Ben Lamm details how AI played key role in dire wolves' resurrection on Joe Rogan’s podcast

Ben Lamm (right) explains to Joe Rogan (left) how he and his team managed to de-extinct dire wolves. [Image credit: PowerfulJRE on YouTube, @joerogan on Instagram]

On The Joe Rogan Experience, founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences Ben Lamm announced that they did the unthinkable: bring back an extinct species to life. With the use of bioengineering and DNA retracing, Lamm and his team were able to bring back dire wolves - the mythical wolves popularized in shows like 'Game of Thrones.'

Dire wolves have been extinct for an estimated 10,000 years. And now, every media outlet known to man is posting photos of the three new dire wolf pups birthed by Colossal Biosciences: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.

Speaking to Rogan, Lamm recounted how his team used the help of AI to sequence the dire wolf genome from a single fossilized tooth:

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"About six years ago, a group sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave. Just a single tooth, and in that tooth they actually found .0.15x or coverage of the genome. So they got about 15% of the genome. But that's not really enough. You need to get up to about 10x, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times."

He added:

"It's done by AI and software, yeah. So we we built a part of our business model - building technologies - to solve these really complicated problems that are much harder to solve than, you know, just solving them for existing species."

Check out Ben Lamm's comments below on The Joe Rogan Experience (0:40):

Joe Rogan plays Devil's Advocate and questions Ben Lamm about the ethics of de-extinction

While Joe Rogan was fascinated and amazed by Lamm and his team's scientific breakthrough, Rogan played Devil's Advocate and asked how Colossal Biosciences addresses the ethical issues de-extinction might pose.

In the episode posted above, Rogan said:

"If I was a reporter it'd be like, 'What right do you have to invade the natural process of nature and to inject your curiosity and your ability to create new life?'"

Lamm replied:

"I think that we've become the apex predator on this planet and we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we overfish the ocean. We over hunt something...Every time we cut odown the rainforest. Every time we drink hydrogenated water we are you know playing God on some level, right. Change we humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things." [3:58]

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Edited by Subham