Bully for woolies!

There are so many terrible potential outcomes associated with global warming, it's hard to know where to begin. Equatorial climates becoming uninhabitable. Oceans rising and swamping coastal cities. More frequent, more violent storms everywhere. Economic upheaval. The extinction of treasured animal species (c.f., polar bears). 

No end to the bad things on the horizon.

But if Colossal, a Boston startup (also located in Dallas and Austin), has anything to do with it, we'll soon see de-extinction. And they're starting with the woolly mammoth. 

Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier. (Source: Colossal)

Well, good luck with the bit about making humanity more human, but I'm absolutely down with the return of the wooly mammoth. 

How great is it that their proof of concept is going to be such a cutie-pie of an animal?

Colossal is the brainchild of Ben Lamm, a serial tech entrepreneur, and George Church, a Harvard geneticist who was behind the Personal Genome Project and who is a professor at Harvard's brilliantly named Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

The duo intends to develop a new critter that's similar to the woolly mammoth - which has been extinct for 10,000 years or so (not long in terms of non-personal historic, geologic time: we really just missed them). The new creature on the block will be a genetically engineered version of currently endangered Asian elephants, a group being wiped out by herpes and by humans. (Hmmm. Colossal may want to rethink that bit about wanting to make humanity more human. Maybe making us less human would be a better route to take.)

The thinking is to breed a version of the Asian elephant that will be hardy enough to stand up to Siberian temperatures, and that won't succumb to herpes. The reengineered elephants are going to look pretty much like woolly mammoths. Once the herds of these new woolies are "rewilded" back into the Arctic, the thought is that they'll be able to both give the world back an interesting (and way cute) animal AND, the bigger bonus, "slow global warming by slowing the melting of the premafrost, where methane is currently trapped."

How's this going to happen?

 If these revived woolly mammoths eventually repopulate the Arctic, they would take down small trees and help repopulate the grasses they thrive on, Church said. Those grasses reflect sunlight better than the dark trunks of the conifer trees that live there. In addition, the woolly mammoths tamp down the snow, making it less insulating.

Those grasses would cool the ecosystem, in turn reducing the release of trapped methane gas from melting permafrost, a major contributor to global warming. (Source: CNBC)

The idea behind this has been kicking around for years, but Colossal is just coming into existence thanks to $15M of seed money that's being pumped in.

The cast of investors is pretty interesting.

The Winklevoss Twins, having been deprived of their right to become billionaires but evildoer Mark Zuckerberg, are in. So's Richard Garriott, who obviously has money to burn. During the aughts he forked over $30M to travel to the International Space Station as a tourist. 

My favorite investor is none other than Tony Robbins. Who says that self-promotion and self-help guruism doesn't pay?

The company anticipates that the first woolies could be ready to start tamping down the tundra in as few s six years. From there, they'll use their science and technology for other conservation projects. 

"Beyond the amazement of ‘de-extinction’ becoming real, proving the technology with de-extinction is only the beginning. These same technologies will be able to solve a huge array of human problems,” Garriott told CNBC. “Synthetic biology will allow us to create new life forms that can address massive problems, from oil and plastic cleanup to carbon sequestration and much more. Solving tissue rejection and artificial wombs will go on to help improve and extend life for all humans.”

I'm all for solving human problems, and God knows there's a "huge array" of them. And I'm more than convinced that private enterprise is as likely to save us from ourselves as anything the government is going to do. (Not that I'm not all for the government working aggressively to stand up to the existential threat that global warming presents. It's just that I don't think very much can or will be done until businesses step up and step in. Once they explain that bad things are happening, that more will happen, and that there's a "huge array" of economic problems attached, global warming deniers may smarten up and we can finally take action.) 

So YAY, Colossal! I hope your success is colossal, and that the Winklevoss twins become richer than Zuck. I don't even mind Tony Robbins making a buck. Actually, this way seems a lot less slick and sleazy than how he's made his fortune to date. 

And extending the life of humans is fine by me, too. Just so they don't make it extend forever. 

More wooly mammoths are one thing. A raft of 200 year old sucking up resources is another.

Meanwhile, put me down as someone looking forward to the return of the woolly mammoth. Bully for woolies!