Scientists Receive $15 Million To Resurrect Woolly Mammoths Back From Extinction

As climate change worsens across the world, one company’s ambitious plan to save Siberian tundras is to create wooly mammoths from elephant DNA to keep the vulnerable low-temperature biomes cold.

The company, called Colossal, is led by Dr. George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, and Ben Lamm, a tech entrepreneur. They plan to create a wooly mammoth by genetically reengineering the DNA of elephants, according to CNN.

“Our goal is to have our first calves in the next four to six years,” Lamm said about the project.

The plan is being funded with $15 million worth of investments from people like the Winklevoss Twins to Climate Capital, a private equity firm focused on lowering carbon emissions, the New York Times reported.

The frozen Siberian tundra, which is covered with moss today, used to be grassland a long time ago. Many have hypothesized that mammoths helped keep the ecosystem intact in the past. Church believes that mammoths would be an efficient way to keep the Siberian tundra from the worse effects of climate change, keeping the carbon dioxide deposits safely in the ground.

“Mammoths are hypothetically a solution to this,” Church argued.

Many scientists are skeptical of this plan, both on how the mammoth will be resurrected as well as the ethical implications of the act.

“The idea that by bringing mammoths back and by placing them into the Arctic, you engineer the Arctic to become a better place for carbon storage. That aspect I have [a] number of issues with,” Tori Herridge, a mammoth expert from the National History Museum in London, said.

“There's absolutely nothing that says that putting mammoths out there will have any, any effect on climate change whatsoever,” Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics focused on mammoth evolution, said.

There is also worry about how the project will make any money. However, Lamm believes that the act of creating a mammoth will also create technology that can be useful in maintaining Colossal’s bottom-line for its investors.

“We are hopeful and confident that there will be technologies that come out of it that we can build individual business units out of,” Lamm said.