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Science Technology

Firm Raises $15 Million To Bring Back Woolly Mammoth From Extinction (theguardian.com) 91

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra. From a report: The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed -- seriously at times -- for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality. The boost comes in the form of $15m raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants. These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan -- and the hurdles are far from trivial -- the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.
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Firm Raises $15 Million To Bring Back Woolly Mammoth From Extinction More

Firm Raises $15 Million To Bring Back Woolly Mammoth From Extinction

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  • Copy and paste works so well for programming.. (Score:3)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @03:29PM (#61792835) Homepage
    Lets try it with DNA!

    • Yeah, except that now there is no one around to debug and fix the mess when things go wrong.

      • Errr, no.

        You'll need to go through multiple iterations. The first few iterations will show errors that kill the foetus before (say) heart-start. The next few iterations will have those problems fixed (or at least, working solutions for the first set of problems, and new problems coming to the surface). Lather, rinse and repeat.

        Literally, the whole process would be one of detecting new problems and fixing them, until you get to viable embryos. Then you have to start being very picky about which ones you pu

    • Lets try it with DNA!

      ...says the person who is a result of 3.5 billion years worth of DNA copy and paste errors.

  • Sure we could inject mammoth DNA into an elephant egg, but the mammoth's habitat disappeared a long time ago. I feel it would be irresponsible to bring this creature back now.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ... habitat disappeared a long time ago. I feel it would be irresponsible to bring this creature back now.

      Same thing happened to Native Americans, no buffalo to hunt no free land... they're still around.

    • That and it really wouldn't change the Asian elephant's plight. Basically a vanity project under the guise of, "because we can".

      • I'm not sure that there is a "plight" to the Asian elephant. They've been a somewhat-managed, half-domesticated species for centuries now. There may be some populations that have little contact with people, but there aren't many. But I very much doubt they're as common as "un-managed" populations of African elephants.

    • This isn't necessarily true, Woolly Mammoths lived at the same period as the pyramids were being erected. They were rendered extinct by the Quaternary Extinction event, which means that hunting by humans was probably a large contribution to their eradication. They are quite likely to be perfectly comfortable in the arctic tundra, which while much smaller in area than in their day, is a similar climate.

      I'd agree that it's a questionable use of resources and effort, tho...

      • Agreed. They lived up to around 4000 years ago [reuters.com] on remote islands while the rest on the mainland died off around 10 or 11 thousand years ago. So the climate definitely wasn't the only thing that killed them off. Given how long they lived on those islands after the main disappearance, humans had to have played the biggest part in their demise. Shitty inbreeding did them in on the islands. I'd bet the North American/cave lions and other large predators that would have kept the mammoths in check disappeared be

    • > the mammoth's habitat disappeared a long time ago

      Canada and Siberia would be a good start.

    • I feel it would be irresponsible to bring this creature back now.

      Being irresponsible hasn't stopped the human race so far - why start now?

    • More to the point, even if we do manage to "bring them back" or some form of them, aren't we supposedly warming the earth so fast that the areas they would be comfortable will be disappearing before they can establish a stable population? Leave it to humans to figure out a way in a time of unprecedented suffering to cause yet more suffering among animals that have been extinct for so long.

      We're nothing if not consistent.

    • Habitat is the easiest problem they have to solve.

      • It might be an intellectually easy problem, but buying (or renting for a few hundred years) the necessary home range is going to make that fifteen megabuck budget evaporate like the "dew in the mornin' ".

        Double-plus ungood if, as has been proposed, the mammoths were seasonal migrators, following the fresh grass.

        • I didn't say it was easy, and you are right, it's not. I said it was the easiest problem they have to solve, and it is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      There's also all the learned behaviors and "culture" that makes up a higher order species that is lost for good. It's not all instinct.

      • > There's also all the learned behaviors and "culture" that makes up a higher order species that is lost for good. It's not all instinct.

        ^^^ This is completely correct.
        In that as much as the surrogate mother will teach her offspring, she herself will be in a prison.
        Good luck with those elephantine children.
    • Bro, taigas and tundras still exist... covering the majority of the two largest countries on Earth (Russia and Canada.)

    • Re:Habitat? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The Real Dr John ( 716876 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @06:34PM (#61793503) Homepage

      Habitat is not the issue, since the end result won't be a mammoth. It will be a very altered elephant for several reasons. First, they need to use elephant eggs. This means that the cellular machinery (DNA> RNA>protein protein, motochondrial metabolism and all other basic cellular functions) will be the same as those of an elephant, not a mammoth. Also, there are lots and lots of missing bits of DNA information, so they will have to stick with the elephant counterpart in every case. The end result will be an elephant with some added mammoth genes that might even end up making it look a bit like a mammoth. That would be very interesting, and kind of cool, but it would not be anything like de-extinction. Mammoths are gone forever (we ate them all, just like the Dodo).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        >Also, there are lots and lots of missing bits of DNA information, so
        >they will have to stick with the elephant counterpart in every case.

        no, no, no.

        It is *well* known that you patch the missing bits with frog DNA . . .

    • Sure we could inject mammoth DNA into an elephant egg, but the mammoth's habitat disappeared a long time ago. I feel it would be irresponsible to bring this creature back now.

      I wonder what the lack of hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation to various viruses and perhaps bacteria will do to the resulting creature's immune system?

      • Not a lot - that is why every mammal (and I think some of what we loosely call "reptiles") immune system spends a considerable period in utero and in infancy generating new antibodies, and learning if they match a "self" antigen, or a non-self antigen, and if that non-self antigen triggers enough of the rest of the immune system to actually generate a full-on immune response.

        There are bits of the parental immune response which are vertically inherited - the mothers vaginal and anal microflora will infest t

    • There is a project to bring back the habitat: https://pleistocenepark.ru/ [pleistocenepark.ru]

      Also there is credible speculation that after reintroducing mammoths, the habitat would not only be self-sustaining, but also help reduce climate change.

  • People do not heed lessons from history (Score:5, Funny)

    by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @03:32PM (#61792841)
    Having watched many movies, this can only end in disaster. Basic lessons that are often ignored:
    1. do not crack open a meteorite; it's always "aliens"
    2. do not resurrect the dead; instant zombie apocalypse
    3. do not lend money to Sean Bean; you are not getting it back

    • They ignored the lessons from Jaws, too.

    • Do we have any dinosaur DNA apart from some insects in Amber?
      • Well, apart from the DNA from the packet of frozen chicken ... not really. There are a couple of lizard limbs in amber - which would produce lizard DNA if anything - which may or may not be more closely related to dinosaur DNA than the nearest bit of turtle DAN you get from the pet shop.

        There are insects in amber. Maybe even some with dinosaur blood in their guts. Of course, 99.9% of blood cells don't have any DNA - red blood cells don't. If the insects have any recognisable DNA, which I don't recall havin

  • I'm 100% positive this can be contained. Because, you know what they say.

    "Life will not find a way."

    • Are we really this sure that "Neolithic Park" is that scary? We might have to... fashion a projectile point to survive? Start a fire?

    • Insert "We spared no expense" meme here.

    • I'm 100% positive this can be contained. Because, you know what they say.

      "Life will not find a way."

      We wiped them out before.
      With thousands of years of extra technology, I think we'll win round 2.

  • into a hothouse world. Hm. It's scientifically cool and all, but I have visions of some creation from Rick and Morty squealing "kkiilll mmeeee".

  • This is just not a good idea on so many different levels.

    • Why do you want to deny me mammoth ribs [mashed.com] , like our forefathers enjoyed?!!!
      We're omnivores, and it we've run out of species to eat, we should be allowed to resurrect extinct ones so we can eat them.
      There is no further room for debate. We must commence project mastodon burger post-haste, without further study or other dilly-dallying!

  • I mean, not much anyway. And hey, since we've solved the world's hunger and nutrition problems, and cured all the diseases like Malaria, Dengue, Zika, Ebola, and the like, why not create a literal mammoth mouth to feed? We have such a surplus, it's not like humans somewhere could use the resources to stay alive instead.

    Oh well, hopefully it at least tastes good.

    • We have such a surplus, it's not like humans somewhere could use the resources to stay alive instead.

      This is correct, we have a huge surplus.

    • The more we can customize beasts the more we can manipulate them for food and other products. The cost is trifling.

      If people in impoverished areas want better lives they should stop wasting resources on reproduction. Poverty is largely a problem of locals making bad choices, believing in sky fairies instead of science, and other stupid human tricks.

      • This may be true of a large amount of US poverty (and poverty in other highly developed nations), but it is largely not true on a global scale. Poverty on a global scale is largely a problem of governmental corruption, lack of property rights (hard to grow crops when anyone with more money can come along and declare it belongs to them, and take it from you), dislocation due to genocide, wars, cartel violence, and terrorist groups (hard to have a profitable business when you live in a refugee camp), etc.

        You

  • For all the technical achievement recreating the mammoth would be, I'd like to know what they plan to do with them once they bring them back. Maybe Elon Musk would be interested in sending a few to Mars?

  • Why not try and bring back the Northern white rhino to a viable species?

    Or the Tasmanian Tiger?

    Lots of other species that are easier and knowledge gained could then help with the Woolly Mammoth.

    • Because we don't have a variety of frozen specimens to work with.

      Send a message to the past and tell them to freeze some white rhino meat whenever one dies.

      • You don't need to freeze specimens to have DNA survive - but it certainly helps.

        Unfortunately, the treatments for taxidermy, and a century or so of hanging on living room walls, isn't good for DNA survival either. The NWR etc conservation teams have been looking for samples for a long time, and not finding adequate ones.

        • Sure, maybe somebody has a pickled rhino head in a jar somewhere, but it seems unlikely that it is sitting in giant drawer and escaping notice.

          • Corollary : a pickled rhino head in a jar, without a reasonably complete documentation of who/ where/ when/ why may well be a rhino head, but showing that it is an NWR head (rather than some other species) requires museum grade documentation. So, by the time you've searched all the known museums (including defunct ones downgraded to 3 junk rooms and a filing cabinet), you're pretty sure you're not going to get more NWR material.

            (Specimens stored in alcohol/ formalin also distort considerably over years of

            • I'm sure they could tell from DNA analysis, even if they were using low quality DNA for comparison.

              • If you have a generally accepted (amongst specialists) DNA sequence for that species, yes. The "If" in that sentence is important. From what I remember, even while they were agonising over the death of the last NWR, they were arguing over whether one, the other, or any of the proposed female NWR females were actually "pure bred", or had SWR in their recent ancestry.

                Are NWRs actually a distinct population from SWRs? If so, then perhaps we should actually have two (or ten, or fifty-seven) reference genomes f

                • agonising over the death of the last MALE NWR

                  Mea culpa - I spelled it perfectly, but forgot to type it.

  • Oh wait, Loverboy mad a song about that. "Pig and Elephant DNA just won't splice"
  • In this dystopian future, huge genetically engineered elephants, Megadonts, provide factory power by turning gears or hauling stuff (their civilization collapsed before wind or solar could be fully deployed) http://steampunkscholar.blogsp... [blogspot.com]
  • This is an interesting article from the Atlantic about efforts to stave off climate change in Siberia - https://www.theatlantic.com/ma... [theatlantic.com]
  • I worry if their scientists are so preoccupied with whether or not they can that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

  • Do we need big Furry Elephants chasing Inuits around the artic ?

  • So someone is planning to live out their Jurassic Park fantasy, and create animals that will be kept in captivity all their lives for the admiration (and money) of onlookers.

    Um, yay?

  • I'll bet he could raise a lot more than $15 million if the project were on Kickstarter and people could buy miniature Woolly Mammoth pets.

    • Hell yea, if we hit 30 million we unlock a free gills upgrade so we can bring them along scuba diving.

  • On the first mammoth mittens.

  • They should bring back some of the mega predators then, too, like the North American lion. From what I just read they were about 25% bigger than African lions, and disappeared around the same time as the majority of mammoths (probably because their prey, and not just mammoths, were being reduced by humans hunting. If they don't do that, and if the intention is to set them free, then they could destroy the environment too. Elephants chew up a lot of bush to eat, and they are kept in check naturally (aside f
  • Humans wiped out the Mammoth, and now, a people are worried about bringing them back? Mammoth me up.

  • "The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA."

    Perhaps we can look forward to a time when another extinct species, the moderate Republican, could be rescued from the elephant graveyard that is American history.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      and maybe some blue dog democrats while we're at it.

      Oh, never mind--whoever heard of a donkey graveyard?

      hawk

  • what could possibly go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong...

  • ... that global warming probably will destroy the animal's habitat before they can release him.

  • Why the fuck would anybody want to do this, and what country would allow those animals in the wild if they're successful?
  • Have we learned nothing from Jurassic Park? On the other hand... I wonder how they taste? Might require some A-1.
  • Biologists are well aware that all seemingly individual creatures are in fact constellations of lifeforms. Without the proper microbiome (especially internal; maybe external as well), these creatures will likely be sickly and/or destined to live very short lives.
  • Having this roll around in my head for a bit and after all the "Pleistocene Park" jokes... I see this type of re-animation of past species to be a potential vector for virus/disease/etc. basically 'Lets recreate old organisms and put them in their past habitat where the snow is melting and old ancient viruses have been preserved.'

  • Brilliant -- Just as global warming is deleting the arctic ecosphere, they decide to try bringing back the Mammoth. Are they hoping to get the Mammoth moved to the Endangered Species List to create further penalties for global warming?

     

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