The Happy Hour - Duuunnnneeee

Dr. Church, who is best known for inventing ways of reading and editing DNA, wondered if he could effectively revive an extinct species by rewriting the genes of a living relative. Because Asian elephants and mammoths share a common ancestor that lived about six million years ago, Dr. Church thought it might be possible to modify the genome of an elephant to produce something that would look and act like a mammoth.

Beyond scientific curiosity, he argued, revived woolly mammoths could help the environment. Today, the tundra of Siberia and North America where the animals once grazed is rapidly warming and releasing carbon dioxide. “Mammoths are hypothetically a solution to this,” Dr. Church argued in his talk.

Today the tundra is dominated by moss. But when woolly mammoths were around, it was largely grassland. Some researchers have argued that woolly mammoths were ecosystem engineers, maintaining the grasslands by breaking up moss, knocking down trees and providing fertilizer with their droppings.

The idea has a few precedents. At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers have developed a sealed bag that can support a fetal lamb for four weeks, for example. But Colossal will need to build an artificial uterus big enough to house a fetus for around two years, reaching a weight of 200 pounds.

However, to be a great VC you have to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. On the one hand, you’re over paying for every investment and valuations aren’t rational. On the other hand, the biggest winners will turn out to be much larger than the prices people paid for them and this will happen faster than at any time in human history.

For all its remarkable creative assets, Disney seems undervalued. Its market capitalization is around $317 billion, just some 13 percent above Netflix’s approximately $280 billion market cap. These are extraordinary numbers, to be sure, but they don’t appear to fully capture the extraordinary value of Disney’s library and decades of intellectual property, particularly multiplied by its rapidly growing direct-to-consumer platform.

Moreover, Disney’s stock is sitting at about $174 per share while Netflix’s trades in another altitude, at $633 per share. One potential reason? Despite its streaming success, Disney is still valued by Wall Street as a behemoth with legacy assets rather than as a pure play streamer. And this, in large part, is thanks to ESPN, which fuels a “media networks” segment that makes $7 to $8 billion in profit annually, but keeps the company tethered to a linear television business that is in structural decline.