Colossal Biosciences Is on a Mission to Save the DNA of 10,000 Species

Human beings are not going anywhere soon. There are 8.2 billion of us living on all seven continents—a population projected to grow to close to 10 billion by 2050. The rest of the world’s living inhabitants don't have it so good.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, approximately 30 percent of known species are expected to have tipped over the cliff into extinction by that same 2050 benchmark. Now, however, there may be a way to protect them—or at least to preserve their genomes so that even if they do vanish, they could, in time, be brought back to walk or swim or fly the Earth again.

That's the word from Colossal Biosciences, the company that last spring engineered the return of the dire wolf after 10,000 years of extinction. On Feb. 3, Colossal announced it is collaborating with the government of the United Arab Emirates to create a bio-vault of millions of frozen cell and tissue samples from more than 10,000 species. They will be housed at the U.A.E.’s Museum of the Future in Dubai. The project will focus first on the world’s 100 most imperiled species—including the snow leopard, the savanna elephant, the Great White shark, and the northern white rhino—with the goal of opening the bio-vault as early as next year.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.