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

At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is dangerous

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.

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

This article was amended on 6 March 2025. Colossal is proposing to modify the genes of an Asian elephant. An earlier version said the species was an African elephant