Colossal hopes to help recover the woolly mammoth from extinction.
Getty Images / Orla
You’ve heard of startups that built computer chips, delivery drones, and video chat apps. One of the so-called Colossal has a different goal: to recover the woolly mammoth from extinction in 2027 using CRISPR, a revolutionary gene editing technology.
The plan is not to recreate real woolly mammoths, but to bring their cold-adapted genetic traits, which include small ears and more body fat, to their elephant cousins, creating a hybrid that can roam the tundra where mammoths have nothing. . It has not been seen for 10,000 years. The co-founders of Colossal are CEO Ben Lamm, who founded five companies before that, and George Church, a professor at Harvard Medical School with deep CRISPR experience.
“Our true North Star is a successful restoration of the woolly mammoth, but also its successful recovery in mestizo herds in the Arctic,” Lamm said. “We are now focusing on having our first calves in the next four or six years.”
It is an interesting illustration of an imperative that drags the technological world: not only do you make money, you also help the planet. Tesla’s mission is to electrify transportation to get rid of fossil fuels that hurt the Earth. Bolt Threads wants to replace leather with a fungal fiber-based equivalent that is easier for the environment than animal farming. Colossal hopes his work will draw attention to biodiversity issues and ultimately help solve them.
Colossal has so far raised $ 15 million, led by investment firm Tulco. The 19 startup employees work at Dallas headquarters and offices in Boston and Austin, Texas, and use their funds to hire more.
Artificial matrices and other technological derivations
Church said he expects referrals from the company’s biotechnology and genetics work.
“The pipeline of large-scale genome engineering techniques can be applied to many other applications beyond their extinction, and therefore [are] more promising for marketing, ”he said.
A mature technology for commercialization is multiplex genome engineering, a technique that Church helped develop that accelerates genetic editing by making multiple changes to DNA at once.
Colossal also hopes to develop artificial uteri to grow its mammoth embryos. Growing just 10 woolly mammoths with surrogate elephant mothers is not enough to reach the large-scale herds the company envisions.
The foundation of Colossal’s work is CRISPR. This technology, adapted from a method that bacteria evolved to identify attacking viruses and shred their DNA, is now a fundamental pillar of genetic engineering and Church has been involved since the early days of CRISPR.
There are other ways Colossal hopes to help. Its gene editing technology could artificially add genetic diversity to species with only small surviving populations, Lamm said.
Jurassic Park-style tourism? No
Selling or licensing derivative technology is a somewhat indirect way of running a business. A more direct option is to sell tickets to tourists. After all, humans are already paying a lot of money to see a megafauna charisma like lions, elephants and giraffes on African safaris. Seeing a creature missing 10,000 years ago could add to the excitement.
But that’s not Colossal’s game plan. “Our focus is on species preservation and biodiversity protection right now, not on putting them in zoos,” Lamm said. By recreating woolly mammoths, Colossal can preserve the genetic legacy of Asian elephants that are now endangered.
Another candidate species that wants to recreate Colossal is the woolly rhino, a critically endangered Sumatran rhino relative.
Although Colossal has no plans to build a tourist destination, he does have a woolly mammoth regrowth site in mind that sounds very close to the Jurassic Park: the Pleistocene Park. This area of about 60 square kilometers in northern Russia, named after the geological period that ended the last ice age, is where researchers Sergey and Nikita Zimov try to test their theories about the ecological and climatic effects of the rebrot.
One idea from Zimov is that woolly mammoths will tread on the snow and knock down the trees. This, in turn, will restore grasslands that reflect more of the sun’s warming rays and remove snow and insulating forests so that the ground cools more. And that means the ground will stay frozen instead of releasing the current deposit of carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases. Scientists estimate that some 260,000 to 300 billion metric tons of carbon could be released from permafrost thaw by 2300, worsening weather extremes and other problems caused by climate change.
Is species extinction a good idea?
There is an appeal to the idea of extinction. Humans have drastically altered the planet and, according to the United Nations, we estimate that we will threaten 1 million species with extinction.
Colossal hopes his work will draw more attention to the collapse of biodiversity. And it also plans to create detailed genetic descriptions of many endangered species, “so we have the recipe if that species becomes extinct,” Lamm said.
But is it really the best use of our resources to help the planet? No, some researchers believe.
A group of biologists argued in an article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. “Possible sacrifices in the conservation of existing species should be a crucial consideration in deciding whether to invest in extinction or focus our efforts on existing species,” the researchers wrote.
But this is not government money that Colossal is talking about and Lamm argues that the work of his startup complements other conservation efforts. And, according to him, startups can move forward faster than government-funded jobs.
In a world dominated by the headlines of the climate crisis, a company that makes money with an ecosystem improvement approach has a special appeal. One investor, Zack Lynch of Jazz Venture Partners, is excited about the software, hardware and biotechnology he hopes Colossal will create.
At the same time, “these advances will help address issues such as land degradation, loss of animal pollinators, and other negative biodiversity trends,” Lynch said. Given the magnitude of our environmental issues, you can see why an investor might be interested.