Gene-ius

In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, based on the Michael Crichton book of the same name, eccentric billionaire Richard Hammond had a dream to resurrect dinosaurs in the modern age using gene splicing technology and some gender-fluid frogs. Despite the protestations of Jeff Goldblum (Always listen to Goldblum...) his team of scientists succeeded, bringing to magnificent life long-extinct Velociraptors, Tyrannosaurs, Triceratops, the long neck ones and the spitty ones. Needless to say (though Jeff did), life, or in this case, death will find a way, with things going awry, several people getting eated and Samuel L. Jackson's arm falling off. Although the Jurassic Park in the story hit a few snags, the movie itself was a runaway success, spawning a still-evolving (arguably devolving, at least in terms of intelligence...) franchise which asks the enduring question, “What if extinction isn't the end of the road?”

Colossal Biosciences, a “de-extinction” company founded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm is on a mission to answer that question, though they're avoiding old Rexy and the lairy gozzer in favour of more recent, arguably more manageable lost species. In their sights are the woolly mammoth (extinct some 10,000 years), the Tasmanian tiger (just 95 odd) and the poster child of the “dead as a...” movement, the dodo (gone since the late 17th century but forever in our thoughts).

Colossal plans to implement gene editing techniques, namely Crispr-Cas9 to the end of resurrecting these species. The Nobel Prize winning technology - Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - allows precise reconfiguring of the DNA of plants, animals and microorganisms. By taking control of the genetic blueprint of life, it could quite literally change the world, fortifying harvests, treating cancers, eradicating inherited diseases, and in the case of Colossal, sticking a load of hairy elephants back in the mix.
In the Tasmanian tiger's case, step one was sequencing the dead animals' DNA, a feat already accomplished in 2017 by geneticist Andrew Pask, whose Melbourne-based team are working with Colossal. Despite a wealth of incredibly well preserved specimens in museums around the world, there was still painstaking work necessary reconstructing DNA chains broken apart from the effects of UV light and bacterial interference, a task akin to completing a vast puzzle minus the picture on the front of the box. Being scientists and thus very brainy, this was accomplished using the similar DNA template of a small marsupial called a dunnart, its genome sequenced and overlaid onto the tiger's to reveal the discrepancies. Using Crispr-Cas9 to tweak the dunnart's genes towards those of the extinct animal, its cells were effectively converted into living Tasmanian tiger calls with tiger chromosomes. Simple as that may sound (??!), those cells still need to be converted into a developing embryo ready for implantation in a suitable host. Pask's team have laboured five years to create marsupial stem cells, the hope being that implanting those into embryos could lead to whole living organisms.
One reason we won't be seeing dinos any time soon is their DNA has spent many millions of years degrading...imagine completing one of those 1000 piece baked bean puzzless… drunk, blindfolded and with cauliflowers for hands.
For budding de-extinctioners like Church and Lamm, woolly mammoths have therefore long been a north star - big, impressive and buzz-inducing, their frozen remains provide a semblance of a chance at reanimation whilst present-day Asian elephants are just asking to be impregnated with their hirsute ancestors' DNA. As such, Colossal have already begun splicing bits of mammoth DNA into their genomes, the resulting hybrid  - fittingly called a mammophant - would supposedly be adapted to the cold Siberian tundra, though experts caution a piecemeal approach to gene reconstruction does not guarantee the attributes of the extinct species would even translate to the new animal. Further concerns have understandably been raised about the ethics of bringing back species which could be doomed to re-extinction through lack of acclimatisation to their modern environments. Whilst this is perhaps less of an issue for the Tasmanian tiger, whose habitat and prey remain relatively consistent from its heyday, the woolly mammoth, if even a viable option for reanimation, risks becoming a lumbering, maladapted sideshow attraction.

In 2003, the bucardo, a type of mountain goat, was the first animal to be brought back from extinction, cloning efforts utilising 782 domestic goat eggs resulting in just one full-term pregnancy. Unfortunately the baby bucardo, its lung misshapen, suffocated shortly after emerging into the world, its species becoming extinct a second time in three cruel minutes.

Admittedly, the gene editing tech has developed apace in the two decades since, promising better results, but like egocentric billionaires turning their attentions to space whilst our own planet burns, some say our focus should be on the species still walking the earth, not those which already had their shot. Colossal however argue their efforts could be the answer to conservation of endangered species, applying the techniques used to restore extinct species to those currently struggling. In collaboration with non-profit conservation organization Re:wild, they intend to bolster the health of embattled ecosystems around the world via their advances in the fields of genomics, assisted reproductive technologies, gene editing and computational biology.

Fun as it might be to ride a mammoth or kick a dodo up the arse, it seems the real promise of Crispr and pioneers like Colossal and their affiliates could be saving that which we haven't yet lost.