“Resurrection science” gains strength: will we revive species?

The era of de-extinction may soon be a reality. Advances in genetic engineering and synthetic biology are making the resurrection of extinct animals a tangible prospect. The organizations and companies at the forefront of de-extinction efforts are promising success — and surprisingly soon.

These efforts have just received a boost. Colossal Biosciences, the biotechnology company behind plans to revive the woolly mammoth, dodo and Tasmanian tiger, announced on Wednesday that it has raised an additional $200 million in investment, raising its total funding to US$435 million (about R$2.6 billion). This considerable sum grew from an initial investment of US$15 million (about R$2.6 billion). R$90 million) in 2021, when entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard University geneticist George Church founded the Dallas-based company.

In a decade or less, the world could see close-ups of creatures known only from black-and-white photographs, museum taxidermy displays and fossilized skeletons, with the ultimate goal of restoring wildlife to their natural habitat.

Advocates say the resurrection of extinct animals is attracting new investors with substantial resources for conservation. The scientific field expands the boundaries of biotechnology in a way that will make it possible to save other species from the brink of extinction and offers a promising way to better protect and preserve current ecosystems, making them more resilient to the climate crisis.

Skeptics, however, argue that the efforts are an under-examined personal project of millionaires whose money could be spent more effectively elsewhere. Critics also claim that scientists will only be able to create poor imitations of extinct animals. Breeding and breeding these creatures, some experts warn, could endanger live animals used as surrogates and the ecosystems into which resurrected individuals could eventually be released.

“Who doesn’t want to see a dodo? Oh my God, I want it. A mammoth. Wow, amazing,” said Melanie Challenger, vice-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the UK.

Challenger, author of “How To Be Animal: A New History of What it Means To Be Human,” argues that de-extinction is a fundamentally misleading term. “It is not de-extinction, it is genetic engineering of a new organism to theoretically fulfill the functions of an existing organism. You’re not bringing anything back from the dead,” she said. “And throughout the process, there are different ethical considerations that are quite complex.”

Is detox really possible?

Scientists are refining three techniques in their attempts to revive lost and rare species: cloning, genetic engineering and traditional backcrossing, a form of selective breeding that seeks to recreate lost characteristics of extinct species.

From this resurrection toolkit, cloning has the ability to create a nearly genetically identical animal. Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal nearly 30 years ago, and recently scientists successfully cloned the endangered black-footed ferret. But the process has been patchy, and is unlikely to be useful in attempts to revive animals that disappeared long ago.

Grazelands Rewilding, based in the Netherlands, breeds a modern equivalent of the aurochs, an ox that appears in prehistoric cave paintings. The giant animal disappeared from the wild in the 17th century. Aiming to restore wild landscapes in Europe, the group uses traditional breeding methods, combined with genetic knowledge, to identify the characteristics of the aurochs in living descendants: domesticated cattle.

Now in its seventh generation, tauros cattle, as they were called, are more than 99% genetically similar to the extinct aurochs, said Ronald Goderie, managing director of the project. Animals show physical changes, such as a darker coat color, and behavioral changes, such as how they respond to predators like wolves, over time.

Colossal scientists are behind the most ambitious projects. This team wants to resurrect the mammoth, the flightless dodo and the Tasmanian tiger, an Australian marsupial that went extinct in 1936. Colossal plans to recreate these creatures by editing the genome of the extinct animal’s closest living relative to create a visually indistinguishable hybrid animal of its extinct predecessor. For the mammoth, that animal is the Asian elephant.

High-profile investors in the venture include “The Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson, socialite Paris Hilton, former professional football player Tom Brady and professional golfer Tiger Woods; in addition to investment companies such as Breyer Capital. The latest capital injection comes from TWG Global, the investment vehicle of Mark Walter, controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team and co-owner of Chelsea Football Club in the United Kingdom.

Are we close to reviving lost species?

With the influx of capital, Lamm said the Colossal team can add another extinct animal to the to-do list as it moves forward on its three main projects.

Among recent milestones is the creation of the first induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, for Asian elephants. This special type of cell can be grown in the laboratory to turn into any type of elephant cell. It’s an important tool as researchers model, test and refine the dozens of genetic changes needed to give an Asian elephant the mammoth characteristics needed to survive in a cold climate.

For the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, Lamm said the pace of progress has been faster than expected. Colossal scientists managed to make 300 genetic edits in a cell line from a fat-tailed dunnart, which is the marsupial that Colossal chose as its base species and future replacement. The company sequenced what Lamm described as the highest-quality ancient genome to date for any animal.

The dodo is proving more challenging, Lamm said. Colossal has established a flock of Nicobar pigeons, the dodo’s closest living relative, which will act as donors of primordial germ cells that will be genetically edited to have dodo characteristics.

However, many of the developments have not been published in scientific journals, meaning they cannot be reviewed by other scientists, as is typical during the peer review process, and will not become publicly available for the benefit of the scientific community.

Lamm said Colossal’s mission as a company is not to publish scientific papers, which is a process that takes months, if not years. However, he said a paper on creating elephant iPSCs is under peer review. The company’s academic partners are planning to submit their work to journals, including the thylacine genome, over time, he added.

Colossal has recruited respected, high-profile scientists, and many other experts serve in advisory roles, including some initially skeptical of some of the company’s goals. Among them is molecular paleobiologist Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientific officer, currently on leave from her position as professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Shapiro is clear that de-extinction is not a solution to the extinction crisis, but she believes that the biotechnology tools she and her teams develop along the way can be applied more broadly to protect and restore threatened species and ecosystems.

“To be clear, getting something 100% behaviorally, physiologically and genetically identical to a mammoth is not possible,” she told CNN in October. “Once a species is lost, it’s gone, and we need to invest in making sure things don’t become extinct.”

Colossal is increasingly using its financial resources to fund conservation efforts, including work to save the world’s most endangered rhino species: the northern white rhino. The company is also collaborating on developing a vaccine for a herpes-like disease that can kill elephants. And Colossal has partnered with conservation organization Re:wild to use biotechnology in its projects.

Ultimate goals

Colossal’s stated end goal for its mammoth project is a world where elephant-mammoth hybrids walk through Arctic permafrost compressing the snow and grass that insulates the ground, slowing the thawing of permafrost and the release of carbon contained in this fragile ecosystem. It is “absurd” to imagine herds of cold-adapted elephants having a significant impact on a region that is warming faster than any other part of the world in the time frame needed to make a dent in the climate crisis, said Christopher Preston, a professor of environmental philosophy at the University. from Montana.

However, restoring lost species in fragile ecosystems has merit as a concept, added Preston, who is also the author of “Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals.” He said he was impressed by Grazelands Rewilding’s bullfighting project, which he visited during his work. The grazing habits of the hundreds of bull cattle, whose herds now also live in parts of Spain, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Romania, play a role in recreating an open landscape where other species can thrive.

Clare Palmer, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University who specializes in animal and environmental ethics, noted that ecosystems are changing rapidly. She said bringing the animals back may not work if the landscape is no longer the same.

“We also do not have good knowledge of the welfare needs of members of extinct species and their offspring, for example, would not be taught by their parents how to hunt, forage or interact with other members of the species,” Palmer said.

Almost 30% of more than 138,000 species on the planet are threatened with extinction

This content was originally published in “Resurrection science” gains strength: will we revive species? on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil