An Australian company unveiled a giant cloned woolly mammoth meatball during a Tuesday ceremony at the Nemo science museum in the Netherlands, according to Reuters.
Vow, which specializes in cultured meats, utilized DNA from the long-extinct woolly mammoth species. Specifically, the meatball came to fruition thanks to the insertion of a single mammoth gene, myoglobin, with sheep cells, according to Reuters.
Company founder Tim Noakesmith told the outlet his team “wanted to create something that was totally different from anything you can get now.” (RELATED: Fake Meat Industry Implodes After Years Of Hype)
The company aims to promote cultured meat as a sustainable alternative to real meat with the team having chosen the mammoth in part due to beliefs among scientists that it went extinct because of climate change, according to Reuters.
Scientists at Vow were able to create the world’s first “woolly mammoth meatball.” Now they want to challenge the meat industry. “We want to change everyone’s conception of what meat is and what it can be,” Vow founder Tim Noakesmith said. pic.twitter.com/jQ0dJzoAKj
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) March 29, 2023
Vow Chief Scientific Officer James Ryall said “myoglobin is responsible for the aroma, the color, and the taste” of the meatball, which currently has an aroma akin to crocodile meat, the outlet reported.
Gaps in the mammoth DNA prompted the Vow team to utilize some African elephant DNA to bring the project to fruition. No animals were killed during the production of the meatball, according to Reuters.
The meatball is currently unavailable to consumers as Noakesmith told the outlet the “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.”