It’s long been the dream of every scientist and science fiction nerd to one day be able to bring back extinct species. We may not quite be there yet, but we did somehow manage to bring the wooly mammoth back for … meatballs. It might not be the huge Jurassic Park we were secretly all hoping for, but at least we’ve now firmly opened the door towards a prehistoric McDonald’s. Which I guess is the most McDonald’s thing ever to do.
Overnight, Vow, an Australian cultivated meat company, unveiled a groundbreaking achievement: the creation of the first-ever meat derived from the DNA of an extinct animal. The unveiling took place at the Nemo Science Museum in the Netherlands, where the innovative Mammoth Meatball was showcased.
The reason behind this experiment is of course to open dialogue about how we impact the environment with our current way of handling cattle and meat production. It’s supposed to show people that lab-grown meat can be a viable alternative to the more classic agriculture that we so rely on today. Considering how food production is responsible for 30% of our global greenhouse emissions, being able to severely reduce those will be good for everyone in the long run.
In order to create the pretty big ball of meat, scientists had to sequence the entire mammoth genome. It shouldn’t be eaten because despite being able to recreate literal mammoth meat, scientists haven’t yet figured out what eating mammoth meat would do to our modern immune systems. Let’s be honest: that just sounds like a cheap excuse to launch a “Mammoth Meat Ball” challenge on TikTok in a few months.
So while we are still quite a ways off from having actual mammoths roam the land, we do have the ability to recreate their meat in a sustainable way. Maybe we can settle for that and skip the entire Jurassic Park thing – let’s be honest, it’s never quite worked out like they thought it would – and just settle for a T-Rex T-Bone steak. If we somehow get cultured meat approved for wide consumption, we could be closer to that fantasy than you think. It’s a huge step for the future and our planet, and hopefully we’ll get some more breakthroughs in this field in the coming decades.
