In 2013, on a desert island in the East Siberian Sea, the warming climate caused the frozen soil to melt and mammoth ivory was dug up by Yakut hunters
Photograph by KARL GOROKHOV
Even before this article was published, "Why not ban (disable) Mammoths!" The topic dominates Weibo's hot search list; but this article is not related to the "half-man mammoth" of the game world. In the real world, on the other hand, scientists are really going to "resurrect" mammoths. So should this mammoth "resurrection" behavior be "ban"?
Mammoths have much smaller ears than modern elephants, helping them cope with the cold
Drawn: DARRYL BROOKS, DREAMSTIME
Harvard geneticist George Church co-founded a new company called Colossal, which has come up with a bold plan to use mammoth DNA to create a hybrid Asian elephant and hope to use the cold-adapted elephant to modify the Arctic tundra, which has sparked intense scientific and ethical discussions.
Colossal has attracted as much as $15 million in discretionary funding to support ongoing elephant cell research at George Church Labs dedicated to "resurrecting" mammoths.
Gilded mammoth skeleton sculpture on Miami Beach, Florida, USA, by renowned artist Damien Hirst titled Gone but not Forgotten
摄影：JEFFREY GREENBERG, EDUCATION IMAGES, UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY
The idea of using biotechnology to help endangered or even extinct species is not new: in 2009, a subspecies of wild goat that became extinct in 2000 was successfully cloned, but the clone survived only a few minutes;
Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica, a subspecies of wild goats that became extinct in 2000
供图：TAXIDERMIC SPECIMEN, REGIONAL GOVERNMENT OF ARAGON, SPAIN
In April, the San Diego Zoo and the nonprofit Revive & Restore announced that they had cloned an endangered black-footed ferret.
The successfully cloned endangered species of black-footed ferret, pictured as it was 3 weeks old, is a wild black-footed ferret that has been dead for more than 30 years, and is conceived with a blindfolded mink, a close relative of the black-footed ferret.
Courtesy photo: REVIVE & RESTORE
For years, George Church's plan to use DNA sequences to "resurrect" mammoths has dominated the headlines around the world.
Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal, said: "Most of the scientific problems have been solved and all that is needed now is funding and attention. But geneticist George Church says that even according to the company's ideal schedule, it would take 6 years for the first hybrid baby elephant to appear.
Yakut hunters found this frozen juvenile mammoth on an ice cliff
The founder of the non-profit group Revive & Restore said: "Resurrecting extinct species and what we call genetic rescue is actually a hopeful idea to repair some of the damage that humans have done over the centuries – not nostalgia, but increase biodiversity." ”
A carver in Yakutsk turned mammoth ivory into a row of miniature mammoths
Colossal's ultimate goal is to transfer enough key genes into the genomes of Asian elephants to create a "proxy" species, a "stand-in mammoth," that adapts to the arctic cold.
Russian ecologist Sergey Zimov and his wife had worked on Siberian permafrost, and Zimov had warned that large amounts of methane and carbon dioxide could seep into the atmosphere after the permafrost thawed. He created the Pleistocene Park in eastern Siberia and introduced large herbivores such as Canadian red deer, North American bison, reindeer, and Twin Peaks wild camels to the park to test their impact on the environment.
Sergey Zimov (right), the first Russian ecologist to discover that permafrost contains much more carbon than human perception. Today, a portion of the carbon from permafrost has been released.
Photo by KATIE ORLINSKY
Permafrost is exposed to the thawing Arctic and is in decline
Photo by JEFFERY KERBY
Mammoths buried in permafrost are famous for their precious "ice tusks", where the Yakuts weigh mammoth tusks on a lakeshore in northern Siberia
Colossal and Sergey Zimovs reached a friendly informal agreement that Pleistocene Park could provide a home for the company's future "resurrected" mammoths.
Although there are no mammoths in Pleistocene parks, the herbivores that have been introduced so far may already be shaping the soil. The Zimovs found that in winter, the soil compacted in Pleistocene Park was more than 12°C lower than the soil outside the park.
Pleistocene Park is surrounded by lush greenery surrounding the blue lakes of northern Russia
Tens of thousands of years ago, during the True Pleistocene Era, much of Europe, Asia, and North America was covered with grasslands of all kinds, and by 10,000 years, many herbivores, including mammoths, had become mostly extinct, to some extent related to human hunting. With the extinction of these animals, the meadows became mosses and bushes, forming today's tundra and coniferous forests.
Mammoth bones, which are about 13,000 years old, are engraved with mammoth images
供图：CHIP CLARK, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE
Tori Herridge, a mammoth biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said: "The last common ancestor of mammoths and Asian elephants lived 6 million years ago, and although the DNA similarity between the two is as high as 99.9%," said Torii Herridge, a mammoth biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, means there are still more than 1 million different differences in the genes of the two, and scientists must carefully screen them."
Mammoths and Asian elephants
绘制：Fernando G. Baptista/National Geographic Stock
But for Colossal, the biggest puzzle is how baby elephant embryos develop. Asian elephants are endangered, and to avoid surrogacy, the company claims it will develop an artificial elephant womb.
In the past, when lambs and mice were used as subjects, artificial uterus could support the survival of preterm fetuses for 4 weeks, or 5-day-old embryos for 6 days. But George Church said: "So far, no mammal has been able to use an artificial uterus throughout its pregnancy. ”
In 2013, female mammoth carcasses found in Russia contained 10,000-year-old mammoth blood
供图：SEMYON GRIGORYEV, NORTHEASTERN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
To achieve this, Colossal must first set a precedent among modern elephants, whose gestations last nearly two years and whose pups weigh 100 kilograms at birth.
In 2011, a fossil of a juvenile Colombian mammoth was unearthed in Colorado, USA
供图：RICK WICKER, DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE
But
Any experiment involving animals,
It will be accompanied by fierce ethical challenges and questions.
Photo by EVGENIA ARBUGAEVA
Elephants are long-lived, highly intelligent creatures that have maintained a complex and multi-generational matriarchal society; so did the ancient mammoths. So how will the first "resurrected" mammoth be properly cared for and socialized within its population? In the future, how will these hybrids learn to survive in the Arctic Circle and effectively restart mammoth culture?
If it is only "existence" that cannot thrive and continue well, then the ending is cruel for these "resurrections".
This is the Siberian steppe mammoth 1 million years ago, and they have many genes that adapt to low temperatures, which can help later true mammoths thrive. Recently, scientists sequenced the oldest DNA to date, a painting based on newly acquired knowledge.
绘制：BETH ZAIKEN, CENTRE FOR PALAEOGENETICS
furthermore
Colossal's vision,
It is to transform the Arctic tundra by "resurrecting" mammoths.
It should be noted that today's migratory elephant herds can travel very long distances, and the same is true of mammoths. The study found that a young male mammoth from 17,000 years ago traveled tens of thousands of kilometers during its 28-year life, traveling most of modern-day Alaska. If Colossal is to realize its full vision, then, it will need to rewild millions of square kilometers of Arctic tundra and "pave the way for migration" for the "resurrected" mammoth, so that it has a chance to influence the global climate – similar to the ancient mammoths of the Pleistocene, we also have a long "road" to go.
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