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Resurrecting the Mighty Mammoth, Cheaply
somanyrobots writes with an interesting followup in the New York Times to the earlier-reported substantial reconstruction of the woolly mammoth genome: "Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." (The Washington Post article linked from the earlier post was much more skeptical, calling such an attempt "still firmly the domain of science fiction." The New York Times article, while describing the process in similar terms, also calls attention to recent advances in sequencing DNA, as well as recoding DNA for cloning.)
Well, the first few we resurrect will be interesting and a tourist attraction and all that, but once the public is used to them there has to be a practical application.
Mammoth Burgers sound good to me :)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
is, from the same story, relegated to second interest, for some reason, the idea of resurrecting a neanderthal, the same way as the woolly mammoth. using chimpanzee as the starting cell lineage rather than human, for ethical considerations of course
but this guy won't be dumb. somebody will have to explain to him he's not the last of his kind... he is the 50,000 year old cloned reconstruction of his kind
weird, lonely, and possible on our lifetime
very cool, very freaky
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Of course that's fascinating, but what would they do with a mammoth? Polar bears are becoming endangered because of rising temperatures and mammoths have disappeared, supposedly because the climate was too warm. They'll have to build a large freezer to keep the beast alive--Jurassic Park meets Frosty the Snowman--or they might not find a place cold enough on Earth for that purpose.
What about the Dodo? Any bits left?
That's a strange coincidence they're talking about this JP-like experiment a few weeks after Michael Crichton's death. Posthumous humour?
His post assumes that we wouldn't try to establish a breeding population. If we plan on bringing back an extinct species, what moral obligation do we have to prevent its extinction when the only specimen dies? Or is it okay, since our world has moved on since the last mammoth lived? If scientists make one, should we make more and restore a population? Would today's world be a good environment for a wild population or not? Would our creations be forever destined to live in zoos?
If we create a breeding population, how do we ensure genetic diversity? I am not a bioengineer, and have no way of knowing if diversity is already included in their method (taking a living elephant's skin cell and slowly reshuffling the DNA from elephant to mammoth) by simply using cells from different donor elephants for making each new mammoth. I guess that would depend on how reshuffled the DNA gets in the process of injecting new sequences.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Stephen Baxter's Behemoth is an omnibus of three books which deal with mammoths. The third book is actually about mammoths being genetically engineered back into existence, and there is actually one individual who is halfway between elephant and mammoth. Very cool books.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
"...But for my money, the clone I would most like to see is Otzi [about.com] everyone's favourite ice-man."
What you fail to understand, in this instance, is that 'Otzi', the person, was a product of the time and environment in which he lived. Science would gain little from cloning him because his clone, a new, separate, human consciousness, would be a product of this time period. Humans have changed very little, from an evolutionary standpoint, since the conscious being that was 'Otzi' existed. The only thing that we could possibly gain from an 'Otzi' clone would be a slightly better understanding of the function of the human appendix.
Sig this!
I've frequently advocated that the current generation animal I would most like to eat is the elephant. This is primarily because it is the most related to the mammoth.
I figure that during the modern human's evolutionary cycle is when we developed our innate sense of what tastes "good" and what tastes "bad".
Those that felt items that best guaranteed our survival were tasted "good" most likely survived. The others did not.
For example, sugar can give us immediate energy. That helps survival. Of course, most of us think sugar is really quite tasty.
When modern man was evolving, mammoth was the meat of choice. Thus, those most disposed to eating mammoth survived and passed on their pro-mammoth genes. Since mammoth has become extinct: 1. the timescale is less than that for evolution to modify, and 2. mankind has pursued non-survival-of-the-fittest survival routines due to morals (i.e. helping the helpless, a noble pursuit in my opinion).
Thus, we are possibly pro-eating-mammoth genetically selected. It might taste like crap, but likely it is really good. But I'm at least wanting to have one bite of an animal that might be the best tasting meat of all, due to my genetic heritage. [Enter Vegan Flame Wars Here, but Meat Is Yummy.]
I'll let you know, if I ever get the chance to take a bite out of the (unfortunately endangered) elephant, or the descendants of the cloned mammoth.
There is a huge moral issue here, and the idea of 'resurrecting any species' especially a mammal would not pass an ethics board. In Australia a few years back there was talk of doing resurrecting Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine), where there is a great deal of information and dna material as the creature became extinct in 1936.
This is a basic 1st yr uni idea. Whilst it might be possible (or at least someday it might be), to 'create' a viable population would be stupidly expensive unless the animal shit gold and pissed oil.
If one is made, would it then be considered an endangered species?
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs there was an attempt to recreate the extinct species of cow called an Auroch. The idea was to identify currently existing cattle that had partial Auroch ancestry and breed them, selecting for Auroch characteristics. Essentially you were building a gene pool that contained all the necessary genes mixed in with others, running everything through a filter and trying to just get the ones you wanted. They were partially successful
There's a series of books written by Jasper Fforde, starting with "The Eyre Affair", that are odd and funny science fiction books about an alternate universe where people truly care about books -- they have cults devoted to 'who really wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare' and such -- but one side-note is that many people own cloned dodos (the heroine of the story has one from a batch that went wrong, so it's kind of stupid and gimpy) but, more relevantly, a huge multinational company that serves as the axis of evil in the series of books has cloned Neanderthals but *owns* them (since it did the work) and uses them as slave labor.
Wow. That was a run-on sentence. Sorry 'bout that.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
No fucking way. The nice thing about walking in New Zealand is *not* having to worry about running into poisonous/dangerous animals. Plus, I don't really want all my fellow walkers packing .45s for self defence. If you want exciting walks, go visit Aussie.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."