A professor working on a “de-extinction” project claimed this week that his team’s effort to bring back the woolly mammoth “could happen in a couple of years.”
“Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” said Professor George Church. “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.”
According to The Guardian, “The creature, sometimes referred to as a ‘mammophant’, would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood.”
“The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr,” they explained. “Until now, the team have stopped at the cell stage, but are now moving towards creating embryos – although, they said that it would be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature.”
Professor Church continued to claim that his Harvard team were currently “working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits.”
“[We’re] basically trying to establish embryogenesis in the lab,” he proclaimed. “We already know about ones to do with small ears, sub-cutaneous fat, hair and blood, but there are others that seem to be positively selected.”
As well as “securing an alternative future for the endangered Asian elephant,” Church and his team also claim that the project could help combat “global warming.”
“They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” said Church, explaining how the mammoths could stop “tundra permafrost” from melting and releasing greenhouse gases. “In the summer they knock down trees and help the grass grow.”
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.
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