There’s no telling what you might encounter in Deep Ellum on a random evening.
A fight spilling out from one of the bars onto the street maybe. Perhaps a man riding his horse into a bar? How about a woolly mammoth?
All three could very well happen in the same night, if the folks at Colossal Biosciences achieve their goals. The company has officially begun their project of trying to de-extinct the long-extinct woolly mammoth, which last walked the Earth 4,000 years ago.
Matt James, Colossal's chief animal officer, told NBC DFW, “We are creating technology that's going to change tomorrow with de-extinction but what's amazing is that those technologies are making a difference to endangered species conservation today.”
Colossal is taking DNA from Asian elephants and DNA recovered from woolly mammoths frozen in the arctic tundra, and using gene editing technology to reengineer the genome of an Asian elephant until it reflects that of a woolly mammoth.
Inside their Deep Ellum labs, they are also working to create artificial wombs to grow a woolly mammoth calf.
Colossal has set a due date for the year 2028.
James said, “When I was offered this position, I was sort of considering my life choices in this amazing opportunity to work at Colossal, my little brother called me and said, ‘Do you understand you could be the first modern human to ever see a woolly mammoth? You could be the first person that's there to take that photo with a mammoth,’ and that opportunity is not lost on me. That privilege is incredible and it’s an amazing driving force.”
Since launching in 2021, Colossal Biosciences has raised $225 million for its research.
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