A biotech boss says that a living mammoth is ‘highly likely’ to be walking the Earth once again and it’s happening much sooner than people think.
Ben Lamm is the head of a company working to revive the ancient creature that last roamed our planet 4,000 years ago.
As CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences, Lamm’s team of scientists are planning to put their research to the test by using Asian elephants as surrogates for mammoth fetuses.
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The science behind it will involve creating embryos with replicated genes using the DNA of a close existing relative.
And it could be happening sooner than you’d think - Lamm says he is confident that the firm is ‘on track for the mammoth for late 2028’.
If you thought he would be stopping at one extinct creature brought back from the dead, you’d be wrong - instead Lamm has plans of repopulating the world with a brand new herd of woolly mammoths.
Speaking to UNILAD Tech, he says: “You need enough engineered and genetic diversity so you can create interbreedable, sustainable herds so you're not just making a bunch of clones. You have to be very thoughtful in that process.
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“Rewilding of the species back into their respective environments with enough population genetics and diversity so that they can create sustainability without human managed care.”
Lamm admits that people have argued this time period is ‘too hot’ for mammoths to live in, but he claims this is a misconception.
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The biotech boss continues: “Everyone thinks of the movie Ice Age, right? In those times, there were those locations, but there were also these massive interglacial periods that were actually warmer than today.
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“And if you look at mammoths, and also the distribution of different types of mammoths, like Columbian mammoths, the distribution and migratory patterns were vast and wild and huge populations, and they went down to very warm locations outside of these kind of global warmed periods.”
The team at Colossal Biosciences is made up of 145 scientists, 17 of which are solely working on the creation of artificial wombs to bring back extinct animals.
After mammoths are brought back to life, Lamm intends to revive the dodo bird and the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
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He adds: “I feel like we as a species have a moral obligation to save species.
“We are playing God every day when we cut down the rainforest, when we hunt the thylacines to extinction, when we kill the dodos off, right? Early man and other anthropologic effects of early man are what drove mammoths to extinction.
“And so I think that we have a moral obligation to leverage technologies to kind of reverse the harm that we've done and stop the extinction crisis.
“If we do nothing, we will lose, it's forecasted that we will lose up to 50 percent of all biodiversity between now and 2050 and that's terrifying.”
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Earlier this week, Colossal Biosciences announced the launch of the non-profit Colossal Foundation, which will focus on conservation efforts and ecosystem restoration to protect at-risk species facing extinction.