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Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation
Ecosystems are inconveniently complex, and elephants won’t make good surrogates.
Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats. A key study offers intriguing evidence that keeping large herbivores —reindeer, Yakutian horses, moose, musk ox, European bison, yaks, and cold-adapted sheep—at artificially high levels in a tussock grassland helped achieve colder ground temperatures, ostensibly protecting permafrost. Or Colossal could help us learn to produce meat from modified microbes or cultivated lines of cow, pig, and chicken cells, developing alternative proteins that could more efficiently feed the planet, protecting wildlife habitat and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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