Chickens without eggs? De-extinction company creates artificial egg

Key points

• On Tuesday, biotech startup Colossal announced its newest development on the road to its announced goal: reversing the extinction of species, in this case, avian species.
• The development itself is essentially an artificial eggshell, one that allows almost the entire developmental process to occur without the shell.
• The company transferred the contents of eggs to their specially designed container within a day or two of laying and were able to have normal chicks walk away from it.
• Beyond its potential utility for Colossal’s intended efforts, the work is personally interesting to me because it may solve a problem I faced in my research days.
• I’m going to start by describing the research problem that Colossal may have solved, before coming back to what it hopes to use its technology to do—and why the company still has a few key hurdles left to overcome.