CIA Backs Tech By Startup That Wants To De-Extinct Woolly Mammoth

You may have heard that scientists are hoping to revive woolly mammoths and even Tasmanian tigers. The company with this ambition is Dallas-based Colossal, which is wholly focused on “disruptive conservation and preservation” to “de-extinct” long-lost animals.

A concept such as this, although controversial, would most definitely garner interest, and Colossal’s list of investors features some, well, pretty colossal names. Among them, as spotted by The Intercept, is In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm founded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to support startups with powerful implications for national security.

Accordingly, In-Q-Tel isn’t so concerned about bringing woolly mammoths back as it is drawn by the promise of Colossal’s technology. Besides spy technology and weapons, CIA is setting its sights on empowering biotechnology services, including DNA sequencing. Colossal is just one of several startups equipped with this prowess that In-Q-Tel is funding.

Colossal plans to revive extinct creatures with CRISPR gene editing, often described as a pair of “genetic scissors” to snip off unwanted areas of DNA and replacing them with desirable genes. The woolly mammoths of the future would actually be hybrids grown from modified skin cells of Asian elephants, whereas the thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger) would return with the help of cells extracted from museum samples and century-old genomes.

“Why the interest in a company like Colossal, which was founded with a mission to ‘de-extinct’ the wooly mammoth and other species? Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability,” In-Q-Tel explains in a new blog post.

Colossal’s co-founder Ben Lamm tells the publication that the flourishing world of biotechnology is a “critical” catalyst in steering the direction of humanity.

And “understanding the code, and learning to read it (DNA sequencing), write it (DNA synthesis) and edit it (using tools like CRISPR)” could solve some of the most pressing global issues, like food security, environmental resuscitation, and equitable healthcare, explains In-Q-Tel.

At the same time, grasping this technology will push the US into a position where it can innovatively tackle problems like climate change and disease, as well as finally set standards for ethical gray areas in biotechnology.

In time, biotechnologists could even unlock capabilities like “programming the physical properties of wood to improve building materials,” “enhancing crop species to tolerate increasingly severe climatic changes,” and “curing human diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, beta thalassemia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and many kinds of cancer.”

“Perhaps more importantly, leadership in biotechnology will allow the US to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards for the use of this technology,” says In-Q-Tel. “How we employ the potentially staggering power of biotechnology to shape the planet and humanity itself will matter as much as our ability to do so.”

[via The Intercept and In-Q-Tel, cover image via Colossal]