Latest news with #deextinction
Fast Company
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
‘Lord of the Rings' director Peter Jackson on the storytelling potential of Colossal Biosciences
At first glance, the pairing of Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson and Colossal Biosciences founder and CEO Ben Lamm is a bit odd. When it's onstage at the world's largest gathering of brands and marketers, it gets even more confusing. But Jackson has been a major investor in Colossal since last year, and he and Lamm were at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity to talk to Chaka Sobhani, president and global chief creative officer at ad agency DDB Worldwide, for a conversation that aimed to find common ground in the creative challenge between Middle Earth and IRL. Colossal, of course, made headlines in April for revealing its first de-extinction project, reintroducing the world's first dire wolf in 10,000 years. After the stage presentation, Jackson told Fast Company that Colossal has significant storytelling potential, particularly in sparking interest and engagement on issues like environmental conservation. 'It's stimulating curiosity, that's the most important thing,' says Jackson. I grew up imagining all sorts of things, imagining flying cars, imagining a woolly mammoth. And the phones, social media, and everything else have the danger of deadening imagination. And so I think that this is an opportunity.' Jackson has had some significant input in how Colossal tells its stories. Lamm says that just before the dire wolf announcement, Jackson had a suggestion: 'He told me, 'When you announce this, you need to show the world the dire wolf howls, because it's the first time in 10,000 years anyone's ever heard that.' That just made it so much better.' Lamm says Jackson is an active investor. The director and his wife Fran Walsh invested $10 million into the company in October 2024. 'Peter gives us a lot of advice,' says Lamm. 'Peter connects us to a lot of people in the world, including George RR Martin. Even though he didn't make dire wolves, he made them famous. Peter actually wants to be involved. It's not about writing a check and then move on to the next deal. They're true partners.' Jackson believes the real power is in the company's potential impact on conservation. 'It's not just de-extinction, which is obviously exciting, but it's also conservation,' says Jackson. 'It's saving species that are really endangered now, and using the technology that these guys have developed to create a larger gene pool, for example, the white rhino. There's only two left.' The most common criticism Jackson hears about Colossal is that it should be spending its time and research on currently endangered species instead of de-extinction. 'Well, you can actually do both,' he says. Both Lamm and Jackson say the de-extinction projects are what get people excited and interested in everything else the company does. Come for the dire wolf, stay for the red wolf. In April, Lamm told the Most Innovative Companies podcast that Colossal had cloned four red wolves that will be able to join the 15 left on earth. 'The red wolf project, to me, is as magical as the dire wolf,' he said. Though sometimes even Jackson gets nervous. 'I was nervous about the woolly mouse,' he says. The company spent 2.5 years editing mammoth genes, then applied its work to mice rather than trying to create a creature that has been extinct for thousands of years. 'It's an important part of their research on the way to a mammoth, but I was saying, 'Do you really want to release it to the public?' Because it could play to people's idea of genetic engineering. It's like your Frankenstein. I was nervous about that.' Lamm says the point of the woolly mice was to transparently show the process toward a full woolly mammoth. It's not taking woolly mammoth genes with 200 million years of genetic divergence and ramming it into a mouse. This is part of a gradual road map. 'Peter brought his concerns to me, but we just feel that if we're doing radical things, we still need to be radically transparent,' says Lamm. 'To Peter's point, while some people could be like, 'Oh, why are they making woolly mice?' We thought it was important to educate the public on this is the process of science, and this is also how we ethically get to a mammoth.'
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Instead of 'de-extincting' dire wolves, scientists should use gene editing to protect living, endangered species
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Have you been hearing about the dire wolf lately? Maybe you saw a massive white wolf on the cover of Time magazine or a photo of "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin holding a puppy named after a character from his books. The dire wolf, a large, wolflike species that went extinct about 12,000 years ago, has been in the news after biotech company Colossal claimed to have resurrected it using cloning and gene-editing technologies. Colossal calls itself a "de-extinction" company. The very concept of de-extinction is a lightning rod for criticism. There are broad accusations of playing God or messing with nature, as well as more focused objections that contemporary de-extinction tools create poor imitations rather than truly resurrected species. While the biological and philosophical debates are interesting, the legal ramifications for endangered species conservation are of paramount importance. As a legal scholar with a Ph.D. in wildlife genetics, my work focuses on how we legally define the term "endangered species." The use of biotechnology for conservation, whether for de-extinction or genetic augmentation of existing species, promises solutions to otherwise intractable problems. But it needs to work in harmony with both the letter and purpose of the laws governing biodiversity conservation. What did Colossal actually do? Scientists extracted and sequenced DNA from Ice Age-era bones to understand the genetic makeup of the dire wolf. They were able to piece together around 90% of a complete dire wolf genome. While the gray wolf and the dire wolf are separated by a few million years of evolution, they share over 99.5% of their genomes. The scientists scanned the recovered dire wolf sequences for specific genes that they believed were responsible for the physical and ecological differences between dire wolves and other species of canids, including genes related to body size and coat color. CRISPR gene-editing technology allows scientists to make specific changes in the DNA of an organism. The Colossal team used CRISPR to make 20 changes in 14 different genes in a modern gray wolf cell before implanting the embryo into a surrogate mother. While the technology on display is marvelous, what should we call the resulting animals? Some commentators argue that the animals are just modified gray wolves. They point out that it would take far more than 20 edits to bridge the gap left by millions of years of evolution. For instance, that 0.5% of the genome that doesn't match in the two species represents over 12 million base pair differences. Related: Colossal's de-extincted 'dire wolf' isn't a dire wolf and it has not been de-extincted, experts say More philosophically, perhaps, other skeptics argue that a species is more than a collection of genes devoid of environmental, ecological or evolutionary context. Colossal, on the other hand, maintains that it is in the "functional de-extinction" game. The company acknowledges it isn't making a perfect dire wolf copy. Instead it wants to recreate something that looks and acts like the dire wolf of old. It prefers the "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" school of speciation. Disagreements about taxonomy — the science of naming and categorizing living organisms — are as old as the field itself. Biologists are notorious for failing to adopt a single clear definition of "species," and there are dozens of competing definitions in the biological literature. Biologists can afford to be flexible and imprecise when the stakes are merely a conversational misunderstanding. Lawyers and policymakers, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. In the United States, the Endangered Species Act is the main tool for protecting biodiversity. To be protected by the act, an organism must be a member of an endangered or threatened species. Some of the most contentious ESA issues are definitional, such as whether the listed species is a valid "species" and whether individual organisms, especially hybrids, are members of the listed species. Colossal's functional species concept is anathema to the Endangered Species Act. It shrinks the value of a species down to the way it looks or the way it functions. When passing the act, however, Congress made clear that species were to be valued for their "aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people." In my view, the myopic focus on function seems to miss the point. Despite its insistence otherwise, Colossal's definitional sleight of hand has opened the door to arguments that people should reduce conservation funding or protections for currently imperiled species. Why spend the money to protect a critter and its habitat when, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, you can just "pick your favorite species and call up Colossal"? Biotechnology can provide real conservation benefits for today's endangered species. I suggest gene editing's real value is not in recreating facsimiles of long-extinct species like dire wolves, but instead using it to recover ones in trouble now. Projects, by both Colossal and other groups, are underway around the world to help endangered species develop disease resistance or evolve to tolerate a warmer world. Other projects use gene editing to reintroduce genetic variation into populations where genetic diversity has been lost. For example, Colossal has also announced that it has cloned a red wolf. Unlike the dire wolf, the red wolf is not extinct, though it came extremely close. After decades of conservation efforts, there are about a dozen red wolves in the wild in the reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina, as well as a few hundred red wolves in captivity. The entire population of red wolves, both wild and captive, descends from merely 14 founders of the captive breeding program. This limited heritage means the species has lost a significant amount of the genetic diversity that would help it continue to evolve and adapt. In order to reintroduce some of that missing genetic diversity, you'd need to find genetic material from red wolves outside the managed population. Right now that would require stored tissue samples from animals that lived before the captive breeding program was established or rediscovering a "lost" population in the wild. Recently, researchers discovered that coyotes along the Texas Gulf Coast possess a sizable percentage of red wolf-derived DNA in their genomes. Hybridization between coyotes and red wolves is both a threat to red wolves and a natural part of their evolutionary history, complicating management. The red wolf genes found within these coyotes do present a possible source of genetic material that biotechnology could harness to help the captive breeding population if the legal hurdles can be managed. This coyote population was Colossal's source for its cloned "ghost" red wolf. Even this announcement is marred by definitional confusion. Due to its hybrid nature, the animal Colossal cloned is likely not legally considered a red wolf at all. RELATED STORIES —Colossal's de-extinction campaign is built on a semantic house of cards with shoddy foundations — and the consequences are dire —'Our animals are gray wolves': Colossal didn't de-extinct dire wolves, chief scientist clarifies —How related are dire wolves and gray wolves? The answer might surprise you. Under the Endangered Species Act, hybrid organisms are typically not protected. So by cloning one of these animals, Colossal likely sidestepped the need for ESA permits. It will almost certainly run into resistance if it attempts to breed these "ghost wolves" into the current red wolf captive breeding program that has spent decades trying to minimize hybridization. How much to value genetic "purity" versus genetic diversity in managed species still proves an extraordinarily difficult question, even without the legal uncertainty. Biotechnology could never solve every conservation problem — especially habitat destruction. The ability to make "functional" copies of a species certainly does not lessen the urgency to respond to biodiversity loss, nor does it reduce human beings' moral culpability. But to adequately respond to the ever-worsening biodiversity crisis, conservationists will need all available tools. This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Fast Company
11-06-2025
- Science
- Fast Company
Is ‘de-extinction' here? How gene editing can help endangered species
IMPACT Gene editing's real value is not in re-creating copies of long-extinct species like dire wolves, but instead using it to recover ones in trouble now. Red Wolves are seen at the North Carolina Museum of Life + Science on Thursday, November 8, 2017, in Durham, NC. [Photo: Salwan Georges/The] BY Listen to this Article More info 0:00 / 8:48 Have you been hearing about the dire wolf lately? Maybe you saw a massive white wolf on the cover of Time magazine or a photo of Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin holding a puppy named after a character from his books. The dire wolf, a large, wolflike species that went extinct about 12,000 years ago, has been in the news after biotech company Colossal claimed to have resurrected it using cloning and gene-editing technologies. Colossal calls itself a ' de-extinction ' company. The very concept of de-extinction is a lightning rod for criticism. There are broad accusations of playing God or messing with nature, as well as more focused objections that contemporary de-extinction tools create poor imitations rather than truly resurrected species. While the biological and philosophical debates are interesting, the legal ramifications for endangered species conservation are of paramount importance. As a legal scholar with a PhD in wildlife genetics, my work focuses on how we legally define the term 'endangered species.' The use of biotechnology for conservation, whether for de-extinction or genetic augmentation of existing species, promises solutions to otherwise intractable problems. But it needs to work in harmony with both the letter and purpose of the laws governing biodiversity conservation. Of dire wolves and de-extinction What did Colossal actually do? Scientists extracted and sequenced DNA from Ice Age-era bones to understand the genetic makeup of the dire wolf. They were able to piece together around 90% of a complete dire wolf genome. While the gray wolf and the dire wolf are separated by a few million years of evolution, they share over 99.5% of their genomes. Subscribe to the Daily Company's trending stories delivered to you every day SIGN UP The scientists scanned the recovered dire wolf sequences for specific genes that they believed were responsible for the physical and ecological differences between dire wolves and other species of canids, including genes related to body size and coat color. CRISPR gene-editing technology allows scientists to make specific changes in the DNA of an organism. The Colossal team used CRISPR to make 20 changes in 14 different genes in a modern gray wolf cell before implanting the embryo into a surrogate mother. While the technology on display is marvelous, what should we call the resulting animals? Some commentators argue that the animals are just modified gray wolves. They point out that it would take far more than 20 edits to bridge the gap left by millions of years of evolution. For instance, that 0.5% of the genome that doesn't match in the two species represents more than 12 million base pair differences. More philosophically, perhaps, other skeptics argue that a species is more than a collection of genes devoid of environmental, ecological, or evolutionary context. Colossal, on the other hand, maintains that it is in the 'functional de-extinction' game. The company acknowledges it isn't making a perfect dire wolf copy. Instead it wants to recreate something that looks and acts like the dire wolf of old. It prefers the 'if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck' school of speciation. Disagreements about taxonomy —the science of naming and categorizing living organisms—are as old as the field itself. Biologists are notorious for failing to adopt a single clear definition of 'species,' and there are dozens of competing definitions in the biological literature. Biologists can afford to be flexible and imprecise when the stakes are merely a conversational misunderstanding. Lawyers and policymakers, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. Deciding what counts as an endangered 'species' In the United States, the Endangered Species Act is the main tool for protecting biodiversity. To be protected by the act, an organism must be a member of an endangered or threatened species. Some of the most contentious ESA issues are definitional, such as whether the listed species is a valid 'species' and whether individual organisms, especially hybrids, are members of the listed species. Colossal's functional species concept is anathema to the Endangered Species Act. It shrinks the value of a species down to the way it looks or the way it functions. When passing the act, however, Congress made clear that species were to be valued for their 'aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people.' In my view, the myopic focus on function seems to miss the point. Despite its insistence otherwise, Colossal's definitional sleight of hand has opened the door to arguments that people should reduce conservation funding or protections for currently imperiled species. Why spend the money to protect a critter and its habitat when, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, you can just ' pick your favorite species and call up Colossal '? Putting biotechnology to work for conservation Biotechnology can provide real conservation benefits for today's endangered species. I suggest gene editing's real value is not in recreating facsimiles of long-extinct species like dire wolves, but instead using it to recover ones in trouble now. Projects, by both Colossal and other groups, are underway around the world to help endangered species develop disease resistance or evolve to tolerate a warmer world. Other projects use gene editing to reintroduce genetic variation into populations where genetic diversity has been lost. For example, Colossal has also announced that it has cloned a red wolf. Unlike the dire wolf, the red wolf is not extinct, though it came extremely close. After decades of conservation efforts, there are about a dozen red wolves in the wild in the reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina, as well as a few hundred red wolves in captivity. The entire population of red wolves, both wild and captive, descends from merely 14 founders of the captive breeding program. This limited heritage means the species has lost a significant amount of the genetic diversity that would help it continue to evolve and adapt. In order to reintroduce some of that missing genetic diversity, you'd need to find genetic material from red wolves outside the managed population. Right now that would require stored tissue samples from animals that lived before the captive breeding program was established or rediscovering a 'lost' population in the wild. Recently, researchers discovered that coyotes along the Texas Gulf Coast possess a sizable percentage of red wolf-derived DNA in their genomes. Hybridization between coyotes and red wolves is both a threat to red wolves and a natural part of their evolutionary history, complicating management. The red wolf genes found within these coyotes do present a possible source of genetic material that biotechnology could harness to help the captive breeding population if the legal hurdles can be managed. This coyote population was Colossal's source for its cloned 'ghost' red wolf. Even this announcement is marred by definitional confusion. Due to its hybrid nature, the animal Colossal cloned is likely not legally considered a red wolf at all. Under the Endangered Species Act, hybrid organisms are typically not protected. So by cloning one of these animals, Colossal likely sidestepped the need for ESA permits. It will almost certainly run into resistance if it attempts to breed these 'ghost wolves' into the current red wolf captive breeding program that has spent decades trying to minimize hybridization. How much to value genetic 'purity' versus genetic diversity in managed species still proves an extraordinarily difficult question, even without the legal uncertainty. Biotechnology could never solve every conservation problem—especially habitat destruction. The ability to make 'functional' copies of a species certainly does not lessen the urgency to respond to biodiversity loss, nor does it reduce human beings' moral culpability. But to adequately respond to the ever-worsening biodiversity crisis, conservationists will need all available tools. Alex Erwin is an assistant professor of law at Florida International University. The final deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
‘A billionaire will pay a lot of money to shoot a recreated being': historian Sadiah Qureshi on extinction and empire
Would you bring an extinct species back to life if you could? If so, which species would you pick? Prof Sadiah Qureshi has taken to asking her friends, students and complete strangers this question because, she says, their answers reveal a lot about how we understand extinction. Some choose a dinosaur, others pick a species like the dodo, killed off by humans. Almost no one chooses a plant or insect. The very idea of de-extinction, Qureshi says, raises profound questions about the meaning of extinction and how we treat life, whether living, endangered, dead or extinct. How, she asks, did human beings come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever? This is the subject of her new book, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, which traces the entanglements of race, empire and colonialism to better understand extinction. 'Every time we save a way of being or mourn the passing of a natural kind, whether a species or otherwise, we make decisions rooted in our emotional attachments, or our perceptions of that natural kind's value – whether commercial, aesthetic, or ecological,' she writes. Extinction is not simply a scientific puzzle, Qureshi argues – it is political and philosophical. Qureshi grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham, and was taught by her father to respect all living beings – a conviction that underpins the book and that we keep coming back to during our conversation, which takes place as we perch on one of the large rocks that line the garden of the Natural History Museum in London. Qureshi studied natural sciences at Cambridge – a place she initially hated as an undergraduate, she says, feeling she was among the 'most entrenched, ossified forms of whiteness'. She also didn't enjoy her subject: she didn't like lab work, her experiments often went wrong, and she realised quickly that she wasn't going to be a research scientist. She decided to study the history and philosophy of science, found her people and stayed at the university for her PhD. Now based at the University of Manchester she is, she thinks, the first woman of Pakistani heritage in the country to become a history professor. Before seeing me, Qureshi squeezed in a visit to Hope, the famous whale skeleton suspended over the museum's main hall. 'As Hope hovers above the museum's visitors', she writes in Vanished, 'she shows what is possible when we forgo valuing species for their economic significance and instead consider them as ways of being worthy of life'. Whales, pushed nearly to extinction by the profitable commercial whaling industry, were brought back from this cliff edge thanks to mass campaigning. But we don't care for all life this way. The Earth is going through a sixth mass extinction of wildlife, with more than 500 species of land animals found by scientists in 2020 to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. In the previous five mass extinction periods, rates of loss were higher than normal, with at least 75% of species going extinct over a geologically short period of time. These extinctions were unavoidable, caused by rapid and significant changes in the climate, among other factors, and driven by natural processes. But the current crisis is an unnatural extinction that human beings have produced through an economy focused on resource extraction, intensive land use and pollution, among other things. Yet many of our stories about extinction focus less on the political nature of the issue and more on heroic scientists discovering lost species and formulating new theories about why they went extinct, she explains in the book. In Vanished, which is both highly readable and academically rigorous, she gives us a new story. According to Qureshi, animal extinction should not be treated as a separate historical development from human extermination, as it often is. Long before social Darwinism's theory of natural selection, colonialists across North America predicted that Indigenous peoples were going extinct and that this was evidence of God's natural law, leaving the spoils of the land for white Europeans. Such reasoning rationalised genocide and persecution because, the argument went, as empires expanded, these peoples would die out anyway. 'That's a very, very different justification for imperialism than saying 'we want resources', [though] obviously, all of those things are linked,' she says. These arguments about extinction helped produce the exceptional violence of settler colonialism, Qureshi says, and they are relevant for thinking about species loss today. 'Who we think are worthy subjects of conservation [is] deeply rooted in past political projects,' she says. The very concept of the national park, for example, was at least partly related to the expectation that Indigenous peoples would soon be extinct. Campaigners imagined the parks as pristine, unpeopled wildernesses. Yosemite, the first US national park, established in 1864, was home to Miwok groups, but their villages were razed and former inhabitants starved or frozen. They were depicted as 'historic ghosts', Qureshi writes, not the 'presently dispossessed'. Too often, conservation efforts write Indigenous people out of the story once again, she argues. And while de-extinction, bringing a species back to life, might sound exciting, for Qureshi it's a form of avoidance that doesn't require we change our current relationships with the natural world. It would be awe-inspiring if the woolly mammoth roamed the earth in the not-so-distant future (which is the aim of one biotech company), but it is never going to come back as it was. It would be 'a new form of life that is genetically engineered and would be intellectual property', Qureshi says. 'What kind of life will that being be able to lead? … And, you know, at some point, some billionaire is going to pay a lot of money to shoot one of these recreated beings.' Science alone doesn't offer the way forward, she argues. It isn't inherently objective, even though that's how it's regularly imagined, especially now, in what Qureshi calls 'a moment of resurging biological tyranny' – referencing the biological essentialism of the fight over trans rights and the re-emergence of eugenics. But she acknowledges that scientific research must be defended when it is under attack, as it is now, because it can still provide us with valuable knowledge. 'Historians and philosophers and sociologists of science have long interrogated attempts to seek authority in science,' she explains. 'That doesn't mean to say that there's not some material reality out there, but … the way that we engage with that world is culturally and historically specific.' We need to respect, not try to control, nature, she argues. For Qureshi, rewilding is one option, as are smaller-scale changes, such as nurturing gardens to make them as welcoming as possible to insects. 'If you really, deeply care about the people around you, about life around you, you will treat it differently to the way than we're doing,' she says, 'and get away from the exploitative ways of living in the modern world that are damaging to the planet … Paying attention to the life around us and recalibrating how we value that life is just as powerful as having more scientific research'.
Forbes
05-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Science Of De-Extinction Is Providing Hope For Nature's Future
Younger audiences are becoming increasingly tired with the rhetoric on the horrors of climate change, with research showing that Gen-Z feel that their climate-related concerns are often dismissed by older generations. Enter: Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech and genetic engineering company working tirelessly to de-extinct several animals and bring hope to the future of nature. Co-founded by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, Colossal Biosciences is tapping into the cultural zeitgeist by not only making bold scientific promises, but by embracing a storytelling approach that resonates with Gen Z. High school students write in asking how they can get involved; college students express inspiration to pursue science because of Colossal Biosciences' work. Their excitement is less about nostalgia and more about agency—about changing the narrative of inevitable loss. 'If history teaches us anything, it's that we shouldn't argue with youth,' Colossal Biosciences CEO Lamm said. 'Progress often begins with what youth culture believes in,' Citing historical youth-led movements, Lamm believes the younger generation is rallying around biotech and conservation innovation. Not only does the company have the backing of Gen-Z, but it has also garnered support from Hollywood's greatest. Peter Jackson, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Sophie Turner and George R.R. Martin have all endorsed or invested in Colossal Biosciences. The company is focused on creating a de-extinction toolkit that can act as a fail-safe if the government, conservationists, environmentalists and citizens fail to do what is necessary to protect animal species. By 2050, nearly half of all animal species could be threatened with extinction, which could pose significant impact on the global economy. Colossal Biosciences' mission is to stop or even reverse extinction and, to date, they have announced ambitious projects related to the woolly mammoth, thylacine, dodo and dire wolf. The species selection is driven by an elaborate plan to assist conservationists, environmentalists, governments and organizations all over the world to biobank genetic materials, create resilience in faltering species lines and, if absolutely necessary, recover full species from extinction. 'It goes back to the apathy point in your research that is making everyone feel so hopeless. We need to all be advocating for genetic rescue science to be used and for lots of advancements to be made in order to save species. But, do you know how hard it is to get people to care about progress or the need for progress in genetic science?' Lamm noted. 'Almost impossible. Do you know how easy it is to get people talking about bringing back their favorite ancient pachyderm? Substantially easier,' Lamm explained that he doesn't believe the company's mission can succeed without public support and an interest in and understanding of the new technologies his company is inventing. In early 2025, the company made a breakthrough with the colossal woolly mouse, sharing parts of the woolly mammoth's DNA and proving the scientists' ability to recreate complex genetic combinations that took nature millions of years to create. 'We need to get people excited about saving the planet, so that we have a shot at being able to actually save it. Part of the reason we are working to bring back the woolly mammoth is so that we could get the public to pay attention to genetic science; it's one part: holy s—t how amazing. And one part: you're doing what now?' Lamm explained. 'That combination has allowed us to talk to a lot of people about what we are working on, why it's important for conservation and how they can get involved,' 'It is going to be their planet to care for,' he added. 'We see it as our job to make sure there is something left for them to take care of.'
