How To Clone A Mammoth

psyconaut writes: "In a story that sounds more fitting for the big screen than the London Times, Japanese researchers are planning on cloning a mammoth by impregnating an Indian elephant. Apparently the source of the DNA will be a newly found mammoth specimen in Siberia. Due to genetic constraints, the final mammoth specimen will only be 88% pure mammoth and the process will take about 50 years."

Comments

Usefull

[Ost99]

Perhaps they can use the cloned mammoths to make new elephants; by 2052 they will be extinct.

- Ost

Why?

[Martigan80]

And why would it be so great to have them back? I just don't see why we they are spending so much money to try to bring back a dead animal, is it an ego thing? Do they think the new hybrid can help us out some way? I just don't think we should be treading in this kind of water.

Re:Why?

[Mwongozi]

"Why not?" is a much more interesting question than "Why?". It's how science advances.

Re:Why?

[Bodrius]

I don't know if it would be great to have them back as a successful, populous species, but it would be great for science to have a specimen or two alive.

Why?

Because we learn as much from dead things as we pretend we do.

There's a lot more to animal anatomy than bones, and there's a lot more to biology and zoology than anatomy.

We speculate a lot on the behavior of animals based on fossils, but there are limits.

Even with fully functioning, breathing animals we don't know exactly how cats "purrr", can you imagine how little we know of an animal we have never seen alive? How many times have we changed our minds on the diet of a dinosaur, or the way it walked?

Sure, social behavior may be contaminated by learned behavior from its contemporary counterparts. But with enough specimens in different conditions, we could learn even about some of their social patterns (non-learned behavior).

Re:Why?

[rtblmyazz]

Why not bring back a species that was extinct due to the actions of mankind like the Dodo bird, rather than something that nature or God extincted, probably for some "valid" reason ? It seems more fitting to bring something back that we destroyed by our own ignorance or greed.

Re:Why?

[yog]

Why try to land on the moon? All that trouble and money to get three guys up there, only two of whom could actually walk around on the surface. And then abandon all the equipment. All they accomplished was to litter the moon.

Why try to build smaller and faster chips? Computers seem plenty fast enough. My word processor never lags behind my typing. It used to, with my old Commodore, though even then it wasn't a big deal.

Why do basic research? It doesn't seem useful. They should focus on curing diseases instead. All that wasted tax money you know.

Why meet new people? I already know all the people I need to. What can knowing more people possibly accomplish?

Why do libraries need funding? I don't use libraries and I don't see the point of them either. That money should be used for something more directly useful such as filling potholes on the streets I drive on.

Etc. You get the idea.

50 years

[Lord Bitman]

..in which time some asshole will ruin everybody's fun by cloning a mammoth through some other method.

Jurassic Park

[Ubi_NL]

During my MSc in biology, we had a genetics class in which such a protocol was discussed, mainly because 'jurassic park' just came out.

Basically the professor said that trying to anything like this was like "pushing an analog tape in a CD player and expecting music to come out"

Ontogeny of mammals is really dependent on interactions between mother and child, and these interactions are quite specific for a species.

sounds familier....

[night_flyer]

Professor Hopes To Clone Mammoth
by
Jolyn Okimoto,
Associated Press Writer

1:07 AM EST; October 2, 1999; Flagstaff, AZ (AP) -- It sounds like a movie plot come to life: A Northern Arizona University Geologist aims to excavate and clone a woolly mammoth from DNA. Larry Agenbroad concedes that cloning the animal is unlikely. Still, he says biologists remain optimistic and he is excited about the project. Agenbroad is part of an international team of scientists whose first task is to cut the cloning candidate -- the likes of which roamed the Earth about two million years ago.

The adult male mammoth, estimated to be about 40 years old when it became frozen, was found by a 9-year-old nomadic reindeer herder in 1997. It's been named Jarkov, after the boy's family. "To feel the skin and touch the flesh of the mammoth will be quite spectacular. It's the closest I've gotten to an animal I've been chasing for more than 30 years," said Agenbroad, sitting in an office crammed full of mammoth bones, teeth, figurines, and paintings.

Agenbroad and scientists from the Netherlands, France and Russia, are removing the ice-encased animal from the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia and airlifting it more than 200 miles to the city of Khatanga. The mammoth will be kept frozen there in an underground tunnel, where scientists will study the 11-foot-tall animal. Besides analyzing dirt, pollen, and even its stomach contents, a primary task is to extract DNA for cloning.

The cloning process involves putting DNA from the mammoth into an Asian elephant's egg that has been stripped of elephant genes. So even though an elephant would give birth, the baby would be a mammoth, not a hybrid, Agenbroad said. "I don't think (the elephant) would know the difference, though she might wonder why her baby is so hairy." Agenbroad said he is not counting on success. "I guess it would be a rarity, but the biologists are quite optimistic," he said.

A medical ethicist at the medical school and the department of philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is among the naysayers. "You need live nuclei and live eggs, plus a host mammoth mother to gestate the fetus. Because none of these are available, 'Jurassic Park' to the contrary, it won't succeed,'' Greg Pence said, referring to the movie in which cloning was used to resurrect dinosaurs.

But scientists at Texas A&M University proved last month that live cells are not needed for cloning. The team successfully cloned a steer from the hide of another that died a year ago. Still, the odds are slim for mammoth cloning, said Hessel Bouma, III, a cell biology expert at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "It would start with DNA not from a fresh cell, but from one haphazardly frozen by nature,'' Bouma said. "The chances of DNA being completely intact is very, very small." But why bring back the mammoth in the first place? "Why not?" asked Agenbroad. "I'd rather have a cloned mammoth than another sheep," he added, referring to Dolly, cloned in 1997 from the udder of a six-year-old ewe. Agenbroad isn't the only one excited about the cloning prospects. "I think it would be a really wonderful thing," said Paul Martin, a retired professor of geosciences and a large mammals expert from the University of Arizona. "It would be a moon shot."

Scary thought

[Goldmember]

Does it ever puzzle you to think about some future civilization on earth that discovers your skeleton, extracts your dna and brings you back to life after a million years of peaceful time underground?

I wonder, how could you make sure none of your own dna is preserved after you're done with this living thing? I still hope I have copyright for my blueprints, even after my death. Or another thing, how could you send your dna in a spaceship to distant stars, hoping that the aliens out there can clone you and start a new civilization on a nearby planet, you being the Adam or Eve...

This cloning thing is confusing me... gotta live now and worry later.

Because.

[RobinH]

Why not bring back a species that was extinct due to the actions of mankind like the Dodo bird, rather than something that nature or God extincted, probably for some "valid" reason?

I believe the current thinking is that mammoths were hunted to extinction by men. Mammoths and sabretooth tigers became extinct about 12,000 years ago in North America, which coincides nicely with the arrival of humans on the continent. Hence, by your argument, we should bring them back.

Re:Because.

[lobsterGun]

Man can't take all of the credit for the extinction of the Mammoths. Current thinking is that there were three contributing factors that caused their extinction: Its called the Chill-Kill-Ill theory. It goes like this:

- Chill: As the glaciers melted after the last ice age there was a period of time where the temeratures were lower than normal. This was a stress on the ecosystem that the Mammoths were used to as they had lived through at least a dozen previous ice ages.
- Kill: Added to the mix the arrival of a new predator (man) that they had never encountered before.
- Ill: Further added to the mix is the introduction of a whole slew of foreign microbes that the new predators brought with them.

Any one of the above were probably not enough to wipe out the mamoths, but combined they put enough stress on their ecosystem that the mammoths were unable to survive. ...at least that's what was on the Discovery Channel two nights ago.

Bison found in Colorado Glacier

[Anne_Nonymous]

Recently the remains of a Bison were found in a Colorado glacier. They are only 200 to 400 years old, and might be a good way to practice restoration cloning. The DNA is "fresher" and could be used to impregnate a much closer relative (genetically) of the original beast. What better way to learn to do this to older samples?

www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E53%257E 80 7802,00.html?search=filter

(No direct link, see the middle of the page)

Got a frog in your pocket?

[A nonymous Coward]

What's all this we business? Is someone taking your money to do this?

Face it buddy, not everything in the world is done to your whim. If somebody else wants to spend their money on this, it none of your business.