12/2/2023 0 Comments Big dodo meaning![]() ![]() “We’re living in the old era of conservation right now,” says Chi. He points to the startup’s work on a vaccine for fatal elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus (EEHV) as one example where conservation could still benefit from Colossal’s work, even if it isn’t able to bring back the mammoth. “In the process we’re going to be working out some compelling things about life broadly and individual species in depth,” says Tom Chi, founder of At One Ventures, a climate-focused venture capital fund and Colossal investor. Resurrecting the dodo will mean working on its closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon, which lives on islands and coastlines in Southeast Asia.īut the hope is that these projects could have benefits far beyond single species. “Right or wrong, the dodo is the symbol of manmade extinction,” Shapiro says. In 2022, Shapiro produced the first complete dodo genome. The dodo work builds on research by Beth Shapiro, lead paleogeneticist at Colossal and a professor at UC Santa Cruz. Scientists can then breed these birds with the hope of eventually producing a bird that resembles the dodo. The bird will then grow up with egg or sperm cells that contain the genetic recipe for a functional dodo-or something approaching that. Instead, Colossal plans to edit cells that become egg or sperm cells, and then implant those into developing bird embryos. Birds present some unique challenges to de-extinction because it’s much harder to access the genetic information inside bird embryos. “There’s a risk of losing sight of what the real problem is that really needs to be solved,” Sandler says.Īs well as these thorny philosophical questions, Colossal also has to contend with the scientific challenge of resurrecting an extinct bird species. What isn’t clear is whether these new tools actually address why we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event, or if they just dangle a technological panacea for the problem, which is that humans are consuming much more of the world’s resources than they should. “There’s a new set of potential tools here, a new set of possibilities and opportunities,” Sandler says. But the flow of money toward biotech might be subtly reshaping how we think about conservation: Is it about leaving things alone, or modifying species-like Colossal intends to do-so they can survive a world that humans have created? The flow of resources into this sector may change the sorts of conservation practices people engage in, says Ronald Sandler, professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University in Boston. It’s clear that the potential for new spin-outs is part of why venture capitalists are excited about de-extinction. Maybe we’ll just license those technologies or whatnot.” “But whether we’ll spin out an IVF company is unclear. “We think this has massive applications across all IVF,” he says. He’s also excited by some of the work that Colossal’s embryology team is working on. One is a way for scientists to rapidly analyze gene-edited cells and check that the edits work as expected. The founder has a few other ideas for potential revenue streams. And that’s when the company starts to look a lot less like a firm hellbent on one crazy idea and much more like a traditional biotech startup. While it has significant backing from its funders, Colossal will also have to find some other way to make money. Resurrecting the dodo presents a whole different set of challenges, which we’ll get into later, so you can expect that project to take a good while too. In 2021 George Church told Stat News that the project to resurrect the mammoth might take six years to produce a calf, and another 10 to 12 for that calf to reach sexual maturity. The US conservation nonprofit the Sierra Club, by way of comparison, raised about $100 million in donations in 2021.īut de-extincting the dodo won’t happen overnight. That’s big money in the conservation space-particularly for a biotech startup with just 83 employees. Whether creating a functional dodo technically counts as de-extinction is up for debate, but the project has piqued investors’ interest. Along with the dodo news, Colossal announced a $150 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $225 million. ![]()
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