By: Henry Mance / The Financial Times
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Consider, on the one hand, some famous but extinct species such as the dodo and the woolly mammoth. On the other hand, imagine some famous and lively figures from the world of showbiz, such as Peter Jackson, Paris Hilton and Tony Robbins.

In the middle, bridging the gap between the two, stands Ben Lamm. He has spent most of his life building software businesses. Now, at 43 years old - "biologically I'm this old, epigenetically I'm 36," he says with conviction - he is leading one of the most ambitious biotech projects in the world. He aims to use the fame and financial resources of these famous figures, along with seed capital, to breathe new life into mammoths and dodos.

Woolly mammoths became extinct about four thousand years ago. Colossal Biosciences, the company co-founded by Lamm, aims to bring back one of these creatures (or at least one that looks like it) within five years. "Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world. And, Colossal it's the company that will solve this," boldly states on its official website.

The company cannot be ignored so easily. It has raised $235 million, plus another $50 million for its non-profit side - Colossal Foundation. Most recently, he claimed to have mapped almost the entire genome of the thylacine, a wolf-like marsupial that went extinct in Australia about a century ago.

"When we started in 2021, we thought we would get to the thylacine in 10 years. We believe we are on the right track, even ahead of schedule," said Lamm, speaking from New Zealand, where he was due to meet with Peter Jackson, the director of lord of the rings [Lord of the Rings], which has invested $15 million in Colossal's "de-extinction" efforts.

Extinction is a story that encapsulates the almost unbelievable advances in genetic biology. But it is also a story that reflects opposing environmental views.

Supporters argue that the only way for humans to reduce their impact on the animal world is through ingenuity. Good technology can counterbalance the effects of bad technology.

Skeptics, on the other hand, see technology, or at least its overuse, as part of the problem. For them, de-extinction is at best an illusionary distraction from what really matters: saving today's threatened species. At worst, it could prevent humans from learning lessons from extinction—and from developing a new environmental conscience. It could teach us that even our worst environmental sins can be undone.

Philosopher Melanie Challenger notes that humans still cannot easily coexist with wolves “without fear ... Why should we think we can reintroduce larger mammals into the environment without any consequences”?

Furthermore, de-extinction treats animals as tools, not sentient beings. The plan calls for Asian elephants, animals with complex social relationships, to be used as surrogates for baby mammoths. Extinction "is a morally corrupt project," says Challenger, a member of the thinktank Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

This debate is the closest thing we have to one Jura Park [Jurassic Park ] of real life. Perhaps the most memorable line of that film is the statement of the mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think about whether they should." Has Lamm fallen into the trap of Jura Park? “We have to keep reminding people that it was a movie with a scripted ending. And, no, you can't bring back a dinosaur," he says. (Unlike in the movie, scientists haven't found the dinosaur's DNA: it doesn't seem to survive in fossils trapped in amber.) “I don't believe Jura Park there was an essential conservation mission in the background, but I may have missed it between the lines."

Unlike this, Colossal- emphasizes its mission to heal ecosystems. If woolly mammoths were to return, supporters say their grazing and behavior could turn the Arctic into a grassland - absorbing carbon and preventing the release of methane trapped in the soil.

Colossal-i also argues that her techniques can help endangered species by finding ways to increase their genetic diversity. Now, mapping the genome of the Asian elephant, from Colossal-i, has helped create an experimental mRNA vaccine for elephant herpes, a disease that affects large numbers of elephants in zoos.

But should we be excited or worried?

The first thing to recognize about de-extinction, says Melanie Challenger, "is that the concept itself is false."

When George Church, the Harvard biologist and co-founder of Colossal-it with Lammi, first spoke publicly about de-extinction around 2013, he referred to the ability to "undo" death.

In fact, says Challenger, “this is not an undoing or a resurrection. This is the genetic engineering of a new organism, with genetic and, we assume, physical and behavioral similarities to an animal species that is now extinct."

Colossal-i will not literally bring back a mammoth, dodo or thylacine. Another American de-extinction initiative, Revive & Restore, has promised to "bring back" the homing pigeon, a bird once so numerous it darkened America's skies. But even here this should not be taken literally.

Scientists cannot go from a mapped genome to a living creature. The genome is something like an “instruction manual Lego", says Lamm. It is not a substitute for Lego-n actual - genetic material that can be edited and then, in the case of a mammal, developed into an embryo and then placed in a uterus. The material and surrogate uterus must be taken from another (related) species.

To produce a thylacine offspring, scientists e Colossalhave mapped the genomes of dasyurids - a family of marsupials that includes the Tasmanian devil. They have also analyzed wolves and other large dogs, which evolved to have similar traits to the thylacine, despite a long evolutionary separation.

By combining the two, they have identified about 300 genes that they think determine the thylacine's wolf-like face. They edited these genes in living cells of a fat-tailed jackdaw, using CRISPR techniques that can replace specific pieces of DNA. "This doesn't give us a thylacine, but it's a big step toward it," says Lamm. Many more edits would be required to recreate the thylacine's other features. If they cannot all be made, what would be created is a hybrid species.

Colossal-has advanced with other steps, including techniques to implant the nucleus of these cells into the egg of a dunart - the planned surrogate species. "We don't need any new technology," says Lamm.

The hope is that marsupials will be suitable for experimentation. Elephants, which would serve as surrogates for mammoths, have the longest gestation period of any mammal. In contrast, pregnancy in Dunarts lasts only two weeks. "Logistics should be infinitely easier," says Ross Barnett, author of the book The lost lynx [The Missing Lynx], a work on extinct mammals.

However, the obstacles are great. Only one extinct species has ever been brought back to life, and the story is a cautionary tale. In 2003, scientists cloned a Pyrenean ibex using cells taken from one of the last surviving members of the species—before it died. They implanted 208 embryos into 57 carriers, Spanish ibex and wild goat-goat hybrids. Only one resulted in a successful litter. The clone died within minutes of breathing problems. Instead of coming back from extinction, the Pyrenean ibex went extinct for the second time.

If we considered nonhuman animals to be moral beings, "we would not tolerate the levels of abortion or harm to welfare" associated with these methods, Challenger argues. Colossal insists that technology has advanced. "We have increased the cloning efficiency from two percent to 78 percent," says Lamm. (He later clarified that this refers to the embryonic stage, not the live offspring or survival to maturity.)

Using elephants, highly complex animals, as surrogates raises ethical issues, Challenger says. Furthermore, there are not enough Asian elephants to act as surrogates, so Colossal-is also developing artificial wombs. Baby mammoths born from the artificial womb would be "raised by the first generations of mammoths to ensure they were properly socialized and experienced optimal welfare," says Lamm. In recent decades, more has been learned about the emotions of elephants, which even the best zoos struggle to accommodate. Can artificial wombs be an ethical solution, whether for surrogate elephants or baby mammoths?

"We have a moral obligation to undo the sins of the past. We exterminated these species," insists Lamm. Thylacines were hunted by Australian farmers on the (probably wrong) basis that they killed too many sheep. But it is morally unclear how we can have an obligation to a species: species (as opposed to individual animals) are not sentient beings. It is even less clear that we might have an obligation to a mimic species that never existed before.

Ben Minteer, professor of environmental ethics at Arizona State University, argues that extinction represents "a refusal to accept our moral and technological limits in nature." Reflecting on the lost species, on the contrary, "forces us to remember our mistakes and limitations".

This argument probably has a broader meaning: a descendant of the mammoth or the thylacine would fascinate the public. However, conservation cannot be reduced to fascinating the public. It must mean addressing the main causes of biodiversity loss today: the destruction of natural habitats, mainly for livestock farming, and the emissions that cause global warming. For this, it would be better if humanity developed humility - a sense of fragility - rather than an excessive confidence in its technological powers.

What if a thylacine-like animal were created and survived? In theory, as a large predator, it could help restore ecosystems in Tasmania by controlling populations of wallabies and other herbivores. But raising a large population of animals in the wild - and then adapting them - takes years. Consider China's much-vaunted panda breeding program: since 1995, more pandas have been taken from the wild than have been reintroduced, a recent investigation by the Daily Mail reports. New York Times.

Any resurrected species would have limited genetic diversity. Animals would not be able to learn "natural" behavior from other members of the target species, as these would not exist. The thylacine, the last of which died in 1936, could survive in today's climate, but other animals, extinct for centuries or millennia, could struggle to cope with new conditions or unknown diseases. Any newly created large mammal would face an uncertain reaction from the public: once we killed the thylacine and the mammoth to extinction.

Initially, Colossal- plans to create “a few dozen mammoths each year,” but aims to achieve a self-sustaining population of “thousands.” It would probably take hundreds of thousands of mammoths to change the Arctic tundra. Most ecologists are skeptical that the animals could breed and be released in sufficient numbers to form functional ecosystems.

Extinction is a controversial concept that some consider “vapourware,” with only “marginal” impact, says Erle Ellis, a professor of geography at the University of Maryland. Ellis, an “eco-modernist” who sees technology as potentially beneficial for environmental protection, is more enthusiastic about translocations of species — the movement of species from one habitat to another to escape climate change. “The most worthwhile investments right now are in preventing the loss of species that are on the brink of extinction and in preserving habitats for the species that we have,” he says.

However, some ecologists remain curious about extinction. Environmental efforts have increased forest cover in Europe over the past decades. New forests have become dense, making them more vulnerable to fires and often poor in biodiversity.

For Jens-Christian Svenning, professor at Aarhus University, something essential is missing: elephants, which could help clear dense forests and allow other species to develop. "We've had proboscideans [the order of mammals whose last members are elephants] in Europe for the last 18 million years, except for the last 0.1 million years. So it's an extremely unusual situation not to have elephants in our system," he says.

Even if scientists can't produce a woolly mammoth, they can identify genes for tolerance to cold climates and create "a cold-tolerant Asian elephant that could live in Europe or North America," adds Svenning, of which is part of an advisory body to the Danish government. He admits there will be obstacles, including public resistance, but is "optimistic that these things can eventually work."

Svenning's curiosity is mirrored by several conservation and research groups. Revive & Restore, based near San Francisco, is looking to identify edited genes that could help birds adapt to climate change. Colossal-i, meanwhile, is working with the University of Melbourne to see if northern quolls, small marsupials, can be genetically modified to withstand poison from cane toads - an invasive species.

Fears that extinction will siphon funds from traditional conservation do not seem well founded. The biggest investor Colossal-it is a venture capital fund led by billionaire film producer Thomas Tull Jurassic World [Jurassic World], a sequel to 2015's Dinosaurs.

A rare question is how do you plan Colossal- to generate income. The main answer is the application of its biotechnological discoveries to human health care. "If you can do this with ancient DNA and with non-model organisms like elephants and fat-tailed jackrabbits, it's significantly easier to use the same technologies in mice, pigs and humans," says Lamm. Artificial wombs Colossal-it, according to him, could lead to improvements in embryo survival in IVF.

Melanie Challenger warns: "Biotech companies are known for exploiting popular or morally acceptable applications, even when these applications are not necessarily their primary interest." Disappearance may be a way to legitimize gene editing in humans.

Colossal-ie presents extinction as a “bold project” – evoking memories of NASA’s race to the moon, which led to other innovations like the space pen. But Barnett, author of The lost lynx, notes that, unlike space pens, “there are complex moral and ethical dilemmas in patenting or trademarking biological processes, or even living tissue. Just look at the cautionary tale of HeLa [the immortal cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman]."

De-extinction is not the only ecological effort involving advanced technology. Space colonization, geological engineering, and the deciphering of animal language have been proposed, even justified, as efforts to ease our influence on the nonhuman world.

Conventional conservation – like protecting forests – works, says Lamm, but “it just doesn’t work fast enough.” Other tech believers also argue that the traditional approach to conservation has failed. The interesting thing is that tech skeptics might say the opposite: our obsession with technology hasn’t brought us much closer to sustainability and the ethical treatment of animals – at least not yet. /Telegraph/

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