Studies suggest that the last surviving herds of Woolly Mammoths died towards the end of the Ice Age after they got stranded on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean. Scientists worldwide have been trying to use various methods of genetic engineering to resurrect Woolly Mammoths since 2003. In September of 2021, a biosciences and genetics company called Colossal Biosciences raised nearly $15 million to revive the iconic Ice Age behemoths; that number has since grown to $225 million. The Texas-based cooperation intends to present the first newly engineered Woolly Mammoth calves to the world by 2027.
Meanwhile, an Australian startup called Vow recently displayed a giant meatball made from a Woolly Mammoth at a science museum in the Netherlands. The curators accomplished this feat using the Woolly Mammoth's genetic information and the DNA of an African elephant (a distant relative) along with sheep cells. The meatball reportedly smelled like cooked crocodile meat. Although no one was allowed to taste the Woolly Mammoth meatball by the Vow, the company's founder indicated that his team's process has to be vetted more before the meat can be deemed safe for consumption.
"We wanted to get people excited about the future of food being different to potentially what we had before,” said Tim Noakesmith. "[But] this protein is literally 4,000 years old, we haven't seen it for a very, very long time. It means that we would want to put it through seriously rigorous testing like we do with any product that we want to bring to market. And for this purpose, we wanted to present it to the world faster and not necessarily bring it immediately to market...Because with new technology it means that the food that we can have doesn't have to replicate what we've had before...It can be more exciting, it can have better flavor profiles, better nutrition profiles. And so we wanted to create something that was totally different from anything you can get now."
One of the primary purposes of Vow's research was to display the impact that cultured (lab-grown) meat could potentially have on the meat packing industry as a viable option to prevent live animals from being slaughtered.
Source: CBS News
