Brainstorm Tech 2024: How AI can bring back extinct species
Presenter: Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer, Colossal Biosciences
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00:00We have this field called de-extinction.
00:03We are correcting our intervention in nature.
00:06Absolutely mission critical.
00:30Hello.
00:58So I'm an evolutionary biologist and a recovering academic until three months ago I was a professor
01:06at UC Santa Cruz where I'm standing there beneath a blue whale at our blue whale skeleton
01:10at our southern at our coastal campus.
01:13I ran a lab for the last 20 years where we were innovating and revolutionizing a field
01:19called ancient DNA.
01:20We travel out to cold places in the world and collect the remains of things like mammoths
01:24and mastodons and giant bears and woolly rhinos and extract their DNA.
01:29The goal of my research was to use that DNA to understand how species and communities
01:33and ecosystems evolve and change with the goal to use the past as a kind of completed
01:38evolutionary experiment to make more informed decisions about how to protect living species
01:44by understanding what makes certain species more robust than others.
01:49But when you extract DNA from million year old mammoths the conversations you have about
01:54your work often tend to go in a slightly different direction.
01:58And so in 2015 I wrote this book really laying out all of the steps that one would need to
02:05overcome if one were to bring a mammoth or some other extinct species back to life.
02:10My goal was to lay out the technical ethical ecological regulatory challenges that we would
02:15have to solve but also to highlight how transformative this technology would be for the conservation
02:21of living endangered species.
02:25And then about seven years after I published this book Ben Lamb and George Church co-founded
02:30a company called Colossal with the goal to do exactly what I had laid out in the book.
02:35And so of course Ben called me and said you should join us.
02:38You wrote the playbook.
02:40And I was a little hesitant.
02:42I joined as a consultant.
02:44I wanted to see how far they could get in pushing along this technology.
02:47And I was immediately surprised, excited, really enthusiastic by how far they've been
02:54able to get in such a short amount of time.
02:56And then a few months ago I decided to take the jump and I am now Colossal's chief scientific
03:01officer.
03:04Colossal's goal is to make extinction a thing of the past.
03:07To use the tools of gene editing, genetic engineering to replace missing components
03:12of ecosystems, to help these ecosystems to become more robust and resilient given the
03:17dramatic upheavals that are happening to habitats across the world today.
03:21We've launched three de-extinction projects, Mammoth, Dodo, and Thylacine, which is also
03:26sometimes called the Tadmanian tiger.
03:29The choice of these three species is purposeful.
03:31We have a marsupial mammal, a placental mammal, and a bird.
03:35And as we develop the technologies to bring these species back to life, these technologies
03:39will have immediate application to helping species pretty much across this animal diversity
03:45to survive and adapt in the climates of today.
03:49Core to Colossal's mission is this idea of de-extinction.
03:54And when most people think of de-extinction, one very specific image comes to mind.
04:00But this is not what we're doing.
04:02First of all, I'm a scientist, so I have to break down the science a little bit.
04:06Dinosaurs went extinct more than 65 million years ago.
04:09The oldest DNA that we've recovered so far is somewhere between 1 and 2 million years
04:13old, but most DNA degrades away by about 10 or 20,000 years.
04:19Dinosaur fossils are rocks, and rocks don't have DNA.
04:23It is also not possible to recover DNA from mosquitoes preserved in amber.
04:28I've tried it.
04:29It doesn't work.
04:30Amber, it turns out, is a really poor environment for DNA preservation.
04:35It forms in very hot places, which encourages speeding up of DNA decay, and also it's porous,
04:41which means that microbes can get in there and chew up the DNA really quickly, making
04:44it disappear.
04:45There's no DNA in mosquitoes and amber.
04:47There's no DNA in dinosaur fossils.
04:50Dinosaur de-extinction is not going to happen.
04:52I'm very sorry.
04:54Right.
04:55Sorry.
04:56But this is not the plan.
05:01The other thing that the scientists at Jurassic Park did was they took these tiny little short
05:05fragments of DNA, and then they filled in the missing bits that they could get with
05:08frog DNA, which is a weird choice, given that even at the time, we already knew that birds
05:13are dinosaurs, right?
05:14But whatever.
05:15And then they put the dinosaurs in habitats that they were completely maladapted to, and
05:19chaos ensued.
05:20This is not what we want to do.
05:22Instead, what Colossal is doing is rebuilding extinct species for the present day.
05:27We will identify these core traits that make these animals unique and important components
05:32of their ecosystems.
05:33In some cases, we will augment these traits, because ecosystems of today are different
05:37from the past.
05:38And when necessary, we will add additional evolutionary adaptations to these animals.
05:44Lots of habitats right now, and species are suffering because of introduced diseases or
05:48introduced predators.
05:49And we can use the tools of genome editing to make these species resistant and resilient,
05:54creating different species in the form of these extinct species.
05:57This is our definition of de-extinction.
06:01If we look at the mammoth project, for example, all we're going to do is start with something
06:05that already exists.
06:07An Asian elephant is the closest living relative of a mammoth.
06:10They shared a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.
06:13Their genomes are already 98% identical.
06:17So when we have an Asian elephant cell growing in a dish in a lab, we already have 98% of
06:23a mammoth.
06:24We just have to engineer the remaining 2%.
06:27So how do we do that?
06:28This is a bit of an oversimplification.
06:30It's pretty good for a walkthrough.
06:31We go out into the field, my sites in Siberia, Alaska, Yukon.
06:35We collect mammoth DNA.
06:37We've done this already.
06:38We have hundreds of mammoth genomes.
06:39We can line them up on a computer next to each other, collect a bunch of Asian elephant
06:43genomes, line them up against the mammoth genomes, and identify where they are different
06:48from each other, and yet where all of those mammoths are the same as each other.
06:52These are the portions of the mammoth genome that are important to make a mammoth look
06:56and act like a mammoth.
06:58Then we use the tools of genome editing to gradually tweak those Asian elephant cells
07:03growing in a dish in a lab to be more mammoth-like.
07:07Then we have our mammothized Asian elephant cells in a dish in a lab.
07:11Then we use somatic cell nuclear transfer, a process commonly known as cloning that most
07:16famously brought us Dolly the Sheep, to transform those cells into an embryo.
07:21And then we implant that embryo into a surrogate maternal host.
07:25That embryo develops and builds into a beautiful, wonderful little mammothized Asian elephant,
07:32and it is born, and it looks and acts like a mammoth, and it lives happily ever after.
07:36Pretty straightforward, right?
07:38What's exciting to me about all of this, clearly, this is hard.
07:42And there are a lot of hard problems that are here.
07:45But the core technologies exist for each of these steps, and as we improve on these technologies
07:50and make them applicable to non-model organisms, things that aren't mice or fruit flies, we
07:56will develop and innovate across all sorts of disciplines that have clear application
08:02to other biological disciplines.
08:04Advances in bioinformatics that allow us to map a DNA sequence or genotype to the way
08:08an animal looks or acts, a phenotype.
08:12Advances in multiplex genome editing, or the assembly and insertion of long, synthetic
08:17DNA constructs.
08:19Advances in animal reproductive biology and cloning.
08:22These all have application to agriculture, to livestock engineering, to animal husbandry,
08:29and to human health.
08:32If we just think about the mammoth team, for example, this team has already made more stably
08:38integrated edits into a cell line that is karyotypically normal and therefore capable
08:42of being cloned than any publication in the academic literature to date.
08:47A few months ago, they announced that they had generated induced pluripotent stem cells
08:52for elephants, a global first.
08:55This is important both for elephant conservation and for de-extinction.
08:59It means that we can take these induced pluripotent stem cells and transform them into all different
09:05types of tissues and organoids and use these to test hypotheses about the edits that we're
09:09making without having to use animal models.
09:12We may even be able to grow our own elephant eggs to use for cloning.
09:19Another innovation that is along our path to elephant de-extinction is to eventually
09:23have an artificial womb that we can use to avoid the use of elephants as surrogate hosts.
09:29This requires developing platforms for fully exogenous embryonic development, and our teams
09:34of engineers and developmental biologists have been building several platforms to work
09:39with both placental and marsupial mammals.
09:42As we discover all of the cues, hormonal, physiological, environmental, that are responsible
09:48and necessary for the development of different tissue types and organs throughout the process
09:52of embryonic development, this will also have application to regenerative medicine, to personalized
09:57medicine.
09:58Imagine we can grow your own kidney from your own cells, and of course to understanding
10:02the biology of pregnancy.
10:06Our animal operations team is already making incredible discoveries that are helping endangered
10:11species today.
10:13Collaboration with the non-profit BioRescue, we are working to save the northern white
10:17rhino from becoming extinct.
10:19Today only two northern white rhinos are alive, a mother-daughter pair, both females.
10:25Obviously this would make it difficult for northern white rhinos to reproduce.
10:29However, by isolating egg cells from these females and fertilizing them with sperm from
10:34northern white rhinos that died some 10 to 20 years ago, we've created embryos that are
10:40being used for embryo transfer into southern white rhinos as surrogate hosts, creating
10:44a path for northern white rhinos to reproduce even though there are no males alive today.
10:51Our conservation team is also assisting in the development of a vaccine to help save
10:56baby elephants from a virus, elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus, that is the leading cause of
11:03death of Asian elephants, juvenile Asian elephants in captivity and increasingly in the wild.
11:08And a few weeks ago, our partners at the Houston Zoo administered this vaccine to a baby elephant
11:13for the first time, a huge win for conservation and also for elephants in general.
11:19But this is not all that the tools of de-extinction can do for the conservation of living animals.
11:24A few weeks ago, I was in Mauritius, the island home of the extinct dodo and the critically
11:31endangered Mauritian pink pigeon, discussing what we might do using the tools of de-extinction
11:36to help save the Mauritian pink pigeon from becoming extinct.
11:40Pink pigeons are in trouble.
11:42Because they nearly went extinct and have been managed heavily since that time, they
11:46are suffering from the consequences of inbreeding, the loss of genetic diversity that's caused
11:51by breeding with close relatives.
11:53Where there aren't that many individuals left, you really don't have a choice.
11:57What we can do is we can use our bioinformatics tools to discover where in the pink pigeon
12:02genome these mutations that are reducing the fitness of these birds are.
12:07We can go to museum collections and sequence genomes of pink pigeons that used to be alive
12:12and then replace the parts of the genome that are making these animals less fit with the
12:17extinct diversity that will actually help them to become more robust and healthy.
12:23This is just some of the ways that the tools of de-extinction can be applied both to resurrecting
12:28extinct diversity and extinct species, restoring missing components of ecosystems and making
12:35these ecosystems and communities more robust.
12:39It is clear that we are in the midst of a biodiversity loss and extinction crisis.
12:46Around the world, the rate of extinction today is more than 1,000 times greater than the
12:51baseline rate of extinction in the fossil record.
12:54The acute problem that species and habitats are suffering today is that the pace of change
12:59is faster than evolution is capable of keeping up with.
13:04Ideally, we could all take a step back and give the species and communities and habitats
13:10of the world the space and time that they need to catch up and adapt, but we can't.
13:15It's too late and the human footprint is too big.
13:18But the tools of de-extinction provide hope.
13:23We can engineer missing diversity.
13:25We can replace missing components of ecosystems.
13:28We can bring back, we can de-extinct missing phenotypes, missing interactions, even missing
13:34entire species, creating robust and healthy habitats.
13:39It is obvious to all of us that extinction is a colossal problem.
13:44It's obvious to me, and hopefully now to you, that the tools of de-extinction will be part
13:50of the solution.
13:53For more UN videos visit www.un.org