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Cloneable Mammoth Cells Discovered in Russia
orthogonal writes "Animal Planet reports, in this article, that 'Russian scientists said Wednesday that they've found living cells in a frozen ice-age mammoth' which could be cloned, and gestated in an elephant. I see a new Republican mascot in this."
I know they're called the Grand Old Party, but that's rediculous.
I see a new Republican mascot in this.
What? Bigger, stupider, but forgets nothing and thinks the best solution is to trample everything underfoot that can't be eaten? Oh, all that, AND a bad ass fro for the extra 'bad hair day' bonus?
- billn
"pig and elephant DNA just won't splice. Haven't you ever heard that song by Loverboy?"
I'm just curious how they're going to get a female of an elephant to gestate an organism that doesn't even share the same genetic code of the species, let alone have half of it come from the mother.
You don't get a species any more endangered than the woolly mammoth!
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"If they reconstitute that species, they better reconstitute it's least powerful predator as well.
Yeah, because we all know how difficult it has been to controll the elephant populations of the world. Without any preditors, they are multiplying uncontrollably.
---Lane
A stone-age mascot for stone-age thinking, or just another tribute to Strom Thurman?
'cause we all know what republicans love: Russians!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Why bother? Its most effective predator is alive and well. And now instead of spears, they have firearms.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Oh and it eats Greens. This joke is starting to get sick.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Seriously though, I don't think this is a good idea. What possible purpose (save entertainment value) could be served by reviving a long extinct species? (A species which has been long extinct for a reason, I might add.)
There are really two reasons, the entertainment/turist value and as an experiment. You need more reasons to get turists to go to Syberia aside from prison camps and cold weather. The experiment part is that we don't have any experience with interspecies cloning to date and there are likely to be significant hurdles. If you don't have a mammoth egg you will be trying to create a creature with part elephant and part mammoth DNA. This means there will probably be essential mitochondria missing. We'll need to figure out where we can get the missing ones, either by repairing the elephant copies that no longer function or by finding similar DNA/RNA in other creatures. There is also the question of knowing if you really are missing something. What if the creature looks like a mammoth but can't digest the syberian vegitation, is that because the vegitation has changed or because the animal is missing some enzyme?
While you might believe in extinction always happens for good reasons. In this case, there is good reason to believe it was simply the result of bad land management by the ancient human inhabitants who overhunted the creature to extinction. The had depended on it and there were probably mass starvation of humans once they eliminated their source of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Not only is there evidence of the overhunting, but there were isolated islands where the mammoth lived into historic times simply because they weren't hunted. But this isn't going to bring the mammoth back, very few creatures have any chance of survival once their genetic pool gets constricted to a few hundred creatures. It would take another 10,000 years for them to recover their genetic health if we had that many, and frankly that is impossible. The best we could hope for is some DNA that could help us save the Asian or African elephants if it comes to that. (The plains African elephant is in a healthy recovery in enough countries but that may change with AIDS, and we just don't know enough about the forest elephant, which we just realized was a different species last year. The Asian elephant may be genetically saved through domestication, but it's wild cousin is practically gone.) But, there are big cats that have had hardly recovered from the feline AIDS pandemic before humans started burning down the land to create farms, the techniques learned with mammoths might be able to save them genetically from extinction do to our early inefficient farming efforts. This would save us the effort of trying to successfully introduce new predators to their ranges, something we've not had great success with before.
While I'm sure ADM and the Sierra Club both have uses for interspecies cloning the main arguement for learning how to do it is just for the basic knowledge of how we work, using mammoths is not only going to give them headlines, which are essential to getting funding, but is also practical because we actually do have some from over 10,000 years ago, providing a great snapshot into the past.
I'll bet Russia could really use the eco-tourism money that this would generate. I wouldn't mind a vacation package to see these things up close.
The team, led by Japan's Kazufumi Goto...
I hear that Goto is considered harmful.
If anyone can get me a steak of this thing, I will pay handsomely.
All things in moderation; including moderation
It depends how many hundreds. This relates to a concept called minimum viable population size. According to a site about elephant conservation:
Other species seem to be able to get around with much smaller populations, less than a hundred in some cases.
I'll admit I don't know much about Siberia, but I would imagine that there are at least a few other animals up there (The Siberian tiger springs to mind). I wonder how the mammoths will interact with them. Who remembers the Simpsons episode where Bart brought a frog to Australia?
Since they have somatic cells (ie normal cells not eggs or sperm) if they clone it into an elephant egg they will get an baby mammoth of the same gender and the original.
I really doubt that mammoth and elephant are more cross fertile that horse/donkey and the offspring will be sterile which means that the only way to perpetuate the species is by continued cloning.... However if the mammoth is male it could be possible to deactivate the 'male gene' (SRY in humans) and create a female mammoth.
I know a Song about that
(to Home on the Range)
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when she is grown,
My very own clone,
We'll be of the opposite sex.
Chorus:
Clone, clone of my own,
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when we're alone,
Since her mind is my own,
She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
Except for the inconvenient little fact that it was humans who wiped out the wooly mammoth. If we hadn't hunted the things into extinction, they would probably survive quite well in areas like Siberia.
So what? We're a part of nature, too. The mammoths ran up against nature's fair-haired boys (who may or may not have actually been fair-haired), and got their asses handed to them. How's that any different than if some species were driven to extinction by any other means, or by some other species? I'm so tired of this "nature good, humans evil" crap!
Yes, we have a mean streak a mile wide. Better hope we still have it when the Bugs come for our planet...
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!