Will the woolly mammoth come back from dead in just 2 years?
SCIENTISTS claim they are only two years away from bringing woolly mammoths back from the dead.
The shaggy beasts, which were 12ft tall with tusks up to 16ft long, wandered the Arctic tundra for nearly half a million years before dying out around 4,500 years, driven to extinction by a combination of climate change and hunting by our human ancestors.
Now a project to bring back the mammoth is close to creating a hybrid embryo that involves programming the prehistoric beast’s traits into an Asian elephant, with which it shares 99.4 per cent of its genes.
US scientists are using DNA extracted from frozen mammoth carcases found in Siberia. The embryos would have genes for mammoth features such as shaggy long hair, thick layers of fat and blood suited to life in sub-zero conditions.
However, it will take years of further work before any serious attempt can be made to produce a living creature.
The Harvard University scientists plan to grow it within an artificial womb rather than use a female elephant as a surrogate mother. Since starting the project in 2015, they have increased the number of ‘edits’ where mammoth DNA has been spliced into the elephant genome from 15 to 45.
Professor George Church, who heads the team, said: ‘The list of edits affects things that contribute to the success of elephants in cold environments.
‘We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood, but there are others that seem to be positively selected.’
‘Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant/ mammoth embryo. Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.’
Professor Church told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, that the mammoth project had two goals – securing an alternative future for the endangered Asian elephant and helping to combat global warming.
Woolly mammoths roaming the tundra once more could help prevent the permafrost that covers the ground from melting and releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
‘They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,’ he said. Snow and ice act as insulation, so creating holes in it helps to cool the earth below.
Professor Church – who helped develop the most widely used gene-editing technique – also predicts that, as a result of the latest developments in genetic engineering, age-reversal in humans will become a reality within ten years.