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The era of de-extinction may soon be a reality.
Advances in genetic engineering and synthetic biology make the resurrection of once-lost animals in this world a tangible prospect. Organizations and businesses at the forefront of de-extinction efforts promise success – and surprisingly rapid success.
These efforts were simply boosted. Colossal Biosciences, the biotechnology company behind the project to revive the woolly mammoth, dodo and Tasmanian tiger, announced Wednesday that it has raised an additional $200 million, bringing its total funding to $435 million. That sizable sum grew from an initial $15 million in 2021, when entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard University geneticist George Church founded the Dallas-based company.
Within a decade or less, the world could see approximations of creatures known only from black-and-white photographs, taxidermy museum exhibits and fossilized skeletons, with the ultimate goal of restoring wildlife to their habitat natural.
Advocates say resurrecting extinct animals attracts new, deep-pocketed investors to conservation. The scientific field is pushing the boundaries of biotechnology in ways that can save other species from the brink and offers a promising path to better protect and preserve current ecosystems, ultimately making them more resilient to the climate crisis.
Skeptics, however, argue that these efforts are a pet project of millionaires, whose money could be spent more effectively elsewhere. Critics also claim that scientists will only be able to create unsatisfactory imitations of extinct animals. According to some experts, breeding and breeding such creatures could endanger the living animals used as surrogates and the ecosystems into which the resurrected individuals might ultimately be released.
“Who doesn’t want to see a sleep? Hell, I do. A mammoth. I mean, wow, incredible,” said Melanie Challenger, deputy co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the United Kingdom.
Challenger, author of “How to Be an Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human,” argues that deextinction is a fundamentally misleading term. “It is not a question of de-extinction, but of the genetic modification of a new organism so that it fulfills, in theory, the functions of an existing (living) organism. You don’t bring anything back from the dead,” she said. “And throughout the process, there are different, quite thorny ethical considerations.”
Scientists are developing and perfecting three techniques in their attempts to revive lost and rare species: cloning, genetic engineering, and traditional breeding, a form of selective breeding that seeks to recreate the lost characteristics of extinct species.
From this resurrection toolkit, cloning has the ability to create a nearly genetically identical animal. Dolly the Sheep became the first cloned mammal nearly 30 years ago, and recently, scientists successfully cloned the endangered black-footed ferret. But the process has been haphazard and unlikely to be useful in trying to revive long-extinct animals.
Grazelands Rewilding, based in the Netherlands, breeds a modern equivalent of the aurochs, an ox that features in prehistoric cave paintings. The giant animal disappeared from the wild in the 17th century. Aiming to restore Europe’s wild landscapes, the group is using old-fashioned breeding methods, combined with some genetic knowledge, to identify aurochs characteristics in its living descendants: domesticated livestock.
Now in the seventh generation, Tauros cattle, as they are called, are more than 99 percent genetically similar to extinct aurochs, said Ronald Goderie, the project’s executive director. Animals exhibit physical changes, such as darker coat color, and behavioral changes, such as how they respond to predators like wolves, over time.
Colossal scientists are behind the most ambitious projects. This team wants to resurrect the mammoth, the flightless dodo and the Tasmanian tiger, an Australian marsupial that disappeared in 1936. Colossal plans to recreate these creatures by modifying the genome of the extinct animal’s closest living relative to create a hybrid animal which would be visually indistinguishable from its extinct predecessor. For the mammoth, this animal is the Asian elephant.
High-profile investors in the project include “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson, socialite Paris Hilton, former professional football player Tom Brady and professional golfer Tiger Woods; as well as investment companies such as Breyer Capital. The latest cash injection comes from TWG Global, the investment vehicle of Mark Walter, majority owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team and co-owner of the Chelsea Football Club in the United Kingdom.
With the influx of capital, Lamm said the Colossal team could add another extinct animal to the to-do list as it moves forward with its three flagship projects.
Recent milestones include the creation of the first induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, for Asian elephants. This special type of cell can be engineered in the laboratory to become any type of elephant cell. It’s an important tool as researchers model, test and refine the many genetic changes they need to make to give an Asian elephant the mammoth-like characteristics needed to survive in a cold climate.
For the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, Lamm said the pace of progress had been faster than expected. Colossal scientists were able to perform 300 genetic modifications on a cell line from a fat-tailed dunnart, which is the marsupial that Colossal has chosen as its base species and future replacement. The company sequenced what Lamm described as the highest quality ancient genome to date for any animal.
Sleeping proves the most difficult, Lamm said. Colossal has established a flock of Nicobar pigeons, the dodo’s closest living relative, who will serve as donors of primordial germ cells that will be genetically engineered to have the dodo’s characteristics.
However, many developments have not been published in scientific journals, meaning they cannot be reviewed by other scientists as is usually the case during the peer review process and do not will not be made public for the benefit of the research community.
Lamm said Colossal’s mission as a company is not to publish scientific papers, which takes months or even years. However, he said a paper on creating iPSCs for elephants is under peer review. The company’s academic partners plan to submit their work to journals on time, particularly on the thylacine genome, he added.
Colossal has recruited top, respected scientists, and many other experts serve in an advisory role, including some initially skeptical of some of the company’s goals. Among them is molecular paleobiologist Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s scientific director, who is currently on leave from her role as professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Shapiro is clear that de-extinction is not a solution to the extinction crisis, but she believes that the biotechnology tools she and her teams are developing along the way can be applied more broadly to protect and restore endangered species and ecosystems.
“To be clear, it’s not possible to get something that is 100 percent behaviorally, physiologically and genetically identical to a mammoth,” she told CNN in October. “Once a species is lost, it’s gone, and we need to invest to ensure it doesn’t disappear.”
Colossal is increasingly using its deep pockets to fund conservation efforts, including saving the world’s most endangered rhino species: the northern white rhino. The company is also collaborating on developing a vaccine for a herpes-like disease that can kill elephants. And Colossal has partnered with conservation organization Re:wild to use biotechnology in its projects.
Colossal’s stated end goal for its mammoth project is a world in which elephant-mammoth hybrids traverse Arctic permafrost by compressing the snow and grass that insulate the ground, thereby slowing the thawing of the permafrost and the release of contained carbon in this fragile ecosystem.
It is “absurd” to imagine herds of cold-adapted elephants having a significant impact on a region that is warming faster than anywhere else in the world in the time frame needed to make a difference in the climate crisis, a said Christopher Preston, professor of environmental studies. philosophy at the University of Montana.
Still, restoring lost species to fragile ecosystems has merit as a concept, added Preston, who is also the author of “Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals.” He said he was impressed by the Grazelands Rewilding Tauros project, which he visited as part of his work. The grazing habits of hundreds of Tauros cattle, whose herds now also live in parts of Spain, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Romania, play a role in recreating an open landscape where other species can prosper.
However, Clare Palmer, a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University who specializes in animal and environmental ethics, noted that ecosystems are evolving rapidly. She said bringing the animals back might not work if the landscape was no longer the same.
“We also do not have a good understanding of the welfare needs of members of extinct species and offspring, for example, would not be taught by their parents to hunt, feed or interact with d ‘other members of species,’ Palmer said.
