$100,000 for elephant mammoth
PayPal Founder Invested $100,000 in Mammoth Revival
Despite the investment, the prospects of the project continue to remain unclear
Natalia Pelezneva, Naked Science
The American billionaire and one of the founders of the PayPal payment system, Peter Thiel, invested $ 100,000 in the work of the laboratory of Harvard geneticist George Church (George McDonald Church). This happened back in 2015, but it has only been widely announced now. The news appeared in a new book by writer Ben Mezrich, dedicated to the history of the project involving the revival of the mammoth. George Church confirmed that Thiel had indeed funded his work. The investment was reported by the Guardian newspaper (Mammoth task: billionaire Peter Thiel funded effort to resurrect woolly beast).
This is one of Thiel's many major investments. One of his most famous investments is $500,000, which became the first external investment in the development of Facebook in 2004.
Church and his colleagues have been working on the project for several years. According to Church, there is a fundamental possibility to bring woolly mammoths back to life. Technically, the animal will be more of an "elephant with mammoth features", since the basis for it will be elephant skin cells.
DNA has been preserved in the remains of mammoths found in permafrost. Thanks to the work of several groups of scientists, its nucleotide sequences were able to be "read" and compared with the DNA sequences of modern elephants. So, scientists have identified genes associated with the main features of the mammoth: a thick fat layer, thick hair and a characteristic blood composition. Using this information, it is possible to modify elephant cells so as to obtain an embryo with the characteristic features of a mammoth.
According to Church, his team managed to introduce 45 mammoth-specific genes into the cells of Asian elephants. This year, geneticists announced that they are ready to create an embryo using the CRISPR/Cas9 genome "editing" technology. Since the Asian elephant is a rare animal, scientists do not consider it possible to carry an embryo by an elephant. They propose to construct an artificial uterus for this. Not so long ago, a tool of this type was created for sheep.
However, what are the chances of the project becoming a reality? Many scientists are skeptical of Church's work. The main complaint is that the achievements of the "mammoth" project are widely covered in the press, but are practically not presented in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In many interviews, the geneticist states that the results will be published soon, but this does not happen. Paleoanthropologist John Hawkes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison did not find among the works of Church and his colleagues any research in any way related to mammoths or elephants (How mammoth cloning became fake news).
Nevertheless, the two-year term of work has been announced, and the scientific community can only wait for the results or their absence.
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03.07.2017