Woolly Mammoth Park

'De-extinction', surrogacy, and fertility technology

Our planet is experiencing its 6th mass extinction. The previous five extinctions were triggered by catastrophic natural events like massive volcanic activity or an asteroid strike. This one is caused by one species, humans, through our activities like agriculture, deforestation, extracting minerals, burning fossil fuels, and growing our population from 1 billion in the early 19th century to more than 8 billion currently.

The belief that we can liberate ourselves from the constraints of nature is a powerful one. It started with religious doctrines that promised we could live for ever, transitioning from a material life on earth to a spiritual afterlife in heaven. Nowadays technology is more influential than religion. It, coupled with a capitalist society which depends on growth without end, devours everything, from the natural world to our biology. Increasingly, it lures us into living more of our time on Earth melded to machines in a virtual reality. Gender ideology takes this further, cutting and pasting commodified body parts, and suggesting it is possible to live an exclusively fantasy life on Earth, as a ‘gendered soul’ dissociated from biological reality. All three - religion, technology, and ‘gender’ - come together in the fantasies of transhumanists like Martine Rothblatt. His quest for everlasting life, via the storage of ‘mindfiles’ and digital cloning, is the ultimate disconnection from nature.

Wild mammals have declined by 85% since the emergence of humans. Average global temperatures are already 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, and we can’t help becoming more aware of how this is making storms and floods more frequent and more intense. But, in economies that are organised around growth rather than basic needs, most voters experience the cost of living as a more immediate concern. Reliance on growth encourages us to deny the material reality of limits to growth, particularly when an economy organised around growth can’t actually deliver it. The current infatuation with AI is no solution - it intensifies our addiction to growth and our disconnect from nature.

‘De-extinction’ - the creation of species that are similar to species that have become extinct - is presented as an attempt by humans to replace nature it has destroyed. The term is inaccurate - the process does not restore extinct species. If it works, it is by manufacturing new species that resemble extinct ones. It’s yet another example of humans arrogantly believing that their technology can improve on nature.

Woolly mammoths

The Arctic is warming at a much faster rate than the rest of the planet. One of the main reasons for this is that as permafrost thaws, this releases methane and carbon dioxide from the organic carbon that had been trapped in the frozen ground for millennia.

Nearly 4,000 years ago, woolly mammoths became extinct, Some scientists believe that if it was possible to reintroduce woolly mammoths, they could help keep the stored methane and carbon in the ground, by in winter stamping through the snow to let cold air cool the permafrost and in summer uprooting trees and shrubs to restore the grasses on which they could feed.

Early this century, scientists speculated that it might be possible to clone a woolly mammoth from the bones, tusks and hair that have survived in the permafrost. They hoped to use a cloning technique that had been developed in an attempt to restore the bucardo (Pyrenean Ibex), a species that became extinct in 2000. Biologists had taken tissue from the last surviving bucardo and frozen it. They later extracted DNA from the thawed tissue, and removed the DNA from egg cells that had been harvested from goats. The bucardo DNA was injected into the goat egg cells, and these eggs were developed into embryos and implanted into goat surrogate mothers. After 153 failed attempts, they managed to achieve one live birth. The newborn only lived for a few minutes.

It soon became clear that, even with recently frozen tissue, cloning was ineffective, and that the difficulties would multiply the longer the DNA had been stored, even in the favourable conditions of the Arctic permafrost. The challenge was taken up by a Texas-based company, Colossal Biosciences, which aims to successfully produce an approximation of the woolly mammoth by 2028, using not cloning but newer and more sophisticated techniques involving gene editing (CRISPR-Cas9).

Beth Shapiro, now the Chief Scientific Officer at Colossal, has summarised, here, what the process of attempting to engineer a woolly mammoth would involve. Biologists would extract DNA from mammoth remains buried in the Arctic permafrost, to sequence its genome. Key genes from woolly mammoth DNA, needed for traits enabling it to survive Arctic conditions, would be cut and pasted into the genome of the Asian elephant (a living close relative), to edit what in effect would become a hairy Asian elephant capable of surviving in an Arctic environment. Colossal’s intention is to develop artificial wombs to grow and birth engineered embryos. It recognises that this will take time to develop, though, so in the meantime it plans to make use of elephants as surrogate mothers.

Shapiro makes it clear that the surrogacy process would be horrendous for the elephant who is made to act as a surrogate mother:

“She’s got to take this developing embryo and fetus actually to term. It’s not simple. There’s a very large size difference between the much larger mammoth and the smaller elephant. It’s not known whether it will actually be physically possible for a female elephant to carry a baby mammoth to term without disaster.”

(Beth Shapiro, How to clone a mammoth, TEDx 2013)

Even inserting the engineered embryo into the surrogate mother would be invasive and cruel. As animal protection charity In Defense of Animals has noted, even conventional elephant breeding programmes are invasive - “Artificial insemination requires restraining elephants with chains in order to obtain reproductive materials and impregnate females.”

The elephants in the room

Elephants have qualities that many see as close to human ones. Their existence should make us question the common human assumption that we are superior to other animals, and that the interests of non-human animals can be disregarded:

“Once you arrive at a being like an elephant - large-brained, aware, sensitive to its offspring, very different in outward form to us but quite similar in many other ways - on what grounds should we be convinced of an absolute border?”

(Melanie Challenger, How to be an Animal, 2022)

Sensitivity to offspring is a quality that is particularly marked in elephants. Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy describe an account of the emotional connection between a working elephant and her young in Myanmar, from when it was a British colony:

“A mother elephant with her three-month-old calf was reported trapped in a fast-moving torrent in the Upper Taungdwin River in heavy flood. The calf was screaming in terror. The mother circled it with her trunk, pulling it upstream. But the heavy waters tore the baby away and swept it downstream. The mother swam after it and was able to catch it fifty yards downstream. She picked it up with her trunk, reared up until she was standing on her hind legs, and placed it on a narrow shelf of rock above the flood level. She fell back into the raging torrent and was washed away. The calf stood shivering and terrified, on a ledge just wide enough to hold its feet. Her mother had crossed the river, got up the bank, and was making her way back with tremendous speed calling the whole time. When she saw her calf she stopped roaring and began rumbling, a sound not unlike that of a giant cat.”

(Jeffrey Masson & Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep, 1996)

Masson and McCarthy point out that accounts such as these, which combine anger, love, terror, and relief, suggest a degree of emotional intelligence that is disregarded in most scientific accounts of animal behaviour. And it is certainly ignored when those animals are experimented upon, including being forced to act as surrogate mothers for a genetically-engineered species that humans want them to birth.

Could they, should they?

Scientists are often tempted to embark on risky or ethically dubious experiments to see if they can be done. But, typically, their experiments can only go ahead if a funder spots a profit opportunity.

Colossal’s ostensible aim is to slow global warming. As with all geoengineering projects, if it was successful it would offer a way of addressing climate breakdown without jeopardising capitalism’s growth objective.

Success is far from guaranteed. There are doubts about how feasible it would be, under current environmental conditions, to expect woolly mammoths to transform Arctic habitats. In the early 2010s, when de-extinction of the woolly mammoth was first proposed, it was assumed that the original mammoths had been hunted to death. Recent research , however, suggests that climate change was responsible - not indirectly, by making the Arctic more hospitable for hunters, but directly, turning the grasslands which fed the mammoths into swamps.

Does Colossal think that if it can keep hunters at bay its re-engineered mammoths will thrive? The latest research suggests that they, like their predecessors, would starve to death. So natural reproduction would not work, and de-extinction could only function as a geoengineering project by producing successive generations of mammoths in the lab, and raising them with elephants to be transferred as adults to the Arctic.

TWG Global is the main investor in Colossal Biosciences, having provided $200 million (half the entire funding) in January 2025. Mark Walter, TWG Global’s co-founder and CEO, is also the owner of White Oak Conservation in Florida. This is home to the largest herd of Asian Elephants in the Americas, so Walter’s interest in Colossal comes as no surprise.

Another prominent investor in Colossal is Paris Hilton, one of those celebrities who is ‘famous for being famous’. Hilton has used two surrogate mothers to produce her two children, and she wore a prosthetic ‘baby bump’ during the surrogate mothers’ pregnancies because she “wanted it to feel real”. Maybe her dissociation from biological reality suggests an interest in the fertility technology innovations that could spin off from Colossal’s de-extinction program.

Bob Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and CEO, gave a revealing interview with Goldman Sachs in 2023. Half way through the interview, Lamm is asked about the Colossal business model. He explains that long-term investors are interested in nature-based climate solutions, and also in the potential profitability of carbon markets which could offer companies the opportunity to buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon emissions. Lamm is careful to point out that “we’re not working on humans”, yet he regrets US regulations that stop companies like his working on the gene editing of human reproduction. He emphasises that the technologies with which Colossal is editing the genomes of non-human animals all have “potentially human applications”. Clearly applications of fertility technology to humans are very much in his sights:

“Even some of the innovations along the way to our end states we’re finding massively helpful …. We have a a 17 person group that’s working on artificial wombs, or ex-utero development. Even before you get get to these goal-term artificial wombs, some of the pieces are crazy. We’re finding that our hydrogel microfluidics kind of robotic system is keeping mouse and other embryos significantly healthier than any known IVF type system.”

The technology section on Colossal’s website gives little away about the technologies it is developing, but it says a lot about possible spinoff benefits - “As is true of all things with great off-label uses, Colossal’s discoveries will create and inspire new opportunities that extend far beyond de-extinction, As was the case with Apollo, we fully intend that what we discover and develop will create rippling effects for the next millennia of human advancement.” A list of some of the 2,000 spinoffs from NASA’s Apollo program is followed by a list of possible ’human advancement’ spinoff’s from Colossal’s de-extinction program. These include IVF and Reproductive Technologies.

It remains to be seen whether or not Colossal can re-engineer a woolly mammoth that could survive in the Arctic, and whether this would be an effective nature-based climate solution.

Colossal’s ‘de-extinction’ program will certainly harm the elephants who it will require to act as surrogate mothers. And if its team working on the creation of artificial wombs is successful, it won’t be long before there are demands for the tech sector to take over human reproduction.

Whether or not Colossal could create a woolly mammoth, we, at least, should stop to think if they should.