A little more than two years ago, serial tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm reached out to renowned Harvard geneticist George Church. The two met in Boston, at Church’s lab, and that fruitful conversation was the catalyst for the start-up Colossal, which is announcing its existence Monday.
The start-up’s goal is ambitious and a little bit crazy: It aims to create a new type of animal similar to the extinct woolly mammoth by genetically engineering endangered Asian elephants to withstand Arctic temperatures.
It could take as little as six years for Colossal to create a calf, Church told CNBC…“Our goal is in the successful de-extinction of inter-breedable herds of mammoths that we can leverage in the rewilding of the Arctic. And then we want to leverage those technologies for what we’re calling thoughtful, disruptive conservation…” Lamm told CNBC.
…Proving the technology with de-extinction is only the beginning. These same technologies will be able to solve a huge array of human problems,” Richard Garriott told CNBC. “Synthetic biology will allow us to create new life forms that can address massive problems, from oil and plastic cleanup to carbon sequestration and much more. Solving tissue rejection and artificial wombs will go on to help improve and extend life for all humans.”
Cripes! I’d like to live another 80 years or so just to see the products of future genetic engineering coming to fruition.
Eideard 
Polar bears could vanish by the end of the century, scientists predict : The dramatic disappearance of summer Arctic ice will have a lasting impact. https://www.livescience.com/arctic-sea-ice-polar-bear-extinction-warning
On Aug. 9, a landmark report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a stark warning that Earth is expected to reach a critical threshold: a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) due to climate change within the next 20 years. A draft third section of the IPCC report leaked to the Spanish publication CTXT warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years if global heating is to remain within 1.5 C.
The researchers published their findings Sept. 2 in the journal Earth’s Future.
“Defining the “Ice Shed” of the Arctic Ocean’s Last Ice Area and Its Future Evolution” https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EF001988
“Can we revive the woolly mammoth? Should we?” (Podcast) https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2021/12/20/can-we-revive-the-woolly-mammoth-should-we
See also “World’s oldest DNA sequenced from million-year-old mammoths” (Feb 2021) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/18/worlds-oldest-dna-sequenced-from-million-year-old-mammoths
7AM MST, tomorrow morning, 21st