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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."
About 100 mammoths have been recovered in Russia, among them the world's finest museum examples. These include the skeleton of the Adams mammoth, found in Yakutia in 1806, and the Berezovka mammoth, recovered in northeastern Siberia in 1901. This had an erect penis, thought to be because it died of asphyxiation. The stuffed Berezovka mammoth and the skeleton are both on display at the Zoological Museum of St Petersburg.
I mean, c'mon, isn't that just begging for the trolls to just run with it?
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
So when are they going to clone some sabre-tooth
tigers?
Do not underestimate the power of the Dark side
Perhaps they can use the cloned mammoths to make new elephants; by 2052 they will be extinct.
- Ost
---- Sig. gone.
I'm waiting for my first real mammoth steak. Flintstones had some, I want some, too.
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.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
..in which time some asshole will ruin everybody's fun by cloning a mammoth through some other method.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
"Due to genetic constraints, the final mammoth specimen will only be 88% pure mammoth and the process will take about 50 years."
50 years of pregnancy? Usually elephants have 2 years (if I'm not mistaking this). So no wonder that mamooths didn't have much kids and were wiped out from that planet.
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.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Actually, 'sabre-toothed tiger' is a bit of a misnomer. You are referring to the Smilodon, which is not closely related to tigers at all.
:)
Sabre teeth were actually a relatively common evolutionary phenomenon during the Cenozoic period, and not only in cats.
Too much to write about. Go read
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Extremely rich but cracked old dude (Richard Attenborough) decides to make a theme park island with cloned mammoths, re-established by using the DNA of a Siberian mammoth and filling out the rest with that of an Indian Elephant. All of the creatures are created female, but he didn't count on the rare sex-change properties of the Indian Elephant when viewing Sex in the City reruns. The mammoths breed like wildfire, overwhelming the hi-tech pens and security systems during a hurricane, as the fat chief programmer (Wayne Knight) smuggles out a baby mammoth in a tin of shaving cream. Some of the mammoths exhibit unsettlingly high intelligence, hunting as a pack and making musical instruments with their trunks. Luckily a mammoth researcher (Sam Neill) his partner (Laura Dern) and a chaos theorist (Jeff Goldblum) are present and save the day.
Why to clone a mammoth?
So you thought those thick glasses and hairy ears would take you out of the gene pool forever? Not true! Now you too can beat mother-nature.
All you have to do is get caught in an avalanche and, a few thousand years from now, scientists will use you to populate a zoo full of half-blind, hairy-eared humans!
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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."
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
McDonalds has reportedly changed their motto from "100% Real Beef!" to "100% Real Meat!"..
I meant:
Because we DON'T learn as much from death things as we pretend we do.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
"If impregnating an Indian elephant with mammoth sperm produced young, that offspring would be impregnated with more mammoth sperm and the process repeated in the next generation, producing a creature that was 88 per cent mammoth. The process would take about 50 years."
This is not really cloning, this is similar to producing hybrid dogs by cross-breeding. And this does not really advance research, man has been doing this to crops, livestock and all for so long.
It just seems like researchers with nothing to do. The real step forward would be the Dolly method. That would be cloning.
Infact such a bit is underway in australia. Scientists are planning to clone a tasmaniana Tiger.
Now that would be the perfect push for cloning tech!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Of course, instead we could just make these things to flash in front of the people and make them shudder in awe of our mighty genetic prowess until they escape our electric fences and hunt us down with their extended middle claw...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Those mammoth jokes were both wooly bad.
*sound of moths hitting spotlights*
(thinks) Lucky I kept my day job!
To hell with burgers. I want me some big frickin' ribs! And a car with no floor boards, so I can power it by running...
do not read this line twice.
Is this like "pollution credits"? For every extinct species we bring back, do we get to take one out for free?
-- Terry
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.
Things won't get really interesting until we clone a Neanderthal.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
The name of the newspaper is just "The Times", not the "London Times". It's the oldest English language newspaper in the world, and other papers added a regional prefix to differentiate themselves from the original Times (e.g., the NY Times, and local papers like the Barnet Borough Times). It's also no longer purely based in London. When I worked there a few years ago, there were three main offices, one in Wapping (London), one in Liverpool and one in Scotland. Each had their own set of journalists and editorial staff, and printing was done at all three sites, plus several others dotted around the country.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
There is only 115 streches of DNA that are known in public databases. Most of these are not that interesting if you want to make a clone. So there is still a long way to go.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Word is that Disney is helping to fund this. They've asked for a special one-off cross breed of a basset hound and the Mammoth.
Look for the release of "Real Life Dumbo" in the year 2053.
The last living mammoths have been dated to 4100 years ago on an island offshore Siberia. This a few centuries AFTER the pyramids of Egypt were constructed.
Mammoths frozen immediately after death are rare gems, as there is a higher chance of their body parts and internal organs being preserved.
:-)
The part of the body that the Japanese are most keen to get are the testicles.
Wow. Why am I not surprised?
...
"Due to genetic constraints, the final mammoth specimen will only be 88% pure mammoth and the process will take about 50 years"
Considering that apes, baboons and the like are closer than this to humans (something like over 90% I believe?), will this just be an echo from the past? Meaning the remaining 12% might make such a huge difference that the creation would be more like a new species than a reincarnation.
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?
E 80 7802,00.html?search=filter
www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E53%257
(No direct link, see the middle of the page)
Most of the arguments against the human-driven extinction of the mammoths are based upon population sizes and the difficulty of taking down a mammoth for primitive humans.
What most academics arent considering is that when humans gain access to an easy supply of food, such as mammoth meat, population sizes will spike nicely to take advantage of the resource. Since the mammoths would become increasingly scarce as they were overhunted, the human population of mammoth hunters would also decline. After the last mammoth was eaten, the survivors would switch to other large game. Such a brief spike in human population size would not leave an overwhelming fossil record, because the time involved is so short.
As for how hard mammoths were to take down: its best not to underestimate humans ability to kill things, for fairly obvious reasons. Some academics are quick to belittle the capabilities of earlier humans, probably stemming from their isolation and distance from field survival situations.
Its sad that we as a species continue this trend even to this day. Whales are continuing to decline. Its morose when environmentalist try to push beached whales back into the water: they generally beach themselves due to poisoning or internal injuries casued by human actions and byproducts.
Global warming, chemical, noise, and petroleum poisoning of the worlds oceans are a larger long-term concerns than whaling. Habitat destruction is also a major factor.
Japanese whaling is on a decline, moreso to economic issues than political. The current level of external pressure, combined with the abating of japanese propensity for whale-meat consumption (it is mostly older japanese who eat whale) is likely sufficient to put and end to commercial whaling.
It appears that the Japanese scientists involved want to clone up a mammoth for an "Ice Age wildlife park" in northeastern Siberia. If so, they're going to have more problems than just creating a mammoth.
Siberia and unglaciated Alaska may have had a very different ecosystem way back then, if what paleontologists like R. Dale Guthrie have claimed is correct. The climate was colder but dryer, with a "mammoth steppe" that was more like the American West than modern-day tundra and coniferous forest, with more grass and shrubs. (Read Guthrie's Frozen Fauna: The Story of Blue Babe for details.) That's the only way it could have supported those spectacular large animals.
I wish the article had more information on the proposed park and exactly what's going on. If they don't have any way of changing the local ecosystem back to mammoth steppe, they're going to have to feed the animals artificially, making it more like a zoo than a wildlife preserve.
Yet, according to the article, they've already gone ahead and imported musk oxen and several hundred wild horses and are negotiating with Canada to buy bison.
I thought I had seen this before, but last time tasmainian tigers were the target species. The difference in my opinion is that the tasmainian tigers demise was a direct result of (pay close attention here) modern human activity, the mammoth was a similar situation, but the extinction of the mammoth was caused by prehistoric humans. Point being is that the methods used to hunt the tigers included rifles, shotguns, snares, dead-falls, etc. The only known method of hunting the mammoth was spears, this fact combined with the lack of habitat for this species really brings into question as to whether or not this is a good idea that should be done. In the case of the tiger I say go for it, but for crying out loud, leave the damn mammoth be.
I assume that this project is simply a proof of concept; a project to generate one freak animal that would die, and the species would be extinct again.But what if it weren't?
What possible place in the world would this species have? If we're truly talking about "bringing back" a species, we have to talk about releasing it into the environment.
Now the environment has long since shaken out to equilibrium from the lack of mammoths, so introducing mammoths must necessarily take it out of equilibrium. Does anyone really thing we have any shot of predicting the impact?
Let's say we generate a genetically viable population of 100 mammoths and release them into the wastes of Siberia. What if it is simply so that the conditions that led to their demise are still in effect?
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
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.
Infuriate left and right
Very carefully.
Sure, it advances science. But damn, sombody is going to be rolling in fame and fortune. First, I'm sure the process is patented 5 ways to Sunday. Second, you can regulate the rarity of these animals... Zoos, museums and other attractions would pay huge for this sort of thing. Yeah, they're in it for the science, but being famous for creating the first prehistoric animal and making bank on top of it can't be a bad incentive either...
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Don't they keep harping on the fact that a chimpanzee is something very close to 100% human, with only a tiny percentage of difference in the genome? How close to authentic can you get with 88% of the genome intact?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Of course, I would only call it a "success" if 2 cloned mammoths were able to successfully mate."
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the mammoths would agree with you...
-- Terry
Sure they are domesticated. Indian Elephants were used as beasts of burden up until very recently. And what about Hannibal Barca?
No, I have never done any big game hunting. Have you?
But stone age hunters won't be worrying about being sporting.
Stampeding the herd with a grass fire might let them single out the weaker or younger individuals. Or perhaps they could stampede them over a cliff. Native Americans did precisely this, prior to the introduction of the horse back to North America.
Now the way I read that I'm saying just the opposite that you have interpreted it to be. Rather I think it is less legitimate to revive species killed off by less evolved humans. I do feel that humans in their current state do have many "unfair" advantages over less evolved species, I am not one to beleve in creationism and I definately think that humans are simply highly evolved animals, but due to our advantages that were carelessly used to wipe entire species from the face of the planet, we should feel somewhat responsible (we are responsible, directly so) and try to correct the mistakes our forefathers have made. The earth is only made richer by the preservation of species, and there is no possible argument to the contrary.
I believe the current thinking [bagheera.com] 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.
That's just a theory of why mammoths are extinct, nobody knows for sure. If I recall, the DNA they are using are from mammoths that were frozen in northern Russia. The evidence is that they were frozen in a cataclysmic event, because some of them still had food in their mouths.
Also, nobody knows the environmental impact of bringing back creatures that have been dead for so long. Has nature adapted and moved on after a dozen millenia? Would the resurrection of a long-extinct species do more harm than good?
Just some thoughts...
I found a link to an online book entitled "Biodiversity and Conservation: A Hypertext Book" by Peter J. Bryant. Here is a link to the chapter devoted to captive breeding and reintroduction. About halfway through this very interesting chapter Bryant addresses the woolly mammoth reintroduction.
African elephants and Mammoths are more closely related than either is to the Indian elephant.
A zoo experimented by crossing an Indian and an African elephant. The hybrid calf died. Bryant pointed out that a Elephant-Mammoth hybrid would probably be sterile, like a mule.