Joe Rogan questions Ben Lamm over “playing god” narrative in dire wolf resurrection debate

Joe Rogan discussed the de-extinction of Dire Wolf, examining arguments for and against it. On April 7, Colossal Biosciences, a U.S.-based genetic engineering company, announced the birth of three puppies of Dire Wolf, a species that went extinct nearly 12,500 years ago.

Rogan interacted with Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm in a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and posed some serious questions that many reporters have raised, stating:

"The aggressive reporters are... Is it you're playing God? How do you have the right to do this?"

Rogan noted that de-extinction of species could be a form of alteration of natural ecosystems. Lamm, in his detailed response, tried to clear Rogan's doubts, stating:

"I think that we've become the Apex predators on the planet. And we inject our curiosity and choices - We overfish the ocean, we overhunt something. In the case of Thylecene, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off, right? Every time we cut down a rainforest, every time we drink hydrogenated water, we are playing God on some level. Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things."

Citing the ecological impact of wolves in Yellowstone, Benn implied that reintroducing some extinct species into the wild could benefit the environment.

Check out Joe Rogan and Ben Lamm's comments below (35:55):

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Ben Lamm shares the challenging process of extracting Dire Wolf genome with Joe Rogan

While the de-extinction of Dire Wolves is being celebrated as a significant advancement in genetic engineering, the process had its own challenges. In the aforementioned episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Ben Lamm highlighted the challenges they faced in extracting the Dire Wolf genome from the remains.

Lamm explained that although there are several remains of Dire Wolves, they do not contain the genetic material due to acidification and heat. He then stated:

"About six years ago, a group including Beth Shapiro, our chief science officer, sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave, just a single tooth, right? And in that tooth, they found 0.15x or coverage of the genome. So they got about 15 percent of it." [33:34]

Lamm added:

"But that's not really enough. You need to get up to about 10x, meaning that you can read the genome about 10 different times, so that even if there are gaps, you understand the core coding regions that you could bring back that animal." [33:49]

Lamm explained that they were able to extract genome from the Petrus bone of a 72,000-year-old Dire Wolf skull found near the mouth of a cave, and shared further details:

"We got permission from the museum to, very carefully, drill into the underside of the skull and remove the petrus bone to see if we could get DNA. And we got really lucky between resampling the first and the skull. We ended up getting about 13 to 14x coverage. So that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the Dire Wolves." [35:26]

Apart from Dire Wolf, Collosal Biosciences is also working on de-extinction of species such as Thylecene, Wooly Mammoth and Dodo. The company has succeeded in engineering mice with some characteristics of Wooly Mammoth.