Jurassic Patent: How Colossal Biosciences is attempting to own the “woolly mammoth”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/16/1115154/jurassic-patent-how-colossal-biosciences-is-attempting-to-own-the-woolly-mammoth/?utm_medium=tr_social&utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement
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Colossal Biosciences not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth—it wants to patent it, too.
MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA.
Colossal, which calls itself “the de-extinction company,” hopes to use gene editing to turn elephants into a herd of mammoth look-alikes that could be released in large nature preserves in Siberia. There they’d trample the ground in a way that Colossal says would maintain the permafrost, keeping global-warming gases trapped and offering the chance to earn carbon credits.
Ben Lamm, the CEO of Colossal, said in an email that holding patents on the animals would “give us control over how these technologies are implemented, particularly for managing initial releases where oversight is critical.”
Lame ChatGPT Ai slop instead of an editorial illustration
I mean… They’re not actually making a wooly mammoth, they’re trying to make an elephant with characteristics similar enough that it can serve the same ecological niche in tundra (which will help maintain permafrost and stop methane off gassing). So they’re trying to patent the specific genome changes they make, which makes sense, it’s similar to patenting the flavor-saver tomatoe or round up resistent corn. It’s not like they’re trying to patent the actual wooly mammoth genome.
Colossal lost all possible credibility when they claimed that their slightly modified gray wolves are direwolves.
I still don’t understand why, the habitat they lived in doesn’t really exist anymore. What are they going to do with them?
Ever since that fawning new york times article and the claim that they made direwolves, they shouldn’t be trusted to put ethics over profit.
Michael Crichton would have loved this, it’s literally the plot of *Next*