Geneticists, led by Harvard George Church, of the Faculty of Medicine, aims to restore the life of the woolly mammoth, which disappeared 4,000 years ago, imagining a future where the eyed giant of the ice age will return to its natural habitat.
Efforts gained momentum on Monday with the announcement of a $ 15 million investment.
Proponents say the mammoth’s recovery is altered could help restore the fragile Arctic tundra ecosystem, combat the climate crisis, and preserve the endangered Asian elephant, with which the woolly mammoth is most closely related. Still, it is a bold plan full of ethical issues.
The goal is not to clone a mammoth: the DNA that scientists have managed to extract from the woolly mammoth that remains frozen in the permafrost is too fragmented and degraded, but to create, through genetic engineering, a walking elephant-mammoth hybrid. . this would not be visually distinguished from its extinct precursor.
“Now we can do it”
The new investment and approach provided by Lamm and his investors is a big step forward, said Church, Robert Winthrop, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
“Until 2021, frankly, it’s been a kind of backburner project … but now we can do it,” Church said.
“That will change everything.”
“We had to make a lot of (genetic) changes, 42 so far to make them compatible with humans. And in this case we have very healthy pigs that are raising and donating organs for preclinical trials at Massachusetts General Hospital,” he said. he said.
“With the elephant, it’s a different goal, but it involves a similar number of changes.”
The research team has analyzed the genomes of 23 species of living elephants and extinct mammoths, Church said. Scientists believe they will have to simultaneously program “more than 50 changes” to the Asian elephant’s genetic code to give it the traits needed to survive and thrive in the Arctic.
These features, according to Church, include a 10-centimeter layer of insulating grease, five different types of hairy hair, including some up to a meter long, and smaller ears that will help the hybrid tolerate the cold. The team he also plans to try to design the animal so that it does not have tusks so that they are not the target of ivory poachers.
Once a cell with these and other traits has been successfully programmed, the Church plans to use an artificial uterus to make the transition from the embryo to the baby, which takes 22 months in living elephants. However, this technology is far from nailed and Church said they had not ruled out using live elephants as substitutes.
“Editing, I think, will go well. We have a lot of experience with that, I think, making artificial matrices not guaranteed. It’s one of the few things that isn’t pure engineering, maybe there’s also a little bit of science that it always increases uncertainty and delivery time, ”he said.
Skepticism
Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Center for Paleogenetics in Stockholm, who works on the evolution of mammoths, believes that there is scientific value in the work that Church and her team are doing, especially when it comes to conservation of mammoths. ‘endangered species that have genetic diseases or lack of genetic variation as a result of inbreeding.
“If endangered species have lost genes that are important to them … the ability to reposition them in endangered species, it could be really important, ”said Dalén, who is not involved in the project.
“I still wonder what the biggest point would be. First, you won’t get a mammoth. It’s a hairy elephant with some fat deposits.
“We, of course, have very little clue as to what genes make a mammoth a mammoth. We know a little bit, but we sure don’t know it close enough.”
Others say it is unethical to use live elephants as substitutes to give birth to a genetically modified animal. Dalén described that Asian mammoths and elephants were as different as humans and chimpanzees.
“Let’s say it works, and there are no horrible consequences. Surrogate elephant mothers don’t die,” said Tori Herridge, an evolutionary biologist and mammoth specialist at London’s Natural History Museum, who is not involved in the project.
“The idea that by retrieving mammoths and locating them in the Arctic, you invent the Arctic to become a better place for carbon storage. I have a lot of problems with that.”
Some believe that before its extinction, animals that grazed like mammoths, horses and bison kept the northern prairies of the planet and kept the earth frozen beneath, trampling on grass, felling trees and compacting snow. The introduction of mammoths and other large mammals into these sites will help revitalize these environments and slow down permafrost thawing and carbon release.
However, both Dalén and Herridige said there was no evidence to support this hypothesis and it was difficult to imagine cold-adapted herds of elephants affecting a fire-filled, muddy and warming environment faster than in no other place. in the world.
“There’s absolutely nothing to say that putting mammoths out there will have any effect on climate change,” Dalén said.
Ultimately, the stated end goal of herds of itinerant mammoths as ecosystem engineers may not matter, and neither Herridge nor Dalén dropped Church and Lamm for starting the project. Many people might be happy to pay to approach a mammoth proxy.
“Maybe it’s fun to show them at the zoo. I don’t have a big problem if they want to put them in a park somewhere and, you know, make the kids more interested in the past,” Dalén said.
Lamm has stated that “there is zero pressure” for the project to make money. It is committed to the resulting effort in innovations that have applications in biotechnology and healthcare. He compared it to the way the Apollo project made people worry about space exploration, but it also resulted in amazing technology, including GPS.
“I’m absolutely fascinated by that. I’m attracted to people who are technologically adventurous and may make a positive difference,” said Herridge, the mammoth expert.