Could Making a New Woolly Mammoth Help Human Health?

It's been at least 4,000 years since the last woolly mammoths went extinct. But the idea of these relatives to modern-day elephants looms large, especially for the biotech company Colossal Biosciences. It's not just like Jurassic Parky. It's also a little bit Indiana Jonesy where we've got incredible folks who've actually gone out into the field and found frozen mammoths.

Ben Lamb is the company's co-founder. He wants to genetically engineer and rewild new hybrid species that resemble extinct animals, like the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and, of course, the woolly mammoth. You have to innovate across genome engineering, synthetic biology, embryology, animal husbandry, even artificial wombs. But many of those technologies are usable today. But could this technology Lamb's companies developing also lead to innovations in human health?

From the Wall Street Journal, this is the Future of Everything. I'm Danny Lewis. Today, we're bringing you Future of Everything editorial director Stephanie Elginfritz's conversation with Ben Lamb from the W.S.J.'s Future of Everything Festival in May. They spoke about how and why he wants to create replacements for these extinct animals and how the technology his company's developing could help treat human diseases. That's after the break.

And now, here's the conversation between future of everything editorial director Stephanie Ilkenfritz and colossal biosciences CEO Ben Lamb. She started by asking him why he wants to genetically engineer a new species similar to the woolly mammoth in the first place. This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.

We are at this weird inflection point where we're going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050 if we don't do anything. So George Church, who's arguably the father of synthetic biology, convinced me that we should start a de-extinction toolkit company starting with the iconic megafauna of the woolly mammoth and then look at how we could apply those technologies to conservation. So that's where we are on our journey.

So why start with something big and scary? Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, there's not a lot of hate groups out there for wooly mammoths, right? I mean, elephants are really important to their ecosystems. There's also a lot of reasons to go into developing technologies for developmental biology for elephants. And so George had been working on the mammoth for about eight years, and he'd been building ecosystem modelings with some folks out of northern Siberia to look at what rewilding of mammoths and other Arctic adapted elephants could be.

and how that can benefit the ecosystem. So it's kind of the first easiest place to start. And people don't hate them. So is the idea that if you could de-extinct something, you could also use that technology to prevent extinction? Yeah, so you have to innovate across genome engineering, synthetic biology, embryology, animal husbandry, even artificial wombs. But many of those technologies are usable today. So like one of our biggest projects that we're working on right now that

we don't get many people talking about is our work with the Northern White Rhino. So we're the genetic rescue partner for the Northern White Rhino team. And they're using the same technologies that we've created to go out and look at museums and frozen zoo samples to understand population genomics and genetic diversity so that we can engineer in genetic loss diversity into the remaining embryos for the Northern White Rhino. So instead of having two and having genetic bottleneck, you can then have like 18 or 20 and you can actually repopulate the entire species.

Well, walk us through how it would work with the woolly mammoth. Where would you start? You start with DNA, and where do you get it? We work with about 60 of the top scientists all around the world in their incredible labs, but it's not just like Jurassic Parky. It's also a little bit Indiana Jonesy, where we've got incredible folks who have actually gone out into the field and found frozen mammoths, right? They've gone in and actually had to do drilling into their teeth, as well as into tusk and into the petros bones, and we get fragmented ancient DNA.

But it's really bad. It's not like our DNA, so you actually need a lot of it. We've had to use AI and software to help assemble a reference genome. And then you compare it to that of its closest living relative. In this case, it's the Asian elephant. And that kind of gives you your place to start genome engineering. Then do you start a sub-sort of cloning process? Where do you get to, say, an embryo?

You start with an Asian elephant cell. So you cultivate Asian elephant cells, you build stem cells, you then look at all of your edits that your computational biology team have suggested, and then you use a myriad of these tools, including CRISPR, large DNA cargo, swap, single nucleotide edits, and you start making these edits to the genome of a cell, and then you get to the cloning step at the end.

And if you get to a point where you have an embryo, what creature would carry this new creature to term? All of our species that we're working on right now will be born through surrogate. So in the case of the willy mammoth, that's the Asian elephant. We do have a team working on artificial wounds. There's engineering challenges, but we kind of know everything that we need to go through the different stages. But long term, we hope that all of our species and endangered species would be grown exudero.

So with all the manipulation you were doing with the genetics to change the style that you started with, could you make a unicorn? I don't get a unicorn question. I get a Pokemon question a lot. It's like, can we make Pokemon? I think it's love Pikachu. Yeah, I think that from a synthetic biology perspective, we are just walking through the door of what's possible. As quantum and other, these technologies continue to come up.

with compute, with AI, with the synthetic biology tools, we will be able to essentially engineer any type of life that we want. Now, should we? That's the ethical... What about something beneficial, arguably beneficial, like say a mosquito that doesn't transmit malaria?

I think that's great. You know, part of Colossal's business models, we're actually spitting out technologies that have an application to human health care or to the environment that we can monetize, right? And so I think that there's a huge application for synthetic biology in us engineering life to better suit not just our way of life on the planet, but also to kind of undo some of the sins of the past that we have caused.

coming up? Could the technology behind colossal biosciences efforts to create modern versions of woolly mammoths also be used for human health? That's after the break.

What kind of direct application for human health do you see with what you're doing? Colossal is not working on human health care, but if we have applications that can help humans, we want to spin that out and obviously monetize it. So two things that most recently have come out of the lab, we spent on a company called Form Bio, which is a computational biology platform. So looking at how we can apply

that drug discovery, cancer research, looking at all these different patients genomes. So we spun that company out and that's gone pretty well. One of the things is sometimes this statement gets taken out of context, but elephants, they get cancer a fraction of what they should if you look at their age and body weight and size.

And most people in the research community believe it's because of a protein called p53 and any time you start editing elephant cells It says I need to kill the cell something's bad. We got to stop it So for us to be successful in our editing We actually had to figure out how to regulate p53 because we don't want to like turn it down make the edits and then create more cancer and elephants And so while we are not then taking p53 research and regulation into the medical field We have several research collaborators around the world that are interested in

taking some of our methods and patents around that and seeing if it could be applied to the answer. That was going to be partly my next question. If you can regulate P53, are you licensing that ability or are you making it open source? Yeah, so anything that the company makes that has an application conservation, we give to the world for free. There's very little new capability development that's happening in conservation. So we really want to ensure that we are like this free R&D group for

We're open sourcing all of that, publishing the papers and just giving that to the world, right? All of our genomes get open sourced. When there's applications of human health care, that is part of our monetization model.

So, let's say you are able to get to the point of creating a new animal and you fix the cancer problem. What would you do then? Would you be just creating one animal is as a demonstration project or are you thinking like herds of Wally Mammoths? No, exactly. It's herds, right? Elf is a very social creature. So, we work very closely with indigenous people, groups, private landowners, the United States, federal governments and investors in the business as well.

We work with states on each one of these rewilding projects. So our three big Keystone species, the mammoth, the thylacine, and the dodo, we're working with individual committees meeting quarterly in Mauritius, meeting quarterly in Alaska and Northern Canada, and also meeting quarterly in Tasmania.

Working with all these folks because there's a lot of stakeholders right to rewilding not just like you know the rewilding willy mammoth I assume Alaska Canada the dodo is Mauritius perhaps and then the Tasmanian tiger the thylacine would be Would be Tasmanian and lower and we'll also lower Southern has many tigers isn't actually a tiger. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a big car numerous of our super, but it's awesome

Like a tiger zebra kangaroo thing. So then, if you rewild these animals...

Who owns them? You have to be very mindful of the stewardship of this, right? What you don't want to do is like rewile something back into the environment and then have a lot of poaching and all of that. Or hunting, I mean, hunting. People used to hunt them. That was their whole deal. Yeah, and so if we are ever going to rewile dialyseins back, it will have an impact on national parks. It will be a protected species, right? They're technically genetically modified organisms. And so certain countries, you know, due to like corn and

other crops and whatnot have different regulations on GMOs. So now you have to not just work with the logging industry about putting these animals back and seeing how it will potentially affect protected areas that they make their livelihood from. But you also have to go talk to the government to say, well technically this is a GMO.

But the concern is that genetically modified organisms could interbreed with, like you said, with corn and other plants at the concern, and then change nature. Yeah. But we change nature every day, right? I mean, I took a lot of supplements today. I changed my nature this morning. We eradicated the thylacine in 1936. Like, we eradicated that species.

tons of research papers that show that we started the cascading effect that led to the mammoth extinction. We eradicated the dodos, right? And so this is an opportunity to bring back these keystone species that will not just have ecological benefits for their return, but have cultural benefits back to the people that care so much about these. Is there anything you would not bring back? We're not working on non-human primates or anything in that category. We will not work on Neanderthals. It's not possible, but I wouldn't bring back the Titan Boa because I'm terrified of snakes.

Fair enough. I'm afraid that's all we have time for a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks. The future of everything is a production of The Wall Street Journal. This episode was produced by me, Danny Lewis. Our fact checker is Aparna Nathan. Michael Laval and Jessica Fenton are our sound designers and wrote our theme music. Like the show? Tell your friends and leave us a five-star review on your favorite platform. Thanks for listening.