In a softly humming laboratory in Texas, the clock is ticking, but time is moving backwards.
Back to the Palaeolithic age — about 12,000 years ago — woolly mammoths roamed the perma-frozen wastes of Eurasia and North America.
The last Ice Age was ending, and with it went the habitat that kept the woolly mammoths alive.
Their disappearance deprived the world of a wondrous beast and a remarkable piece of natural engineering.
Now another feat of engineering is underway with the aim of bringing the woolly mammoths back.
Colossal Biosciences, a company co-founded by the renowned American geneticist George Church, has set itself a four-year deadline to produce its first baby mammoth.
Should the trailblazing tusker arrive as planned, it would be the first in a series of what Dr Church and his colleagues call “de-extinctions”.
Also slated for comebacks are the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian Tiger, and the dodo, a large flightless bird. The idea, stresses Dr Church, is not to create a real life Jurassic Park, but to put the revived species to work on saving Earth’s environment.
Mammoths, he believes, would help preserve the tundra of Siberia and North America, which is warming fast and leaking carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Bedecked in shaggy coats and long, looping tusks, woolly mammoths could handle temperatures of -30°C, and for tens of thousands of years roamed a vast, uninhabited belt of the northern hemisphere, known as the ‘Mammoth Steppe’, which stretched from Spain to China.
Preserved specimens found buried beneath ice sheets have given scientists a mass of genetic information the Colossal team believes will enable them to bring the creatures back.
“We’ve known for a long time that ancient DNA could be extracted from extinct species,” says the company’s chief scientific officer, Beth Shapiro. “That’s what kicked off all the Jurassic Park excitement, and I wrote a book called How to Clone a Mammoth. Everyone asked me if it was possible — well, today, I’d say all the core technologies we need are available.”
The current plan is to take DNA from frozen mammoths and splice it into cells from Indian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative. The result is likely to be a kind of elephant-mammoth hybrid. However, over time, says Beth, the company hopes to get closer to a pure mammoth.
“Once an organism has gone extinct, it’s not possible to bring back something absolutely identical,” she says. “But the habitats these creatures lived in don’t necessarily exist either. So what we’re concentrating on is an animal that will be recognisable as a mammoth, but which is capable of thriving in the habitats we have today.”
Woolly mammoths weighed up to 10 tonnes, lived in small herds and, until the advent of cave-dwelling early humans around 30,000 years ago, had few predators. They’d use their tusks to break up snow and ice, allowing them to reach the grass underneath. This had the side-effect of letting the frozen soil breathe and renew itself.
The scientists believe after the animals became extinct accumulations of snow created a layer of insulation that eventually caused the permafrost to warm and begin releasing greenhouse gases.
Dr Church’s team argues returning woolly mammoths — or at least hybrids to fill the same ecological role — could reverse that process. Powering the project are advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of DNA. The first sequencing of the human genome took almost 20 years and cost billions.
“Today,” says Dr Church, “there’s been about a 20 millionfold reduction in cost, and a similar improvement in quality. We can do it in hours.” The technology means the Texan researchers can glean unprecedented amounts of information about extinct species and use the knowledge to help today’s threatened animals.
“When we’re working, say, on the DNA of an elephant,” says Beth, “we’re learning about what makes elephants work as a species. There isn’t any step we’re taking that isn’t relevant to the welfare of existing species.”
The challenge of creating a mammoth isn’t just technologically daunting, but highly controversial. No one really knows how such an animal would look or behave, let alone fare in the wild.
Critics point out that elephants are highly sociable, with close ties between herd members and a particularly strong mother-child bond that lasts for years. How would a lone baby mammoth, created in a laboratory, learn, well … how to be a mammoth?
Tom Ireland, editor of The Biologist, the magazine of Britain’s Royal Society of Biology, is sceptical. “Under the guise of restoring lost or damaged ecosystems,” he says, “these scientists are rushing headlong into a project that involves making unprecedented changes to an intelligent and highly endangered animal. Even if the procedure miraculously results in a healthy elephant-mammoth hybrid, what kind of life will they have?”
Other critics point out that Colossal is not a purely scientific research project, but a privately-owned business, funded by investors — Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Chris Hemsworth are among its high-profile backers — and set up to make profits.
The firm’s boss, Texan entrepreneur Ben Lamm, has raised around $250 million to fund the “de-extinction” work. Ben says the payback will likely come from educational programs, selling data and technology to other organisations and — if the company can succeed in reducing greenhouse gas emissions — lucrative carbon credits from governments.
Ben says he understands the doubters. “Firstly, I think it’s our responsibility to ensure everything we’re doing is transparent and ethical. We’re pretty open-minded. Some of our biggest early critics are now advisors, or even working at the company.
“When we started out, the data suggested we were going to lose up to 10 per cent of our biodiversity by 2050. Fast forward by three years, and those numbers are 35 to 50 per cent. So now, more than ever, we need new technologies to save critically endangered species as well as a de-extinction toolkit if we need it.”
In other words, our beleaguered planet requires radical solutions, and if unleashing hordes of genetically engineered woolly mammoths into their historic stomping grounds can help, why quibble over the ethical small print?
“There are always ethical questions around scientific progress,” says Beth Shapiro. “We’re living in a period of very rapid natural loss, and we have a moral responsibility as scientists to at least find out what these new technologies can do to help.”
Consider what happened in Tasmania when the thylacine. The stripy-coated marsupial roughly the size of a small wolf, was hunted into extinction in the 1930s.
For thousands of years, the tigers were the island’s prime predators and a key part of its ecosystem. They preyed mostly upon wallabies and other small herbivores. When the tigers were gone these species multiplied, piling pressure on the food chain and bringing a gradual degradation of the ecosystem.
This led to a proliferation of diseases, erosion, increased wildfires and the success of invasive species, most notably wild cats. Given the last known thylacine died in Hobart Zoo in 1936, scientists have an abundance of DNA and documentary evidence to work on. Colossal has teamed up with Melbourne University professor Andrew Pask who heads the TIGRR (Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research) project, working to return the creatures not just to Tasmania but the Australian mainland.
Australia has suffered one of the highest rates of mammal extinctions in the world. At least 10 per cent of known species having disappeared since the late 18th century — many of them unique to the country.
“We know, since we lost the Tasmanian Tiger, the ecosystem became destabilised,” says Professor Pask. “Being able to create an animal that can put it back in place is really important.”
The Melbourne team aims to splice the DNA of thylacine remains into the living cells of a dunnart — a mouse-sized marsupial, believed to be the tiger’s closest genetic relative.
“We can’t just magically bring the tiger back,” explains Professor Pask. “We have to start with a living cell and then engineer one back into existence.”
Sara Ord, who heads the Texas end of the thylacine project, says the progress being made is “just fantastic”, and the company may have a tiger on the ground even before a mammoth. Possibly by late next year.
“The key difference,” she says, “is that elephants take 18 to 22 months to gestate, whereas the dunnart will be 12 to 14 days.”
Serene in their island paradise, with no natural predators, the dodos — a large, droopy-beaked bird that lived in Mauritius — were decimated by the arrival of humans in the late 16th century.
Many were shot for food, the rest killed by rats, dogs and diseases brought ashore by sailors. Within 100 years the birds were extinct. As with Tasmania and the tundra, the ecosystem has been suffering ever since.
Several species of fruit tree the birds used to feed off have died out, and the dodos’ droppings no longer fertilise the forests. Reasoning no other species symbolises extinction quite so powerfully, Colossal entered a partnership with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation last year to bring the dodos back.
The scientists have identified the Nicobar pigeon, itself an endangered inhabitant of South Asian islands, as the dodo’s closest living relative. A genome of the dodo has already been completed using a skull kept at the University of Copenhagen. The plan is to replicate the bird using re-engineered eggs implanted into a chicken.
Science fiction? Hollywood hokum? Elaborate publicity stunt? Ben Lamm has heard it all.
“It’s a huge challenge, and maybe we won’t achieve everything we want to. But what keeps me going is the thought of a five-year-old kid’s face when they first see a mammoth.”
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