Where do you draw inspiration for that topic?

Well, I'm going to start by pushing back a little bit that this was started by Jurassic Park.

Oh, that's fair.

In fact, when Michael Crichton published the first book, the Jurassic Park book, he thanked Alan Wilson and the Extinct Species Study Group at UC Berkeley for giving him the inspiration to write Jurassic Park.

So in fact, it was the very early work in the field of ancient DNA that inspired Jurassic Park and not the other way around.

Excellent.

But, you know, it is true that as soon as people became aware that we could extract DNA from things that were no longer alive, and that first paper that was published was a collaboration from really the lab that was the The father of the father lab, I guess, because it was Alan Wilson's lab of everything that came after that.

How do you then release these modified organisms into the wild to help aid them and make them more resistant?

There's, there's no shred of DNA left, so to speak.

Yeah.

As soon as an organism dies, the DNA in its cells starts getting chopped up into smaller and smaller and smaller fragments until eventually there's nothing left.

This is really by three processes.

UV light, we know about this.

It's why we wear sunscreen when we go outside.

But the UV light hits your DNA, and it actually breaks it.

You know?

But what happened? How did that lead to impossible science? I'm missing the connect.

Right.

I got lost on a tangent.

So I had an opportunity at the end of my freshman year to go on a this really amazing class.

It meant a lot to me.

It actually meant so much to me that I ended up teaching something really similar at Santa Cruz when I moved there.

But it was a class where it was a nine-week class.

Like, what is happening? I know it's a big question, but it is a well-known, exciting, exciting story.

How did that get stopped?

It was an accident.

So it was...

It's actually a fun story.

It...

You should, you should look it up and read the, the whole story, because it, it involved these two guys, um, one, one of them was the guy who was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America, and another guy was like a con man who had worked as a pimp and a journalist and all these other things.

And they had actually been employed during the Boer Wars to kill each other, but they came together on part of this congressman's team.

Yeah.

But they wanted to make sure that the genes they had identified were really responsible for the traits that they wanted. They couldn't just, you know, try to engineer Asian elephants with genes they thought might control those traits because it would be unethical given the fact that Asian elephants are endangered.

Here's a difference in a letter in a long string of As and Cs and Gs and Ts and a genome of a mammoth that we've gotten out of a bone that was preserved in the permafrost in Siberia. It's hard to test that in an elephant because an elephant is pregnant for 22 months, and then it takes another decade to 14 years for that elephant to be able to have a baby.

But a mouse is a different story.

With a mouse model, we can really rapidly test these hypotheses and learn whether this change might be responsible for making the animal woolly, and now I can add that to the list of things that I want to change when I'm editing that elephant cell-