Pushkin. There's a company called Colossal Biosciences that has raised over two hundred million dollars and its stated aim is to bring back the wooly mammoth and also the dodo bird, as well as a considerably less famous but equally extinct animal called the thylacine aka the Tasmanian tiger. I have questions like, why why are private investors putting hundreds of millions of dollars into this company? And really mostly how how do you bring back a species that has been
extinct for centuries. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's problem the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Beth Shapiro. She's the chief scientific officer at Colossal Biosciences, a company that is in the business of d extinction. BET's problem is this, how do you use the tools of modern biology to bring back species that have been extinct for
hundreds or thousands of years. Also, on kind of a more subtle level, BET's problem is just defining for the world what de extinction really means. Before Beth joined Colossal, she spent decades in academia. She helped to pioneer the field of paleogenetics, studying the genes of ancient organisms, and she spent a lot of time studying the Dodo bird. Tell me about your life with the Dodo.
I guess my first exposure to the Dodo was in nineteen ninety nine when I started my PhD at Oxford. The ancient DNA lab that we were using with in the back of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and that is so we had to pass by the
Dodo every time we were going to the lab. And I was, you know, in this field ancient DNA where we could extract DNA from things, no one was sure what exactly a Dodo was, what kind of bird it was most closely related to, And so I thought it would be really cool if I could use these really new tools and technologies to be able to solve this question answer what sort of bird a Dodo is? So I ask if I could extract DNA from the Dodo.
If they said no, because it is a very specials special, precious specimen and you have not proven that you are good at this yet, And so I proved myself. You know, I extracted DNA from other birds and other things, and I was having pretty good success with this, and they said, okay, you can take some grungey bits out of the inside of the skull of this dodo with these long forceps.
They have this one Dodo that's an actual Dodo, and you're like, look, I could I could tell you whatever the genome of that bird if you just let me at it.
Yep, that's well, maybe not the genome, but I wanted to know at the time what type of bird it was. And at the time we were the field of ancient DNA was focusing on extracting mitochondrial DNA, which is a type of DNA that is inherited maternally, so it doesn't tell you everything about a species. So there's lots and lots of mitochondrial DNA in every cell, and there's only two copies of every nuclear locus that's in the cells.
And so in the early days of ancient DNA, when we really weren't very good at recovering DNA, we were focusing on mitochondria. So I wanted to get mitochondria from this Dodo specimen. So why I could answer this outstanding taxonomic question, what type of bird is or was a dodo?
Uh huh, because people were just trying to guess based on the morphology, based on what it looked like.
Essentially, Yeah, I mean, taxonomy before DNA really was that people are comparing the shapes of things. But DNA is a really unbiased way of reconstructing evolutionary history and it's really powerful, and so I wanted to be able to apply that in addition to the morphological data that people have been collecting for hundreds of years.
And so they eventually let you at the bird, and what do you figure out?
They first let me take some long force ups to try to scrape some gunk out of the inside of its skull, and that led to nothing because there wasn't any DNA and the gunked up bits of gunk from the inside of the cell. And then they finally let me cut a tiny little piece of bone out of its leg and I was able to extract mitochondrial DNA from that and compare that to all other types of birds that were hypothesized to potentially be a dodo, and we discovered that the dodo is a type of pigeon.
It falls within the diversity of pigeons. Most closely related to a pigeon called the nicobar pigeon, which is a very strong flyer, very beautiful bird, different a lot different from a dodo.
So you figure out that the dodo was a pigeon that was relatively early in your career, right, and then spend a long time doing scholarly work, doing academic work. You eventually sequence the whole Dodo genome, right, and then eventually what last year you get to Colossal? What made you want to join Colossal?
Well, I mean you summarized twenty five years of my academic history.
You want to give me a high point along the way.
Well, you know, I've been working in this field of ancient DNA, trying to develop tools to be able to get more DNA out of things, to look at the nuclear genomes of different species, develop computational approaches to be able to use the genetic information that we've extracted to tell us when populations are growing and shrinking, To look at replacements, to get DNA directly from ancient sediments so that we can look at what whole ecosystems look like.
And all of this really driving toward understanding how we can use the past as a sort of completed evolutionary experiment to try to make more informed decisions of what we can do to protect and preserve species and habitats
and ecosystems moving forward. I mean, now, when we're deciding what we're going to do from a conservation perspective, we look around, we see things are in trouble, and we use science we make educated guesses about what the best things are going to be to restore missing ecological interactions to help make these different communities more resilient or more
robust in the face of these changes. And ancient DNA lets us do this by showing us how things responded in the past to massive perturbations to their habitat, whether that's an ice age or a really warm interglacial, or the introduction of people or a predator, a different type
of predator into that into that ecosystem. And every time we would publish this work that we would want to tell people about it, we would we would want to explain to people what it is that we're excited about, But often the only question that people wanted answered was what does this mean about how close we are to bringing these species back to life?
Kind of fighting that right, like you write about it like there's I was reading the twenty twenty edition of your book How to Clone a Mammoth, where you said the present focus on bringing back particular species, whether that means mammoths, Dodo's passenger pigeons, or anything else, is misguided, right, which seems tell me about that? Is there a point where you stop thinking it's misguided?
You know, there's a lot of complications. There a biological, technical, and ethical challenges associated with bringing extinct species back to life, And so you ask what is misguided? When people hear about de extinction or the word de extinction, or think about bringing mammoths back to life, what they imagine is recreating something that is identical in every way to a mammoth that used to be alive. But that isn't possible, right, And I think that is where I find the push
to this to be misguided. As I said at the time, it's a little bit more nuanced than just as explained. So what is misguided is this idea that de extinction is a solution to the extinction crisis. Right, once a species is gone, we can't bring it back. That species is gone. What we can bring back are some of these core phenotypes, whatever it was that was about that species that made it unique in their habitat some way
of replacing that missing ecological interaction. But it's not by resurrect something that's identical to the species that used to be there, but by taking species that are alive today and tweaking them using the tools of genetic engineering, so that they can fit into that ecosystem, so they can play some of those roles ecological roles that the extinct species once had. Does that make sense?
It does? It seems somewhat at odds with the sort of public messaging of Colossal Right, Like I was reading your writing on all of what you're saying makes sense and we can talk more about it. But it is the case that like the homepage of Colossal Right Now says, we endeavor to jumpstart nature's ancestral heartbeat to see the wooly mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again, right, which is not to see the Asian elephant with some phenotypical traits of the wooly mammoth. Like, so, I don't know,
like how do you reconcile those? Is it? Just like there's sort of a public story that needs to be simplified, just because that's the nature of public stories and then a more complex technical story.
If you dive into the website on Colossal, it does explain that the idea of the extinction includes resurrecting extinct traits using extinct genomes, but also engineering that we are taking Asian elephants and engineering them to have and express some of these mammoth trades. On the website, they're even called Arctic adapted elephants in several places. So I think
it depends on what you're willing to accept as a mammoth. Right, if you are only ever going to accept something that is ecologically, genetically and physiologically one identical to a species that used to be alive, then that's not what we're doing,
because that's not possible. But if you are willing to accept an elephant that has longer hair, slightly larger back, the longer curved tusks, that is capable of living in the habitat that mammoths once lived in and playing the roles that mammoths once played, then that is Colossal's goal, and that is what we are we are saying that we are making.
Has your view on sort of what scientists should try and do, or how they should talk about it, or anything along those lines changed over time, like this idea of the extinction, which I don't want to get too caught up in the semantics, right. I understand that it can mean different things different people, and that there's a kind of subtle meaning of it, but like, has your view in fact changed it all over time?
My view is that the idea of de extinction is exciting because it allows us to write down a long list of all of these challenges that we would need to be able to solve if we were going to do this, and along the way we come up with new technologies and new ideas and new associations that have application to present day conservation work as well as to
extinction work. My idea of whether de extinction, if you define it as bringing something back that is one hundred percent identical to a species that used to be alive, is impossible, has not changed, right. I don't like the idea that people would say that that is what we're doing, because I think then that gives people license to imagine that extinction isn't a problem. But extinction is a problem,
and this is not a solution to that problem. But am I willing to say that we shouldn't try this, that we shouldn't develop these tools that may have application to helping species not become extinct because we're worried that somebody is going to get tied up in the semantics
of something and accuse us of something we're not. No. Am I sad that Ben Lamb has been able to raise two hundred and twenty five million dollars to be able to invest into developing these tools that I hope, I imagine are going to dramatically impact the way that we do by diversity conservation moving forward. No, I think this is amazing. I think it's a fantastic opportunity that we should celebrate.
Great since you mentioned that that Ben Lamb, the CEO of the company, has raised two hundred and twenty five million dollars, Like, what what is the business model? You know, it's a it's a private company, right, it's not a nonprofit. So how are the investors going to make a profit?
You know, this is that's a Ben question. It's not a me question. I'm the chief science officer. But you know, some of the ways that the company will make money is along the path toward the extinction. There are a ton of technologies that are going to be developed, things like multiplex genomediting, different approaches to driving genetic changes. We're working on an artificial womb as one of the tools, and all of these will drive patents that will be
useful for things outside of the extinction landscape. Ben has promised that any technology that we develop for conservation can be applied to conservation without having to pay for that. So he's promised that that tools that we develop will go to conservation at no cost. But the path toward toward bringing in investment return for investors really is in the space of being at the absolute cutting edge of genetic engineering and that sort of science.
Right, And a company was already spun out sort of in that way, right, is it form Bio that's spun out of a spun out of Colossal and is a sort of kind of platform genetics, Like, yes, it's.
A software company's sort of developing tools that we really need to be able to track what we're doing all the different experiments that are going on in Colossal that have to do with a different species, so that we're not repeating experiments, but it's super useful for being able to refine experimental designs. And so that is a spinout company that's working on developing software platforms for other industries including drug development, etc.
So let's talk about how it works and sort of what you've figured out and what you still have to figure out. And I know how it works is different for different species. So tell me about the plan with the mammoth.
Sure, So, there are lots of different steps toward figuring out how to take an Asian elephant and turn it into an Arctic adapted elephant that we would let's call a mammoth, defending on whether you're willing to say that. The first step is to figure out the link between the genotype, the a's and c's and g's and t's that make up on organism's genome and the phenotype or
the way that organism looks and acts. For this, we collect a lot of information, go out into the field, collect a lot of mammoth bones, sequence high quality whole coverage genomic data. We have academic collaborators who are helping with that, Luvo de Lens Lab and Stockholm is a
major advisor to this group. We have now more than fifty high coverage genome sequences from mammoths, and we can compare these to genome sequences from Asian elephants and African elephants and other afrotherorians, so they differentiate all mammoths from everything else that's there. As a way to start to look, we can get information from doing experiments like looking and see what genes are being expressed during tusk development, or what genes are being expressed in the follicles that produce
long hair. As another way of narrowing down where our fosi should be as far as identifying these genes that we want to change. Once we have a panel, we then have to engineer those and so for this we take cells from elephants that are growing in a dish in a lab. A few months ago we released a pre print and now we have the paper under revision where we were able to derive induced play potent stem
cells from elephants. This is something people have been trying to do for a long time and our mammoth team was successful in doing this. This is really cool and useful for us because it means that we have cell lines that are healthy and happy and survive in a dish that we can transform into different tissue types. So if we have hypotheses about whether this particular DNA sequence change causes changes in hair growth, we can make a
type of organoid where we can test that hypothesis. So we don't have to make an elephant in order to test our hypothesis. We do this in culture.
So, dumb question, in that particular example you gave, would there actually be like hair growing out of the dish in the lab?
Yes?
That's rad okay, So you have that, which is a useful sort of platform, right, A useful tool certainly to test hypotheses about, well, what genetic changes lead to what phenotypical changes right? Go on? Right?
So then after you do that, you have your your cells growing in addition to lad that you've engineered all of your edits into. So I've probably skipped over there. Lots of very difficult challenging biology. Identify what genes we're interested in, figure out how to edit these the genomes
and cells to get all those changes in them. And we have teams of people who are working on multiplex genome editing, replacing large chunks of DNA rather than just making single edits to the DNA sequence lots of different approaches that are developing new tools, new ways of doing genome engineering that of course have application outside of the field of the extinction or mammoth or any of these
other cells. Then once you have your edited cell, you do cloning, sematic cell nuclear transfer, the same process that brought us Dolly the sheep. You have planted that into a host, and then eventually your animal is born. So
all of that is very hard. I have summed cross very hard, difficult, challenging things, and in elephants in particular, one of the one of the groups that we have at Colossal is an EXODEV group or artificial boom group, with the idea of eventually being able to do all of this without needing a surrogate hoast, without needing to use a female elephant to get there. The mammoth project obviously has a very long timeline.
In terms of the sort of macro side. So that was a description of the cellular level for the most part. Right, Like, you're starting with an Asian elephant, which I understand is quite similar genetically to the mammoth, Right, like more than ninety nine percent the same genetically, is that? Right?
That's right?
How different does an Asian elephant look from a mammoth?
I don't think I've quantified that.
What do you think? I don't have any idea. I mean, how much bigger is a mammoth at the same size?
The size is not a is not one of the changes. I mean, a mammoth has a slightly different shape, but has a different, different tusk shape, and it's obviously harrier.
And how far along is that project? I suppose one kind of milestone is implanting some genetically modified elephant that's a little bit more mammoth like into an Asian elephant. When do you think that might happen?
I always tell Ben and also the comms team here that I am not going to answer timing questions. I would love to be able to predict the timing of scientific innovation, but I want my teams to be able to do good scientific work and to think hard about the experiments that they're doing, rather than to work against
an externally imposed deadline. Now, George and Ben and Ariona have said that they plan to have this happen before twenty twenty eight, and I, as far as I know, this team is on goal to being able to do this. Before the implantation, and that that would be fascinating. Now it is not going to be all of the genetic changes, right, It's not going to be absolutely everything, but you're writing that it is an important first step to try to
get there. We have a separate team called our Animal ops team, who's really it's made of people from the veterinarian zoo community who are working with the animals, who are working to try to really learn what these animals need to be physically and psychologically healthy and captive environments to learn about processes like OPU, which means ovum pick up. This is how do we get eggs from these animals that are going to be the surrogate hosts for somatic
cell nuclear transfers. We're also working with the community of people who are doing the Northern white Rhino Southern White Rhino project because you know, what we learn in one species we can apply to other species. But there are lots of very hard problems to solve there, but they're also important problems for the future of those species. So remember that anything that we learn as we push toward a mammoth is also something that we can apply to
elephant conservation and to rhino conservation. So this is all work that is hard, but I appreciate that we have the opportunity and the finances to be able to put the energy into it.
And so, setting aside the understandably sensitive question of specific timelines, talk about the sort of happy outcome for the mammoth project in whatever timeframe it may happen, If it sort of works, what does that look like in the world.
The long term happy outcome to me is that we have structured communities of animals that are able to live in an environment that is really similar to the wild environment to replace whatever ecological interactions are missing because of their extinction. And this happy outcome to me, where we have grandparents and parents and offspring that are all living in a wild habitat somewhere. This is not a near term solution. Elephants have twenty two months gestation. They reach
sexual maturity when they're teenagers. So this is something that I can tell you isn't going to be by twenty twenty eight or twenty thirty, right. This happy outcome of an entire population or community of animals living in the wild is.
That is a sort of kind of human lifetime's time scale this's a one hundred years story, absolutely, And what I mean would that be Siberia? Is it basically the tundra.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be Siberia, wouldn't necessarily have to be Alaska or the Yukon. Remember, mammoths lived everywhere from temperate to subtropical zones. They live throughout warm intervals and they live throughout cold intervals. But where these ecosystems have been most changed by their absence is the Arctic and places where the plant community has changed a lot. There are lots of missing animal species. We know elephants
are engineers of their ecosystems. There's no and to suspect mammoths wouldn't have similarly been engineers of their ecosystem in the past.
In a minute, why bringing back the dodo maybe even harder than bringing back the mammoth. Tell me about the dodo. Give me like a dodo one on one.
Well, based on sort of written records from the first people who saw them, So dodos lived on this island. They were a flightless bird, so about the sides of a really big chicken, and they probably ate fruit. They had a big beak that was probably able to crush fruits and seeds and things like that. We don't know much about their color. The people who drew them, they're very Some of them looked like they couldn't have actually stood up according to the to the way that they've
been drawn. It's funny because most people who drew a dodo never saw one, because dodos went extinct within a couple of decads after the first person set foot on
Borucius Island. And it wasn't because people ate them. There are some written records that suggests that they didn't taste very good, but because when people arrived in Mauritius, they brought things like cats and pigs and rats, and dodos laid a single egg and a nest on the ground because they couldn't fly, and the things that we brought with us, that people brought with us just ate all the eggs. And if you can't, you can't have offspring, then you're not going to survive.
Yeah, a single egg and a nest on the ground is like a perfect I mean, it's not a metaphor because it's real. It's just so wildly vulnerable, right, it's just so vulnerable. So okay, so you're trying to bring back the Dodo or something like the Dodo, and I understand that one particular challenge there is you actually can't use the same cloning technology that people have been using for decades for mammals. Right, tell me about that.
It's not possible to clone birds the same way that we clone mammals because of the intricacies of their reproductive system. So the way that Colossal is working on this problem with birds and is similar to way that other teams
have been doing this. There's a person called Mike McGrew who's in Edinburgh, the Roslin Institute, who's developed a lot of this technology for chickens, but that's the only bird species so far for with this technology exists, and we're working on that now for pigeons for the Dodo project. So the idea is when the egg is laid, the cells that are called primordial germ cells. These are the cells that will eventually become germ cells, either sperm or eggs,
depending on the biological sex of the animal. They are circulating throughout the bloodstream of the developing embryo. They're on their way to the gonads, which don't exist yet because it's not that stage of development yet, and at that point you can stick a needle into the egg very carefully. I've actually seen our DODO lead do this a few times.
It's pretty impressive how you do this. And you can suck out a little bit of that circulating blood without harming the embryo, and you can put that in a dish in a lab and if you understand what the right culture conditions are for those cells, you can keep those cells alive. Then they'll start to grow and make lots more of themselves, and then you can edit those cells.
And then because those are edited, you can inject them into an embryo at that same developmental stage and they will circulate around the bloodstream established in the gonads, and that chick will be chimeric. Right. It will not be edited itself, but it's sperm or it's eggs will be edited. And then you can, if it's a female, you will fertilize it with edited sperm and then when it lays eggs, those eggs will hatched into the edited offspring.
And so I mean is that I don't know if it's a dumb question to ask, Is that the hardest part of the DODO like project that whole idea, or there's so many.
Hard parts, oh the hardest part. Yeah, though, there are a lot of hard parts. But you know, this is a situation where we currently don't have any way of
driving gene edits into bird species. The birds are among the most endangered species on the planet, especially on islands, and if we can develop these technologies of being able to keep these germ cells alive and different species in addition driving these edits into them, and show that we can do this, then this is a tool that we could use, for example, to help make Kawaiian honeycreepers resistant to avian malaria, or drive resistance to diseases of other
bird species that are impacted by changes to their habitat, a lot of which have been caused by changes in the way that people have used the landscape.
And then talk about the long happy story for the dono, like, how does that story go?
We have collaborations with the Russian government and Russian Wildlife Foundation. This is an island country that is very proud and very excited about doing conservation work and have an incredible track record of success there as well. They have several islands that are off of them mainland that they've been doing removal of invasive species and replacements sometimes with proxy species. For example, one of the species that went extinct at the same time as the dodo is a giant tortoise,
and they have replaced on some of these islands. There's an island called Round Island, another called eulok Agret where they've put giant tortoises from Seychelles, And what they've seen is that having these giant tortoises on the landscape have been able to help out with their invasive species removal programs and really change the shape and face of that
floral and faunal community. So it turns out that ebony trees germinate better after they've passed through the digestive system of a giant tortoise and many of the other endemic plant species because they evolved alongside tortoises. They have anti tortoise or bivory like really sharp little baby leaves for example,
that tortoises can't eat. So the tortoises are consuming all of the non native species, the species that have been introduced and leaving behind the endemics species that are now coming back because of the replacement of this animal on the landscape, and they hope that by replacing this other key member of that extinct foneal community, a forgivorous bird that had a very strange shaped face that's able to move around and consume fruits and do similar things, I mean,
maybe not even things that we've imagined yet, that this will will really help them to help them in their restoration projects. One thing that's clear though, is that even the idea that there might be a Dodo at some point has caused a reinvigoration of the excitement of other people for their conservation programs, and they've seen renewed investments
in creating habitats that dodos might someday be in. They are really excited about working with us on setting up places where we can have aviaries for some of these early birds, because obviously we would love to have them back there. They're Marsian animals, so they should they should be there, And so yeah, this is it's been a it's been I've got to go to Murcius in June this year and interact with see some of these sites and interact with some government officials, and the excitement for
having a Dodo and Mauritius is really palpable. It's it's exciting to be part of.
What you're trying to do is wildly hard. It's like kind of amazing, as you alluded that somebody was able to raise two hundred million dollars for this very hard, not obviously commercial project. And so I don't know, you're in a really interesting spot, right, Like you've been studying this at an academic setting for twenty ish years. Now you're at this company that's that strangely amazingly has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to do this hard thing. Like where are you right now?
What I like about this project is that, as we've said, as you've said here, everything that we're doing is really hard.
Right.
But as we look around the planet today, what we see are ecosystems, species, and populations and communities that are in trouble, And what we have is decision anxiety. What do we do? How can we help? Where do we even start? Right? But this project, what it forces us to do is write down all of the steps that we need to do to answer this really hard problem, to get to the end of this really hard solution. And that now that we've had them written down, means
that we can just go and start knocking them down. Right, here's problem we have to solve. Here's a problem that has to do with rewilding and restoration that we have to solve. In order to solve that, there are all of these other problems that have to do with invasive species on the landscape that are going to eat the dodo's eggs on the ground. How do we solve those?
Who do we partner with to solve those? It's not all Colossal's job, right, but we do want to enable it because we want to create an environment where we can be successful and our partners can be successful. And our partners are nonprofit conservation groups and governments and local communities who want these things to happen. But by saying we're going to do it, we've enforced you got to write down the problem, We got to figure out how to solve them.
And I love that.
I think that this motivation to get there is going to solve is going to help so much as we try to figure out what we can do as a global community to try to stem the biodiversity loss crisis that we're facing today.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. I have read that you have a tattoo of a dodo. First of all, is that correct?
It is yes.
If you are going to get a tattoo of another animal extinct or not, what would it be.
I promised our thylacine lead Sarah that when she delivered a thylacine I would get a thilocine tattoo. I haven't decided what it will look like or where it will be, but that's that's.
Probably what's the thylacine look like?
Well look it up. It looks like it looks like a weird stripey large marsupial wolf.
I've heard it called the Plasmanian tiger. I know us Okay, that seems like a cool animal to get a to get a tattoo of. What's the most dangerous or sketchy thing you did to get a piece of ancient DNA?
The most dangerous or sketchy thing I did? You know? I try not to do any dangerous or sketchy things. Let's see, I have written on Russian helicopters. That's pretty dangerous and sketchy to try to get out into the field. We did once time one time get left in the field for an extra couple of weeks because these same helicopters got a better deal taking some wealthy people fishing for a little while rather than pick up some scientists that they were supposed to pick up.
Were you out getting mammoth DNA? What were you doing.
We're collecting just fossils from Arctic species. I've worked a lot on muskogs and bison and horses and species like that. So we were out just in the field collecting bones for future work. Yep.
Yeah, we haven't talked all about dinosaurs. Are you tired of people asking you about dinosaurs? No?
I mean it's something that people are excited about. There's no DNA in dinosaurs, right, So the oldest DNA that's been recovered could be escas escaviller Slav's ancient plant DNA, which is from sediment that might be about two and a half million years old. The oldest DNA from bones are mammoth bones that were frozen in permafrost for more than a million years, maybe as long as two million years. But dinosaurs have been extinct for more than sixty five
million years. There is no dinosaur bone out there that still is organic. They're all fossils that organic material has been replaced. So we're not going to get dinosaur DNA.
And there's not even like a theoretical way. It's sort of like a laws of physics of problem, like fundamental laws of biology say, we're just not going to get it.
We're not going to get dinosaur DNA. Yeah, I've tried even the amber thing like smashing stuff up and getting because I answer that, yeah, of course. You know why. You can only be asked that question at least four hundred or five hundred times before you're like, well, you know, I'm just.
Gonna just try it. Time some asshole asked me, I could say I did it. It didn't work. What's the oldest DNA that you have ever retrieved?
Me, personally working in a lab touching samples, the oldest DNA that I've recovered is from a horse that's probably around eight hundred thousand years old, somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred thousand years old, horse like animal. In fact, we thought it was a horse, but it turns out that it is a type of extinct donkey. Well not even really, that it's slightly more closely related to donkeys
than it is to horses. It's in that lineage, but it's a species that really hasn't been known to paleontology, but now we have a whole genome from it.
So that's fun. Was one surprising thing about the Dodo.
Surprising thing about the Dodo, I guess I was mostly surprised very early in the beginning of my experience with the Dodo that it's a pigeon.
Well, that's a sign of a good paper, right the side of a good finding. What's the worst thing about winning a MacArthur Genius Grant That.
People ask you what you're going to do with the money, Like everybody expected you're going to have something really profound to do with the money that they give you over the course in the next few years.
The real answer, just stop writing grants all the time for the next three years.
No, do you know what I did with it? I used it for childcare.
You know.
It actually made it possible for me to be a very young mom trying to run a lab and get myself off the ground, you know, if I was able to use it to help my kids.
So that's actually a really interesting answer, Like it's a really that's a really interesting answer. I know you might not be the right person asked this question, but you're the one I'm talking to, so you know, it was interesting to me looking at that at the last round of funding that Colossal got that it came part of it came from you know what I'm gonna say, part of it came from in q TEL, the venture capital
fund set up by the CIA. What does I know it's not actually the CIA, But what does this CIA VC fund want with you?
I don't think this is things I can talk about. And actually I think you know, inq TELL are just really interested in knowing what's happening, and they like to be involved in things that are really at the cutting edge of any sort of new discipline, and I think their interest is just, you know, we want to know what you're doing.
Fair Enough, I'm going to mix metaphors on this one. Do you have a white whale? Like, is there some particular species or even just technique or something? Is there so thing you've been trying to figure out how to do that you haven't figured out yet that you really want to figure out.
Figure out how to make a mammoth? Now, well, I mean.
All of this. Can I end on that? Could I end on that? Please?
We're gonna do it. We're I think we're on the path, but it's there are definitely a lot of things to solve still, So yeah, it's a white whale. Isn't a white whale something that you think you're not going to solve? I don't, I don't.
I don't really know the I mean it's from Moby Dick and Ahab is like his whole thing is he's got to get the white whale. I mean, it ends up killing him, but we don't have to think about that part. It's the thing that he has driven to get but that he has not yet gotten.
I guess that's the right answer, you know, let's get there.
Is it a dodo?
Though for me? It might be a dodo for me?
Do you think do you think? I mean? Well, I I We're going to get back to the semantic question. And that's a dumb thing to end on, but I do want to ask, like, do you think you're gonna make it? And I know it's a dumb question, but it's also not a dumb question, right, like one wants to ask it.
Absolutely, you know there's and I accept something that looks and acts like a dodo, that can fit into that environment, that.
Can do like a do and it quacks. Though, do we know did a dodo quack? Problem? Cool? It was a pigeon.
It cools, right, it coos yeah.
Beth Shapiro is the chief Scientific Officer at Colossal Biosciences. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruger. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob Boldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem As