Reacción a "US company Colossal says it has developed artificial egg system to incubate extinct bird embryos"

The private company Colossal has succeeded in developing an artificial egg, something for which there are no comparable precedents. The most significant breakthrough lies in the permeability of the membrane, which allows gases (oxygen and carbon dioxide) to pass through. Colossal aims to bring back an extinct New Zealand bird, the moa, but its eggs were 80 times larger than those of chickens and about eight times larger than those of the emu; some species of moa stood over three and a half metres tall and could weigh up to 250 kilograms. This means they could not use any modern bird as a surrogate mother, which is why they have opted to develop their own artificial incubation system technology. The most practical approach will likely be to use hens as incubators in the early stages of development and then transfer the embryos to artificial eggs, which can be sized as required. This scaling up to a large-sized embryo will likely require further research to ensure the system is scalable.

Naturally, it could be used to de-extinct other birds, such as the Carolina parakeet, whose genome I first sequenced six years ago. At that time, the difficulty of manipulating bird genes due to their oviparous strategy ruled them out entirely for any de-extinction endeavour, and, in fact, birds have never been successfully cloned for the same reason (and 30 years have passed since the cloning of the first mammal).

But, furthermore, this artificial egg may have other uses in biotechnology and biomedicine. For example, transgenic hens are being used to produce proteins with therapeutic functions in egg whites. With this system, if it can be scaled up, production would be more efficient.

Naturally, ethical questions remain regarding Colossal’s ultimate objectives, and it is legitimate to ask whether it makes ecological sense to genetically redesign some modern birds to superficially resemble moas, and what fate would await such animals. Would we release them on New Zealand’s South Island? As with other examples publicised by the same company — one need only recall the mammoth or the giant wolf — there is a rather surprising mix of scientific advances and publicity that could be described as misleading, which transcends the scientific sphere and must always be interpreted in the context of a private company’s business interests.