Elephant Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells: How Much Should We Focus on Today? The Case of the Woolly Mammoth

“There are so many species going extinct today. We’re not going to be able to help any of them if we’re thinking about the woolly mammoth. We should focus on the species today. In terms of focus, living animals are where our focus should be, according to Mastromonaco. It’s a distraction.

“What I find troubling is bringing back some sort of a surrogate that is part- mammoth, part-elephant,” said Joseph Bennett, an associate professor of biology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. “Bringing that back as something that would somehow be portrayed as conservation would be a difficult sell on my part.”

“We’re very, very excited that we have derived the first elephant induced pluripotent stem cells,” said Eriona Hysolli, who heads Colossal’s mammoth project. “These cells will benefit the elephant conservation community just as much as being engineered to bring back the woolly mammoth.”

“This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project,” said George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded Colossal Biosciences in Dallas.

The achievement is still far from the ultimate goal of creating herds of giant hairy beasts roaming in the wild again, but Church said it’s a major step. “This isn’t really asking Neil if he plans to go to Mars; it’s more about the point he just landed on the moon on Apollo 11,” Church said.

There are only an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants in the wild, so access to these animals—and particularly their sperm and eggs—is extremely limited. Colossal needs the cells if they are going to bring their mammoths to life. “With so few fertile female elephants, we really don’t want to interfere with their reproduction at all. We want to do it independently,” says George Church, a Harvard geneticist and Colossal co-founder.

Creating a woolly mammoth to save endangered species from global warming: What is going on in releasing a herd into the Arctic tundra?

“What are you going to get out of this?” asked Karl Flessa, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona. “First of all, I think you’re going to get a bit of a freak show in a zoo somewhere. And then if you’re going to release a herd into the Arctic tundra, is that herd going to go marching off to its second extinction in the face of global warming?”

Some people don’t like the idea because there will be only one lonely elephant. That’s not our intention,” Church said. “It’s to have them fully socialized in large herds. Some people think it’s a bad idea because it takes money away from conservation efforts, when in fact we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

Church said the woolly mammoth program could lead to new ways to protect endangered species like Asian elephants by expanding their habitat and helping scientists study the animals.

It opens up new possibilities for saving species’ genetic diversity, prevention of extinction and contributing to the survival of the species. “There is an enormous amount of potential.”

The biology of elephants and the peto’s paradox: How much cancer is caused by genetic mutations? A study by Hiraku Yamanaka

The unique biology of elephants could be the reason for this difficulty, according to a researcher who was not involved in the Colossal study. Elephants are an example of the Peto’s paradox, which is that very large animals have low rates of cancer. Since cancer can be caused by genetic mutations that accumulate as cells divide, you’d expect that animals with 100 times more cells than humans would have a much higher risk of cancer.

iPSCs are cells that behave like stems cells in an embryo, and Colossal created them. Embryonic stem cells have the ability to give rise to all kinds of different cell types that make up organisms—a quality scientists call pluripotency. Most cells, however, lose this ability as the organism develops. Human skin, for instance, can’t spontaneously turn into muscle or cells that line the inside of the intestine.

Yamanaka showed in 2006 that mature cells could be taken and turned into a new type of cell called a pluripotent state. Yamanaka used mice cells for his research, but later scientists used iPSCs for many different species, including the northern white rhinoceros, which is functionally extinct.