scientists want to create a hybrid animal half mammoth half elephant

A team of American researchers announces that they are about to revive a mythical animal: the mammoth. Even if the creature they plan to give birth to is a hybrid between elephant and mammoth, it would have 44 genes from the animal that disappeared almost 12,000 years ago. Enough to make this animal more resistant to the cold, and allow it to migrate to the Arctic, where it could play an important role in the fight against climate change.

Novelists and filmmakers are not alone in wanting to revive missing animals. While in Jurassic Park John Hammond had managed to give birth to dinosaurs, today is a species a little less ancient, certainly, but just as extinct, that scientists are trying to revive. And this time, it's not a fiction.

Researchers at Harvard University in the United States have just announced their project - a priori a bit crazy -  to resuscitate the mammoth . Or almost ... It would be more like a hybrid animal , half mammoth, half elephant. A creature devoid of defenses, but endowed with the 44 mammoth genes preserved for millennia in the ice of the Arctic, and found recently. " My goal is not to bring the mammoth back to life, it is to revive its genes and show that they work.We have 44 mammoth genes that have been resurrected," says Professor George Church, the geneticist at the head of the project.

The goal of the scientist: to allow the animal to withstand a harsher climate than the current elephants, and migrate to the North, and even, why not, to the Arctic, where he could act to try to stop rising temperatures.

A weapon against global warming

The ice continent is in fact under increasing pressure from climate change,  which favors the inexorable melting of the ice that covers it , and which, in the long term, risks ending the permafrost, the part of the ground frozen throughout the year. . The most dramatic consequence of this thaw would be a massive release of methane, described as a real "time bomb" by the scientific community.

This greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide - the famous CO2 - could indeed be emitted during the decomposition of organic matter present under the ice cap. As a result, global warming could increase even more and thus cause a kind of "runaway" of rising temperatures.

It is on this point that hypothetical hybrid mammoths could play a crucial role. By colonizing the Arctic, they would indeed help to pack the snowpack, and thus allow the winter cold to penetrate better the soil, and thus to ensure that it is kept frozen all year round.

An ally for the protection of elephants

Beyond these climatic considerations, another aspect related to the environment also motivates the scientists in their incredible attempt: that of the protection of the elephants. These mammals, poached for their tusks , would probably be a little less attractive to hunters if they did not have their precious incisors. This is why researchers have modified some of the animal's genes to reduce its defenses to their strictest minimum.

It's been 11 years since the team of scientists worked on this project. After more than a decade of effort, they seem poised to succeed, and plan to publish the results of their research in the coming months. Seeing the Arctic invaded by hybrid mammoths, however, is not yet for tomorrow ...

The experiments of the researchers are indeed in their infancy. In particular, they face a major difficulty: that of creating an artificial uterus in which to implant a potential hybrid mammoth embryo. This technique should initially be implemented on mice, before being tested on larger and larger animals, and end, who knows, the mammoth.

" The most difficult part we face now is to test all these genes that we have created, which requires at least one embryogenesis (the development of an embryo), so since we do not want to interfere with the reproductive potential existing elephant females, we try to do it in vitro in the laboratory, " explains Professor George Church. If he succeeds one day, let's hope for the scientist that his story does not end like Michael Crichton's novel ...


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