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Most of Woolly Mammoth Genome Reconstructed
geekmansworld writes "From the Washington Post, 'An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.' Who wants a pet mammoth?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
right NOW, we can do this
apparently it would be tedious, but a number of technical hurdles have been overcome lately to the point where this is really conceivable to do, and the talk about doing it isnot theoretical, but practical
1. most recent modern genome decoders don't care that the dna is shredded into pieces
2. encapsulated in keratin (hair), the dna is not so tainted by bacterial dna like it is in bone
3. a new technique allows modifying modern elephant dna 50,000 genomic sites at a time, rather than one by one, so the proper egg can be arrived at after a few generations of reconstruction, implanted in a female elephant, and voila
this can be done, right NOW!
amazing
even more freaky: we can do the same, right now, with neanderthal!
using chimpanzee as a starting point for ethical considerations, we can also, right NOW, bring a neanderthal back to life
that's pretty freaky. these guys wouldn't be dumb. someone would have to explain to the guy that he is not the last of his species, he's an artifically reconstructed clone of a guy who died 50,000 years ago. no one of his kind exists anymore
but we revived a wooly old friend of yours too. here's a spear, happy hunting
just don't eat the dodo
or the quagga
or the irish elk
or the auroch
or the sabretooth though
really really freaky and amazing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No. Mammoth meat probably smells and tastes like limburger cheese.
University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher had a theory that early Americans of 10,000 years ago used frozen lakes as refrigerators to store mastodon and mammoth meat. He tested his theory when a friend's horse died of old age. Fisher dropped chunks of horse meat of up to 170 pounds below the ice in a nearby pond. He anchored some pieces to the bottom. Every week or so he cooked and chewed a piece of meat, and eventually swallowed each bite. The meat remained safe to eat well into the summer. The theory is that as the water warmed in the spring, lactobacilli (the bacteria found in yogurt & cheese) colonized the meat, rendering it inhospitable to other pathogens. So despite the smell and taste (similar to Limburger cheese), the meat remained safe to eat.
http://www.foodreference.com/html/f-mammoth-meat.html
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!