The most tragic loss of all the species that have been wiped out is the thylacine. The government paid its citizens a bounty for every animal killed in order to bring about the extinction of the thylacine. We have photographs and film clips of the last animals to leave zoos. In a few decades, countries would start writing laws to make sure other species don't see the same fate.
Colossal, a company that wants to bring back the mammoth, announced a partnership with an Australian lab yesterday that it says will help bring the mammoth back to life. A number of features of marsupial biology make this a more realistic goal than bringing the mammoth back.
We had a conversation with Colossal's founder, Ben Lamm, and the head of the lab he's partnering with.
Branching out in different directions.
Colossal is a way of funding the ideas of Lamm and Church. The church has been talking about removing the mammoth's skin for a long time. Lamm said that the company is very open to commercializing technology it develops while pursuing its goals. Colossal is developing new software, wetware, and hardware that can have profound impacts on both human health care and the environment. It is about developing products for which there is no market.
Even if the details are complex, the general approach is straightforward. There are lots of samples of mammoth tissue that we can get partial genomes from, which can be compared to the elephants to find differences that are different to the mammoth line. Key differences can be edited into the genome of an elephant stem cell in order to destroy it. We will have a shaggy beast ready for the sub-arctic.
The details are important. We didn't create elephant stem cells or do gene editing at all at the beginning of the plan. There are arguments that the elephant reproductive system makes the "bit of IVF" that's needed a practical impossibility. There is a reasonable debate to be had about whether elephants should be used for this purpose.
Lamm said that Colossal had been looking for a second species to de- extinction. The Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research Lab, based at the University of Melbourne, was found thanks to the search.
The pouch has something in it.
Similar to Colossal's mammoth plans, TIGRR intends to obtain the genomes of the thylacines, identify key differences between them, and then edit those differences into stem cells that can be used for fertility treatments. There are some significant hurdles that it faces, in that nobody has made stem cells or cloned a mammal.
The thylacine is a much more tractable system than a mammoth. If we want to reestablish a stable breeding population, we need enough genomes to get a sense of the population's genetic diversity.
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