A biotech company aiming to resurrect lost creatures said Tuesday it had hatched live chicks in an artificial environment, a development met with mixed reviews from scientists and critics of its de-extinction mission.
Twenty-six baby chickens, ranging from a few days to several months old, were born from a 3D-printed lattice structure that mimics an eggshell, according to Colossal Biosciences.Colossal previously announced it had genetically engineered living animals to resemble extinct species, including mice with long hair like the woolly mammoth and wolf pups that take after dire wolves.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said the artificial egg technology could one day be scaled up to genetically tweak living birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa, whose eggs are 80 times the size of a chicken’s and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay. "We wanted to build something that nature has done a pretty good job of developing and make it better and scalable and even more efficient," Lamm said.Independent scientists say the technology, while impressive, lacks some components to be truly considered an artificial egg.
They also noted that reviving extinct beasts is likely impossible. "They might be able to use this technology to help them make a genetically modified bird, but that’s just a genetically modified bird. It’s not a moa," said Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist with the University at Buffalo.To hatch the chicks, Colossal scientists poured fertilised eggs into the artificial system and placed them in an incubator.
They added calcium, which is normally absorbed from the eggshell, and imaged the embryo development in real time. Scientists say Colossal has designed an artificial eggshell with a membrane that allows the right amount of oxygen to get in, just like a real egg. However, temporary organs that form to nourish the growing chick and remove waste were not included.
"That’s not an artificial egg because you’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell," Lynch said.In decades past, researchers used cruder technology to create transparent eggshells that hatched chicks from plastic films or sacks to study chicken development. "Producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new," said Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the University of Sheffield.
There is a long road ahead before Colossal attempts a moa resurrection. Scientists must first compare ancient DNA from well-preserved moa bones to genomes of living birds. They also need a bigger eggshell. "We didn’t want to wait till we were ready to birth a giant moa. We actually wanted to start working on the engineering challenges for surrogacy and birth now," Lamm said.Even if Colossal succeeds, some scientists are concerned about how the animals would survive in a landscape that looks nothing like the past. "The big challenge is, what environment is this animal going to live in?" asked bioethicist Arthur Caplan with New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
Associated Press