Ever heard of woolly mice? I hadn’t either until recently.
The story begins with de-extinction research.
De-extinction can be both cool and arguably a colossal waste of research dollars. The specific effort to de-extinct woolly mammoths fits that dual classification.
Woolly mice on the road back to mammoths?
Let’s dig into this with some news: Hoping to revive mammoths, scientists create ‘woolly mice’, NPR. The piece is about a preprint reporting research from Colossal Biosciences.
What are woolly mice? They are mice with some genetic changes that are mammoth-related. The mutations were made with multiplex gene editing. The technology here is impressive. From the preprint:
“Our optimized workflows achieved high editing efficiencies and produced genetically modified mice with simultaneous editing of up to seven different genes. Selected modifications include loss-of-function mutations in Fgf5, Tgm3, and Fam83g, among others. The resulting mice display exaggerated hair phenotypes including curly, textured coats, and golden-brown hair.”
In the bigger picture, this development is supposed to show the company is making progress toward bringing back mammoths. Unfortunately, at the same time it illustrates that Colossal Biosciences is not actually going to de-extinct mammoths.
Are you a mouse or a mammoth? Neither
Instead, they are probably going to make elephants that have some similarities to mammoths.
These new creatures will be mostly elephants with genetic changes perceived to be similar to mammoths. Should we call the new woolly mice “woolly mammoths”? Of course not. But if you make the same changes in elephants?
Why even do this project? From the article addressing critics:
“For their part, Shapiro and her colleagues defend their project. They say reintroducing mammoth-like creatures could benefit the environment by helping repair ecosystems where the mammoth once lived.
“Our intention is to re-create these extinct species that played really important roles in ecosystems that are missing because they’ve become extinct,” Shapiro says.”
The idea that this project could help the environment is just baloney.
I recently wrote about how Beth Shapiro went from de-extinction skeptic to a leader at Colossal, which is an interesting evolution.
Also, see what I think if you are set on de-extincting something, woolly dogs might be a better choice.
More recommended regenerative reads
- All patients see benefit in Mass Brigham’s cornea stem cell therapy trial, Clinical Trials Arena. This is an encouraging development. It’s not every day that you see “all patients” benefiting. A subset of patients reportedly had particularly striking improvement. This area of eye repair is one of the most promising types of regenerative medicine.
- Mesoblast prices pediatric stem cell treatment at $1.55 million, BioWorld. What do you think of that price tag? It reinforces the sense that many regenerative therapies are going to be priced in the millions a shot. One might argue that the price tags could be justified based on the cost of the research at biotechs but who can pay?
- The Scientific Literature Can’t Save You Now You can cite peer-reviewed research in support of almost any claim, no matter how absurd, The Atlantic. This comes to us from Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch.