The woolly mammoth went extinct some 10,000 years ago, but there are some who say they can bring it back from the dead. - This picture was generated using AI.
FOR those who grew up watching the Jurassic Park film franchise, we are still holding on to every glimmer of hope of admiring beasts from an ancient era in our time.
To quote Dr Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum); "Life, uh, finds a way."
But has life found a way to bring back, say, the magnificent Woolly Mammoth, back from extinction?
Verdict:
TECHNICALLY, FALSE
The Woolly Mammoth once roamed the cold tundra of Europe, Asia, and North America until about 10,000 years ago.
While the genomes of several frozen mammoths have been sequenced, these are riddled with gaps. However, it is possible to edit the genomes of living elephants to make them mammoth-like.
Well, at least to de-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences which claims it has found a way to reprogram elephant cells that could lead to the return of the long-lost mammals.
Colossal co-founder and lead genetics advisor George Church was quoted by CNN saying that the goal isn’t to clone a mammoth but to genetically create an elephant-mammoth hybrid that would be visually indistinguishable from its extinct forerunner.
In March 2024, the biotech company reached an important milestone: creating a long-sought kind of stem cell for the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth.
Though the achievement is still far from the endgame, Church said it's a major step.
However, according to the other Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, we are "less than five years away from seeing mammoths back on the planet.".
But we can't help but once again quote Dr Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park; "Scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.".
Responding to this, Lamm said that they are no strangers to being compared to what the scientists in the movie did along with the consequences that follow.
"We are not taking Dino DNA and putting it in a frog DNA, we're not taking a mammoth DNA and putting it in an elephant DNA, we are actually doing it in reverse," he told NBC in an interview.
According to Colossal, Asian elephants (yes, our elephants as seen in Zoo Negara) are the closest living relative to their prehistoric predecessor - with a 99.6% match.
The company also said that this process will not only bring back other extinct animals but also save animals on the brink of extinction and improve the environment along the way by restoring the animals to old habitats.
Church said reintroducing these species could help fight global warming by restoring ecosystems in ways that would help reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the science community has been met with excitement and concerns at the same time.
"It's not really a mammoth. It's a mutated Asian elephant," said Genetics and Evolutionary Biology specialist Dr Vincent Lynch.
"To put them back now isn't to replace something that was once there but to put an invasive species into an environment to which it's never been before," he told NBC.
With scientists split on the issue, the question now is how the world will react to these changes.
We shall close this article with one last quote from Dr Ian Malcolm; "Change is like death. You don't know what it looks like until you're standing at the gates.".
References:
1. https://colossal.com/mammoth/
2. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
