The World’s First De-Extinction Lab – Come See What’s Happening At Colossal Biosciences

De-extinction – it’s a hefty prospect to get your head around. To some, it means seeing a living animal that shares the cold-adaptive traits of a woolly mammoth – the first in ~13,000 years. For others, it’s the quest to retrieve ancient DNA and build a repository of reference genomes that could one day act like a “modern-day Noah’s Ark” to reverse genetic diversity loss. It can create toxin-resistance in animals exposed to poisonous species introduced by humans, and vaccines to protect young elephants from deadly diseases. Colossal Biosciences is approaching de-extinction in all of these ways and more, with a goal to innovate new technologies that could close the gap on how much investment is needed to achieve meaningful conservation – an area of science that has been, and still is, woefully underfunded. So how, exactly? We wanted to know too, so we visited Colossal HQ in Dallas, Texas, home to the world’s first de-extinction lab and part of a fleet of new ideas Colossal hopes to open up to the public. “We’re trying to do cool things that a lot of people think are a little bit crazy and maybe a little bit risky,” said Chief Science Officer Beth Shapiro to IFLScience. “But if we talk about it out loud and say what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, we can reach out to all different types of people across society and say tell us what you’re worried about and let’s talk about it.” Read more: https://www.iflscience.com/step-inside-the-biovault-colossals-global-approach-to-preserve-10000-species-genetic-diversity-82617 Colossal HQ footage courtesy of Colossal Biosciences