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

Do we really need that much detail?

[PyroMosh]

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?

Re:Do we really need that much detail?

[cswiii]

Oh, seriously, c'mon now, look at what you're implying. I seriously doubt these 14 year-old, scrawny, pimply trolls could lift an erect mammoth penis, much less run with it!

If they could do anything that somewhat resembled heavy lifting, they wouldn't be trolling Slashdot. Perhaps if they could recognize anything that somewhat resembled an erection, the same could be said.

...Opening the floodgates...

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.

No doubt

[Advocadus Diaboli]

that the species of mammoth extinct.

"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.

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.

Isn't this a movie?

[shut_up_man]

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.

Re:Need bigger cats

[rosewood]

Thats a scary thought... what if he locks me out of my house and I am forced to bang on my door and scream for my wife?

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."

In other news..

[fadeaway]

McDonalds has reportedly changed their motto from "100% Real Beef!" to "100% Real Meat!"..

is this cloning!!??

[tanveer1979]

"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!

More interesting than Zoo Attraction

[Kaz Riprock]

As a bioinformaticist, I'd find it more interesting to get the DNA sequence from these frozen specimens than growing them up Jurassic-Park-style. A lot of what we know about our "ancestor's DNA" (see the race gene, the talking gene stories by S Paabo) is extrapolated from the DNA in organisms now-a-days. The "years ago" applied to these things are highly suspect (attributed by simple math extractions based upon pseudo-expected mutation rates). Comparing the DNA of these frozen specimens to that of modern-day elephants can shed some light on mammalian DNA mutation rates and protein evolution. Right now, we can usually only make best guesses given a somewhat single-rate equation for time. It is completely imaginable that the mutations happened in batches and by looking at the differences, we may be able to answer some of these questions.

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...

Is this like "pollution credits"?

[tlambert]

Is this like "pollution credits"? For every extinct species we bring back, do we get to take one out for free?

-- Terry

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.

Mammoth DNA

[lovebyte]

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.

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.

Re:Neanderthal

[sharkey]

Things won't get really interesting until we clone a Neanderthal.

Hopefully, they'll clone him a nice, sexy cave nug so he won't get lonely, bud......dy.