NBC News gets the woolly mammoth story badly wrong

I’ve posted quite a bit on the futility of attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth via genetic engineering. In my view, it’s close to a scam that deludes the public about what the geneticists really intend to produce, which, as Dr Tori Herridge at the University of Sheffield calls it, is simply “an elephant in a fur coat”. For my posts on this debacle, inspired by conversations with Matthew Cobb, go here. But there are two other useful references that Matthew provided, with links:

An extract from his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

and

A Vox article dealing with this mishigas.

As I watched NBC News last night, I was upset to see that NBC had also bought the story, selling it as the program’s final “There’s good news tonight” upbeat story. You can watch it below, but do it today as they replace the news each day. Click on the screenshot below and start the segment at 18:29 (turn up the sound using the icon at the left bottom of the screen):

First, Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm says that the company aims, besides producing mammoths, to  “return balance to ailing ecosystems.” That is ridiculous. Is the tundra ailing because of the absence of mammoths, and, if so, will a couple of elephants in fur coats, not adapted to that ecosystem, cure it? Which ecosystem will the dodos “cure”?

He adds, misleadingly, “We actually took the genes that made a mammoth a mammoth, mapped them to mice, and then in only one month we produced living, healthy mice.”  He doesn’t mention the huge mortality in this experiment, nor that they didn’t REALLY use mammoth genes, but mice genes that had a few DNA bases changed to the mammoth version (As I recall, they changed I think only three bases in seven mouse genes.) There was no attempt to insert full mammoth genes into mice, and they really couldn’t because they’d have to insert the control regions, too.

Lamm’s statement is flat wrong, and misleads the listener into thinking that they put mammoth hair genes into mice, making the mice “woolly.” In fact, as I pointed out before, the wooliest of all the mice had no mammoth-informed DNA in it. There is not the slightest indication that the lipid-related gene they put in the mice will increase their ability to withstand cold.

Lamm also neglects to mention the difficulty of getting entire mammoth chromosomes into the egg of an Asiatic elephant, nor the impossibility of constructing the Volkswagen-sized artificial elephant uteruses that would be needed to grow up the “mammothy” embryos to birth.

Finally, in view of the futility of this project, another Colossal officer says that their endeavors have inspired children to love science, and perhaps to save the environment. That’s the Hail Mary call of a dying project.  Note that they project the production of the first mammoth (again, just an “elephant in a fur coat”  for 2028. Only three more years! Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to put a giant fur coat onto an Asiatic elephant and then usher several of these garbed pachyderms to the tundra?

There are many changes–probably millions–necessary to convert an Asiatic elephant to a woolly mammoth, including those affecting behavior and metabolism. They will not accomplish such a conversion. Nor will they accomplish it with the dodo nor the thylacine. But Colossal talks a good game, as you see, and they’ve pulled the wool (pardon the pun) over the eyes of the public and of many credulous journalists. Shame on NBC News for not doing due diligence.