THE CIA WANTS TO BRING BACK WOOLLY MAMMOTHS
The CIA is funding research into resurrecting extinct animals, including the woolly mammoth and tiger-like thylacine. Via a venture capital investment firm called In-q-tel, which the CIA funds, the American intelligence agency has pledged money to the Texas-based tech company Colossal Biosciences. The company’s goal is to “see the woolly mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again” through the use of genetic engineering – that is, using technology to edit an organism’s DNA.
De-extinction may sound like science fiction, and to an extent it is. There’s no way to bring back the woolly mammoth as it was ten thousand years ago. However, by using Dna-editing tools, scientists can insert cold-resistant characteristics into the DNA sequences of modern elephants, making them genetically similar to woolly mammoths. The resulting creature wouldn’t be a mammoth, per se. It would be a proxy animal that’s more like an elephant with mammoth-like characteristics. The foundation of this process is a gene-editing method called CRISPR – genetic ‘scissors’ that scientists can use to cut, paste and replace specific gene sequences into an organism’s DNA. Investing in this project will help the US government “set the ethical, as well as the technological standards” for genetic engineering technology.