That was a movie!’ The man who wants to bring the woolly mammoth back to life Ben Lamm of ‘de-extinction’ specialist Colossal Biosciences not only has plans to bring back prehistoric creatures, but also preserve those on the verge of vanishing.
Colossal Biosciences founder Ben Lamm is working to revive the woolly mammoth and the dodo – but he wants to make clear the ending will be different to that of Steven Spielberg’s gory dinosaur epic Jurassic Park.
Instead of filling the gaps in these genetic samples with frog DNA, as Spielberg’s researchers do in the movie, Lamm’s team start with the closest living relative to the beast they are trying to bring back from the dead.
They then take an elephant cell and “engineer in” the specific genes that are essential to the mammoth, using a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, pioneered in Edinburgh, where Dolly the famous sheep was cloned, back in 1996.
Despite his determination to repudiate the ending, Lamm concedes that there are distinct parallels between the fictional process of bringing velociraptors back from the dead in the Jurassic Park films and his eye-catching “de-extinction” projects.
