The Science Is Real and Moving Fast
Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021, has a single audacious goal: resurrect the woolly mammoth. Not a theme park attraction — a living, breathing, cold-adapted elephant that can walk across Siberia and restore the lost grassland ecosystems that once held the permafrost together. They have funding. They have a timeline. They have CRISPR.
Australia's Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab (TIGRR) is working on the Tasmanian tiger — extinct since 1936, but with preserved DNA available. The passenger pigeon project, run by Revive & Restore, is editing living band-tailed pigeon genomes to re-express lost traits. De-extinction isn't theoretical. It's a race.
How CRISPR Makes It Possible
The breakthrough enabling all of this is CRISPR-Cas9 — a molecular tool that allows scientists to edit DNA with surgical precision. Where traditional cloning requires an intact living cell, CRISPR allows researchers to take a closely related living species and edit its genome to express the traits of the extinct one.
For the mammoth, this means taking Asian elephant cells — the mammoth's closest living relative — and editing in cold-adaptation genes recovered from frozen mammoth specimens. The result won't be a perfect mammoth. It'll be a hybrid. But it will carry the ecological function of the animal that disappeared.
Should We Do It? The Ethical Minefield
Even scientists who support de-extinction have serious reservations. Bringing back a species requires more than genetics — it requires habitat, prey, social structure, and learned behaviour. A mammoth raised without other mammoths has no mammoth culture. A thylacine with no parents to teach it hunting is ecologically orphaned from the moment it's born.
And then there's the conservation funding question. Every dollar spent on a spectacular resurrection is a dollar not spent on the thousands of species quietly sliding toward extinction right now. De-extinction is science's most photogenic project. Whether it's its most useful one is a harder conversation.
The Ecological Case For It
- Woolly mammoths maintained the mammoth steppe — a grassland ecosystem that stored more carbon than modern Siberian forest
- Restoring them could slow permafrost melt and reduce Arctic methane release
- The passenger pigeon was a keystone species whose absence reshaped North American forests
- De-extinction isn't nostalgia — it could be climate mitigation at scale
Lucy and Ellie don't land cleanly on one side of this debate. That's the point. Listen and decide where you stand.