Genetic rescue

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

So as I've said this, all of the technologies that we're developing, I feel like de-extinction and genetic rescue for conservation are really the same thing.

And when we talk about them, we talk about the tools that we're developing that are applicable to work that's being done in conservation.

We do have the Colossal Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization focusing on developing and using, deploying these tools for conservation.

In fact, for each of our species, we have a local advisory groups that comprise local governments.

For example, in, for our thylacine project, we have the Tasmanian advisory group that includes indigenous people, um, People from the logging community, there are local conservationists, scientists, government officials that are having conversations about what this should look like.

How many thylacines should there be? What should the staged release look like to make sure that it's safe? What sort of regulatory permits are needed to do this? What conversations need to be had right now? Who's going to be the long-term stewards of these animals? These are all really fundamentally important questions that will guide how we do all sorts of genetic rescue and ecosystem restoration projects into the future.

Very interested in the indigenous view on the reintroduction of some of these species.

So what's the deal with these black-footed ferrets? Because it's an example of this, a dynamic tension betwe- between trying to reestablish a population and wanting enough genetic diversity.

Yeah, and it's also a great example of how we can use multiple tools, um, that we have for genetic rescue simultaneously to help a species.

I should say the, the black-footed ferret project is not something that I was personally involved with.

This is a project that's been a collaboration of US Fish and Wildlife and the San Diego Frozen Zoo and Revive and Restore, which is a nonprofit conservation organization.

... are not susceptible to plague, and that susceptibility must have some genetic underpinning.

So if we can figure out what that is, and there are several hypotheses that different teams are working on right now, we could use the tools of synthetic biology, of genetic engineering, to edit the genome of these black-footed ferrets and make them resistant to plague.

So not only use cloning, a form of genetic rescue, but then also synthetic biology to create animals that are able to survive in this habitat despite that people have mucked with that habitat in a way that makes their survival hard.

We can use these same tools for, for lots of different things.