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Colossal Gets $15 Million to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 14 2021, @10:37AM   
from the big-deal dept.

takyon and looorg write:

Firm raises $15m to bring back woolly mammoth from extinction

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. 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 (£11m) 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.

[...] The project is framed as an effort to help conserve Asian elephants by equipping them with traits that allow them to thrive in vast stretches of the Arctic known as the mammoth steppe. But the scientists also believe introducing herds of elephant-mammoth hybrids to the Arctic tundra may help restore the degraded habitat and combat some of the impacts of the climate crisis. For example, by knocking down trees, the beasts might help to restore the former Arctic grasslands.

Pleistocene Park.

Also at NYT and CNBC.

Previously: Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced
Resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth Could Begin in Two Years
Analysis Supports Conservation of Existing Species Rather Than De-Extinction of Mammoths
Mammoth DNA Activates Briefly in Mouse Eggs

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Original Submission

• Re:Playing God (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 15 2021, @01:30AM

  by khallow (3766) on Wednesday September 15 2021, @01:30AM (#1177928) Journal

  Why do we need Woolly mammoth hybrids roaming the earth again?

  Why do we need anything? My take is that it's likely the reason that mammoths and a whole lot of other large mammals became extinct is because of humans hunting them to extinction. So we have some responsibility to bring them back and figure a way to fit them back into our world. After all, there are still a bunch of plants [americanforests.org] throughout the northern hemisphere that are adapted to a plant-eater that hasn't been around for longer than human civilization has existed.

  Now let’s return to the forlorn fruit of the Osage orange. Nothing today eats it. Once it drops from the tree, all of them on a given tree practically in unison, the only way it moves is to roll downhill or float in flood waters. Why would you evolve such an over-engineered, energetically expensive fruit if gravity and water are your only dispersers, and you like to grow on higher ground? You wouldn’t. Unless you expected it to be eaten by mammoths or ground-sloths.
  
  According to my field guide, Osage-orange has a limited natural range in the Red River region of east-central Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and adjacent Arkansas. Indians used to travel hundreds of miles for the wood, prized as the finest for making bows. Then European settlers planted it widely as living fences, taking advantage of the tree’s ability to spread via shoots from lateral roots. But Osage-orange persisted, and became widely naturalized long after the invention of barbed wire rendered them useless to farmers. The tree can now be found in 39 states and Ontario. If Osage-orange does so well elsewhere, why was it restricted to such a small area?

  [...]

  Now when you see an Osage-orange, coffeetree, or honeylocust, you might sense the ghosts of megafauna munching on treats made just for them. (You may even see tropical ghosts in your local grocery store hungrily eyeing the avocados and papayas.) But you can also conjure megafaunal ghosts by considering the weapons designed by trees to discourage or slow their big mouths from eating the foliage.
  
  Osage-orange, mesquite, and hawthorn all bear stiff thorns, spaced too widely apart to do much good against narrow deer muzzles, but they would be unavoidably painful in the wide mouths of groundsloths and mastodons. Wild honeylocusts have vicious, trident-like thorns several inches long covering the lower trunk and branches. Hollies have prickly leaves. Devil’s walkingstick is festooned with wicked prickles. In all these heavily armored trees the thorns or prickles are present well above the reach of browsing deer, where they could still frustrate a mammoth’s trunk or a giant ground-sloth’s muzzle, but no higher. Cacti, Joshua trees, and other yuccas of the Southwest are particularly well armed in case the Shasta ground-sloths return.
  
  If some trees have evolved big fruits so that huge mammals would disperse their seeds, why, now that those dispersers are gone, do they waste their efforts on big fruits that rot on the ground with seeds that will never germinate? If some trees have been in an evolutionary arms race with megafaunal browsers, why not disarm and save energy now that their enemies have been eliminated?
  
  It’s true that such adaptations are now anachronistic; they have lost their relevance. But the trees have been slow to catch on; a natural consequence of the pace of evolution. For a tree that lives, say, 250 years, 13,000 years represents only 52 generations. In an evolutionary sense, the trees don’t yet realize that the megafauna are gone.
  
  This would all be just another interesting natural history story if not for the very strong likelihood – many scientists would say fact – that humans, not climate change, caused the extinction of the megafauna, mainly by hunting. Humans first came to North America from Siberia just before the megafauna became extinct. That was also at the end of the last Ice Age, but all those species had been through over 20 previous ice-age cycles and come out just fine. The same two-step sequence occurred when humans first came to the West Indies about 6,000 years ago, Australia 50,000 years ago, Madagascar 2,000 years ago, and New Zealand less than 1000 years ago. Wherever humans first colonized the world, megafauna soon disappeared, an extinction pattern that is not correlated with climate change or anything else.

  Consider that last paragraph. There's a strong indication that humanity has fairly recently caused the extinction of almost all large land animals. The ecosystems of today are missing that component. How long ago do we need to cause an extinction before it is no longer our responsibility to reverse it as best we can?

  Parent