Matthew Cobb and I have repeatedly criticized the efforts of geneticist George Church and his colleagues to “bring back the extinct woolly mammoth,” because in fact all they intend to do is insert a few genes for stuff like hair into the elephant genome, creating a hairy elephant rather than resurrecting an extinct species (see our posts here and especially the one here). The NBC Evening News, after showing these fluffy rodents, even said that the mammoths could appear as early as 2028!
And problems are greater than just the duplicity involved in saying that a few inserted genes can re-create an extinct species: they also involve how to put those genes into an Asian elephant egg, and create a womb that will nurture the modified egg and keep the fetus alive. Not to mention that if you want to keep this bogus “species” going, you have to produce at least one male and one female.
The Guardian has given new life to this fiction by saying that the creation of “woolly mice” who carry inserted genes giving them longer and newly-colored hair is the first step to creating the woolly mammoth. The article even even has the temerity to describe the woolly mice as a “new species”, which under any reasonable species definition is sheer nonsense. It’s a long way from putting extra hair on a mouse to putting extra hair on an elephant, even if that extra hair somehow supports the crazy idea that “we’ve re-created the mammoth!”
Read this mishigas by clicking on the headline:
An excerpt. The bolding is mine:
A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.
Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.
Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.
Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.
In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates.
The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair.
However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.
The team also disrupted a gene associated with the way fats are metabolised in mice and was also found in mammoths, which they suggest could play a role in cold adaptation.
Note that they don’t know if the gene is associated with cold tolerance, and they changed only nine genes involved with hair. There are probably thousands of genes that differentiate the Asiatic elephant from the extinct mammoth.
As you see above, yes, they got furry mice, which of course are NOT a new species as they can interbreed with house mice.
Why don’t these people have the simple realization that:
a.) You don’t recreate an ancient species by making a modern one that somewhat resembles the extinct one but doesn’t near have the genetic differences that separate them. (What about behavior, for crying out loud?)
b.) You can’t genetically manipulate elephants the way you genetically manipulate mice.
c.) You have to create a lineage of breeding hairy elephants so the “revived species” will perpetuate itself.
But there’s at least one sane person who’s quoted:
Dr Tori Herridge of the University of Sheffield, said: “Engineering a mammoth-like elephant presents a far greater challenge: the actual number of genes likely to be involved is far higher, the genes are less well understood – and still need to be identified – and the surrogate will be an animal that is not normally experimented upon.”
And while some said the goal of reviving the mammoth had drawn closer, others were more sceptical. “Mammoth de-extinction doesn’t seem to be on the horizon anytime soon,” said Herridge.
I suspect Church will be dead before they even get close to their mammoth goal. If I were in charge, I’d simply give up this tedious and worthless project.
Here’s a reconstruction of the real ancient wooly mammoth from Wikipedia. How are they gonna make those long, curved tusks?
So glad for the attention to this intriguing topic – now when I see it – like this story the other day – I can see through the wool!
Utter gasrbage. I thought it must be 1 April.
I didn’t realize the Woolly Mammoth recreation was just inserting some genes in an Asian Elephant genome. I thought it was actually using more of the recovered DNA of Mammoths. So it looks like more of a scam than anything.
As someone with three cats, I would implore this intrepid team of definitely not scammers to also insert a “no shedding” gene!
Maybe they can create a moustadon.
+1 🙂
Very good, Doug!
lol
Thanks for sharing this. The mice are pretty interesting in their own right, though.
This folly would be better advanced if they tried to “resurrect” the Thylacine. Rather, it would be a long-legged opossum with stripes. The shorter generation times and lower costs could move it along a bit faster.
You have to admit, those mice are cute! If I had pet mice (instead of unwanted invaders), I’d want one.
Indeed. Maybe they’ve found another funding stream.
A few weeks back there was a very confused and misleading article about genetically engineering dodos. Of course all they are doing is trying to cosmetically alter pigeons to resemble dodos.
A few ago when I first read about the mammoth project I was interested. But after researching what the were actually doing, I was disappointed to discover just how fake the “mammoths” will be. I am guessing it will be a long time before there are functional mammoths roaming the steppes of Russia and Siberia.
This is playing God.
No, it’s a pantomime clown dressing up as god.
Just a metaphor. On of my favorite films it getting more and more real.
Awww. I wanted them to have tusks.
If they can get it funded I’m sure they’ll manage something. Superglue?
Can you imagine the cost of the cheese needed to feed them if this works out?
Then there’s the size of the holes in the skirting boards when they begin to infest houses…
And the huge drifts of shed hair about the house.
You always realise how fundamentally wrong the press can be when you read an article about something you are intimately familiar with. Imagine that across the entire journalistic world, from sciences to the arts to just historical basic facts of the day.
Hard to accept anything from journals, particularly in the sciences and what’s happened to peer reviews. But I’m sure AI will put a stop to all that mishigas. /LMAO/
There are number of issues here. Without extracting the entire genome from a frozen mammoth and inserting that genome into a modern elephant egg, they won’t actually recreate a Woolly Mammoth. And, even the modern elephant mother surrogate would have her own mitochondrial DNA, and not that of an actual Mammoth.
Another matter is whether it would be practical to go further than simply creating a curiosity. De-extinction would presumably mean creating and nurturing a viable population of Mammoths in the wild.
A third is whether a Mammoth population can be viable in the modern post-Pleistocene world, or would we just creating sentient beings only to have them suffer.
A fourth is why? I suppose that the coolness of creating a Mammoth might serve as a motivation—and we might even learn some useful genetic engineering along the way—but it seems to be more a vanity project than anything else.
According to the BBC (link in my post at #17 below), “Genetically engineered woolly mice could one day help populate the Arctic with hairy, genetically modified elephants and help stop the planet warming”!
Stop the presses! Mouse Gives Birth to an Elephant.
I assume you’d need more than just one male and one female to regenerate a stable population.
Adam and Eve managed it. (OK, Cain wasn’t exactly stable.)
Excellent, Leslie!
I think Norman sums it up rather succintly; why bother, or better yet, what is the motivation to do this rather cruel experiment? Even if remotely possible, it stands to reason that from an ecological viewpoint, this would be a disaster. A wasteful, arrogant vanity project. Let’s strive to eliminate hunger, poverty and a resurgent religious idiocracy before resurrecting a prehistoric relic. Why feed into the myth that science is losing it’s relevancy in an age when intellectuals (who should know better) babble incoherently about a God shaped hole in our metaphysical make up? I think that “hole” is actually filled in with epistemic hunger and awe of just being alive.
Hey, if long hair and a dress can transform a “he” into a “she,” then why grouse about the woolly mouse!?
At least the woolly mouse actually exists.
Is it possible – and I’m not saying this is the case – that Colossal Bio. is just a money making scam looking to leverage its huge publicity into an Initial Public Offering?
D.A.
NYC
Certainly possible, plausibly plausible, and possibly certain.
The BBC also covered this nonsense: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0jg4n776evo
Apparently, “Genetically engineered woolly mice could one day help populate the Arctic with hairy, genetically modified elephants and help stop the planet warming”. Yeah, right!
That planet warming stuck on at the end remains me of General Ripper’s communiqué to SAC explaining his execution of War Plan R. It tailed off about the purity and essence of our natural fluids, causing George C Scott to almost crack up reading it to Peter Sellers as President. “We’re, uh, still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, Sir.” (I think that’s why he put a stick of chewing gum in his mouth earlier in the scene and bites on it just there, to help keep a straight face.)
I appreciate the viewpoints in this review, as well as those in the comments – they will come in handy when this subject is brought up in conversation, as it inevitably will be.
Re an animal that is not normally experimented upon; fercrissake, wild-type rats would be near impossible to experiment upon, as opposed to the cute docile weak strains of lab rats. And good luck trying to breed a strain of lab elephants.
OTOH, a fly-on-the-wall documentary of their attempts to do this could be a good money-spinner, especially the stampede scene. Or when S.A.F.E. breaks into the lab to free the subjects. I’m undecided if it would sell better as a tragedy, a morality tale, or a farce. The Modern Prometheus it ain’t.
This topic always gets me steamed, this vanity project, the sheer arrogance, the folly, the ignorance of the uber-biotech muscle flexing crowd — but others here have got to it just fine.
oh, oh (eagerly) — I know: trans-mammoth. Just put the felt sense of being a mammoth into…anything.
Transmammoths are mammoths. No debate.
“De-extinction” — bah! We can’t even hold on to extant species.
Fortunately, non-human animals are not commonly thought to have “souls”, much less trans-species ones, so this ought not to become an issue.
OTOH, human animals are thought to have souls, sometimes trans-species; consider furries, and South Park season 9 ep 1. So it’s feasible that there could be a sub-sub-group of furries who identify as furry Pleistocene mammals. If there already are, I’d rather not know.
If we could resurrect mammoths, their genetic diversity would probably be pitiful.
That being said, I wonder about extracting DNA from much younger fossils. How about re-creating the aurox, or more practically, use ancient DNA to improve the genetic diversity of living animals, especially those almost driven to extinction?
Putting hair on an elephant doesn’t make it a mammoth, just as putting breasts on a man doesn’t make him a woman. It’s disappointing that these ‘scientists’ don’t understand science.
My first thought was to disagree with PCC(E). But then I read some more. I was wrong and the critics (including PCC(E)) were right. To quote from “joolz” “Putting hair on an elephant doesn’t make it a mammoth”.
The economics of enterprises like Colossal Biosciences is what puzzles me. What is the hoped-for future revenue stream from what they propose to do? Will the hypothetical mammoths be put to work, under Inuit mahouts, like Indian elephants? Will the work be harvesting lumber in the Arctic—presumably from genetically engineered trees which can be cultivated north of the Arctic tree line?
Or does Colossal Biosci’s business plan expect a big demand for wooly mammoths in zoos, circuses, and pet shops?
Or could it be that businesses like Colossal Biosci are no more than scams to bilk investors who have much more money than sense and knowledge of Biology?