Is creating a 'woolly mammoth mouse' a step too far for biotechnology?

Are scientists so preoccupied with whether or not they could bring back mammoths, that they're not concerned with whether they should?

- by TOM IRELAND

Colossal Biosciences, a US biotech start-up, has announced the birth of what it calls a “woolly mouse” – the world’s first animal genetically altered to express key genes from a woolly mammoth. The company says the luxuriously haired rodents are living proof that it’s making progress in its mission to resurrect the woolly mammoth from extinction within a matter of years.

To make the mice, scientists used the latest genetic technologies to introduce eight simultaneous edits to the genomes of laboratory mice. These include the addition of genes that cause its fur to grow up to three times longer than normal, and others that make the hairs wavy and golden. Other edits targeted genes associated with fat metabolism that are thought to have helped mammoths increase in size.

The mice are the result of years of painstaking work by scientists to reconstruct key parts of the mammoth genome. The last woolly mammoths are thought to have died around 3,000 years ago, and scientists have been piecing together bits of degraded mammoth DNA from remains between 3,500 and 1.2 million years old. This is the first time that some of the key genes identified through that work have been expressed in a living animal.

MAMMOTH 2.0

Colossal’s ambitious long-term plan is to add lots of these mammoth genes to embryos of modern-day elephants to create mammoth-like hybrids.

Despite its claims to be resurrecting the woolly mammoth, the original Mammuthus primigenius, with all its original genetic complexity and population diversity, isn’t being brought back to life. The creatures are more accurately described as “cold-resistant elephants”.