The two mice on display in Colossal Bioscience’s Dallas headquarters are noticeably woolly, covered in leonine tufts of light hair. Otherwise, they appear to be regular, albeit fancy and Disney-like, mice. But they are a milestone for the company. Colossal, cofounded by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church in 2021, has pledged, to much fanfare, to bring woolly mammoths (“cold-tolerant elephant mammoth hybrids,” actually) back to the Arctic, where their grazing habits might help prevent the thaw of permafrost and the release of greenhouse gases stored within it.Ultimately, Colossal hopes to implant gene-edited Asian elephant embryos into Asian or African elephant surrogates. Its objective is not as Jurassic Park as it may appear at first glance—Colossal is really just trying to optimize elephants for…
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