Geneticists, led by George Church of Harvard Medical School, aim to bring the woolly mammoth, which disappeared 4,000 years ago, back to life, and the effort has secured a $15 million investment.
Scientists will create an “elephant-mammoth hybrid” by breeding embryos in a laboratory that carry giant DNA, from frozen mammoths dating back thousands of years.
According to a report by the American “CNN” network, reprogramming the skin cells of Asian elephants that are on the verge of extinction into stem cells that can harbor the huge DNA, then scientists will be able to identify the correct genes responsible for the layers of hair and giant fat by comparing Substances in animals extracted from permafrost, these embryos can then be carried by surrogate mothers or even artificial wombs.
Ari George Church, American chemist and geneticist, £11m for the project.
The US company, Colossal, has set a challenge to bring back woolly mammoths, an extinct species 4,000 years ago, to the Arctic using genetic modification techniques.
Asian elephants and woolly mammoths share the same DNA by 99.6%, according to “Colossal” on its website.
Colossal noted that genetically modified woolly mammoths could “restore life to the polar wilds” that capture carbon dioxide and eliminate methane, two of the greenhouse gases.
And the American biotechnology company succeeded in raising $15 million in private funds to achieve this goal, which has raised skepticism among some experts.
“A variety of problems will arise along this path,” biologist Beth Shapiro explained in the New York Times.
Also, Tori Heridge, a biologist and paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, tweeted: “This is not a re-extinction. Mammoths will never return to Earth. If that works, we’ll have a mythical elephant, a whole new, artificial, genetically modified organism.” .