Colossal Biosciences has some really big plans - you might even say, they have mammoth plans. The problem is, that their plans don't include any actual mammoths. They have, however, claimed a breakthrough in the development of pluripotential stem cells that may put them a step closer to making a pseudo-mammoth.

Colossal Biosciences, which calls itself “the world’s first de-extinction company,” has created stem cells it thinks will hasten the company’s marquee goal of resurrecting the woolly mammoth. The team’s research describing the accomplishment will be hosted on the preprint server bioRxiv.

The cells are induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), a type of cell that can be reprogrammed to develop into any other type of cell. The cells are especially useful in bioengineering, for their applications in cell development, therapy, and transferring genetic information across species. Colossal’s new iPSCs are the first engineered elephant cells converted into an embryonic state, a useful development if you’re in pursuit of a woolly mammoth. Or rather, an animal that looks like a woolly mammoth. 

Yes, an animal that looks like a woolly mammoth. Woolly mammoths are extinct and will always be extinct; there's no changing that. These animals, should they eventually produce them, will be—to borrow a phrase from a popular movie that featured de-extinction—genetically engineered theme park monsters.

See Related: De-Extinction: Just Because We Can Do It, Does That Mean We Should Do It? 

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The really interesting bit about this project is one of their stated goals for the pseudo-mammoths.

Once Colossal produces a herd of proxy mammoths, its intention  is to decelerate the melting of the permafrost by loosing the animals on a swath of Siberia. Ultimately, Colossal says, the mammoth steppe—the ancient ecosystem in which the giant proboscideans roamed—could be restored, helping fight climate change and pushing new technologies in gene editing in the process, helping extant elephants, which face their own survival threats.

That's not going to happen; here's why and I'm gonna tell you.

The mammoth steppe was a biome that encompassed much of the northern hemisphere. This environment spread from Spain through Eurasia, across Berengia (now under the Bering Sea,) and North America. The mammoth, both the woolly mammoth and the larger steppe mammoth, were not the only megafauna integral to this habitat; there were also woolly rhinos, several species of bison, muskox, camelids, and horses. You can't reproduce an extinct biome by reintroducing one species, or a facsimile thereof. Environments like this are enormously complex and chaotic, and it's impossible to recreate this easily.

That's not the only problem. To have any effect on any environment by introducing a new species, it would take a population. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of animals would be required; this de-extinction-scheme-that-isn't would, at most, produce one or two animals, which will be the most pampered, protected, and studied animals in history—and which would never, ever be released into the wild.

There's an even bigger problem. Proboscids in general—African and Indian elephants and, presumably, their extinct relatives like mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres—are intelligent animals, and they spend the first few years of their lives learning from their mothers and other herd members how to be elephants. That includes knowing which plants are good to eat, how to find water, how to interact with other elephants and other animals in the environment, and what predators may be dangerous and which may be ignored.

There are no extant elephants or mammoths in any northern biome that can teach these animals what they would need to know to survive.

Exploring the possibilities of genetics is interesting, and such research may well yield dividends in treating genetic disorders in humans. But a population of pseudo-mammoths in Siberia just isn't going to happen.