This Team of Scientists Is Working to Clone a Woolly Mammoth
We spoke with scientist Ben Novak, whose team is working to bring back extinct species like the woolly mammoth.
Homo sapiens have been directly responsible for an untold number of animal extinctions. And humanity’s disruptive appetites have been supercharged in the industrial age, but it’s hardly a new phenomenon — we’ve been offing inconvenient and/or delicious species since prehistoric times.
The good news is that the same skills that have made us such a problematic force in nature might also let us undo some of the damage. The Long Now Foundation’s Revive & Restore project wants to use advances in genetics to bolster endangered populations and bring back extinct species through cloning, which it matter-of-factly calls “de-extinction.”
This concept may sound like something out of the sci-fi super-future, but there have already been somewhat successful de-extinction efforts. In 2009, a team of researchers cloned a bucardo (a type of wild goat) whose last natural-born member died nine years prior—but the clone survived for only a few minutes because of respiratory complications. The fragility of clones has been a known issue since Dolly the sheep, but scientists have greatly improved their track record in recent years (in fact, if you’re a carnivore, you’ve probably eaten meat from a cloned animal).
To find out which animals might soon be making an encore, we invited Ben Novak, the lead scientist for Revive & Restore, to join us for a recent episode of The Convo (embedded below), our live-streaming Q&A show in which we talk to the boldest minds in science, technology, and geekdom.
Sorry, No Dinos
This might sound reminiscent of a certain 1993 blockbuster, but the good (or bad) news is we probably don’t need to fear being hunted down by a cloned amusement-park T-Rex anytime soon.
“The process of de-extinction is about working with a genetic code of an extinct species,” Novak explained. “And dinosaurs went extinct way too long ago for us to retrieve any DNA from their fossils. DNA might last a million years if it’s frozen in permafrost, but otherwise, it degrades really quickly.
“So, we’re restricted to working with things in the 10,000- to 100,000-year time frame,” he said.
(And no, despite Michael Crichton’s promises, DNA won’t even survive inside a mosquito preserved in amber. Following some pushback on the dino front from commenters (and the host ), Novak explained that he spent the early part of his twenties looking for useful dinosaur DNA, and “there’s nothing there.”)
But even if no dinosaurs are a no-go, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some really cool de-extinctions on the horizon. Revive & Restore is pursuing several de-extinction and genetic rescue projects, including the black-footed ferret, heath hen, passenger pigeon, and the one I’m most excited about: the woolly mammoth, which is being run out of Harvard under Dr. George Church.
In fact, right now, the mammoth revival team “has a Petri dishes full of elephant cells carrying 14 to 16 mutations from mammoths affecting traits for things like hair growth, fat development, and other traits,” Novak said. “The question is less about, how do we make a woolly mammoth, but how do we make an elephant that is able to survive in Siberia where it’s cold ? That’s essentially what the woolly mammoth is.”
While the mammoth team could probably create an embryo right now, they will first create stem cells and grow different types of mammoth tissue in the lab (skin, blood, fat) to observe if the mutations are indeed leading mammoth traits as opposed to elephant traits. After this research is complete, the team will move onto cloning attempts, possibly in the next few years.
It would be amazing to see some of these creatures again, but this isn’t just science entertainment; there is an ecological purpose to de-extinction. The passenger pigeon, for example, once played a critical role in preserving the health and diversity of forests in eastern North America before they were hunted to extinction in the early twentieth century. Since their disappearance, no other animal has stepped up to fill this ecological niche. Meanwhile, mammoths (which have been MIA for at least 10,000 years) may play a key role as grazers on grasslands in the arctic tundra, which are being newly restored to offset climate change.
Jurassic Park may remain a fantasy, but there’s a very good chance that we will see a Pleistocene Park in our time. Good work, humans.
Correction: In addition to its de-extinction projects, Revive & Restore is also pursuing various genetic rescue projects in which the organization is attempting bolster endangered species using genetic technologies — the black-footed ferret is one of these projects.
Additionally, an earlier version of this story stated that cloned mammoths might be used to graze on new grasslands which have been exposed as a result of climate change. Actually, these mammoths might become grazers in grasslands that are being restored in the arctic tundra in order to combat climate change. The current text has been updated to reflect these changes.
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Originally published at www.pcmag.com.
