Scientists create ‘woolly mouse’ in effort to resurrect woolly mammoth

Transcript

00:00Is real-life Jurassic Park around the corner?

00:03Well, scientists trying to bring back the woolly mammoth have successfully created a woolly mouse.

00:09Texas-based biotech company Colossal Biosciences announced their goal to revive the extinct

00:14species in 2021 and have just moved a step closer to achieving it.

00:19So you've got these little golden brown mice, right, that have this thicker woolly coat that's

00:25reminiscent of both color and texture and an exaggerated link like that of the woolly mammoth.

00:31So we took all that comparative genomics of the genes that we're editing.

00:35We then looked and said, what are the comparative genes in mice?

00:38Because we don't want to just stick woolly mammoth genes into a mouse.

00:41There's 200 million years of genetic divergence.

00:44You know, we don't know if that's ethical.

00:45We don't think that's, it couldn't even be compatible with life.

00:48So we did a lot more computational analysis to understand it and then we plugged it in.

00:52So why are they doing this?

00:54Apparently it's all in the name of conservation and biodiversity.

00:58We thought that this entire kind of quest to bring back the mammoth and other species

01:03would allow us to not only bring back species that we could reintroduce

01:07back into their natural habitat to help the ecosystem,

01:10but also gives us the ability to make technologies which we make available for free to conservation.

01:15And in terms of a Jurassic Park-style risk, safe to say Ben Lam thinks it's unlikely.

01:21Unless I missed a subplot of Jurassic Park,

01:24I don't think they were doing anything for conservation.

01:27So we are pretty different, right?

01:29Similar tools, similar mission to bring back extinct species, similar even processes.

01:34But, you know, we try to educate kids.

01:36So I think there are some similarities there for sure.

01:38But we're doing it for conservation and we're doing this in a very measured way.

01:42The company hopes to move on to testing on Asian elephants next.

01:46But as they're an endangered species, the plans will need a lot of approval.