Biotech company Colossal aims to “reincarnate” the extinct wooly mammoth in 2027 by introducing genetic information from mammoth remains to the biological makeup of its closest living r…
Biotech company Colossal aims to “reincarnate” the extinct wooly mammoth in 2027 by introducing genetic information from mammoth remains to the biological makeup of its closest living r…
Would the re-introduced species be the intellectual property of Colossal? Would breeding mammoths be patent infringement?
@AbouBenAdhem you can patent how you make rats and knock out mice, so kind of, yes. But not necessarily the living organism. The mice have been genetically altered to “knock out” genes (strings of dna that code for a protein). The organisms - the mice with the knocked out genes- are licensed as research materials. That is my understanding.
Notwithstanding all of that, creating clones of woolly mammoths is a spectacularly bad idea and probably unethical. WTF are you going to do with one if you succeed?
@btaf45
IMO our overriding priority should be maximizing earth’s remaining biodiversity. While I’m not convinced that resurrecting extinct species is the most effective way to do it—or that this case is how it should be done—I’m not ready to declare it a bad idea in principle. Especially if we’re talking about a relatively recent extinction caused by human overhunting.