De-extinction company plans to bring dire wolf and woolly mammoth tech to Australia
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Texas-based Colossal Biosciences announced Wednesday, Aug. 20, that they’re officially expanding down under. The company is launching Colossal Australia, which will focus on reviving extinct species, like the thylacine, and restoring the ecosystem.
“Australia actually has the highest rate of mammal extinctions of any country in the world,” said Andrew Pask Ph.D. Pask, who has worked as an advisor to the company for years, will now serve as the company’s chief biology officer and will oversee Colossal Australia.
“It’s just an absolutely fascinating job that does everything from sort of real conservation in the field, to real conservation in the lab and everything in between,” said Pask about the new role.
Pask leads the Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research Lab (TIGGR) at the University of Melbourne. The TIGGR lab has partially been funded by Colossal for several years. As part of the expansion, the lab will become part of Colossal Australia.
Saving Australia
According to a press release, all Colossal-affiliated research conducted at the University of Melbourne will now fall under Colossal Australia.
“We’ve been working on the Tasmanian Tiger, you know, trying to bring this, this incredibly iconic marsupial species back. It was this really unusual marsupial apex predator, and we have no other species like it, so it played a very important role in the landscape,” Pask said about their work.
Other efforts have focused on the Northern Quoll. “[It’s] this little marsupial species that is going to go extinct in the next 10 years, and that’s because it eats an invasive pest species,” Pask said.
The company plans to use genetic engineering to alter the Quoll’s DNA to make it immune to the poison released by the invasive species, the cane toad.
“It’s just one single gene in their genome that we can edit, and that makes our cane toad completely resistant then to cane toe toxin,” Pask said that then the Quoll can help stop the spread of the invasive species and the destruction it causes.
“We have to save so many different animals at the moment because of this huge loss of biodiversity we’re seeing globally,” Pask said.
The ethics of de-extinction
The idea of altering the genetics of living species to re-create extinct ones has drawn criticisms in recent years.
“When you create something, like a dire wolf or wooly mammoth, what you’re creating is something that looks like one, but isn’t actually one, right?” said Jay Odenbaugh, a professor and philosopher at Lewis and Clark College.
Odenbaugh has studied the ethics of de-extinction technology, and has written papers on the subject. He worries that the lack of regulation on the science is concerning and that genetic engineering could cause animals to suffer during the development.
“If you want to do animal research in the university, you have to go through a variety of protocols,” Odenbaugh said. “When you’re doing in a private corporation context, you don’t have those same hoops that you have to jump through to show that what you’re doing is ethical.”
Odenbaugh argues that altering genetics and creating species with similar traits to extinct ones is “inauthentic.”
He’s also concerned about using the tech in Australia. “In the history of Australia, there have been a lot of attempts to control one species by introducing another, and often that leads to increasingly bad problems, right?”
Pask said to not use the technology could be worse.
“I think morally and ethically, we’re obliged that we just have to do this now. This is the only solution we have to building really resilient ecosystems that will be able to thrive again and hopefully stabilize our planet once more,” Pask said. “We have to embrace these genetic technologies to bring back the diversity that we’ve lost.”
