Christina Larson, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The dodo won’t be back anytime soon. Nor the woolly mammoth. But a company developing technologies to resurrect extinct species is attracting the interest of new investors, while scientists wonder if such a feat is possible or makes sense.
Colossal Biosciences first announced plans two years ago to bring back the woolly mammoth. On Tuesday, the company said it also wanted to resurrect the dodo.
“The dodo is a symbol of human-made extinction,” said Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences.
The last dodo, a flightless bird approximately the size of a turkey, was killed in 1681 on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
Created in 2021, the Dallas company announced on Tuesday that it had secured additional funding of US$150 million. It has so far secured US$225 million from a range of investors ― including In-Q-tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm that invests in technology.
The return of the dodo is not expected to generate revenue, Mr Lamm admitted. The tools and techniques the company will develop to achieve this, however, could have other applications, including in human health, he said.
For example, Colossal Technologies is currently examining what is sometimes called an “artificial womb,” he said.
The dodo’s closest relative is the Nicobar pigeon, said Beth Shapiro, a molecular biologist who works at Colossal and has studied the dodo for 20 years.
Her team plans to study the genetic differences between the dodo and the Nicobar pigeon to understand “what are the genes that make a dodo really a dodo,” she said.
The team could then try to modify the cells of a Nicobar pigeon to look a little more like the cells of a dodo. The modified cells could then be placed in the developing eggs of other species, such as chickens and pigeons, to produce birds that would then naturally lay dodo eggs, according to Shapiro.
But because animals are a product of their genes and their environment, which has changed a lot since the 1600s, Ms Shapiro warned that it “is not possible to recreate a 100% faithful copy of something that does not exist anymore”.
Other researchers wonder if we should even try and if the funds spent on reversing extinction shouldn’t instead be used to protect the species that are still among us.
“There’s a real danger in saying that if we destroy nature, then we can put the pieces back together ― because we can’t,” said Stuart Pimm, an unrelated Duke University ecologist. with Colossal.
“And where on Earth could we put a mammoth, except in a cage?” Asked Mr. Pimm, who recalls that the mammoth ecosystem is long gone.
More practically, experts point out that animals from captive breeding programs can struggle to adapt to life in the wild. It helps if they have examples of wild animals of their kind, which obviously wouldn’t be the case with dodos or mammoths, said Boris Worm, an ecologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who is also unrelated to Colossal.
“Preventing species from becoming extinct should be our priority, and in many cases it costs less,” he said.