What if I told you that there’s a plan to bring back wooly mammoths back to Siberia?
Wild right?!? And if resurrecting a 6-ton creature that’s been extinct for about 4,000
years isn’t crazy enough, wait till you hear this…they’re hoping to enlist these
shaggy creatures to help us solve a mammoth-sized problem.
But before we get to that particular issue, we’ve got to rewind, about 20,000 years ago.
Let's hit the scene!
It was a time when giant woolly mammoths roamed the grasslands of Northern Siberia.
During this time, much of the water on the planet was busy being ice, which made the
rest of the northern hemisphere a dry grassland ecosystem that was sorta like a cold-weather
version of the African Savanna. It’s known as the Mammoth Steppe, and the
abundant grassland was perfect for large grazing herbivores like bison, oxen, reindeer, and
of course, the wooly mammoth. Mammoths were great ecosystem engineers. They knocked down
trees and shrubs, making room for light colored grasses that reflected more sunlight than
the darker trees, keeping ground temperatures cooler.
In the winter, they trampled through the snow, exposing the ground to the arctic chill. By
maintaining their grassland home, they also protected a perpetually-frozen layer of carbon-rich
soil underneath, called permafrost. By the end of the last Ice Age though, most of the
mammoths vanished, and the grasses of the steppe did too.
We don’t know whether to point the finger at humans, climate, or some other cause, but
what we do know is that the ecosystem changed significantly.
Fast forward to today, and the
arctic is warmer and wetter. That poses a serious problem for our climate.
The human-induced rise in global temperatures is causing the permafrost to melt. During
an almost twenty year period, scientists saw the arctic permafrost lose approximately 1.7
billion metric tons of carbon each winter. And if it continues to thaw, that carbon-rich
soil will decompose, emitting enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, equivalent to burning
all the forests on the planet three times. By reintroducing thousands of woolly mammoths
back to Siberia, scientists hope to restore the grasslands that once protected the permafrost.
But to do that, they need to start with one woolly mammoth, and we’re all out at the
moment, so I guess someone’s gotta make one!
A new company called Colossal is up to the challenge.
Leading the team is George Church, a key member of the
Human Genome Project, who pioneered the genomic sequencing techniques that we use today. The
team hopes to use ancient DNA recovered from unearthed mammoths to fight the climate crisis.
Only problem is, DNA degrades over time, getting damaged by water, radiation, and exposure
to air. Even the very best samples are missing data, so the DNA can’t be used to make an
exact clone. So, the team turned to the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative.
Even though there’s a difference of 1.4 million DNA letters between the two species,
they still share 99.6% of their genetic makeup. The group selected more than 50 traits that
helped mammoths tolerate the cold, like smaller ears and shorter tails to reduce heat loss
and frostbite, a thick layer of fat to stay warm, and their signature fur coat.
Using CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology, they’re cutting the specific sections of the Asian
elephant DNA, and copying and pasting the mammoth traits in their place.
Next, they’ll need to transfer an elephant nucleus with the hybrid DNA into an elephant
egg cell, which has never been done before. Electrical pulses simulate fertilization,
causing the egg to divide and create an embryo. And here’s where things get even more interesting.
The plan is for the embryo to develop in an artificial womb.
This technique was already tested back in 2017 on premature lambs, but building an artificial
uterus big enough to house a 2000-pound-mega-fetus for its entire 22-month development has yet
to be attempted.
If they’re successful, the result will be a mammoth-elephant hybrid
that some are calling a "mammophant", or “elemoth”. If Colossal’s hybrids are going to protect
the permafrost, they’ll need to get started quickly. But with a timeline of 5 years for
the birth of the first calf, and at least 14 until the animal is old enough to reproduce,
these hybrid elephants might not be helping us solve our climate crisis anytime soon.
In the meantime, the tech can still be used for a bunch of really game-changing research.
Like improving artificial wombs to help premature infants, helping the endangered Asian elephant
become more resilient to disease, and making genetic tweaks to animal organs so they’re
more suitable for transplant into humans. While this all sounds really cool, there are
a lot of technical hurdles and ethical questions that remain unanswered, like should we even
bring back an extinct species? So while we wrestle with these questions, this visionary
program could inspire equally ambitious projects that we’ll need to tackle the climate crisis
in the years to come. And who knows, one day we may see our woolly friends walk the earth again.
If my mention of artificial wombs piqued your
curiosity, check out this video on why scientists grew a lamb in a bag! So can we just hit “undo”
on the extinction of animals like the woolly mammoth? Should we even be doing that? Let
us know in the comments below. Make sure to subscribe and thanks for watching Seeker.