A de-extinction company has hatched live chicks from an artificial eggshell
NEW YORK– A biotechnology company that aims to resurrect lost creatures said Tuesday that it has hatched live chicks in an artificial environment – a development that has drawn mixed reviews from scientists and critics of its de-extinction mission.
Twenty-six baby chickens – ranging in age from a few days to several months – were born from a 3D-printed lattice structure that mimics an eggshell, according to Colossal Biosciences.
Colossal previously announced that it had genetically engineered living animals to resemble extinct species, including long-haired mice like the woolly mammoth and wolf pups that resemble dire wolves.
Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal, said artificial egg technology could one day be scaled up to genetically modify living birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa, whose eggs are 80 times larger than those of a chicken and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay.
“We wanted to build something that nature has done a really good job of developing and make it better, scalable and even more efficient,” Lamm said.
Independent scientists say the technology, while impressive, lacks certain components to truly be considered an artificial egg. And they said the idea of reviving extinct beasts was probably impossible.
“They might be able to use this technology to help them create a genetically modified bird, but it’s just a genetically modified bird. It’s not a moa,” said evolutionary biologist Vincent Lynch of the University at Buffalo.
To hatch the chicks, Colossal scientists poured fertilized eggs into the artificial system and placed them in an incubator. They also added calcium, which is normally absorbed by the egg shell, and photographed the development and growth of the embryos in real time.
Scientists say Colossal designed an artificial eggshell that has a membrane that allows the right amount of oxygen to enter, just like a real egg. But other components of an egg – like the temporary organs that form to nourish and stabilize the growing chick and eliminate waste – were not included.
“It’s not an artificial egg because you’ve added all the other parts to it that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell,” Lynch said.
In recent decades, researchers used more rudimentary technology to create transparent egg shells that hatched chicks from plastic films or bags. Such technologies are useful for studying chicken development and obtaining insights that can also be applied to other mammals and even humans.
“Producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” said Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the University of Sheffield. Hemmings is not part of Team Colossal.
There’s a long way to go before Colossal attempts a moa resurrection using this artificial egg system. Scientists must first compare ancient DNA from well-preserved moa bones to the genomes of living bird species. And they need a bigger eggshell.
“We didn’t want to wait until we were ready to give birth to a giant moa. We actually wanted to start working on the technical challenges of surrogacy and birth right now,” Lamm said.
Even if Colossal succeeds in creating a large moa-like bird, some scientists worry about what happens next, including how it would survive in a landscape that looks nothing like the past.
“The big challenge is knowing in what environment will this animal live? said bioethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
Such de-extinction efforts could make more sense with currently endangered species, where scientists could preserve sperm and eggs from living members to try to bring back more, Hemmings said.
“My personal interests lie more in preserving what we have than in trying to bring back what is already gone,” Hemmings said.
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