Scientists get funding boost to bring back woolly mammoths

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists hope to bring the animals back to the Arctic tundra.

Discussions on this have been ongoing for more than 10 years but last week researchers announced they had raised $15 million in funding that could help make their dream a reality.

The funding comes in the form of $15m raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The Guardian reported that the scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA.

The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA, the Guardian reported.

These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

“Our goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but it is going to look and behave like a mammoth. Not because we are trying to trick anybody, but because we want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40C, and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do, in particular knocking down trees,” Church told the Guardian.