Resurrecting the long extinct woolly mammoth has been a dream of scientists for decades. Now a food company has managed to do it—sort of—by making mammoth meatballs. Cultivated meat company Vow used the DNA sequence of mammoth muscle protein to make its meatballs as a way of showing the possibilities for lab-grown meat as an alternative to the traditional slaughter of animals. The Australian company filled in gaps in the genetic code using elephant DNA, which was then put in sheep stem cells before being replicated into billions of cells to grow the mammoth meat. But no one has yet tasted it. “We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years,” Ernst Wolvetang, a professor at the University of Queensland, told TheGuardian. “So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.” Although the woolly mammoth is believed to have gone extinct more than 4,000 years ago, they were once hunted by humans for food, and stories of explorers eating mammoth carcasses have been reported as recently as the 20th century.
