On Tuesday, an oversize meatball made partly from the DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth was displayed at the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam. The meatball, which was not an early April Fools’ joke, was created using cultivated flesh in a lab. Why? Vow, an Australian cultured meat company, wanted to educate people on alternatives that are more sustainable than real meat. The woolly mammoth was specifically chosen because its extinction is thought by scientists to have been caused by climate change.
“We wanted to create something that was totally different from anything you can get now,” Tim Noakesmith, Vow’s founder, told Reuters. In something that’s like a scene from Jurassic Park, the meatball’s end result used sheep cells that were altered with one woolly mammoth gene. African elephant DNA filled in any gaps in the DNA sequence. The company stressed that no animals were killed to create the meatball, and it should be noted that this meatball is currently not for consumption.
“Its protein is literally 4,000 years old. We haven’t seen it in a very long time. That means we want to put it through rigorous tests, something that we would do with any product we bring to the market,” Noakesmith said.
Tragedy in Nashville
On March 27, three students and three adults were killed by a 28-year-old shooter at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville. “Our community is heartbroken,” the Covenant School said in a statement Tuesday. “We are grieving tremendous loss and are in shock coming out of the terror that shattered our school and church.”
