a profit. The first and most obvious way for his
company, Colossal, to make money is just to sell cloned Mammoths. This is pretty straightforward.
Countries that have melting permafrost could buy Mammoths from Colossal directly and then
turn them loose in areas that are most affected by warming climates. But there could be plenty
of other buyers. Zoos already spend a fortune on rare animals and a cloned Woolly Mammoth would
clearly be the rarest of all. Pandas routinely sell for over $1 million dollars, and they’re
only endangered. There’s also a long history of cloned animals selling for incredibly high prices.
Sir Lancelot Encore is a cloned dog estimated to be worth millions of dollars, and a company named
Sinogene clones cats and dogs regularly for around $50 thousand dollars a piece. Missy the Cow sold
for $1.2 million dollars in 2009, and she wasn’t even cloned. So there’s clearly a market for rare
animals with very specific DNA sequences. I could definitely see the market for cloned
Mammoths being extremely lucrative, even if it was only for a few years before the novelty wore off.
After all, one of the investors in Colossal's funding round was the TikTok star Josh Richards.
He hasn’t disclosed how much money he put in, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he could make
it all back, just by being the first influencer to do a dance on top of a Woolly Mammoth. But
there are other ways that this company could make money, and they might not even need to sell any
Mammoths to do it. Church teamed up with a serial entrepreneur named Ben Lamm to found Colossal,
and Ben has an interesting history in startups. His last company was an artificial intelligence
business named Hypergiant. If you’ve never heard of them, that’s to be expected. Even
though they have a really slick website, they don’t make consumer-facing products. Instead,
the company focuses on partnerships with big companies who operate in the aerospace and defense
industry. So this project could be an attempt to do something similar. Attract a bunch of
really incredible talent to an ambitious project and then make money licensing out intellectual
property and contracting with other biotech companies. Either way, Church clearly takes the
implications of his work very seriously: “We are taking more and more control over our biological
destiny” The ability to both read and write DNA is a truly incredible breakthrough,
and one that we shouldn’t take lightly. We need to be careful about the second order effects of
these projects, but that shouldn’t slow us down. Big problems require big ambitious solutions,
and I, for one, hope this project succeeds. Thanks for watching.