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A flashy new biotech startup launched yesterday called Colossal is on a mission to create an elephant wool mammoth mashup – with the ultimate goal of promoting biodiversity and fighting climate change, he says. The effort has generated a lot of hype and big names, but scientists working in conservation are still quite skeptical.
The science behind Colossal is still in its infancy and is mired in ethical dilemmas. The company will not actually bring back a woolly mammoth, which has not roamed the Earth for about 10,000 years. Instead, Colossal’s de-extinction effort aims to create a hybrid between a woolly mammoth and its distant relative (the two share a common ancestor): the Asian elephant, which itself is an endangered species. of disappearance.
Mammoths are a bad choice for de-extinction – an area of research that has gained momentum in recent years – and this project could steal the spotlight from larger conservation efforts, according to environmentalists and biologists. The edge. The pseudo-resurrection of the woolly mammoth is also a risky proposition as a solution to climate change, experts say, given the short time humanity has to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that have caused the fever to be feverish. Earth.
“I guess I’ll admit that the five-year-old in me would love to see a mammoth,” says Joseph Bennett, assistant professor in the Institute for Environmental Sciences and in the biology department at Carleton University. “It’s just fascinating from a scientific point of view. But if it’s called conservation, and if it’s called tackling climate change, that’s where the problems arise.
How extinguishing might work
Imagine a bigger, bigger elephant with smaller ears and a bulging head. This is what Colossal could one day create by using CRISPR technology to modify the DNA of an Asian elephant to introduce traits of woolly mammoths. Over the next four years or so, the goal is to produce embryos with these characteristics building on the work of Harvard geneticist George Church, co-founder of the company. To create the embryo, they could harvest elephant eggs or try to create stem cells using elephant tissue. Colossal also wants to create an artificial uterus to carry the embryo, which would take around two years to grow into a 200-pound fetus.
Church and his team of researchers have been working towards this goal for about a decade and said in 2017 that there are only a few years left before the embryo is created. But the Church team, until now, has lacked the funding to make it happen, according to Colossal co-founder and CEO and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm. Colossal investors, which include private equity firms and self-help guru Tony Robbins, will inject $ 15 million into the project. This builds on a previous contribution of $ 100,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, which the Church team received before Colossal was formed.
If all of this funding ultimately results in a real-life Asian elephant-mammoth hybrid, there will still be plenty of ecological and ethical issues to grapple with. Colossal is presented as an effort to fight against the loss of biodiversity. Earth is probably losing one or more species per day, according to Bennett. There is evidence of a mass extinction that has not been seen on Earth for millions of years. When it comes to protecting biodiversity on our planet, resurrection of a prehistoric creature is low on the priority list.
“Even among the endangered species that we want to prevent from becoming extinct, we must prioritize the winners and the losers,” says Ginger Allington, landscape ecologist and assistant professor at George Washington University.
Funding for de-extinction could hurt other conservation efforts by siphoning off limited resources, according to previous research by Bennett. Spending the same amount of money on traditional conservation efforts could save up to eight times more cash than if the money were to be spent on extinction. The Asian elephant itself would need help; its number has halved over the past three generations.
Lamm believes Colossal’s work could benefit elephants and draw more attention to other conservation efforts. “We’re trying to make sure we’re doing this in the most transparent and ethical way possible,” Lamm said. The edge. “We are very confident in what we can do to help the elephant lineage… For us, it’s about giving the species additional tools to survive. An elephant with gigantic features would be better able to survive in the cold temperatures of the Arctic, far from the urbanization that threatens its species, he says.
But the home of Asian elephants is tropical South and Southeast Asia. They are also very intelligent and social animals that form very close-knit groups. “They have a culture,” Bennett says. All of this raises “major” ethical questions for Bennett as to whether a mammoth-elephant hybrid would be able to handle the behavior of being transplanted to a new home that is very different from where elephant species currently live.
A feat of gigantic proportions
Even a full-fledged woolly mammoth might struggle to adapt to the Arctic as it is today. “If you were to take a piece of an entire system like a Model T, say a piston, and you had to wait even 100 years and then try to fit it into a Tesla – that wouldn’t do because the rest of the system completely evolved and radically changed, ”says Douglas McCauley, environmentalist and associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Colossal believes animals could essentially reorganize ecosystems, turning mossy tundra into grasslands that once thrived with the help of mammoths 10,000 years ago. Without mammoths, the meadows where they roamed were slowly replaced by moss and trees. This poses problems for the planet, as the snowy prairies of the Arctic reflect solar radiation better than darker shrub or forest areas. The return of the herds could theoretically reverse this trend.
Hybrid animals could also help prevent permafrost (year-round frozen ground) from melting, which releases old stores of carbon dioxide that heat the planet. A father-son pair of environmentalists in Russia tried to use bison, reindeer and other animals to do something similar in Siberia at a place called “Pleistocene Park”. The hope is that the animals – perhaps one day with the help of elephant-mammoth hybrids – will trample on the snow and make the ground easier to freeze.
But in order for Colossal to achieve his goals, he would have to make sure there are enough animals to do the work mammoths once did. Otherwise, the animal could become something of an “eco-zombie” that no longer significantly participates in its ecosystem as it once did, as McCauley and other authors describe in their 2017 article on how to prioritize species for extinction efforts. Choosing animals that have recently become extinct or are on the verge of extinction are better candidates, according to this document. They should also be species that perform a unique function or job in its ecosystem, and which can bounce back to numbers large enough to be able to do that job effectively.
One promising avenue for de-extinction research is research on breeding corals that are more resistant to a warming world – potentially saving them from extinction. It’s an effort that could support fisheries and protect coastal communities around the world from storm surges. Unless greenhouse gas emissions reach net zero by mid-century, the planet is on track to reach a level of global warming that would essentially wipe out the world’s coral reefs.
There are other issues that could prevent the return of the prairies. The pH of the soil has become more acidic. There is also a risk that new animals will disturb the soil too much, exposing the permafrost to faster melting. Whether animals protect or disrupt existing permafrost depends in part on their behavior – which at this point is still a big unknown, as they don’t exist.
“Extending the small herd scale effect to the entire permafrost area that impacts the climate also seems futuristic rather than something that can help anytime soon, although it has helped the everything, ”Ted Schuur, professor of ecosystem ecology at Northern State. The university wrote to The edge in an email.
Even if everything goes according to plan for Colossal, Lamm believes it would take around six years to give birth to a hybrid calf. Then it would take another fourteen years or so for their first animal to be old enough to reproduce. From there, efforts are expected to scale up massively to have a significant effect on the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. But even this best-case scenario comes too late for pressing climate goals. It is far from soon enough to help save coral reefs, which will need global emissions to halve by the end of the decade if they are to survive.
To tackle the climate crisis, the world needs deep and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. Climate action should focus on tackling the pollution that is causing the climate crisis, says Bennett, not projects that have a massive profile and uncertain impact.
“My big concern with these things is that investors will be looking to offset their climate footprint, and they will be looking for things to do and someone will look at something like that and say, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’” Bennett said. . “It’s a very, very risky prospect.”
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