Got $10 Billion? Don’t blow it cloning a Woolly Mammoth

As if the 2020s weren’t weird enough, we might see woolly mammoths pounding across the tundra by this decade’s close.

Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotechnology and genetic engineering startup valued at $10 billion, has raised $435 million to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth, a species that hasn’t walked the Earth in over 4,000 years. The company also plans to clone a dodo bird and a Tasmanian tiger.

Colossal made international headlines earlier this month when it announced it had created a genetically modified mouse with a mammoth-like woolly coat. (Alas, no tiny tusks.)

The company’s leaders have said that while they’re focused on some of the most celebrated victims of extinction, the technology they’re developing could prove useful for other conservation efforts — perhaps adding cloned creatures to increase genetic diversity in critically endangered species.

But do we want mammoths back? If so, where would they live? How would they be protected, and who would protect us? Even if Colossal Biosciences takes precautions to ensure nobody gets trampled by their creation, the project might not accomplish what people think. Cloning is a misunderstood technology.

In 1996, when scientists in Scotland created a sheep from a cloned mammary cell and named her Dolly, people reacted with elation and horror because they thought scientists had, in effect, brought a sheep back to life in a new body.

By 1997, members of a UFO cult had started a human cloning company called Clonaid. While rumors floated about resurrected children, there’s no evidence that they were successful. Soon after that, companies sprang up to clone dogs and cats. Some pet owners were crushed to find they’d spent $50,000 for a dog with a different personality — a similar-looking but different animal.

People shouldn’t have been surprised. Identical twins share the same DNA but are not copies of the same person. They can have different personalities, different sexual orientations, and different predispositions to depression, heart disease and other illnesses. While a clone may sound like an improved version of an identical twin, clones are actually less similar to the original because they come from different egg cells and develop in different wombs.

As resurrection technology, cloning has been a major disappointment. Otherwise, billionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson wouldn’t be eating pureed broccoli in his quest to live forever, and Elon Musk would have at least one Mini-Me following him around.

To clone a mammoth, scientists would have to patch together a genome from frozen carcasses and specimens that have been dead for thousands of years. Since Asian elephants share most of their DNA with mammoths, scientists have said they plan to start with elephant DNA and use gene editing to splice in mammoth genes. Today’s ability to reconstruct ancient DNA and make synthetic genomes means they don’t need a single, preserved mammoth cell to create a replica. They could stitch together a genome from different animals, synthesize the DNA, and inject it into an egg cell from an elephant. A female elephant would also be commissioned to gestate and give birth to the replicate. Some biologists argue this would only produce a mammoth-like animal.

While science fiction stories such as Jurassic Park gain dramatic force by showing cloned dinosaurs killing people, a book that better captures the hazards of cloning is nonfiction: Dog Inc., by an investigative journalist who uncovers a real horror in a South Korean cloning company’s treatment of dogs — the clones, the egg donors and the surrogates.

Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, argues the risk of animal suffering isn’t offset by a clear scientific payoff for mammoth de-extinction. Will the process cause the animals to have health problems? Will they be lonely? Will they have the space and food sources they need to thrive?

“I think it’s this old fascination with the resurrecting the dead, whether it’s Jesus or Lazarus or whoever … it attracts attention,” Caplan said.

“People might think it’s cool or neat,” he said, “but they haven’t thought it through.”

Beyond that, there are far better ways to spend such huge sums of money, including a few projects that could improve or protect the planet’s biological diversity.

Better Ways to Spend $10 Billion

Build Biosphere 3

Building a new biosphere would catch the world’s attention, as in 1991, when eight jumpsuit-wearing humans sealed themselves inside a giant geodesic greenhouse in the Arizona desert. The goal of the experiment, Biosphere 2, was to create a microcosm of Earth’s self-sustaining ecology. The crew lived off food, water and air produced or purified by soil and 3,800 species of plants and animals.

The food soon started to run short; the oxygen levels dropped, the bees died, and, according to inside accounts, relationship drama tore the group into warring cliques. Still, it didn’t entirely fail as a science experiment since people came away with crucial new knowledge about the difficulty of reproducing our biosphere — at least with 1990s technology.

Why not try again with 21st-century technology? If we ever set up a base on the moon or Mars, it should be as self-sustaining as possible. The New York Times reported that Biosphere 2 didn’t use all the data they collected to understand what went wrong. A Biosphere 3 would generate massive amounts of data and perhaps help us learn how to survive catastrophic changes here in Biosphere 1.

Save an Ecosystem

One of the most memorable places I’ve ever visited was a mountaintop in Haiti, where a fairy-tale variety of tiny frogs and lizards clung to leaves and branches — some red, yellow, and green, others striped or polka-dotted. At night, the air was filled with the music of competing frog chirps. It was a tiny remnant of paradise surrounded by deforested dirt. That was 2011. Who knows what’s left now?

In his book The Future of Life, biologist E.O. Wilson describes biodiversity hotspots — places that house more than their share of species of plants, animals and fungi. His vision wasn’t to hold back human growth and development but to recognize where to draw boundaries and where to invest money and effort in coexisting.

I later visited the Philadelphia Zoo, where a few of the same species of frogs from that Haiti mountaintop had been able to breed in captivity. It was depressing. These frogs were meant to be part of an ecosystem lost due to a lack of resources. Saving this or some other barely surviving ecosystem would be a colossal achievement.

Adopt an Even More Colossal Creature

The North Atlantic right whale can weigh more than 10 mammoths. Fewer than 400 of these colossal mammals remain. Right whales were given their name because they were considered the “right whale” to kill. When whaling was finally outlawed in the early 20th century, they were killed accidentally by fast-moving boats and fishing gear. They’re also endangered by chemical pollution, sewage runoff, underwater noise and other stressors.

Right whales have been around for four million years, writes J.B. MacKinnon in The Atlantic. We tend to see endangered species as snowflakes, he wrote, “high maintenance and generally unable to roll with the punches.” But these whales survived decades of unlimited hunting and pulled through.

Protecting them might be expensive, though cheap, compared to cloning a mammoth. NOAA recently scrapped an initiative to spare right whales by slowing boat traffic because it would have been costly. Whales also get caught by fishing gear, especially lobster and crab traps. With enough money, this equipment can be designed to be safe for the whales.

These long-lived, intelligent animals have the bad luck of living in a busy, urbanized part of the Atlantic. If we can’t co-exist with them, perhaps we’re not ready to bring back the mammoth.

Solve the Seed Bank Problem and the Future of Our Food

Until recently, scientists counted on the frigid Arctic temperatures to preserve what’s called the Doomsday vault: a collection of more than a million seeds from over 6,000 species of edible or useful plants. It’s a backup if some natural or human-generated catastrophe wipes out these species.

In 2017, unusual warmth allowed water to leak into the seed bank, the Svalbard vault, which is housed on an island halfway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. The leak inspired scientists to consider bigger and better ways to squirrel away biological samples in case of emergency. They proposed creating a repository for seeds, animals, and microbial cells on the moon.

The moon’s big advantage is that one side is shielded from the sun, providing a natural freezer. However, there are many downsides, including the fact that the samples would be difficult to reach in an emergency.

Smithsonian biologist Mary Hagedorn first thought of the lunar repository as a way to safeguard our wild and domestic species. In an interview with Science, she said it might not help if the world ended but was aimed at more localized disasters that might wipe out repositories on Earth. There’s a big opportunity for intellectual challenge here — to figure out a cost-effective way to get the repository on the moon or to come up with an even more creative solution.

Cloning in the Public Interest

Some of those cells housed in a doomsday repository might need to be cloned to create a population of animals. But instead of cloning the showiest, most famous animals for the sake of attention, Colossal could lead a series of discussions with world leaders, ecologists, agronomists, ethicists, animal welfare advocates and interested members of the public. Together, we could decide which species to clone and why.

Maybe the first choices would include lost heirloom food crops or animals that we drove extinct through a threat that no longer exists. Mammoths went extinct when humans started moving into North America and other places where they lived, so ancient indigenous people likely contributed to their demise. But there’s a better opportunity to learn from an animal with a recent extinction history — one that gives us a chance to see if we’ve made any progress in learning to live without destroying what’s around us.