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Update (4 March 2024): George Church has told New ������ý that when he said “a couple of years” he was referring to the gestation period of elephants, and not to how soon a hybrid woolly mammoth embryo might be created.

Maverick geneticist George Church, at Harvard University, has announced that he believes he is just two years away from creating a hybrid woolly mammoth embryo. The end goal is to develop a mammoth embryo into a fetus, and to take it to full term, he told New ������ý.

However, resurrecting a pure woolly mammoth this way is still many years away. First, Church’s team is adding key genetic traits – such as shaggy long hair, thick layers of fat and cold-adapted blood – to the genome of the Asian elephant.

So far, 45 mammoth-like edits of DNA have been spliced into the Asian elephant genome. “We’re working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits,” says Church. “The list of edits affects things that contribute to the success of elephants in cold environments. We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood.”

Church says the next step would be to produce a hybrid embryo, although in reality this would really be more like an elephant embryo carrying a handful of mammoth genetic traits. “We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.”

Lab-grown mammoth

This would just be a first step towards the tricky goal of making a pure woolly mammoth embryo, and then developing it to make a grown, living mammoth. This is still many years away, if it ever happens.

Cloning can be a difficult business, even when working on an animal that hasn’t been extinct for more than 4000 years. When scientists cloned Dolly the sheep, she was the only lamb born out of 277 attempts.

Asian elephants are endangered, making it impractical – and to some minds unethical – to try using living elephants as surrogates for any mammoth embryo. Church told New ������ý that instead, he would hope be able to develop fetuses in the lab, with no need for a living surrogate – technology that doesn’t exist yet, but that may one day be available.

However, Church acknowledges the fact that, because he has no intention of using live elephants, it may mean that he won’t be able to resurrect the mammoth.

As for why we would want to bring back the woolly mammoth, Church says the move could secure an alternative future for endangered Asian elephant, and could also help combat global warming. “They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” says Church.

Read more: How to Clone a Mammoth: But should we?