Thread by @ToriHerridge

News has broken that a new biotech company, Colossal, has been founded with the aim of creating an gene-edited Asian elephant that is tolerant to Arctic conditions.

aka "Mammoth de-extinction"

And so, a personal thread of discovery and opinion

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Colossal's founders are:

🛰️ Entrepreneur Ben Lamm (previously he founded Hypergiant hypergiant.com/company)

🧬 Biomedical researcher George Church (genetics.hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/…)

Colossal's Head of Biological Sciences is:
🔬 Eriona Hysolli, former post-doc w/Church

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I met George & Eriona in 2018 in Yakutsk, where
I found myself in the awkward position, as a de-extinction sceptic, of supplying them with falcon tubes, sharpies & mammoth bone know-how. I later visited Eriona in the lab at Harvard/MIT

watch here: channel4.com/programmes/mam…
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Those meetings were illuminating for me, and shifted my opinion of mammoth de-extinction as being a cynically-employed PR stunt, rolled out every few years.

At that point I decided George was serious, if overly optimistic, about 'bringing back the mammoth.'

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I also found both George and Eriona to be thoughtful people, driven by scientific curiosity, & also maybe a desire to do the impossible & break boundaries. My overwhelming personal impression was of some hubris, maybe, but tempered with kindness & also a desire to do good
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Then in July this year I was approached by Ben Lamm, and invited to join the advisory board of Colossal.

He knew my opinions on de-extinction, and wanted to ensure they had a diversity of opinions on board. I think that has to be applauded.

I said no.

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I'm not a corporate person, & I prefer to maintain my independence when giving advice.

Colossal's advisory board:
Claire Aldridge
Carolyn Bertozzi
Alta Charo
Joe DeSimone
Elazar Edelman
Helen Hobbs
Michael Hofreiter
Matthew Liao
Vagheesh Narasimhan
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But before I said no, I thought I would re-examine and interrogate some of my opinions on mammoth de-extinction.

In particular, I wanted to ask myself: could there ever be an ethical path to de-extinction?

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Now first up. The elephant in the room.

[and it is an elephant]

This is not de-extinction.

There will be no mammoths on Earth ever again.

If successful, this will be a chimeric elephant. An entirely novel, synthetic, genetically modified organism.

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Colossal is very open about that.

But they, like me here to my shame, are still banging on about 'bringing back the mammoth', & using emotionally-manipulative language like DE-extinction, RE-wilding.

A useful shorthand? Maybe.

But also loaded, &problematic.

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I touched on this in my review on @bonesandbugs's excellent How to Clone a Mammoth

toriherridge.com/2015/08/12/boo…

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The language of rewilding and de-extinction may even cause real harm to conservation efforts. See this by Campagna et al:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

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This might sound like flimflammery, fixating on language when this about science.

But it isn't just about science.

For a minority, maybe, there should be no boundaries to curiosity driven research. But for most, ethical considerations play a role in what & how we research
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And thus the justification for, and framing of, our research is key in establishing an ethical framework.

Who will be impacted?

Who will benefit?

Who will be harmed?

What will those impacts be?

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In mammoth de-extinction...

*AHEM* I mean synthetic cold-adapted elephant GMOs a la Colossal...

the stated justification is primarily about the potential ecosystem/biodiversity & climate-mitigating benefits of introducing woolly 🐘 GMOs into Siberia.

So, how does this⚖️?
🧵/15

Oh crikey, it's kiddie pick up time... I will return ANON.

so where were we?

Ah yes, the ⚖️ between the potential benefits of GMO Arctic-adapted elephants vs the costs associated with its creation.

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Could this new chimeric elephant perform the same ecological role as a wooly mammoth?

Lets explore...

1. elephants are ecosystem engineers & affect carbon stocks; likely this will also be true in the Arctic
nature.com/articles/s4156…
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2. It has also been argued that the loss of mammoths, and other Pleistocene megaherbivores fundamentally altered these Arctic ecosystems.

See this excellent review by @JacquelynGill nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

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whether this was the main driver behind the shift from the vast open grasslands of the Mammoth Steppe to today's bogs, dwarf shrubs & patches of evergreen forest is unclear.

e.g. Climate modelling alone can predict biome shifts: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
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[this, by the way, feeds into another aspect of the ethics of the debate -- the potential role of humans in mammoth extinction, and whether endeavours of this sort are 'righting a wrong'. But I don't want to get sidetracked to that just yet.]

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oh dear my 2 year old just wandered in to say he wants to help me. xxxxxxxxxxcc`c````

Thanks P, that was very helpful

But lets just run with the argument for a while, & take it as given [it's not, btw!] that mammoths were vital to the persistence of the Mammoth Steppe, & had they never gone extinct we would be looking at a very different kind of Artic (beyond the obvious mammoth presence)
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Why is that important, beyond the argument that this putative ecosystem is somehow more natural (by which read 'right' in many people's opinion)?

Well, there are the potential climatic feedback effects, that may help in the current climate crisis.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…
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>we break for bedtime duties<

Okay, so given all that, let's get to some numbers. How many mammoths would it take to achieve these effects on Arctic ecosystems?

Well, at Peak Mammoth (TM), 21,000 years ago, it is estimated there were 200 MILLION mammoths in Eurasia

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journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…

That is a lot of mammoths! And of course we are then back to the tricky question of *when* in the subsequent decline in mammoth numbers was the tipping-point reached in terms of Mammoth Steppe maintenance?

A question I don't have an answer to -- please chip in if you do!

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But, of course you don't need to go the whole hog to make a difference. Every little helps when we are dealing with the climate crisis. So what about at the other end of the scale, the 20 sq km @PleistocenePark proposed as a potential home for our GM Arctic elephants?

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@PleistocenePark Based on the density of bones at a site called Duvanniy Yar, downriver of Pleistocene Park, it has been estimated the average density of mammoths in that region of Siberia 42k-13k years ago was 1/km^2.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

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So, if you are after recreating a functionally equivalent population of mammoths, even in a small area, you are talking about 20 mammoths.

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[that's still 17 shy of a Carthaginian Elephantry, for those of you worried about weaponised war mammoths after this foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/04/woo…]

quick back of the envelope, conservatively we can say that 20 GM Arctic elephants -- it really isn't as catchy as mammoths, is it?!-- are on the cards. Any less wouldn't approximate the functional role of mammoths in the place they're mostly likely to be released.

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I've no idea what the carbon capture impact of this will be, because as far as I know nobody does, but African elephant studies don't show a clear net gain in carbon sequestration.

e.g.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

The Arctic is of course different, as things rot more slowly.

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And this is the critical thing. The case, in my eyes, has yet to be made for (i) the functional role of mammoths in the mammoth steppe (they clearly had one, but the parameters are poorly understood), (ii) what actual impact, per mammoth, we can expect to see on climate.🧵/30

Once we have those numbers, we can start to get a sense of the true magnitude of the task ahead for 'mammoth de-extinction' if the agenda is to help mitigate the climate crisis.

Especially given the rate of warming in the Arctic: public.wmo.int/en/media/news/…
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elephant pregnancies are 22months. It's another 10 years or so after birth before we have full-sized adults, and I would expect at least one adult to be needed for a viable herd.

12 years minimum from first implantation before the environmental impact even begins.

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I forgot to mention this above, & it isn't fair to miss it out. Experiments at Pleistocene Park have suggested that winter temps for soil in grazed areas are 10-15oC lower than in ungrazed regions.

That would definitely help slow permafrost melt!

[NB achieved without 🦣]
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So, my balance sheet FOR the ecological case for "mammoth de-extinction":

⚖️ a LOT of unknowns, but that includes unknown benefits

⚖️ 20 🧬🐘 needed to create functional analogue at Pleistocene Park (1st step)

⚖️ many more 🧬🐘 to create environmental climate/impact

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So here is where I considered the costs.

I'm not a religious person, & don't have a fundamental objection to gene-editing as 'playing god'. Many will do, and I think that is a valid viewpoint that should be listened to, but I am not going to discuss that here (much)

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As mentioned above, there are the general concerns over de-extinction efforts, nicely summarised in this @IUCN report:

researchgate.net/publication/31…

but specifically for this case I want to weigh-up the immediate costs to the research participants.

AKA the elephants involved in experimentation.

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To be continued tomorrow. I am knackered and need to go to bed!

I will just leave you with a little conundrum: if there is even a small chance that our actions might do good, are we morally obligated to try?

Continued here!

https://twitter.com/toriherridge/status/1437746215437971457