Colossal Biosciences hatches chicks using artificial egg technology

NEW YORK (AP) – A biotechnology company seeking to bring back lost creatures said on Tuesday that it had hatched live chicks in an artificial environment, prompting mixed reactions from scientists and critics of its de-extinction mission.

According to Colossal Biosciences, 26 chicks, aged from a few days to several months, were born using a 3D-printed lattice structure designed to mimic an eggshell.

The company has previously announced that it genetically engineered living animals to look like extinct species, including long-haired mice resembling woolly mammoths and wolf pups resembling dire wolves.

Chief executive Ben Lamm said the artificial egg technology might eventually be scaled up to genetically modify living birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa. Its eggs were 80 times the size of a chicken’s and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay.

“We wanted to build something that nature has done a pretty good job of developing and make it better and scalable and even more efficient,” Lamm said.

Independent scientists say that, although the technology is impressive, it does not contain everything needed to qualify as a truly artificial egg. They also say bringing extinct animals back is likely to be impossible.

“They might be able to use this technology to help them make a genetically modified bird, but that’s just a genetically modified bird,” said Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo.

“It’s not a moa.”

Colossal Biosciences’ artificial eggshell

To hatch the chicks, Colossal’s scientists poured fertilised eggs into the artificial system before placing it in an incubator.

They added calcium, which would normally be absorbed from the eggshell, and used imaging to monitor the embryos’ development and growth in real time.

Scientists say the artificial eggshell Colossal designed has a membrane that lets the appropriate amount of oxygen enter, as a real egg does.

However, it did not include other egg components, such as the temporary organs that develop to nourish and stabilise a growing chick and remove waste.

“That’s not an artificial egg because you’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell,” Lynch said.

In previous decades, researchers used more basic technology to make transparent eggshells, hatching chicks from plastic films or sacs.

These technologies can help researchers study chicken development and gain insights that may also apply to other mammals and even humans.

“Producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” said Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the University of Sheffield and is not part of the Colossal team.

Challenges for a giant moa revival

Colossal has a long way to go before it attempts to resurrect a moa using the artificial egg system.

First, scientists must compare ancient DNA from well-preserved moa bones with the genomes of living bird species. They also need a larger eggshell.

“We didn’t want to wait till we were ready to birth a giant moa,” Lamm said.

“We actually wanted to start working on the engineering challenges for surrogacy and birth now.”

Even if the company manages to create a tall bird resembling the moa, some scientists worry about what would follow, including how the animal would survive in a landscape very different from that of the past.

“The big challenge is, what environment is this animal going to live in?” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

Hemmings said such de-extinction work might make more sense for species that are currently endangered. Scientists could preserve sperm and egg cells from living members of those species in an attempt to bring more of them back.

“My personal interests lie more in preserving what we’ve got than trying to bring back what is already gone,” Hemmings said.