The Mammoths Are Coming
Could T-Rex Be Far Behind
I don’t understand why George Church wants to genetically resurrect thousands of wooly mammoths to roam the wilds of Siberia and I am concerned, in part, because anyone can be bought and what if a certain windbag ex-president wines and dines Church and convinces him to let loose said wooly mammoths on states that just happen to be blue in persuasion.
This is not a fantasy, at least not the first part, as Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, has created a company cleverly called “Colossal” that has so far received $15 million in private funding. Church and a team of researchers have been working for the last eight years to create the tools to recreate the precursor to today’s elephants.
Asian elephants and mammoths share a common ancestor that lived about six million years ago and Church has theorized that the genome of an elephant could be modified to harvest an animal that would look and act like a mammoth. Colossal scientists want to edit elephant DNA, infuse it with genes to grow mammoth traits like dense hair and thick fat and produce embryos of the not exactly wooly mammoths and not exactly elephants, sort of woolly elephants elephoths. The embryos would mature and they could then begin to grow a real population of elephoths.
Church has picked the Siberian tundra as the future home of his elephoths because way back, wooly mammoths grazed in the former grasslands, now turned tundra. The woolly mammoths knocked down the trees while foraging for grasslands to eat and their boli or poop helped fertilize and enrich the grasslands.The restored grassland would deter the soil from melting and might lock up heat-trapping carbon dioxide, a chief culprit in climate change.
The plan is to remove the DNA from an elephant egg and replace it with the mammothian DNA which will then result in an embryo that could be placed in an artificial uterus, however, one concern is that the uterus would to be big enough to house the fetus for two years until it reached a weight of 200 pounds and storing it would be a big problem.
Dr. Church’s proposal has attracted funding from some real heavyweights: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Climate Capital, a private equity firm that backs efforts to lower carbon emissions; the billionaire twins, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, known for their intellectual property challenges over Facebook and investments in Bitcoin; James W. Breyer, a billionaire venture capitalist and founder and CEO of Breyer Capital; and Timothy Draper, another billionaire venture capital investor, whose investments range from Tesla and SpaceX to Ancestry.com, which is interesting in the context of manufactured relatives of elephants.
Personally, I think this effort to create a faux-Jurasic Park is in the same context of space flights for rich people arranged through Amazon founder, billionaire Jeff Bezos and his company, Blue Origin; Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Can’t the venture capitalists and Bezos, Musk and Branson put their billions to better use, like helping to reverse climate change, finding a cure for cancer, developing a longterm strategy to avoid another coronavirus plague, build quality schools in poverty areas, build more hospitals to serve the underserved, help third world countries to fight diseases, build systems to provide clean water to poor nations, and yes, I know the argument, just like going to the moon, mankind has to explore, has to expand horizons beyond the earthly prison but there will be time for that after we reverse climate change, find a cure for cancer, develop a longterm strategy to avoid another coronavirus plague, build quality schools in poverty areas, build more hospitals to serve the underserved, help third world countries to fight diseases, build systems to provide clean water to poor nations and there are certainly a few more worthwhile causes.
Back to the elephoths, if they can play god with the elephants, why won’t somebody use the same technology to bring back the Neanderthal man and then unleash an army Neanderthals on the country to rival the current Neanderthals who populate the land of trump. And what’s next, saber tooth tigers in Somerset County, Pterodactyls soaring high above the wilds of Bergen County, and then a terror of tyrannosauris rexes destroying the Connecticut countryside. They could make a movie about it but nobody would believe it.
And how about the creepiest, most blood curdling, spine chilling and horrendous scenario of all, combining a dash of DNA of Hitler, a sprinkling from Mussolini, a spritz of Stalin, a squirt of Mao, a splatter of Tojo, a splur of Pol Pot, a drip of Ida Amin and a slosh of al-Bashir and then season it on a sample of trumpian DNA, and voila, a truly special creation, technology gone wild and the results of science without ethics.
But how about using the elephothian technology to create the best Santa Claus ever, the best Mr. Rogers ever, the best Ozzie and Harriet family ever and that would be really fun to have those ciphers of all that is good, roaming about the planet spreading their joy far and wide for all to see and to make the world a better place, a truly MAGA world.