There's a mission to bring back one of history's most famous animals, it's already underway, and it's closer to becoming a reality than even some of the most forward-looking minds think it is.
For all the talk and attention it gets, de-extincting an animal isn't exactly easy—it's difficult to clone cells from an animal that has been dead for thousands of years, tougher to turn it into a viable embryo, and, most importantly, more difficult still to find a closely-related animal that can serve as a surrogate mother to give birth to the cloned animal. There's certainly work still being done in that area, but, increasingly, researchers are working to hybridize existing animals with extinct ones in order to create what Brand calls a "2.0" version of the animal.
That's what Harvard synthetic biologist George Church is doing with woolly mammoths. Using a genome editing technique known as CRISPR, Church is working on inserting three key genes from woolly mammoths into Asian elephant cells, with the hope of eventually creating a hybrid between the two that will ideally be more mammoth-like than elephant-like.
The project and technology has been touched on before, most notably in a lengthy New York Times Magazine article from February, but Church tells me that the team has now successfully migrated the three genes, which gave the woolly mammoth its furry appearance, extra layer of fat, and cold-resistant blood. In theory, given what we know about both the woolly mammoth genome and the Asian elephant genome, the final product will be something that more closely resembles the former than the latter.
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