When Victor Frankenstein abandoned his monstrous creation after taking one look at it, he actually left a valuable lesson for scientists: just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done. This is a lesson that scientists at Colossal Biosciences would do well to pay heed to. This American private biotechnology company has long made it its mission to bring back the woolly mammoth from extinction. To that end, the company published a non-peer-reviewed paper in which it claims to have genetically engineered a mouse to express a gene that relates to mammoth hair. What this means, in effect, is that it has created some mice with slightly longer hair than normal. The road from hairy mice to woolly mammoths is not only long but also fantastical because there exists no intact mammoth nucleus and no complete mammoth DNA — the most basic requirements for cloning an animal. What the company has is the species’s genome from fragments of mammoth DNA unearthed from ice. At best, this will give birth to a genetically modified, hairy elephant, which, much like Frankenstein’s monster, may end up being abandoned by its creators once it has served its express commercial purpose.
The mammoth’s modern avatar would have to overcome other challenges. For instance, should such a freakish being come into existence, where would it go? Besides the fact that the Arctic tundra and the frozen swathes of the Antarctic are rapidly melting and thus not big enough to support even the species already existing there, the new creature’s elephant genes would leave it poorly equipped to deal with those regions and its mammoth wool would make its survival impossible in hotter climates. Moreover, it will also be utterly alone. The best possible outcome of this venture will be a single boutique animal that is profoundly confused but makes a huge amount of money for commercial ventures that think nothing of profiteering from turning species into spectacles. Science’s capitulation to corporate greed will do more harm than good. For instance, this could damage science’s credibility and reduce State and public support for future research that could have more positive, meaningful impacts.
The mammoth, though, is not the only creature in the midst of such a resurrection exercise — the Tasmanian tiger, an Australian marsupial believed to have gone extinct since the 1930s, and the dodo, a large flightless bird from the island of Mauritius that died out in the 17th century, are also part of de-extinction projects. These projects offer the false hope of undoing the excesses of humanity and bringing back creatures whose extinction humans helped bring about without addressing the causes of their disappearance. Without a protected area to return to and, more importantly, with climate change decimating the requisite atmospheric conditions, de-extinct animals might be relegated to zoo curiosities or being exotic pets. At a time when scientists are under attack from governments that are looking to cut costs — the US
administration, for instance, has threatened cuts that span all scientific disciplines — and the world is witnessing the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history, preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should
be the priority instead of playing Victor Frankenstein.