"You will never ever see a living woolly mammoth," geneticist Adam Rutherford writes. "While this is an obvious truth to most geneticists, zoologists and mammoth experts, the endless promises that you might get to meet an extant version of this very-much extinct elephantid apparently necessitate me typing it. The latest on the conveyor belt of mammoth resurrection stories came... in the form of a slightly hairy mouse. Colossal Biosciences, the US company behind the 'woolly mouse' and ensuing media frenzy, published a non-peer-reviewed paper in which it has genetically engineered a mouse to express a gene that relates to mammoth hair, resulting in a mouse with slightly longer hair than normal." Rutherford adds, "This unusually hirsute mouse was not created for any... noble purpose but rather as a farcical little sideshow for the fantasy that one day Colossal will breed a living mammoth." Rutherford says the venture won't work and recommends directing "scientific excitement and energies towards real problems, things on which millions of lives depend, rather than on this mammoth circus of macabre fantasy and moral bankruptcy". The Guardian

 

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