Colossal Woolly Mammoth De-Extinction Project

Colossal Laboratories has received $15 million in private funding to do one incredible thing — bring back the woolly mammoth. Extinct for over 3,700 years, Harvard biologist Dr. George Church is leading a research team that has spent eight years developing tools to modify Asian elephant DNA with the goal of creating a mammoth. The mammoth is nearly tangential to Colossal’s larger goal — “de-extinction” and eventually, modifying the human genome. De-extinction involves adding genetic code to currently endangered species with the goal of improving disease resistance and environmental adaptability to increase the odds of survival. While ethical questions and skepticism of the moonshot project abound, it does illustrate the leaps in technology that have been made over the last 40 years.