How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction - with Beth Shapiro

Could we bring back mammoths? Should we bring back mammoths? Beth Shapiro explains the science of de-extinction and Jurassic Park, and asks if it’s a good idea at all.
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Beth's book "How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction" is available to buy now - geni.us/q7dE29
Could extinct species, like mammoths and passenger pigeons, be brought back to life? Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist and pioneer in ancient DNA research, takes us through the astonishing and controversial process of de-extinction. From deciding which species should be restored, to sequencing their genomes, to anticipating how revived populations might be overseen in the wild, Shapiro explores the extraordinary cutting-edge science that is being used to resurrect the past.
Beth Shapiro is an American evolutionary molecular biologist, working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She researches mammoths, dodos, and other extinct animals using ancient DNA and statistical models, giving us a glimpse back in time.
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[@kaigreen5641]

I misread the title and thought I had slipped in to an alternative timeline where Ben Shapiro was an evolutionary biologist.

[@Th0ughtf0rce]

Evolution doesn't care about your feelings

[@colinjava8447]

That happened to me as well, except for the alternative timeline bit

[@smittywerbenjagermanjensen9217]

i did not read the whole title before i clicked. your comment is the first one, so as i was reading your comment my eyes slowly looked up and i cracked up laughing.

[@RingxWorld]

ben shapario is her evil clone from an alternate timeline

[@blitz8425]

@Jerry C Ben Shapiro is also the name of a conservative talk show host who has famously said very dumb and terrible things. They are calling that Ben Shapiro evil, not the one in this video

[@abdullahalmosalami2801]

Man, she's so ANIMATED! I didn't expect to watch it all but bam! And, the amount of things that have been cleared up in my head in the past hour is just unprecedented! :D

[@hightwelve9991]

And kinda hot

[@ta192utube]

Fun to watch and listen to...

[@Bearak_]

And the audience is a pile of dead fish. The only reason I know they were awake is that they laughed about the bratty, crying kid in the slide projection.

[@FatesRhysHoward]

@@hightwelve9991 eww dude she's ancient, probably has cobwebs down there

[@hightwelve9991]

@@FatesRhysHoward I must have been drinking when I posted this original comment

[@btfofffice]

The producers of Jurassic Park should cast Beth Shapiro in the next series of the franchise. Maybe relative of Jeff Goldblum.

[@JohnDoe-wi8sx]

Loved the information covered in this speech, very informative. I however want to add, it would be great if Canada would ban accelerated melting of permafrost. The sloppy mass release of methane gas from the permafrost has to be staggeringly destructive to the ozone, not to mention improperly extracting rich and well preserved world history.

[@symmetrie_bruch]

clear, concise, interesting, very engaging talk, easy to understand, no meandering, laser focus on the topic at hand yet still casual , building a momentum and keeping it up all the way through, great stuff kind of a benchmark on how it should be done

[@ex-nerd]

You know this is a hot topic when the 5 year old sees the mammoth photo for the corresponding article in Popular Science and asks "is that an article about un-extincting mammoths?!"

[@CosmicPotato]

Great lecture. This is the best one I've seen in a while (last one is probably the black hole firewall with Sean Carroll on this channel). I usually watch physics related talks, but this was so engaging and she did a great job of conveying the concepts in laymen's terms. Hope to see more videos of this quality :)

[@onlythewise1]

as if all she says is true

[@simonwhite8474]

What an excellent communicator. Treat your audience as if they can understand you, add wit and finish with a moral dilemma. Fantastic. Thank you.

[@daniellaahmed7277]

Thankyouu so much, I had been working on a project and so far this has been the ONLY video that really helped me out :)

[@deanmilitello7774]

Very Impressive and I love the energy and sarcasm humor she delivers!

[@MarkMiller-zm2th]

Great talk, brilliant presentation. I could listen to this lady all day

[@brsnight]

Absolutely great talk, really engaging, lots of info put in a understandable way for the non connoisseur and the ethics at the end make the link between science and human considerations an enjoyable experience.

[@pauls5745]

I really enjoyed this lecture. at times she is so passionate, and thought for a moment she'd shed a tear because she is emotionally connected to some efforts in this research only to come up against more road blocks

[@deeliciousplum]

Exceptional, playful, and enlightening talk. Thank you for sharing this.

[@jaschabull2365]

I like Beth, she reminds me of the professor I had for Physical Anthropology a couple of years back. Really full of life and engaging. Also, I sure was surprised to hear that horses were originally American and bison originally Asian! Seems Beringia was important in both hemispheres!

[@LloydieP]

Prof Shapiro gives an amazing lecture! edit-just started reading her book of the same name. Well worth a read.

[@markcollinson9452]

Great talk. She is one of the best presenters I've ever seen. Great delivery.

[@LloydieP]

This was great! Just downloaded both of her books. Can't wait!

[@williamchapman6963]

That was fantastic and you are incredible! Thanks so much!

[@deemarr9151]

i enjoyed this beth thank you:)

[@jennyjohansson47]

Fascinating video. The idea of de extinction is very interesting. I think Beth made a good job at explaining the science and mentioning the ethic part was mature of her. It can easily be left out as this is such an exciting project.

[@joshuadaltilia8480]

Agreed

[@MsKariSmith]

Wonderful talk, and something to think about.

[@dangerdackel]

@ the RI: Is there no Q&A for this lecture?

[@pauls5745]

edit: at 45:00 she does concede it may be possible in the future, right after talking about ethical concerns, as a qualifier. not much has been publicly reported about progress as the ethical concerns as the tricks needed to do it became forefront. nothing new publicly avaialble since 2019, and as I suspect, _private_ research has not stopped and only will be noted to media when a major breakthrough is "ready" to be announced

[@PUBHEAD1]

Awesome presentation

[@1fishmob]

Then lets call it: Ressurextinction.

[@1fishmob]

As well, there are still some roles in an ecosystem that are not filled.

[@rodschmidt8952]

Next movie in the "Alien" franchise, no doubt

[@craighartley551]

Beth is so lovely I could listen to her for hrs. Are there any other televised lectures by her. Craig Hartley England.

[@danm9297]

Not normally into biology, but I really enjoyed this. Super engaging presentation style and really interesting.

[@BlueMonkeySky]

I LOVE this talk so much!!!

[@peterz53]

Thanks to Beth Shapiro for speaking sensibly about the ethical issues of de-extinction, something that is normally glossed over or ignored.

[@cliffordcalhoun3201]

She destroyed extinction with facts and logic.

[@paxdriver]

Great job! Way better than a jet pack :-) you got my vote

[@judyalexander]

Fabulous!!!!

[@atomicrooster56]

Loved this.

[@kaustavadhikary8940]

she is the real live Felicity smock (arrow reference). a goofee genius.

[@broderp]

This video burst my bubble of having a cloned Mammoth. Seems like we are decades away from even doing this.....if at all.

[@wlhgmk]

If you are going to call the period from the Eemian interglacial period some 125.000 years ago up to the present Holocene interglacial period an "ice age' then you will have to come up with a different term for the approx. 2.75m year period in which there have been numerous cycles between icy periods and warm periods.

[@tiedupsmurf]

This was brilliant

[@itsgooglyeyes6686]

According to "How to Clone a Mammoth," Beth Shapiro argues that the overarching goal of de-extinction should be the stabilization and revitalization of contemporary ecosystems. True For those who got a quiz

[@ezragonzalez8936]

separating the 1% of what is important and what is mot so much will ultimately be the most difficult might get a closer looking elephant to a mammoth but it will never truly be a mammoth or Tasmanian tiger or whichever species they attempt to "bring back" Beth gave an amazing presentation though!

[@handelviola]

she's a good story teller!

[@thekennethofoz3594]

Was the camera at the back of the hall much cheaper to operate or something? Every time she started talking about a chart of some sort, we'd see the chart for a couple of seconds, then the view cut away to the back of the hall as she talked on about the chart.

[@michaelcox9855]

I just keep hearing Ian Malcolm's words in my head. This woman seems to get it though. The question should be whether or not we should more than whether or not we can.

[@blowfishes]

Consider altering - if possible- the genetic for tusk production in modern day elephants. Either remove the tusk completely, or potentially alter the construction so that it has no use in so called medicinal remedies. Hell, lace it with a chemical that won't hurt the elephant but cause severe irritation to humans if ingested or applied to skin.

[@ta192utube]

Don't forget rhino horn and tiger penis...well, maybe not tiger penis...

[@BrianBattles]

It's all based on superstition, so it wouldn't matter

[@davemwangi05]

@@BrianBattles lol. A good comment. U're a legend.

[@IbnFarteen]

Elephant ivory isn't used primarily in folk medicine. It's used for artistic objects no of great value. Also, every elephant will someday die and the tusks are valuable. Ivory could be a sustainable resource.

[@Markgeoghegan100]

Changing the Asian elephant or any other animal to survive in a different climate for whatever reason means changing them for good... crazy thought in my opinion....! Humans should not mess with this sort of thing in any species full stop. That includes humans..... Why not just protect the these and other amazing creatures period....!

[@jasonbyrne8487]

Very impressed...

[@jamesstuartbrice420]

One of the possibilities is to find a way to make American chestnut trees resistant to the fungus that destroyed great forests of these trees a century or so ago. I have read that researchers are trying to find some genetic fix so that these trees would be resistant and we could have the big chestnut tree forests again. But this seems to have been going on for decades without success. Will it ever succeed? There are living chestnut trees growing here and there in isolation from the fungus. It should be possible to insert the gene for resistance to fungus into the genome. Why has it not been done? Will it ever happen?

[@IbnFarteen]

What do you do with the mammoth ivory recovered from the permafrost? - that's gotta be worth as much as the gold from the mining operation.

[@jamesdriscoll9405]

Mmm... say $3K to $5K per tusk, so, no.

[@lesliekilgore648]

? nope, it's worthless. you can't trade ivory unless it's an antique item with a DOCUMENTED provenance of a specific length of years, which I don't know that length. that's international law. the 'raw' ivory trade has been banned world wide for decades. so no, mammoth ivory is worthless, except to researchers and museums and folks visiting those museums. unless you want to get into gray or black markets and yeah... no thanks. getting killed, maimed, or going to prison for a very very long time... bad. very bad.

[@gregorymalchuk272]

@@lesliekilgore648 Mammoth ivory is exempt. I'm not sure what to think about that, given that it means that a lot of mammoth DNA is being lost to make trinkets for China, but at the same time it incetivizes people to recover genetic samples for further study.

[@wood_croft]

23:30 I've never heard of that. Does anyone know what she's talking about? I'd like to learn more about those "condensed repeat regions".

[@Beniguitar94]

Wood Croft What Beth Shapiro calls "tighly condensed repeat regions" are generally known as "tandem repeats". In eukaryots, these are usually located at the center of a chromosome (centromere repeats), at the ends of a chromosome (telomere repeats) but can be found elsewhere. Tandem repeats are also found in bacteria and archaea: CRISPRs (from the CRISPR/Cas9 system mentioned in the talk) are some sort of interspaced tandem repeats (CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). Tandem repeats are not the only repetitive elements found in genomes. One must mention interspersed repeats such as transposons, retrotransposons or some introns. Actually, it is said that approximately 50% of the human genome is repetitive. You might find interesting (it is free access): J. Duitatama et al (2014). Large-scale analysis of tandem repeat variability in the human genome. Nucl. Acids Res. 42(9):5728-5741. I am sorry for such a long post. Best wishes!

[@wood_croft]

Beniguitar94 Why is it hard to detect it? And when they publish a "complete" genome, if it's missing the tandem repeats, why do they call it "complete"?

[@Beniguitar94]

Wood Croft Firstly, one must understand how genomes are sequenced nowadays (check out, for example, Roché 454 sequencing). Explained briefly, extracted genomic DNA is broken into fragments (300-800 base pairs in the case of 454 sequencing). Each fragment is sequenced (there are many elegant ways of doing it) and then comes the hard work: aligning these short reads (luckily they overlap) and deducing the whole sequence. It is even harder work to deduce the sequence of a tandem repeat from fragments which can get aligned in many several ways due to the repeats. You can read more about this (writen by experts) in the following link: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21116/ With respect to your second question, the human genome has been mapped (not sequenced), which means that we now know the sequences of all genes and their location within the genome, plus intergenic regions (in total 90% of the human genome). Nevertheless, we do not know (exactly) the sequence of centromeres or telomeres. For example, click the following link to see the sequence of the Y human chromosome:(www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/568815574?report=fasta) At the beginning of the sequence, you can read letter N (nucleotide), meaning that we don't know which nucleotide it corresponds (thought, we know the number of N's). If you drag your mouse down, suddenly, you will notice that sequence starts to appear (written in As, Cs, Gs, Ts). So the real question is, should we call "complete" a genome that has been mapped? In the days when the Human Genome Project was launched, non-genic genes (non-coding regions) where considered junk DNA. In that sense, it wasn't misleading to say "we know the complete genome". In the modern world, we are starting to grasp the essential function of so called junk DNA (we know call it noncoding DNA, which is more respectful). So my amateur opinion is that it is not at all complete and that it shouldn't be called that way.

[@SimonSozzi7258]

Telomeres...

[@brettvonhenneberg-romhild3535]

Dr. Shapiro just replaced Dr. Lipscomb as my power-crush.

[@pmcrisp]

well said

[@Chris.Davies]

Personally, I'd settle for cloning Beth Shapiro. :) We'd need to make lots and lots of copies because every village, town, and city should have at least one Beth!

[@JohnGriffith222]

seent that mosquito pic, its just like that in parts of alaska. the buzzing will drive you mad.

[@user-uv5cm2pc6x]

It's funny hearing her joke about hockey being played in Vegas seeing how popular the Golden Knights now are

[@ulftnightwolf]

de-extinction of mammoth and then ? how do you create a self sustaining diverse gene pool for this species?

[@GoldsmithsStats]

Sorry didn't finish last posting. Darwin didn't exactly predict 'countless' intermediate forms in the fossil record. He predicted that transitional forms would be found, and in many cases they have. As for species appearing suddenly, this is correct, but it doesn't contradict evolution. In geological terms, 'suddenly' can be 100 thousand years. If we have two species at times X and X + 2, and we find another species at time X + 1 intermediate between the two, the most obvious interpretation is that the first form gave rise to the second which gave rise to the third. But if you demand that every tiny gradation by which form 1 led to form 3 should be discovered as fossils, you are setting the bar very high. And the existence of gaps is not, as this speaker suggests, a proof that Darwin was wrong, but it is precisely what you would expect given Darwin's theory. But this is not the end of the problems with ID. If ID wants to be taken seriously as an explanatory paradigm, it needs to provide a more convincing hypothesis for why things appear as they do in the fossil record. If evolution does not happen, then God must be constantly creating new species by fiat. Why? What is it about the nature of God that makes him do this? If you cannot give a 'God model' for this then your hypothesis is vacuous and it provides no alternative to Darwinism, however imperfect the latter is. I have as yet come across no description of how ID accounts for things as they are, merely a set of more or less well informed criticisms of the existing Darwinian paradigm. I am not impressed by ID so far, but maybe there is some real content to the theory out there somewhere. I wait in hope.

[@highlands]

That photo of the boat on the dry lake bed is Poyang lake in China. It wasn'r caused by climate change, it was caused by the Three Gorges dam.

[@yuibot5998]

Don't get in the way of a California lefty and their climate alarmism.

[@davidvomlehn4495]

Though Ms. Shapiro is obviously extremely well versed in the subject manner, I found some of her negative comments related to "de-extinction" surprisingly specious, yet I think she also missed what may be a significant obstacle. An example of the former is the elephant hyman. I can't help but think that a small incision, followed by a stitch or two would be sufficient to implant a mammoth embryo. However, should we overcome this and many other challenges, there is still another issue worth considering--mammals, at least when young, require a great deal of care and in many (most?) cases, it is during this time that they are taught basic survival skills. Intelligent and social de-extinctees (sorry, what should we call them?), such as mammoths reared by elephants, will lack this critical socialization and may be lack the skills to survive in the wild. Success of such efforts may require providing simulated parents that can bridge this critical gap, but that will require that we know not only what needs to be taught, but how to teach it. We're a long way from bring back mammoths, though I do expect there are other species that have fewer obstacles to overcome.

[@mattmoran6812]

American Chestnut trees!

[@zarkobiz]

Talks eloquently for an hour without correcting herself, restarting a sentence, even without a single "uhm..." We need more humans like this.

[@solomonessix6909]

It would be nice if you cloned Honey Bees instead.

[@MrMichiel1983]

Better to just protect them from extinction I would think.

[@solomonessix6909]

Preservation efforts are out paced by environmental exploitation and global warming.

[@lesliekilgore648]

that actually is a more viable research path and easier to do than bringing back an already extinct species. and there is probably a large number of entomologists that could clone bees easily. like the Dr. here mentioned the 'frozen zoo', if he DOESN'T have thousands of insects in his zoo he'd be NUTS! plus it wouldn't be so 'I am right and you are wrong!' confrontational on the root causes of colony uhh... what's the word? collapse, colony collapse. plus with the 'rewriting genomes' technology we could create 'Bionic Bees' or 'GM Bees' or 'SUPERbees' that would be immune to some if not all of the 'proposed causes' of CC. plus we could probably 'de-Africanize' killer bees as well. make populations of bees that would be immune to the 'sperm of Africanized bee drones'. therefore the 'GM Bees' would move throughout the US in nature and 'push out' the Africanized bees.

[@lesliekilgore648]

considering nobody can decide or even discuss what causes colony collapse without getting into a fistfight?

[@hanshenrikbuttner9340]

what if you can get all the dna pussels from other mammoths dna ? so if one mammoth is missing some dna but maybe another mammoth have this missing dna data can you put them together maybe ?

[@hanshenrikbuttner9340]

i mean ! lets say !"this mammoth is missing the dna for the nervsystem , but you have more than 1 mammoth so maybe another mammoth will have this missing Dna for the nervsystem" !

[@digitpixel9198]

Hans Henrik Büttner so and extreme jig saw puzzle???

[@FHB71]

Brilliant in many ways, but mostly she is so hilarious that I could listen to her for hours!

[@HalilKarad]

Cloning a mammoth with facts and logic

[@deemarr9151]

amazing...and yes i agree..beyond to combine dna..but if able....it is

[@heyquantboy]

It's now the end of 2022, 7 years after this talk- and I still cannot buy a ticket to Pleistocene Park. I am feeling very let down.

[@gloryshadow8710]

I think we should focus on preserving elephants.

[@99Randizzle]

The MM hockey stick, really??? Michael man is currently hiding on various continents hoping that he isn't forced by the courts to cough up scads of data and calculations which birthed the hockey stick graph. I predict that when that day arrives Professor man will claim, as others of his tribe have done, that the material was all accidentally deleted.

[@rafaeldelaflor]

Potentially adapt humans and other organisms for the rigorous environments of other atmospheres

[@TheBasspot]

BOOORING!!! GIMME MAMMOTH NOW!!! ...jk a highly enlightening and well-delivered speech which provided the answers I clicked for.

[@therealshakur]

guess i'm not getting my own hairy elephant any time soon :(

[@technopoptart]

now, now. as long as there is tindr there are hairy elephants for all!

[@Bifrost14]

Spider goats have existed for how many decades? As far as farm produce there is gmo everything. Mammoths shouldn’t be that difficult.

[@f.puttstycker2784]

Mommoth was so disappointed with man they died of heartache!?💕🐘

[@Markgeoghegan100]

Changing the Asian elephant to survive in a different climate means changing the Asian elephant... crazy thought in my opinion....! Humans should not mess with this sort of thing in any species full stop. That includes humans..... Why not just protect the Asian elephant and other creatures period....!

[@kencory2476]

There was no need for a land bridge between Canada and Russia to foster migration. Animals could cross quite easily over the ice bridge that existed during glacial times.

[@onlythewise1]

they already said all this in a movie fifteen years ago

[@lyness1217]

No discussion on younger dryas impact on mega fauna extinction

[@nicksamek12]

To add on to her Black-Footed Ferret story; Revive and Restore have cloned a Black-Footed Ferret from the Frozen Zoo!!

[@veryde_3356]

This lady *applies* herself, it's amazing

[@Knownasnemoo]

Would be so cool to have Mammoths 2.0, elephants reloaded :D

[@tosche774]

Why does the clip at 1:17 min give me the feeling like its straight out of a cheap horror movie.

[@humphrex]

5 years later i wonder how things have progressed

[@johnryan2193]

The graph is only representative of a minute of the deep time of Earth

[@arlenesmith5143]

Would it be at all important to make things easy and keep species from going extinct in the first place?

[@messageinabottle8978]

Some animals cross breed I might try a bison and an elephant in the reference section on the comparison or attempt a breed on the two.🧐

[@danicadabic9789]

There is no breeding between species. A lion and a tiger a genetically very close and can breed but their offspring is not fertile. Same with horses and donkeys. It ends with the next generation.

[@messageinabottle8978]

@@danicadabic9789 cats and rabbits breed but the offspring looks like a handicapped cat so breeders avoid it so they don't end up with handicapped animals. Mammoths are all similar, like a donkey and a moose. Breeding it with an off shot is difficult. You might have to find the right animals to breed is all.

[@midget4957]

Anything is gone because of human actions deserves a come back

[@yatitvk9s530]

Clone it fast!

[@rafaeldelaflor]

If you could adapt an animal for life on another planet it would be a black footed ferret, so cute. Which animal would you choose?

[@applemauzel]

35:21 Time to dope with the woolly mammoth Hb during the next winter olympics.

[@permafry247]

this is like saying, we should not keep animals from going extinct because there in the way of people.

[@bojankotur4613]

So, nobody has a problem with them destroying huge patches of land by washing away the permafrost?

[@JackTheCarver]

She's made it pretty clear that it's people digging for gold doing this and the scientists are just there to pick up the interesting bits that happen to wash out. Same as when fossils are found in quarries or construction sites. I'm also fairly certain the scale is so small as to be basically irrelevant.

[@cinthialara386]

It is possible to cloning the elephants birds in the future?

[@charlesb5007]

Well you can always see the brilliance and political mindsets of some people adding in their insults despite their ignorance. People that tend to lend accolades to themselves have a tendency to be less brilliant than they let on, ever notice that. First example is if you think Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house you'd be a bought head chump, she didnt say that SNL's Tina Fey did.. Does washing away permafrost help the environment or ice breakers, neh not worried about it do as we say not as we do.

[@yuibot5998]

She's a professor in California...are you surprised?

[@DarkAsSilver]

Would elephants be elephants if we altered their genome?

[@brentwalker8596]

They would be a hybrid of Mammoth and Elephant.

[@btfofffice]

Tasmanian Tiger?

[@AC-he8ln]

Wow 5 years old. Little did she knew that we would already clone a baby mammoth in 2020.

[@Sorenzo]

Really, the problem with elephants is that they can't live in Siberia. If they could, we wouldn't have to protect them from habitat destruction, because there'd be more than enough habitat.

[@rowaneisner6802]

maybe they could live there in summer and would gradually reevolve o mammoth-like

[@onlythewise1]

they found remains of a mammoth 4 thousand year old on a island

[@litestuf]

If we do this once, someone will make a pair of T-Rex's and we're screwed.

[@nodetransit4277]

you start up a terminal and type `git clone mammoth`

[@BawlzOfuzz]

I would....

[@skyclaw]

Re Jurassic Park, it needed to be frog DNA so that the plot point would work where some of the dinosaurs changed sex, allowing them to breed. A bloody stupid reason, but still a reason.