Colossal Biosciences is a tech company. You know what that means: hype, exaggeration, and lies, all to accompany developments that nobody needs or wants. In order to keep the stock prices up, they have to constantly pretend to have breakthroughs that get promoted on various media.
A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.
Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.
Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.
Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.
There are a few problems with those claims.
- We already have woolly mice. We have all kinds of interesting variants of lab mice with diverse mutations, and one of them is the woolly mouse:
Showing off a mutation to a single gene in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.
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The woolly mouse, either the existing mutant or whatever new mutation they’ve inserted into this breed, does not represent a “new species”. It can still be bred with lab mice. It’s also exclusively a small lab population.
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They claim that they are going to produce the first Asian elephant calf “with woolly mammoth traits…by the end of 2028.” The first part of that prediction is absurdly vague — if they make an elephant hairier, they’re going to trumpet it as a triumph. It will not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a woolly mammoth, any more than that woolly mouse is a throwback to the Pleistocene. But also, the “end of 2028” is about three years away. The Asian elephant gestation time is 18-22 months, almost two years. They’d have to have an extensively gene-modified elephant fetus in a petri dish in about a year, or they’re going to miss their imaginary deadline, and they’ve left themselves no room for error.
So they make stuff up for their press releases. The bigger problem is that the whole company is a lie.
EXTINCTION IS A COLOSSAL PROBLEM FACING THE WORLD.
And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.
They’re not going to fix shit. Bringing back one individual with some of the traits that made a whole population successful 500,000 years ago does not resurrect the species, especially since their ancient environment is gone. The entire network of species that coexisted with it no longer exists. At best, they might generate a sad hybrid animal that isn’t adapted to any place on the planet that will be shown off to wealthy VCs to justify more investment, but they’ll fail, the animals will be abandoned, and they’ll die off, probably more quickly than slowly.
As Adam Rutherford explains, it will be a moral debacle doomed to failure, and every competent geneticist, molecular biologist, and zoologist knows it.
And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.
The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.
If the ghouls at Colossal actually cared about extinction, they’d be working to stop habitat destruction and save existing species. But they don’t. What they care about is the gullibility of rich tech bros and convincing them to give them more money.
Is the wooly mouse the “transgenic mouse” that Trump mistakenly complained about spending millions of dollars on for a “transgender” mouse?
No.. Who knows what he was talking about? Not Trump, for sure.
You’re not thinking this through. Elephants are afraid of mice, so the woolly mice is obviously there to control them. In order to control the mice we are of course going to need woolly cats. The cats will be controlled by woolly dogs which are controlled by woolly dog catchers and so on, and hey presto you have an entire ecosystem.
robro @1
The “transgenic” thing went viral yesterday as many jumped on that bandwagon. Unfortunate that. I didn’t.
CNN actually did it a little better the second time around:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/04/politics/fact-check-trump-address-congress
I don’t know how clear the White House was as they are probably scoffing at what may be important research. I’m not clicking on the WH site. But there have been rightwing talking points floating around for several months.
Some of those animal models may actually involve transgenic mice, but I don’t think saying Trump confused one for the other helps any. It’s the focus of the research that is at issue, not whether transgenic mice happened to be used.
Here’s another take:
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/no-president-trump-theyre-not-transgender
Though again some of the studies may, counter to that site, have utilized transgenic mice. Trump was wrong to call them transgender mice, but I don’t think he or the right wingers he parroted meant transgenic mice. The mice were probably used to model the effects of certain hormonal regimens and would be thus applicable to transgender people.
@ #2 — Needless to say Trump does’t know what he is talking about. However, during his ramble with Congress the other day, he apparently said (I can’t watch Trump):
This is interpreted as him mistakenly referring to transgenic mouse research as transgender (see here).
At the risk of diverging too far from the wooly mammoth here’s an example of the sort of research Trump may have been scoffing at:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36484619/
“A mouse model mimicking gender-affirming treatment with pubertal suppression followed by testosterone in transmasculine youth
Cynthia Dela Cruz et al. Hum Reprod. 2023.”…”National Institutes of Health grants F30-HD100163 and T32-HD079342 (H.M.K.)”
And two sites which have the talking points:
https://blog.whitecoatwaste.org/2024/12/21/wcw-investigation-10m-wasted-to-create-transgender-mice-and-monkeys/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Transgender-mice-WCW-12-2024-v2.docx.pdf
They missed a real branding opportunity by not calling them “woolly mammice.”
Thanks for the clarification, Hemidactylus.
Dibs on wooly mammoth sweaters.
Pass on wooly mice sweaters.
a wise scientist once said “they spent so much time wondering if they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should!”
Hemidactylus @6
One of the papers posted on the WH website concerns asthma research that involves using hormones on mice. I don’t pretend to understand it but neither do the people who scoff at it and consider it a “waste of money.”
As for the mammoth breeding, I wonder if they plan to make a “Pleistocene Park” in the same vein as Jurassic Park. I’m sure it’ll be also work out as well as that did.
@3 – Is the project leader Woolly Jack?
Trump has taught the world that the way to succeed is to lie lie lie, lie about facts, lie about achievements, lie about aim.
Also occurs to me that these sort of private companies are the way of science in the future following Trumps attacks on science and Musks wrecking ball.
Walter Solomon @11, “Pleistocene Park” is already a thing, check out pleistocenepark dot ru. It gets a nod in Church’s book “Regenesis,” both of Beth Shapiro’s books about making mammoths, and Jamie Metzl’s book “Hacking Darwin.” Church recently published a paper saying the North Slope of Alaska is totally great mammoth habitat, possibly because their first choice in Siberia wasn’t looking very likely? I think it’s super fun and interesting that the CIA’s VC fund, In-Q-Tel, was an early investor in Colossal, when they were into the Russian Pleistocene Park.
Sergey Zimov, the Russian geophysicist who started Pleistocene Park is also responsible for the paper all the folks in Revive & Restore’s orbit cite on the role of large grazers in maintaining permafrost (woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths) during the pleistocene. This is how the “Mammoths are totally going to solve climate change” pitch that Ben Lamm uses to get folks investing in Colossal came about. Of course, all those books ignore the estimate from said PLoS paper that maintaining the Mammoth Steppe required something on the order of 1 mammoth per square kilometer.
@Richard #12: No, oddly enough it’s Jack Woolley.
You can’t blame them for making up bullshit, after all it worked out for Musk, he got very rich and even bought himself a president.
In the novel Neptune’s brood, humanity has been resurrected and gone extinct on several occasions.
Hmm.. well a woolly mouse is one thing, ticked off their To-Mammoth list. Now they need to get something created in the mammoth’s size range.. Maybe a kitten? (Just over a minute long.)
I would vote for any program to create capybara-size mice. Or maybe give moles their eyesight back. That hive-living variant would make a long-lived pet.
Also, big-ass grey parrots that retain their vestigal claws, so they can fight off raptors. And stupid kids.
Or really big wombats? Wombats are cool.
Me @ 19.
I was thinking of naked mole rats. Giving them back eyesight and fur would provide long-lived pets. Porcupines and beavers are already long-lived. I suggest creating a spiny, amphibian hybrid. With venomous spures, like a platypus. Let them spread though the everglades, they will finish off those invasive snakes.