If you didn’t know there was an industry attempting de-extinction, now you do. Colossal Biosciences is one of the largest companies working, and they recently announced a breakthrough in stem cell research, which brings them closer to their major goal, of bringing the woolly mammoth back to life.
Able to turn induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from engineered elephant cells into an embryonic state, the team at Colossal are making big strides towards their ambitious goals of bringing the first woolly mammoth babies into the world by the year 2028.
It’s a hugely difficult and controversial project, and one that we find fascinating for a number of reasons. What’s your take? Is de-extinction an exciting step, or a possibly dangerous one?
Read more about the complex process on Colossal’s website.
Colossal Biosciences has a long list of species it wants to bring back to life, including the Dodo bird, and the Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger.
“Engineering a woolly mammoth embryo no longer poses a huge challenge, Hysolli said, but birthing a healthy calf will take more time and work. The team is still researching alternative methods to generate elephant iPSCs and maturing the ones they have newly developed. The iPSCs breakthrough, which will be published on the preprint database bioRxiv, has yet to be peer-reviewed.”
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3 Comments
They may have to either keep it in a freezer for its entire life. It’s too hot for them now. Where will it live.?
They should have done something like the Tasmania devil or some other species we have killed off.
Only a rich person could afford keeping it alive.
The Wooly Mammoth seems an odd choice to bring back from extinction since it lived in the Ice Age and we are now experiencing global warming. Where will they live? Surely they won’t be released into the wild?
Utterly ridiculous endeavor. Why would bringing back a creature who couldn’t exist here to begin with be a good thing for the animal? Playing God is dangerous, twisted human powertrip behavior.