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 Maverick geneticist George Church, at Harvard University, has announced that he believes he is just two years away from creating a hybrid woolly mammoth embryo. The end goal is to develop a mammoth embryo into a fetus, and to take it to full term, he told New Scientist. 
 
 However, resurrecting a pure woolly mammoth this way is still many years away. First, Church’s team is adding key genetic traits – such as shaggy long hair, thick layers of fat and cold-adapted blood – to the genome of the Asian elephant. 
 
 So far, 45 mammoth-like edits of DNA have been spliced into the Asian elephant genome. “We’re working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits,” says Church. “The list of edits affects things that contribute to the success of elephants in cold environments. We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood.” 
 
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 Church says the next step would be to produce a hybrid embryo, although in reality this would really be more like an elephant embryo carrying a handful of mammoth genetic traits. “We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.” 
 
 Lab-grown mammoth 
 
 This would just be a first step towards the tricky goal of making a pure woolly mammoth embryo, and then developing it to make a grown, living mammoth. This is still many years away, if it ever happens. 
 
 Cloning can be a difficult business, even when working on an animal that hasn’t been extinct for more than 4000 years. When scientists cloned Dolly the sheep, she was the only lamb born out of 277 attempts. 
 
 Asian elephants are endangered, making it impractical – and to some minds unethical – to try using living elephants as surrogates for any mammoth embryo. Church told New Scientist that instead, he would hope be able to develop fetuses in the lab, with no need for a living surrogate – technology that doesn’t exist yet, but that may one day be available. 
 
 However, Church acknowledges the fact that, because he has no intention of using live elephants, it may mean that he won’t be able to resurrect the mammoth. 
 
 As for why we would want to bring back the woolly mammoth, Church says the move could secure an alternative future for endangered Asian elephant, and could also help combat global warming. “They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” says Church. 
 
 Read more: How to Clone a Mammoth: But should we? 

 The woolly mammoth went extinct at the end of the last ice age thousands of years ago, a victim of warming weather and hunting by prehistoric humans. But the mammoth — or rather something very much like it — may be resurrected if Dr. George Church has his way. 
 
 The Harvard geneticist started with a close relative, the Asian elephant, and is using a genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR in an effort to create a mammoth-like elephant capable of thriving in cold regions. 
 
 It’s not a vanity project. Church thinks reintroducing the mammoth-like animal into parts the tundra could help curb climate change. 
 
 Related: Why Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever Anymore 
 
 "By allowing cold resistant elephants or mammoths to repopulate the tundra," Church says, "they will punch down the snow in wintertime allowing cold air to come in, and in the summertime they'll knock down trees, which are very absorbent." This will help the dead grass start to grow, he explains, and slow the release of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere. 
 
 "When you simulate this with a real ecosystem in Siberia," he says, "the temperature drop is 20 degrees, which is really big deal in terms of delaying the release of carbon by melting." 
 
 So far, Church’s team has edited 15 key genes that will be needed to resurrect the creature, and he says they're well on the way to editing another 30-odd of the essential genes. Sounds like a mammoth effort. 
 
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 The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering. 
 
 
 
 Speaking ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the “de-extinction” effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant. 
 
 “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” said Prof George Church. “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.” 
 
 The creature, sometimes referred to as a “mammophant”, would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr. 
 
 Could we 'de-extinctify' the woolly mammoth? Read more 
 
 Until now, the team have stopped at the cell stage, but are now moving towards creating embryos – although, they said that it would be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature. 
 
 “We’re working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits and basically trying to establish embryogenesis in the lab,” said Church. 
 
 Since starting the project in 2015 the researchers have increased the number of “edits” where mammoth DNA has been spliced into the elephant genome from 15 to 45. 
 
 “We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood, but there are others that seem to be positively selected,” he said. 
 
 Church said that these modifications could help preserve the Asian elephant, which is endangered, in an altered form. However, others have raised ethical concerns about the project. 
 
 Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, said: “The proposed ‘de-extinction’ of mammoths raises a massive ethical issue – the mammoth was not simply a set of genes, it was a social animal, as is the modern Asian elephant. What will happen when the elephant-mammoth hybrid is born? How will it be greeted by elephants?” 
 
 
 
 Church also outlined plans to grow the hybrid animal within an artificial womb rather than recruit a female elephant as a surrogate mother - a plan which some believe will not be achievable within the next decade. 
 
 “We hope to do the entire procedure ex-vivo (outside a living body),” he said. “It would be unreasonable to put female reproduction at risk in an endangered species.” 
 
 He added that his lab is already capable of growing a mouse embryo in an artificial womb for 10 days - halfway through its gestation period. 
 
 “We’re testing the growth of mice ex-vivo. There are experiments in the literature from the 1980s but there hasn’t been much interest for a while,” he said. “Today we’ve got a whole new set of technology and we’re taking a fresh look at it.” 
 
 “Church’s team is proposing to rear the embryo in an ‘artificial womb’ which seems ambitious to say the least – the resultant animal would have been deprived of all the pre-birth interactions with its mother,” said Cobb. 
 
 The woolly mammoth roamed across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America during the last Ice Age and vanished about 4,000 years ago, probably due to a combination of climate change and hunting by humans. 
 
 Their closest living relative is the Asian, not the African, elephant. 
 
 Dinosaur embryos reveal remarkable secrets of life – and extinction Read more 
 
 “De-extincting” the mammoth has become a realistic prospect because of revolutionary gene editing techniques that allow the precise selection and insertion of DNA from specimens frozen over millennia in Siberian ice. 
 
 Church helped develop the most widely used technique, known as Crispr/Cas9, that has transformed genetic engineering since it was first demonstrated in 2012. Derived from a defence system bacteria use to fend off viruses, it allows the “cut and paste” manipulation of strands of DNA with a precision not seen before. 
 
 Gene editing and its ethical implications is one of the key topics under discussion at the Boston conference. 
 
 Church, a guest speaker at the meeting, said the mammoth project had two goals: securing an alternative future for the endangered Asian elephant and helping to combat global warming. Woolly mammoths could help prevent tundra permafrost from melting and releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. 
 
 “They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” said Church. “In the summer they knock down trees and help the grass grow.” 
 
 The scientists intend to engineer elephant skin cells to produce the embryo, or multiple embryos, using cloning techniques. Nuclei from the reprogrammed cells would be placed into elephant egg cells whose own genetic material has been removed. The eggs would then be artificially stimulated to develop into embryos. 
 
 Church predicts that age-reversal will become a reality within 10 years as a result of the new developments in genetic engineering.
– This whole nostalgia thing is getting out of control because scientists are about to bring back the woolly mammoth, the Guardian reports. Harvard professor George Church—who New Scientist calls a "maverick geneticist"—is leading a "de-extinction" team that says it's about two years away from creating a hybrid embryo combining mammoth traits with Asian elephant DNA. Woolly mammoths went extinct about 4,000 years ago due to human hunting and warming temperatures. But in the past few years, Church and his team have managed to splice 45 mammoth edits into Asian elephant DNA, including ones that control for a mammoth's shaggy hair, small ears, fat layers, and more. While Church and his team believe they can have a "mammophant" embryo in two years, it will be much longer before anyone sees one in the wild. The team wants to grow mammophants completely in a lab in order to not mess with the reproduction of endangered Asian elephants, and that technology doesn't exist yet. But if his team succeeds, Church says it could do a lot more than gives zoos a neat new exhibit. He tells NBC News that releasing a herd of mammophants into the Arctic could fight climate change by keeping the tundra from thawing. "They will punch down the snow in wintertime allowing cold air to come in," Church explains. (Alaska's woolly mammoths likely died of thirst.)