"the plan is to take stem cells from a closely related species that has not gone extinct, and edit a series of changes based on the corresponding genomes of the

"the plan is to take stem cells from a closely related species that has not gone extinct, and edit a series of changes based on the corresponding genomes of the deceased species. In the case of the mammoth, that means the elephant." My impression from previous info released by Colossal is that the plan is to take isolated fragments of mammoth DNA and put those back into elephants. They haven't been able to recover a full mammoth genome, but they've been able to recover many fragments that include cold adaptations, and long hair is just one of them. The result won't be a mammoth, but it would be part-way there and, perhaps, something that could actually live in the far North. They face a lot of sticky challenges though. Last I read anything on their work, they were hoping to use artificial wombs rather than surrogate elephant mothers due to ethical concerns. Elephants often grieve for dead newborns, and genetically engineered mammoth-elephant hybrids are more likely to die shortly after birth than not. Bringing hybrids to term in elephant mothers would be inhumane. However, their website now mentions plans for using surrogate elephants. What's going on there? A lot of this work also involves collaboration with Russia, which can't be easy right now, ethically or practically. The end goal is still laudable though. Restoring the mammoth steppe, if done in time, could help keep massive amounts of methane locked in permafrost, reducing the impact of global warming. It's a moon-shot, but not impossible.