Before making a mammoth, ask the public
By Victoria Herridge,
Nature
| 10. 20. 2021
Image by Russ Seidel on Flickr
Every few years for the past 20 or so, the story resurfaces, frozen in time like a permafrost carcass. At some future point, typically within the decade, scientists hope to ‘bring back the mammoth’. There have been a few tantalizing results — stirrings in mammoth nuclei transplanted into mouse eggs (K. Yamagata et al. Sci. Rep. 9, 4050; 2019) — but that’s it. Hence raised eyebrows at last month’s announcement by de-extinction champion and geneticist George Church, co-founder (with entrepreneur Ben Lamm) of biotechnology start-up Colossal: yet again, the world has about five years until a wobbly, woolly calf takes its first steps into the Anthropocene.
What Colossal actually aims to produce is less a mammoth than a new synthetic species, a chimaera of Asian elephant DNA and mitochondria, mammoth genetic code and, from the probable surrogate dam, African elephant epigenetics. The resulting cold-adapted elephants — Colossal hopes — will trample and graze northern Siberia to create something akin to the Ice Age grasslands of the woolly mammoth’s heyday. Compacted...
Related Articles
By Meagan Parrish, PharmaVoice | 10.10.2025
When CEO Ben Lamm steps into the spotlight, it’s usually to talk about his efforts bringing extinct animals back to life. Once a far-flung idea, Lamm and the company he heads, Colossal Biosciences, have proven they can pull it off...
By Aleks Krotoski, The Guardian | 09.28.2025
Imagine you’re the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world. You have everything you could want at your disposal: power, influence, money. But, the problem is, your time at the top is fleeting. I’m not...
GeneWatch UK has prepared a briefing on the genetic modification of nature for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in October 2025
The upcoming Congress claims to be “where the world comes together to set priorities and drive conservation and sustainable development action.” A major concern for those on the outside is that the Congress may advance plans to develop and encourage the use of synthetic biology in nature conservation. This could at first glance sound like...
By Peter de Kruijff, ABC News | 09.16.2025
Do you wonder where your meat comes from? Maybe it is organic, wild harvested, or farmed.
Or perhaps it was designed in a lab.
Faster-growing fish, heat-tolerant cows and disease-resistant pigs are among a new class of animals that are...