Real-World 'Jurassic Park' Startup Argues Not De-Extincting Animals Would Be Even Scarier (rollingstone.com) 54
George Church was part of the team that pioneered CRISPR gene editing. In 2021 he co-founded a kind of real-world "Jurassic Park" — Colossal Biosciences, a biotech startup working to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth.
For the 30th anniversary of the movie Jurassic Park, Rolling Stone brought in Colossal's co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamm, to share how the movie inspired and influenced their plans. Lamm writes that in 1993 he was 11 years old when he'd first seen the movie Jurassic Park. And even then, "Yes, as an 11-year-old I thought, what if dinosaurs could be real?"
Lamm says he's now excited at "not just de-extincting animals but at the possibility for endless discoveries that would arise from the pursuit of doing so..." When I first told my lawyer that I was interested in starting Colossal and bringing back the woolly mammoth, he asked me if I had read Michael Crichton's book or seen Spielberg's Jurassic Park movie. Since then, it's a question that has come up in nearly every meeting with investors, journalists, and lawyers. I have, which meant that I spent a number of years thinking about if we should de-extinct animals before I set out to figure out if we could. (Thanks, Dr. Ian Malcolm.) Before ever setting foot in a lab, I spent many years and countless hours thinking about the moral questions at the heart of the story.
And, with each successive year, I watched, heard, and learned about more and more animals dying due to climate change — a modern-day extinction. I came to the conclusion that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right... [T]he scary vision of the future isn't one where dinosaurs escape Isla Nubar and fly to the mainland, putting a healthy planet at risk, but instead a future where there aren't enough animals left to support food webs and ecosystems. And that includes humans, too... [I]t is our belief that it is possible to safeguard against or even stop that fatalist future vision using a similar approach in the original movie with some slight variations. It all goes back to genetics and a lot of what I learned about when I first met George...
In the same way that wireless headsets, CAT scans, LEDs, the computer mouse, and thermal blankets are all products of going to the moon, de-extinction efforts have created breakthroughs already for both conservation and human healthcare. In Colossal's first few years of work, our woolly mammoth research alone has not only accelerated genetic rescue in elephants, but also, it is working to cure a deadly elephant virus that kills 25% of all baby elephants worldwide each year. The de-extinction toolkit is also establishing a genetic backup of all living elephant species, and building the necessary tools for elephant cloning and gestation. And now, unlike Dr. Hammond, who bought an island and hid his experiment from the world, governments are coming to us asking if we can help them to restore their critically endangered animals and help safeguard their keystone species.
Lamm points out that you can get good DNA samples from specimens frozen in permafrost, skeletons preserved in caves, and from preserved specimens in museums.
But "You can't get DNA from amber. Trust us. It's porous and doesn't preserve well."
For the 30th anniversary of the movie Jurassic Park, Rolling Stone brought in Colossal's co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamm, to share how the movie inspired and influenced their plans. Lamm writes that in 1993 he was 11 years old when he'd first seen the movie Jurassic Park. And even then, "Yes, as an 11-year-old I thought, what if dinosaurs could be real?"
Lamm says he's now excited at "not just de-extincting animals but at the possibility for endless discoveries that would arise from the pursuit of doing so..." When I first told my lawyer that I was interested in starting Colossal and bringing back the woolly mammoth, he asked me if I had read Michael Crichton's book or seen Spielberg's Jurassic Park movie. Since then, it's a question that has come up in nearly every meeting with investors, journalists, and lawyers. I have, which meant that I spent a number of years thinking about if we should de-extinct animals before I set out to figure out if we could. (Thanks, Dr. Ian Malcolm.) Before ever setting foot in a lab, I spent many years and countless hours thinking about the moral questions at the heart of the story.
And, with each successive year, I watched, heard, and learned about more and more animals dying due to climate change — a modern-day extinction. I came to the conclusion that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right... [T]he scary vision of the future isn't one where dinosaurs escape Isla Nubar and fly to the mainland, putting a healthy planet at risk, but instead a future where there aren't enough animals left to support food webs and ecosystems. And that includes humans, too... [I]t is our belief that it is possible to safeguard against or even stop that fatalist future vision using a similar approach in the original movie with some slight variations. It all goes back to genetics and a lot of what I learned about when I first met George...
In the same way that wireless headsets, CAT scans, LEDs, the computer mouse, and thermal blankets are all products of going to the moon, de-extinction efforts have created breakthroughs already for both conservation and human healthcare. In Colossal's first few years of work, our woolly mammoth research alone has not only accelerated genetic rescue in elephants, but also, it is working to cure a deadly elephant virus that kills 25% of all baby elephants worldwide each year. The de-extinction toolkit is also establishing a genetic backup of all living elephant species, and building the necessary tools for elephant cloning and gestation. And now, unlike Dr. Hammond, who bought an island and hid his experiment from the world, governments are coming to us asking if we can help them to restore their critically endangered animals and help safeguard their keystone species.
Lamm points out that you can get good DNA samples from specimens frozen in permafrost, skeletons preserved in caves, and from preserved specimens in museums.
But "You can't get DNA from amber. Trust us. It's porous and doesn't preserve well."
Morons (Score:5, Insightful)
De-extinctifying apex predators from millions or even thousands of years ago is a ludicrous endeavor. We don't need flying human eaters in our skies, nor the equivalent bird/lizard-brain predators walking our streets. If you think for a moment that we're smart enough to keep these things isolated to a "secure location", you don't need to watch the movies to learn we can't, just look at our recent history of cross-pollenating the continents with "invasive" species (both intentional and unintentional).
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Re:Morons (Score:4, Insightful)
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Have you not seen any of the recent Godzilla movies?
Not that it confirms the original point but it's good entertainment.
T-Rex (Score:3)
The oldest DNA that we have some of is less than half a million years old. Getting to 1 million is an impossible hope. 5 million is completely out of the question, much less 66 million.
With current technology you'd want a complete set of nuclear DNA, and that means stuff that went extinct recently enough that we have video footage of them: Thylacine, Quagga, West African black rhinoceros. Things like that.
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I live in Los Angeles. I see coyote regularly. There are mountain lions in my city. In the city.
I have just returned from New Zealand where, I am sure, the sentiment years ago was, "Mammals we bring in won't have much effect on things here — there's a big robust biodiversity." Oh well.
Really, the issue is not at all whether predators will attack people in cities, but what would happen to the rest of the biosphere.
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De-extinctifying apex predators from millions or even thousands of years ago is a ludicrous endeavor. We don't need flying human eaters in our skies, nor the equivalent bird/lizard-brain predators walking our streets. If you think for a moment that we're smart enough to keep these things isolated to a "secure location", you don't need to watch the movies to learn we can't, just look at our recent history of cross-pollenating the continents with "invasive" species (both intentional and unintentional).
Personally, I would like to see pterosaurs, big and small, once again soaring through our skies. Unfortunately, there's no way to make that happen since we don't, and won't, have any DNA material to work with.
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We don't need flying human eaters in our skies, nor the equivalent bird/lizard-brain predators walking our streets.
Don't be silly. Large animals are not the threat, small ones are. Australia is not over-run by feral bears and tigers, but by rabbits, foxes and toads.
Also, it seems to be the more highly evolved (whatever that means) ecosystems that produce animals that damage more ancient ones when introduced. Eurasian animals have spread in Australia, but not the other way around. Australian possums have invaded the even more ancient New Zealand ecosystem.
So how well would ancient dinosaurs etc compete in the modern worl
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We don't need flying human eaters in our skies,
Haast's eagle? They'd be pretty easy to avoid. They hunted in bushland, and could only take a small child.
nor the equivalent bird/lizard-brain predators walking our streets.
Such as?
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We don't need flying human eaters in our skies.
Yeah, about that...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ne... [theatlantic.com]
Re: Morons (Score:1)
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The idea the pterosaurs were just gliders has not been a thing in awhile. Take a look at Quetzalcoatlus that big boy supposedly could fly long distances like an albatross.
Pterosaurs flapped their wings just like birds and bats.
https://www.amnh.org/exhibitio... [amnh.org].
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just look at our recent history of cross-pollenating the continents with "invasive" species (both intentional and unintentional).
To be fair to the human race, cross pollination has been a problem with the introduction of small pests, not apex predators. If anything human history has shown that if there is an apex predator a flying human eater so to say, we seem to be far more interested in hunting them to extinction.
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Movies with dinosaurs as a threat to the human protagonists often make a lot of artistic choices that make the dinosaurs more of a threat. In fact, it's just generally done for animals as a threat more regularly. Movie dinosaurs are encountered in the wild far, far more often than is statistically likely. Even in the Jurassic park movies where, since it's a zoo, the concentration is higher. Movie dinosaurs are statistically far more likely to be predators than in real life. Once again, for the Jurassic Park
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If we caused their extinction once... (Score:2)
If you think for a moment that we're smart enough to keep these things isolated to a "secure location", you don't need to watch the movies to learn we can't
Look if we are bringing back creatures that we ourselves caused to go extinct - and in the case of the wooly mammoth with weapons vastly more primitive than what we have now - then I do not think we need to worry about getting taken over by flocks of wild dodos or rampaging herds of mammoths. We wiped them out before without even trying and, if we ever needed to, we can most certainly do it again.
The species that cause ecological damage are generally ones that are small and breed extremely rapidly makin
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If you think for a moment that we're smart enough to keep these things isolated to a "secure location", you don't need to watch the movies to learn we can't, just look at our recent history of cross-pollenating the continents with "invasive" species (both intentional and unintentional).
Or look at zoos and the way that every single town with a zoo in it is now a deserted wasteland after a simultaneous escape of all of the animals, which then proceeded to slaughter every last man, woman and child! Or... wait, that's never, ever actually happened? So, zoo escapes of dangerous animals are actually rare and pretty limited (not all animals escaping at once) and usually quickly contained? Huh. Who knew?
breed raptors! (Score:2)
breed raptors!
So fucking stupid (Score:1, Troll)
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As we live through the man-made Holocene extinction with literally hundreds of species disappearing every day, the rich invest money into reviving animals that will never replace or add anything positive to the biosphere. In fact I'm quite sure those revived animals won't be able to procreate. If that's not madness, I don't know what that is.
"Madness" wasn't the goal of Jurassic Park.
Profit was.
Same shit, same humans.
Stopping the tape (Score:4, Funny)
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I doubt bringing back wooly mammoths (or a big, woolly elephant, more likely), is gonna hurt anybody. And I'm sure people will flock to see them.
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Win-win-win.
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I doubt bringing back wooly mammoths (or a big, woolly elephant, more likely), is gonna hurt anybody.
You want something really scary? What happens if we develop that technology, and then find Neanderthals in the permafrost?
Can you imagine the political storm, the culture wars, that will result from even the possibility of resurrecting them?
If we discover that in China, several Neanderthals have been born to volunteer surrogate mothers?
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What about the Cro-Mags from Sliders?!!! (O_O)
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Wouldn't it be more likely the Chinese would resurrect Denisovans instead since they were the species more likely to be found in Asia?
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Chinese would resurrect Denisovans instead
I think you are focusing on the wrong part of a hypothetical thought exercise. It's not real you know. And people are more familiar with the former.
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Clearly he stopped the VHS tape right before the dinosaurs started to run amok and do what meat eating dinosaurs do.
What meat eating dinosaurs do? You mean the same thing basically all other predators do? Kill usually just one easy to kill animal (even if in a pack) eat it and then take a really long nap? As opposed to killing everything and anything in sight, then looking for more and more and more to kill indiscriminately?
well, duh (Score:2)
"It's immoral if we don't do the thing I plan to profit from!"
Read the book, George (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)m glad you enjoyed the movie as an 11 year old, but as an adult you clearly seemed to have missed the point entirely. Please pick up a copy of the book and read it so you may understand why youâ(TM)re 100% wrong.
Stick with recently-extinct species (Score:2)
I'm a lot less concerned about "what could possibly go wrong" if we resurrect some species we unintentionally killed off 50 years ago than one that's been absent for 5,000 years.
After 50 years, the risk of damage to re-introducing it to its former habitat is non-zero but likely acceptable, not much more than if the species had been extinct in the wild but living in captivity the past 50 years.
After 5,000 years though, the previously-native habitat, if it even still exists, has adapted to life without it. R
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To follow on your coattails...
There's a reason extinct species went extinct, even if humans hunted them to that point. Who's to say they'd survive, much less thrive, after reintroduction? Native habitats would likely have adapted to their absence and be even more hostile to their survival. And any that would be reintroduced would be a from a very shallow pool of genetic diversity, anyway. Worst case, they'd become an invasive species that ravages the habitat that they once called home (because the nativ
Just what we need (Score:5, Funny)
A rich guy who has spent years working out the morality.
Typical non-argument form (Score:2)
but instead a future where there aren't enough animals left to support food webs and ecosystems.
De-extinction would not help, and would not be resource-efficient or time-efficient enough. If there aren't enough animals to support food systems and ecosystems, then WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO FEED THE DE-EXTINCTED ANIMALS WITH?
By then, it would have already been way too late.
If they're really concerned about this future, then they should just pay would-be farmers to preserve rainforests and other re
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If there aren't enough animals to support food systems and ecosystems, then WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO FEED THE DE-EXTINCTED ANIMALS WITH?
I know this is a really far out there thought, but if the de-extincted animal is an herbivore, there's likely to be no shortage of plants to feed them with. As it turns out, we've gotten really good at mass-growing plants that produce food for herbivores and omnivores.
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As it turns out, we've gotten really good at mass-growing plants that produce food for herbivores and omnivores.
If we are in such a situation where we need to DE-EXTINCT an animal, then that implies whatever plants were unable support the herbivores that we ALREADY have and farm. Because if we needed to DE-EXTINCT AN ANIMAL, then where the fuck did our current herbivores go? Why weren't we unable to prevent their extinction? And how would bringing up a DE-EXTINCTED animal help, when for some reason our EXTANT animals went EXTINCT?
There is NO situation, where DE-EXTINCTION would be more viable than what we are curr
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Did you not realize that there are reasons animals go extinct that aren't related to the food supply? Such as over-hunting, environmental destruction, ecological collapse due to non-food related items (climate change, natural disaster, etc.)
Just because you can't think of it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. We've hunted several species to extinction or near - poachers in Africa that have no fucks to give about laws and species extinction has absolutely nothing to do with whether that species has naturally
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Did you not realize that there are reasons animals go extinct that aren't related to the food supply?
Did you not read what I quoted from the article? They said this:
but instead a future where there aren't enough animals left to support food webs and ecosystems.
And then I said, in response to you, THIS:
There is NO situation, where DE-EXTINCTION would be more viable than what we are currently doing, in which we aren't fucked in other unrecoverable ways.
In a situation where there are not enough animals left TO SUPPORT FOOD WEBS AND ECOSYSTEMS, that means there's not enough food IN GENERAL. They're not talking about the extinction of one animal, and covering that with the de-extinction of another animal.
They're talking about situations where enough animal species have gone extinct that THERE AREN'T ENOUGH ANIMALS LEFT TO SUPPORT FOOD WEBS.
Learn to
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Name calling, ad hominem, and getting even more belligerent does not make your point. It does the opposite, in fact.
Have you never heard of herbivores - you know, the animals that don't eat other animals? Do you think they don't go extinct due to over-predation or environmental destruction? If such a herbivore would be un-extincted, don't you think that might increase the food web support for other endangered species that rely on such animals as long as we don't re-introduce the conditions that lead to o
Off to a great start (Score:2, Offtopic)
âoewireless headsets, CAT scans, LEDs, the computer mouse, and thermal blankets are all products of going to the moonâ
With the exception of the space blanket, none of these had anything to do with the moon missions.
LED history predates the space age and didnâ(TM)t become practical until Fairchildâ(TM)s kit in the 1970. Apollo had EL displays in the computer display, but thatâ(TM)s not LED
CT scans in their modern incarnation were invented in the UK and the very first unit is in the
European Bison (Score:2)
Save the ones you have now (Score:1)
There are abundant species of living dinosaurs among us now, living alongside us in diverse, vivid, vital, astonishing ways all the time. They're under threat, and the solution to that is much simpler than any science fiction mad scientist's vision.
Protect bird habitat, and you're literally saving the world.
Missing species - pleistocene park (Score:2)
There is this insane russian, Sergey Zimov, who pretty much proved that the lack of big wildlife in Siberia accelerates its warming.
The pleistocene park (https://pleistocenepark.org/) project needs big herbivores to knock over trees and trample the ground so that the area becomes a grassland-steppe again (instead of a forest) , the woolly mammoth is the apex of what it needs. This will also require reintroducing some kind of predator, to keep the herbivore counts in check...
Resurrecting the mammoth isn't
Great. (Score:1)