CAMBRIDGE — A Texas firm and a Harvard scientist are attempting to make science fiction a actuality by bringing again an enormous, extinct species to roam the earth once more.
Decades after Jurassic Park hit bookshelves and film screens, Texas-based Colossal is working to resurrect — not dinosaurs — however woolly mammoths.
“I just fell in love with the idea of the project,” mentioned Colossal CEO Ben Lamm.
He is teaming up with famend Harvard scientist George Church to carry the mammoths again to life.
“I reached out to George Church at Harvard University a little over three and a half years ago,” Lamm mentioned. “His passion and his tone changed completely when he started talking about de-extinction and the mammoth.”
Lamm mentioned there are not any scientific limitations to what they’re attempting to do.
“For the first part, we actually have sequenced genomes from various mammoths’ DNA that’s been collected over the years,” Lamm mentioned. “That process is to really understand the genome and how it relates to its closest phylogenetic relative being the Asian elephant. The Asian elephant is actually 99.6% genetically identical to the woolly mammoth.”
All that gene splicing and dicing might be finished by one thing known as CRISPR, a revolutionary enhancing device for genomes.
Lamm mentioned the actual problem might be gestation.
“We could do surrogacy, we prefer exo-utero development,” he defined. “We’re about four to six years away from our first calves.”
Colossal claims the cause behind this gargantuan mission is to combat climate change.
“You could actually lower the temperature of the permafrost anywhere from half a degree to anywhere up to 10 degrees,” mentioned Lamm.
They have already got a plot of land picked out for the mammoths in Siberia.
Trees breath in carbon dioxide and launch oxygen again into the air. But on this case, the mammoths would truly knock down the timber creating extra spots for grasslands.
Grasslands are fairly good at storing carbon of their roots. The elephant-like creatures would then pack the snow deeper, performing as an insulator.
All of that is to assist stop the melting of permafrost, which releases dangerous greenhouse gases into the ambiance.
Still, the large query: is bringing again an extinct species actually a good suggestion?
“We are in the world of synthetic biology. These tools exist. It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. We need to be really thoughtful about the intended and unintended consequences of our actions,” mentioned Lamm.
Because of the mammoths’ measurement, Lamm mentioned they’d be fairly straightforward to roll again if one thing went unsuitable. He worries extra about different teams that might carry again historical bugs or different small species.
