On Woolly Mice, Resurrecting Mammoths, and Tech Bros

^{Riquet Mammoth Kakao (c.1920) 
by Ludwig Hohlwein, Public Domain via Flickr}

Colossal, the de-extinction company, scored headlines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) recently by announcing that they had created mice! Not just any mice, not even colossal mice, but genetically engineered, normal-size “woolly mice” that are the result of editing seven genes in mouse embryos. This Colossal presented as an important step toward making a specimen of charismatic megafauna – a brand-new woolly mammoth – by editing the genes of elephant embryos and using an elephant as surrogate mother. 

This breathless revelation was rather thoroughly and immediately debunked by, among others, the UK geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford, in The Guardian but first on BlueSky:

There Will Never Ever Ever Be A Cloned Mammoth. 

The follow-up posts and replies are entertaining. One of their points is that woolly mice already exist, developed with traditional breeding techniques. Moreover, as the reliably indignant science blogger PZ Myers explained:

Showing off a mutation … in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.

Clearly some writers, editors, film producers and even scientists think there is a market for fantastic stories about creatures made in biotech labs, and the wilder the better. Jurassic Park, to name but one, was a best-selling novel that became a stunningly successful franchise. These are fantasies designed to sell. They distract from ecological, social, personal, and political problems – and that seems to be the source of their appeal. It’s also a reason to keep a close eye on scientists who try to make these nightmares come true.

Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review reacted to the recent burst of publicity by covering previous attempts to mix extinct DNA with that of living organisms, for which he coined the term chronogenics. He found five such efforts, dating back to 2004, none of them with practical application. The scariest is that scientists attempted to isolate what made the 1918 influenza virus so lethal, by reconstructing a version of it with genes from a frozen body; we may be thankful it never escaped, since it did kill mice.

There is an even longer tradition of cloning. The term clone was coined by Herbert John Webber in 1903, based on the ancient Greek klon (twig). Clones are genetically identical to their source or to each other: Twins are clones because one egg had split to generate two genetically identical embryos (both of which differ from both their parents). Some plants reproduce by cloning, as do single-celled organisms, such as bacteria. An artificial mammoth would essentially be produced by using a combination of gene editing and cloning technology to create an embryo that would be implanted into an adventurous elephant for development over close to two years.

Several scientists worked on cloning-related research in the 1950s. John Gurdon succeeded in cloning a frog in 1958, was eventually knighted, and shared a Nobel Prize with Shinya Yamanaka, who was born in 1962, as Gurdon pointed out in an amusing acceptance speech. In 1996, the first mammal was cloned: Dolly the Sheep.

Dolly generated world-wide headlines, and scientists were off to the races. In the first decade of this millennium, at least half a dozen other species were cloned, and a pet-cloning industry was launched. The idea arose of using animal organs to replace failed human organs, thus making what the Washington Post in 2007 called manimals; that technology is still developing. Hwang Woo Suk, a Korean scientist, claimed in 2004 to have produced cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them; he hoped for a Nobel prize but he was busted as a fake who exploited women for their eggs and was last heard of cloning race-camels.

Several other charlatans have claimed to have cloned, or be about to clone, humans. (So far, none did and it’s not clear they even tried.) But the commercialization of genetic selection in humans proceeds apace, as does advocacy of heritable genome editing, particularly including heritable polygenic editing. There are already a few trans- and post-humanists, including members of the Silicon Valley broligarchy who have thrown their support to the regime occupying the White House, who hope to mutate themselves or their offspring, or even enter digital immortality. (Can they rely on the rest of us not to pull the plug?) 

Editing human embryos to order as a commercial enterprise would be a significant step beyond selecting embryos based on their genes – one might even say a mammoth step. It is illegal in more than 70 nations, and will hopefully remain extinct. Genetic selection of IVF embryos, on the other hand, is already happening despite the recommendation of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG). All this and more constitutes modern techno-eugenics, and the implications are a lot scarier than movie fantasies. Ultimately, these visions (should they ever be realized) would represent a dire threat to humanity as we know it, with an enhanced caste system representing the end of our imperfect democratic society and its replacement with something much worse.

Circling back to Colossal, one of its two co-founders is George Church, a professor at Harvard and MIT who is notorious for his conflict-of-interest slide, which lists dozens of the biotech companies with which he is or has been involved. Church is renowned for causing a fuss by making wild speculations. Back in 2008, he told science reporter Nicholas Wade of The New York Times that he hoped to reconstruct the mammoth genome, though fixing the energy crisis was higher on his priority list. And in the prologue to his 2012 book Regenesis, he speculated about recreating Neanderthals, or at least a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid with an “extremely adventurous female human” as a surrogate mother. Would that be more acceptable, he wondered, than a human-Neanderthal hybrid?