Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life | Dr. Beth Shapiro

So are Direwolves. They have Twenty 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 gray wolf genome to recreate the dire wolf. You know, we 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 thylosines, 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 everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Beth Shapiro.

Dr. Beth Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist. She was a professor at UC Santa Cruz and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute before leaving to become chief scientific officer at Colossal Biosciences. Her work at Colossal is focused on what is called de-extincting species such as the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird, and the dire wolf, meaning bringing them back to life. But that entire initiative is also about species preservation more broadly and how genomics can be used to improve the global ecosystem. In this episode, we discuss what it means to use ancient DNA to bring back extinct species, which then led us to a broader discussion about genetic engineering in human health.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (136 minutes, 26,507 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.