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Scientists To Breed the Auroch From Extinction
ImNotARealPerson writes "Scientists in Italy are hoping to breed back from extinction the mighty auroch, a bovine species which has been extinct since 1627. The auroch weighed 2,200 pounds (1000kg) and its shoulders stood at 6'6". The beasts once roamed most of Asia and northern Africa. The animal was depicted in cave paintings and Julius Caesar described it as being a little less in size than an elephant. A member of the Consortium for Experimental Biotechnology suggests that 99% of the auroch's DNA can be recreated from genetic material found in surviving bone material. Wikipedia mentions that researchers in Poland are working on the same problem."
It sounds delicious.
Why is it that every time something neat in biology comes up, the first thing everyone says is 'What could possibly go wrong' implying, of course, that something exceptionally negative will come about as a result of it? Jeepers, this thing only died out four centuries ago. They're not going to hunt you down in trained squads.
Considering that the aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, it just *might* be possible to come up with viable substitutes for the missing 1%.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Presumably, it depends on which 99% they've recovered. If it includes all or most of the genes that make an aurochs an aurochs rather than Bessie, they're good to go.
Also, TFA says they're not trying to create an aurochs genome de novo. They're carefully breeding modern cattle to try to get a genome that's as close as possible to the reconstructed aurochs genome. So the intermediate generations may not be aurochs, exactly, but they won't be nonviable; they'll just be different breeds of cow.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A bit offtopic, I know, but can we please stop referring to everyone and everything as scientists? If you need better terms, try "Geneticists" or "Breeders" or "Italians." Saying that Scientists are going to do it is an overused catch-all phrase that doesn't actually add any information. What, could it have been that Creationists were going to breed the auroch from extinction? Linguists? Liberal arts majors?
The ______ Agenda
A 30min radio offering via bbc iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hc946/b00hc6xc/Jon_Ronson_and_the_Quest_for_the_Aryan_Cow/ (runs until 9:32pm Thursday 21st January 2010 ) covers the trip to Munich Zoo by John Ronson. "Jon Ronson investigates the controversial story of the work of Lutz Heck, the director of Berlin Zoo who attempted to resurrect several pure-blooded, extinct animal species as part of the Nazi programme to control the genetic destiny of all creation. He visits Munich Zoo, which proudly advertises its 'formerly extinct aurochs' - a type of large and powerful cow - but does not refer to the fact that behind this apparent triumph lies the story of Heck's collusion with Goering's aspiration to replace Europe's 'racially degenerate' wildlife and plant life with pure, 'noble' and extinct species."
This is great and all, but it's also something that the Nazis were doing before WWII - there are quite a lot of these Heck cattle still around. There was even a radio programme on the BBC about it a week or so ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heck_cattle
Maybe the Italians and the Poles are using a technique closer to cloning, but why then talk about breeding back - the same methodology that the Hecks used?
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
Clever girl, Bessie...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
They can just fill in the missing 1% with frog DNA.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Toying with life? Do you mean like what we do with vaccines that stop disease, medicines that cure, or plant breeding that feeds the world? Even brewing beer and baking bread could be considered 'toying with life.' No one's saying to be reckless, but you've got to admit toying with life has brought a hell of a lot more benefit than harm.
Jurassic Park was a good movie, but a parable? My arse! Why is it that so many movies have some mad scientists killing people with their crazed experiments, but you never see the movie about people starving to death or succumbing to preventable/curable diseases because the scientists didn't do the research?
What if people like Norman Borlaug or Edward Jenner didn't 'toy with nature?' It wouldn't be a very pretty sight, would it? I for one like it when we toy with life.
It's a fucking cow, for chrissakes, and a big one. We're not talking weirdo Eurasian frogs in or some strange aquatic algae. At worst it might be competition for any other Eurasian wild bovines (not that there are a lot of those left anywhere). But this beasty has only been extinct about 400 or 500 years, and is close enough to megafauna that I doubt anything has really filled its shoes, except for all the domestic animals we've put there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
TFS says "The auroch weighed 2,200 pounds (1000kg) and its shoulders stood at 6'6". The beasts once roamed most of Asia and northern Africa. The animal was depicted in cave paintings and Julius Caesar described it as being a little less in size than an elephant."
Some modern horses weigh over a ton (shire horse is up to 1½ ton, brabant horse average over 1 ton, clydesdale horses typically about 1 ton), bulls in some breeds of cattle can be up to 1½ tons, and the American Bison occasionally exceeds a ton also. These animals would hardly be described as just a little less than an elephant in size, so we're looking at a certain amount of exaggeration or hoopla in TFS and TFA.
BTW, the record weight for a bull is 1740 kg, so the Auroch hardly merits being referred to as a "giant"
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
A pig would better - they could market it as jew-rassic pork.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
+1
Just to see the face on the toreador on seeing an elephant sized wild bull with 2m horns charging down on him.
I'd pay to see that.
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Made from the freshest electrons.
There's more than one kind of elephant.
In fact in Caesar's time there was a third kind - the North African elephant. These were used in war, most famously by Hannibal and so that's probably the sort he was familiar with. They were pretty small, as elephants go.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... but you never see the movie about people starving to death or succumbing to preventable/curable diseases because the scientists didn't do the research? ...
There are.
But usually, people who die to preventable diseases are displayed as heroes for sticking with their belief system. Martyrdom meme is strong.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Details matter.
You actually *can* learn something useful in a way from considering the Jurassic Park story. Consider this: the T. rex was awesome, *cool* even. The raptors were terrifying. The little venom spitting dinosaur was the worst.
If you think about it, that's actually a fairly reasonable reaction. Which of the animals would be a potential problem for people if they were reconstructed? The T. rex is huge, easy to spot, and probably needs an enormous geographic range to itself to survive. If a breeding pair escaped, they'd have almost no chance of establishing a stable population, even if people left them alone.
The raptors on the other hand might have a chance. The range for a single T. rex probably would support a good sized band of them. But they probably wouldn't be hard to hunt down. They're still pretty big and would be easy to track down. As formidable as they are, they wouldn't be a match for a squad of human commandos.
It's that little spitting dinosaur that you'd have to look out for. If a breeding pair escaped, they'd be all over the place and you'd never be able to eradicate them.
The smaller an individual organism is and the less resources it requires to maintain itself in breeding condition, the harder it is to eradicate. Insects the the fire ant, the japanese beetle, or the asian tiger mosquito pretty much can't be stopped once they start breeding in a hospitable environment. Microorganisms are the very hardest. Unless they have a very narrow habitat (e.g. pathogens that infect humans only), you can't even begin to contain their geographic spread; even then it's hard.
In any case, if you read the book, the real screwups werent't he scientists. They were the systems engineers who relied too much on the resumptions in the requirements spec.
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