Quotes
You might be able to alter the hair pattern of an Asian elephant or adapt it to the cold, but it’s not bringing back a woolly mammoth. It’s changing an Asian elephant,
said University of Montana’s Preston It’s part of how we monetize our business,
You’re not actually resurrecting anything — you’re not bringing back the ancient past,
said Christopher Preston, a wildlife and environment expert at the University of Montana, who was not involved in the research Since there is more than 200 million years of genetic divergents from woolly mammoths to mice, we decided to look for similar pathways and edits in similar genes to ensure that the edits we were going to make in our our woolly mice would be compatible with life while driving the core genotype to phenotype relationships we were looking for,
Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, told Mashable We currently expect to alter around 85 genes in the Asian elephant to de-extinct the core genes and cold-tolerant phenotypes but will know a better exact answer as we get closer to the completion of the project,
The mammoth de-extinction project also provides a kind of moonshot goal that inspires people to come together and solve the hard problems that we need to solve in order to save other large megafauna (and smaller animals!) from becoming extinct,
[I]t is clear that we need to be thinking of new ways to combat the extinction crisis underway today,
[W ... W]e only chose genes to edit that we already knew were compatible with healthy mice based on previous work and research,
We believe that these changes will impact fat metabolism in response to cold climates,
I think that the ability to edit multiple genes at the same time in mice, and to do so and obtain the expected woolly appearance, is a very important step,
said Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University While we know a lot about mouse genetics, we know much less about mammoths and elephants. It isn’t yet known which sections of the genome are vital for achieving the characters (needed) to make an elephant fit for life in the Arctic circle,
said Tori Herridge, Senior Lecturer, School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield, in a statement shared by the Science Media Centre My biggest problem with the paper is that there is nothing addressing whether the modified mice are cold-tolerant — through introducing traits that are apparent in mammoths — which is the justification given for carrying out the work,
Lovell-Badge said via email It is an important step toward validating our approach to resurrecting traits that have been lost to extinction and that our goal is to restore,
said Dr. Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal, in a news release Tuesday Working with mice or even cattle is relatively easy,
Unless you decide to make EVERY edit necessary … in the genome, you are only ever going to create a crude approximation of any extinct creature, based on an incomplete idea of what it should look like. You are never going to ‘bring back’ a mammoth,
The Colossal woolly mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,
said company CEO Ben Lamm in a statement We do not argue that gene editing should be used instead of traditional approaches to conservation, but that this is a ‘both and’ situation,
Our three flagship species for de-extinction—mammoth, thylacine, and dodo—capture much of the diversity of the animal tree of life,
says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer My overall concern is whether this is a sensible use of resources rather than spending the money on trying to prevent species becoming extinct,
It is an interesting piece of work, but the idea that we could bring something back from extinction is false hope,
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