Scientists raised $ 15 million to revive the mammoth: why is it needed - ForumDaily
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Scientists raised $ 15 million to revive the mammoth: why is it needed

The company raised $ 15 million to revive the woolly mammoth, reports The Guardian.

Photo: Shutterstock

Scientists are thinking about creating a hybrid elephant-mammoth, the first cubs of which are expected in six years.

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths disappeared from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to return these animals to the Arctic tundra.

The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed—sometimes seriously—for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced new funding that they believe could make their dream a reality.

Colossal has raised $ 15 million, it is engaged in bioscience and genetics. The company is co-founded by Ben Lamm, a technology and software entrepreneur, as well as George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who pioneered new approaches. to editing genes.

Scientists initially thought about creating a hybrid of an elephant and a mammoth, creating embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point of the project is to take skin cells from endangered Asian elephants and reprogram them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. Specific genes responsible for mammoth fur, isolating layers of fat to cold climates, are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals harvested from permafrost, with genomes of related Asian elephants.

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These embryos will then be transferred into a surrogate mother or possibly an artificial womb. If all goes according to plan—and the obstacles are far from trivial—the researchers hope to have their first batch of animals within six years.

“Our goal is to create a frost-resistant elephant, but it will look and act like a mammoth. Not because we are trying to deceive anyone, but because we want an animal that is functionally equivalent to a mammoth, that will enjoy the weather at -40°C and do everything elephants and mammoths do, particularly tearing down trees,” Church told the Guardian.

The project is framed as an attempt to help preserve Asian elephants by providing them with features that allow them to thrive in the vast expanses of the Arctic known as the mammoth steppes. But scientists also believe that introducing herds of elephant-mammoth hybrids into the Arctic tundra could help restore degraded habitats and combat some of the effects of the climate crisis. For example, by breaking trees, beasts can help restore former arctic meadows.

Not all scientists are convinced that creating mammoth-like animals in the laboratory is the most effective way to restore the tundra. "Personally, I think the rationale given - the idea that you could geoengineer the Arctic environment using a herd of mammoths - is implausible," said Dr Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum.

“The scale at which you will have to conduct this experiment is enormous. You are talking about hundreds of thousands of mammoths, each of which takes 22 months to carry a child and 30 years to grow to maturity. "

Lamm said, “Our goal is not just to bring back the mammoth, but to bring back the interbreeding herds that are successfully returning back to the Arctic region.”

It is currently unknown whether Asian elephants will be willing to breed with hybrids. “We might have to shave them a little,” Church said.

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Gareth Phoenix, professor of plant ecology and global change at the University of Sheffield, said: “While we do need many different approaches to stop climate change, we also need to responsibly initiate solutions to avoid unintended damaging consequences. This is a huge problem in the vast Arctic, where different ecosystems exist in different environmental conditions. "

“For example, mammoths are proposed as a solution to help stop the melting of permafrost because they will remove trees, trample and compact the earth and transform landscapes into grasslands, which can help keep the earth cool. However, we know that in forested areas of the Arctic, trees and moss can be critical to protecting permafrost, so uprooting trees and trampling moss is the last thing that should be done.”

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