Woolly mammoths may roam the Earth again.
That’s the goal of Colossal Biosciences, the biotechnology company announced Wednesday that it has made significant progress in its mission to bring the 6-ton, 16-foot-long animal back from extinction.
A Dallas-based company has reportedly created a set of stem cells from Asian elephants in hopes of bringing back creatures eerily similar to woolly mammoths.
“This is probably the most important early step in this project,” said Harvard University professor George Church, a geneticist and co-founder of the company. According to NPR.
The woolly mammoth followed the same path as the dodo bird about 4,000 years ago. The company won’t bring back the exact same species, but it will create animals with similar characteristics, such as thick fur coats and plenty of fat to withstand freezing. temperature.
“They walk like woolly mammoths, look and sound like woolly mammoths, but most importantly, they can live in the same ecosystems that were previously abandoned by the mammoth extinction,” the company said. Said.
The company’s goal, no matter how lofty, is to eventually use mammoth genes to genetically engineer stem cell nuclei and fuse them with elephant eggs. The Washington Post reported. They then entrust the embryo to an elephant surrogate in the hope that the elephant will give birth.
But not everyone agrees with Colossal’s goals.
Tori Herridge, a palaeontologist at the University of Sheffield in the UK, warned that if a living elephant were to give birth to a new mammoth, it would likely face at least some amount of suffering.
“How many elephants would have to die to get one hairy elephant?” she told The Washington Post.
Another scientist bluntly called it “irresponsible.”
“What do we get out of this?” Karl Fressa, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona, told NPR.
“First, I think we’re going to have a little freak show in a zoo somewhere. And if we’re going to release a herd into the arctic tundra, that herd will march towards a second extinction in the face of global warming.” Will it matter?”
According to the Washington Post, Colossal insisted that if everything goes according to plan, it would eventually like to use an artificial womb.
The company also believes that relocating woolly mammoth herds can slow the thawing of permafrost (the frozen layer of the ground) that releases atmosphere-destroying carbon into the air, making it actually possible to bring back woolly mammoths. The Washington Post reported that it could help fight climate change.
“There are many reasons to restore the environment to its original state,” Church said, according to the newspaper. “This is the keystone species that is missing for that.”
