The woolly mammoth is being revived by scientists
A Herd of Elephants to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth: Bringing Back the Elephant’s Hairy Mangum
De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. The Asian elephant was gene-edited to give the woolly mammoth fuzzy hair and blubber that helped it thrive in cold climates.
Bennett, a professor of biology at Carleton University in Canada, said that he found it troubling to have a surrogate elephant that was part elephant and part mammoth. It would be difficult to bring that back as something that was portrayed as Conservation.
The closest living relative of the woolly mammoth has been created by a company that hopes to resurrect extinct species.
“This is the most important step in the early stages of this project,” George Church, co-founding ColosSAL Biosciences in Dallas, said.
It’s still far away from the ultimate goal of creating herds of hairy monsters in the wild, but Church said it’s a major step. “This is similar to asking Neil Armstrong if he wants to go to a foreign land, because he just landed on the moon,” Church said.
Reintroducing elephants with woolly mammoth traits could also help fight global warming by restoring ecosystems in ways that would help reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, Church said.
“What are you going to get out of this?” asked Karl Flessa, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona. I think that you’re going to get a freak show in a zoo. Is it possible that a herd will go off to its second extinction in the face of global warming?
“Some people think it’s a bad idea because there will be only one lonely cold-adapted elephant. “That isn’t our intent,” Church said. “It’s to have them fully socialized in large herds. Some people think it’s a bad idea, because it takes money away from conserving efforts, but in actuality we are injecting money into conserve efforts.
Church said that the woolly mammoth program could lead to new ways to protect the rare Asian elephants by expanding their habitat.
“It opens up new possibilities for conserving species’ genetic diversity, preventing extinction and contributing to the sustainability of species,” Ryder said. “There’s an enormous potential.”
Elephants have a Peto’s Paradox: Genetic Instability Causes Cell Deceleration and Stem Cells in Embryos
TheBiology of elephants may have caused the difficulty, according to a developmental biologist who was not involved in the Colossal study. The idea that elephants have low rates of cancer because they are large is known as the Peto’s paradox. The risk of cancer in animals is higher than in humans because of genetic instability that can occur when cells divide.
Colossal’s cells behave like stem cells found in an embryo, and are called iPSCs. pluripotency is the ability of embryont stem cells to give rise to a variety of different cell types. Most cells, however, lose this ability as the organism develops. Human skin, for instance, can’t spontaneously turn into muscle or cells that line the inside of the intestine.
In 2006, the Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka showed it was possible to take mature cells and turn them back into a pluripotent state. Yamanaka’s research was in mice cells, but later scientists followed up by deriving iPSCs for lots of different species, including humans, horses, pigs, cattle, monkeys, and the northern white rhino—a functionally extinct subspecies with only two individuals, both females, remaining in the wild.
US-based startup ColosSAL Biosciences has created the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth. The Asian elephant was gene-edited to give the woolly mammoth fuzzy hair and blubber that helped it survive in cold climates. “Some people think it’s a bad idea because there’ll be only one cold lonely elephant. Church said. “It opens…new possibilities for conserving species’ genetic diversity,” he added.