Bitcoin billionaires want to bring back woolly mammoths. here’s how

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A number of Bitcoin billionaires and a professor of genetics want to bring back the woolly mammoths in order to reverse climate change. Stop me if that sounds like the plot of a blockbuster sci-fi movie.

Per Fortune, George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard, has the idea that bringing back woolly mammoths would help reverse climate change by restoring the root systems of plants where mammoths graze and thus extract more carbon from the atmosphere.

A startup called Colossal has pledged to help the project. Church will work with entrepreneur Ben Lamm as well as billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Winklevoss Capital, Tim Draper of Draper Associates, Peter Diamandis of Bold Capital and Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital. Oh, yes, author Tony Robbins is also a big investor in the project.

Cameron Winklevoss, known for his role in the early days of Facebook and for becoming a new cryptocurrency investor, supports the project as it tackles a major problem.

I see Colossal as an opportunity to make the environment and species sustainable, he told Fortune. They are trying to solve an important problem of not only how to bring back extinct animals, but how to preserve the genetic record of endangered species, of which there are many. It could be a game changer.

Colossal has similar ambitions. On its website, the startup presents 10 reasons to revive the mammoth, including decelerating the melting arctic permafrost and saving modern elephants.

The project would create an ecosystem capable of maintaining its own defenses against climate change, the website said.

So, is it possible? According to NPR, scientists want to use a tool called CRISPR-Cas9 to take DNA from a frozen mammoth and inject it into an Asian elephant, according to NPR. The new animal called a mammoth would then behave like a woolly mammoth.

That said, experts still don’t know if this will actually lead to a change for the climate. And scientists told NPR the project might be better off saving near-extinct species than bringing back dead species.

I can see a few reasons to do the early stages where you tinker with cell lines and edit genomes, Love Daln, professor of evolutionary genetics at the Stockholm-based Center for Palaeogenetics, told NPR. I think there is a lot of technological development that can be done (and) we can learn a lot about how to edit genomes, and it could be really useful for endangered species today.

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