What happened in this episode?
Andrew Huberman interviews evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, formerly at UC Santa Cruz and HHMI and now chief scientific officer at Colossal Biosciences, on de-extinction and related conservation technologies. Shapiro argues that “species” is a human classification and that breeding compatibility, genetics and geography each produce different species concepts. Using ancient DNA examples, she discusses human–Neanderthal admixture and what ancient genomes can and cannot reveal.
The conversation centres on how Colossal approaches “de-extinction” by identifying trait-relevant genetic differences between extinct species and their closest living relatives, rather than attempting to recreate an exact extinct individual. Shapiro describes Colossal’s direwolf work as engineering a set of selected edits into a grey wolf genome, and details how her team avoided a coat-colour edit pathway due to welfare risks, opting for a safer alternative already present in living dogs. She also says three direwolves exist and are being prevented from breeding.
Shapiro outlines ecological rationales for interventions, citing trophic cascade effects in Yellowstone and arguing that technology developed for high-profile projects can be redeployed for endangered species. She claims a gene-edited American chestnut tree was recently deregulated by the USDA, and describes genetic-rescue approaches including cloning for black-footed ferrets and red wolves. The episode also touches on gene drives for invasive species control, embryo selection and the ethics of human genetic technologies, and Shapiro says artificial womb work may be necessary to scale mammoth births without using elephant surrogates.
