And finally…Paypal founder funds bid to bring back woolly mammoth

Thiel, who according to The Guardian, believes that viewing death as inevitable is a sign of the “complacency of the western world”, has given the money to Harvard University genomics professor George Church, whose laboratory is attempting to revive the mammoth.

The donation to the Jurassic Park-esque project, which was made in 2015, has been revealed in a new book by Ben Mezrich called Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures.

Church has said that the cash injection to the project resulted from an inquiry by Thiel over breakfast between the two when he asked how he could fund the “craziest thing” Church was working on.

Church suggested three options: an anti-aging scheme involving gene therapy, a project using human neurons to create artificial intelligence, and the mammoth.

The de-extinction scheme as outlined in the book to extract DNA from frozen mammoths and use it to genetically modify elephant cells.

So far, according to the book, the team has managed to get mammoth fur to grow from the side of a mouse grafted with some elephant cells. Although the results have yet to be published in any scientific papers.

Peter Thiel’s team did not respond to requests for confirmation of the investment, but Church told MIT Technology Review that it was true.

Thiel interest in the project would seem to be consistent with statements he’s made in the past expressing his irritation at the ephemeral nature of life.

“Almost every human being who has ever lived is dead. Solving this problem is the most natural, humane, and important thing we could possibly do,” he is quoted as saying on the website of the SENS Foundation, a charity Thiel funds that approaches aging as a disease in need of a cure.