Monterrey.– Ben Lamm and George Church are the founders of one of the most ambitious projects of all time: to bring back extinct species more than 10,000 years ago, such as the mammoth, highlighted the digital newspaper El Español.
Lamm, founder of the Artificial Intelligence software company, Hypergiant, contacted Church to learn about the projects he was working on and one of them gave rise to the Dallas-based startup Colossal, which has already achieved the unicorn level, entrepreneurship It has a valuation of over one billion dollars.
Church is one of the parents of the Human Genome Project.
The project began in 2021 and was kept secret for more than a year until it was announced at the end of 2022.
Lamm was recently interviewed by the D+I publication, here is an excerpt.
D+I. How are you going to achieve the project without turning the world into a Jurassic Park?
Lamm. We hear the Jurassic Park comparison a lot, but we’re not making weird DNA combinations. The only similarity is that we are “de-extinguishing” some of the genes of these species.
We searched for the closest phylogenetic relative to the extinct animal. In this case, the closest relative to mammoths would be the Asian elephant, they match genetically at 99.6 percent. We conducted comparative genomics to understand the differences between the mammoth and the Asian elephant from a genetic perspective.
Once that part is complete, we will be able to identify the genes that we want to “de-extinct” and introduce them into the genetic architecture that we are building.
D+I. Would we be facing a mammoth like the one that became extinct 10,000 years ago or a hybrid?
Lamm. It would be a hybrid. The objective is that the animal can fill the ecological void left by its absence in the environment.
For example, if we create version 2.0 of the mammoth, it will have all the basic phenotypes and its entire core, so it will physically look like a mammoth, but we need it to be able to survive in today’s environment.
D+I. What are the chances of success in reviving the mammoth?
Lamm. We have a 100 percent chance of being successful, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. We have all the technologies we need for this.
D+I. When can we expect Colossal to get his first species revived?
Lamm. There is a very good chance that before 2028 we could see one of the first extinct animals come back to life.
