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What could go wrong?

If you’ve seen Jurassic Park, or Jurassic World, or whatever comes next, you may be rather apprehensive about the idea of bringing extinct animals back from the dead.

It sounds far-fetched, but advancements in the field of genetics have already seen scientists clone endangered animals and sequence DNA extracted from the bones and carcasses of long-dead, extinct animals.

Now geneticists, led by Harvard Medical School’s George Church, are looking to bring the woolly mammoth, last seen roughly 10 000 years ago during the Ice Age, back to life.

Church has previously worked on projects like creating pigs whose organs are compatible with the human body, so that we may see organ transplants helping humans in the future.

The project has been given a massive boost thanks to a $15 million investment, reports CNN:

Proponents say bringing back the mammoth in an altered form could help restore the fragile Arctic tundra ecosystem, combat the climate crisis, and preserve the endangered Asian elephant, to whom the woolly mammoth is most closely related. However, it’s a bold plan fraught with ethical issues.

The goal isn’t to clone a mammoth — the DNA that scientists have managed to extract from woolly mammoth remains frozen in permafrost is far too fragmented and degraded — but to create, through genetic engineering, a living, walking elephant-mammoth hybrid that would be visually indistinguishable from its extinct forerunner.

The investment was put forward by Colossal, a bioscience and genetics engineering company, co-founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Church.

Lamm says the company aims to have its first calves in the next four to six years, with Church adding that the investment “is going to change everything”.

The idea had previously “been kind of a backburner project” but this cash injection means they can now actively pursue it:

The research team has analyzed the genomes of 23 living elephant species and extinct mammoths, Church said. The scientists believe they will need to simultaneously program “upward of 50 changes” to the genetic code of the Asian elephant to give it the traits necessary to survive and thrive in the Arctic.

These traits, Church said, include a 10-centimeter layer of insulating fat, five different kinds of shaggy hair including some that is up to a meter long, and smaller ears that will help the hybrid tolerate the cold.

There’s a rather obvious hindrance to the safe return of the mammoth in the form of its tusks.

Church says the plan is to engineer the animal to not have tusks, which will hopefully prevent it from becoming a target for poachers.

I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but the tusks are one of the mammoth’s best features.

Well done, humanity.

Before the mammoths can be returned to the Arctic, they will need to be rewilded. Colossal’s cofounders have a site in mind – Pleistocene Park.

CNET below:

This area of about 60 square miles in northern Russia, named after the geologic period that ended with the last ice age, is where researchers Sergey and Nikita Zimov are trying to test their theories about the ecological and climatic effects of rewilding.

One Zimov idea is that woolly mammoths will trample snow and knock down trees. That, in turn, will restore grasslands that reflect more of the sun’s warming rays and eliminate insulating snow and forests so the ground cools more. And that means the ground will stay frozen instead of releasing its current store of carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases.

Obviously, we are a long, long way off this becoming a reality.

Let’s dream big anyway, with this graphic breaking down the complicated process in very basic terms:

There has also been some pushback against the idea.

Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, says you’re not really going to get a true woolly mammoth, but rather “a hairy elephant with some fat deposits”.

Whilst he isn’t against the project, he also argues that there is little evidence that putting mammoths back in the Arctic will have any effect on climate change whatsoever.

Am I a bad person for wanting this to succeed simply because I want to see a mammoth, and not for any justifiable scientific reason?

[sources:cnn&cnet]