But we’ve already got wooly mice

Colossal Biosciences is a tech company. You know what that means: hype, exaggeration, and lies, all to accompany developments that nobody needs or wants. In order to keep the stock prices up, they have to constantly pretend to have breakthroughs that get promoted on various media.

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

There are a few problems with those claims.

• We already have woolly mice. We have all kinds of interesting variants of lab mice with diverse mutations, and one of them is the woolly mouse:

  Showing off a mutation to a single gene in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.

• The woolly mouse, either the existing mutant or whatever new mutation they’ve inserted into this breed, does not represent a “new species”. It can still be bred with lab mice. It’s also exclusively a small lab population.

• They claim that they are going to produce the first Asian elephant calf “with woolly mammoth traits…by the end of 2028.” The first part of that prediction is absurdly vague — if they make an elephant hairier, they’re going to trumpet it as a triumph. It will not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a woolly mammoth, any more than that woolly mouse is a throwback to the Pleistocene. But also, the “end of 2028” is about three years away. The Asian elephant gestation time is 18-22 months, almost two years. They’d have to have an extensively gene-modified elephant fetus in a petri dish in about a year, or they’re going to miss their imaginary deadline, and they’ve left themselves no room for error.

So they make stuff up for their press releases. The bigger problem is that the whole company is a lie.

EXTINCTION IS A COLOSSAL PROBLEM FACING THE WORLD. And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.

Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.

They’re not going to fix shit. Bringing back one individual with some of the traits that made a whole population successful 500,000 years ago does not resurrect the species, especially since their ancient environment is gone. The entire network of species that coexisted with it no longer exists. At best, they might generate a sad hybrid animal that isn’t adapted to any place on the planet that will be shown off to wealthy VCs to justify more investment, but they’ll fail, the animals will be abandoned, and they’ll die off, probably more quickly than slowly.

As Adam Rutherford explains, it will be a moral debacle doomed to failure, and every competent geneticist, molecular biologist, and zoologist knows it.

And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.

The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.

If the ghouls at Colossal actually cared about extinction, they’d be working to stop habitat destruction and save existing species. But they don’t. What they care about is the gullibility of rich tech bros and convincing them to give them more money.