Colossal, a biosciences company, wants to resurrect the woolly mammoth by creating a hybrid between an Asian elephant and mammoths. This will be achieved by using CRSPR-Cas9, a gene editing tool, to splice bits of DNA from frozen mammoth specimens into the DNA is an Asian elephant. The result of this is a “mammophant”. According to Church, resurrecting the woolly mammoth could possibly reserve climate change and restore the ecosystem. Others disagree with him, some of them being Dalén, Frederickson and Shapiro.
Dalén, a professor in evolutionary genetics at the Stockholm Centre for Paleogenetics is skeptical of Church’s claims due to a lack of evidence. He believes that resurrecting the woolly mammoth will not have any impact on the rate of climate change. Frederickson, vertebrate paleontologist, and director of the Weis Earth Science Museum in Mensha, WI thinks that instead of trying to bring back previously extinct animals, we should instead focus on species that are currently at risk of extinction. He also believes that we should help animals whose genetic diversity is dwindling by adding older genes from fossil records or adding new ones. This would lead to an increase in their health. Shapiro is a paleo-geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction. Shapiro says “I don’t want to see mammoths come back. It’s never going to be possible to create a species that is 100% identical, but, what if we could use this technology not to bring back mammoths but to save elephants?”. Bringing mammoths back could have negative outcomes such as upsetting existing ecosystems. Their ecosystem has adapted to their absence and bringing them back could possibly cause an imbalance or even affect their survival rate. Colossal’s goal is to enrich their ecosystem since it has been degrading for years. Another concern is how the mammophant will interact with elephants.
I agree with Dalen, Frederickson, and Shapiro. Instead of bringing back previously extinct species, we should focus on the ones who are currently at the risk of extinction. The cause of the extinction of mammoths was both hunters and climate change. Our current climate change crisis could have negative effects the mammophant.