Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossible | Adam Rutherford

You will never ever see a living woolly mammoth. While this is an obvious truth to most geneticists, zoologists and mammoth experts, the endless promises that you might get to meet an extant version of this very-much extinct elephantid apparently necessitate me typing it.

The latest on the conveyor belt of mammoth resurrection stories came this week in the form of a slightly hairy mouse. Colossal Biosciences, the US company behind the “woolly mouse” and ensuing media frenzy, published a non-peer-reviewed paper in which it has genetically engineered a mouse to express a gene that relates to mammoth hair, resulting in a mouse with slightly longer hair than normal.

Mice are a crucial part of the story of genetics, not least because of their utility in the study of human genes, and particularly disease. But this unusually hirsute mouse was not created for any such noble purpose but rather as a farcical little sideshow for the fantasy that one day Colossal will breed a living mammoth.

“The woolly mammoth is a vital defender of the earth,” it claims on its website, despite the fact that mammoths are extinct and therefore – I feel this shouldn’t really need saying – have literally no role in defending the Earth. Colossal states that packs of mammoths were a crucial part of tundra ecosystem management in their heyday tens of thousands of years ago – that much is true – and that bringing them back might be a useful tool in the fight against global warming. It is a ridiculous suggestion for tackling the climate crisis – and more than that, it is scientific folly.

How is it folly? Let us count the ways. A few years ago, the first mammoth genome was sequenced from remains acquired off eBay. You can get some today from as little as a tenner. The genome sequence allowed scientists to piece together some aspects of the lives and the biology of these magnificent beasts, as indeed we have for many animals – including humans – that are long dead. This is good science, gifting us insights into the adaptations that helped mammoths evolve to suit their environments. What the ancient genome of the sadly departed does not allow us to do is bring them back.

DNA from dead creatures is profoundly degraded, chewed up by time and bacteria, and what we actually recover is fragments. When scientists unveiled the “complete” genome of our Neanderthal ancestors in 2009, it was in fact sparse bits and pieces of the interesting parts, the genes, which we could usefully compare with our living DNA. But genes make up a tiny proportion of the total amount of DNA in a living creature, most of which is lost in time, like tears in rain. Much of that lost DNA has function in living cells and is species specific. This is not cloning as per the famous Dolly, whose actual complete genome was taken from a living sheep. This is not photocopying – it’s trying to assemble a book with only a clutch of sentences.

Colossal knows this and is proposing to modify the genes of an African elephant so they are more like mammoth genes. The proposed resulting creature would be a mixture of elephant and mammoth. These two elephantids parted ways on their evolutionary trees roughly 6m years ago. That was at about the same time we separated from what ended up as chimpanzees. That’s how different they are; that’s the equivalent hybrid being proposed.

Cast your moral distaste over that particular monster aside and just consider that we don’t know the gestation period for a mammoth. We don’t know how big a mammoth neonate would be. We don’t know if a mammoth could digest African elephant milk. We would be performing artificial insemination and experimental IVF on an elephant that I am guessing did not give informed consent for this procedure.

Should Colossal manage to overcome all of these apparently insurmountable scientific barriers, it will have an African elephant mother giving birth to a different species into a social group with which it has no affiliation in an environment it has not evolved to be part of because it ceased to exist many millennia ago.

And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.

The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.

The only way you will ever see a living mammoth is if our physicist friends finally crack time travel. I am a mere geneticist, but my understanding is that this remains very much in the realm of fiction. Perhaps in the meantime we could direct our scientific excitement and energies towards real problems, things on which millions of lives depend, rather than on this mammoth circus of macabre fantasy and moral bankruptcy.

• Dr Adam Rutherford is a lecturer in genetics at UCL and the author of How to Argue With a Racist