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Hello and

this is Thursday April 18th, 2024 and this is a special episode of the excerpt.

Could the woolly mammoth return? Ben Lamb thinks so. He's the co-founder of colossal biosciences, a company at the heart of an evolving science that aims to bring the ancient

animal back to life. Here to talk about his work in the ongoing ethical debate

around the extinction is Ben Lamb, co-founder and CEO of colossal.

Ben, thanks for coming on the excerpt today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

So Ben, it sounds like something straight out of science fiction.

I'm sure you've gotten that before bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Can you just set the stage for us here?

Why the woolly mammoth and why now?

For us, you know, we think that de-extinction and species preservation go hand in hand.

And we are at this, you know, interesting inflection point

for biodiversity where when we started the business,

a lot of the data that we saw was that we were going to lose up to 10% of biodiversity between now and 2050.

Fast forward three years later, those new numbers are now 35 to 50% loss of biodiversity between now and 2050.

And so I think that now more than ever... loss of biodiversity between now and 2050.

And so I think that now more than ever,

we need to build technologies to save critically

endangered species, as well as build a de-extinction

...