Biotech boss working to bring back woolly mammoth and dodo hits back at Jurassic Park comparisons
A biotech boss is working on achieving what many have considered to be the impossible by bringing the woolly mammoth back from the dead.
But despite this incredible feat, the CEO has hit back at comparisons made to Jurassic Park.
Ben Lamm is the founder and head of Colossal Biosciences, a firm that is working to revive ancient creatures that no longer roam our planet.
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These include the woolly mammoth and the dodo bird.
While you’d be forgiven for thinking this is very reminiscent of a certain 1993 Steven Spielberg film, Lamm disagrees.
Speaking to UNILAD Tech, he said: “Jurassic Park was a super entertaining, super interesting movie that wasn’t real.
“People will be like, ‘but didn’t they see Jurassic Park?’ Yeah, I also saw Blade Runner, I saw Dune, I saw a lot of other things that aren’t real.
“One of the things that I think Jurassic Park did a great job of is Mr DNA taught kids and everyone that there’s this thing called DNA. It’s made up of these letters, and we as humanity now have these tools that can edit and change it, and that inspires people.”
Lamm continued: “We actually have a lot of scientists that we work with. I won’t name names… that say that Jurassic Park was one of the reasons why they wanted to go into genetics.
“They don’t want to bring back dinosaurs, but they just inspired them and got them excited.”
Instead, the biotech company has its sights on bringing back other ancient creatures and right now, they are focussed on the woolly mammoth.
Lamm had previously shared that his team hopes to have a living mammoth back on Earth by late 2028.
And now, they’ve made a new breakthrough by creating a ‘woolly mouse’.
While the experts clarified that they didn’t just ‘shove a mammoth gene into a mouse’, instead the team focussed on certain mammoth traits like ‘woolly hair’ and ‘thicker layers of fat’, to narrow down which genes to select. And thus, the woolly mouse was born.
While the genetically modified mice will help the scientists narrow down the traits for their mammoths, they don’t intend to stop there.
The firm has hopes of ‘de-extincting’ other animals that are no longer with us including the dodo and the thylacine, which is better known as the Tasmanian tiger.
How will this technology help endangered animals?
But de-extinction isn’t the only focus for Colossal Biosciences as they are using the groundbreaking technology to save animals before they reach extinction.
Lamm said: “Don’t get me wrong, the woolly mouse is pretty damn cute and mammoths are amazing, but people want to only talk for the most part about de-extinction.
“You know, what’s funny is, we have more species preservation and conservation projects going on than de-extinction projects.
“And with some of those, some of the work that we’ve done around elephant disease (EEHV) that’s killing 20% of elephants every year, some of the work that we’re doing on the Northern White Rhinos, or the other work that we’re doing around the world has produced some very quick results from a conservation perspective.”
And if something isn’t done to protect our wildlife, we’re facing a pretty bleak future, according to the biotech boss.
Lamm added: “We are in an extinction crisis. We’re in the sixth mass extinction, it’s caused by humans. We’re going to lose up to 50% of biodiversity between now and 2050.
“We have to build new tools and technologies, and we just want to be one very small player helping with that movement.”