Russian Scientists Say They'll Clone a Mammoth Within 5 Years

Many scientists (mainly Japanese and Russian) have dreamed of cloning a mammoth over the years. When the mammoth genome was partially reconstructed in 2008, that dream seemed a bit closer. Besides the millions of dollars needed for such a project, the biggest hurdle was the lack of a good sample of mammoth DNA. That hurdle has now been cleared, thanks to the discovery of well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues from Japan's Kinki University say that within 5 years they'll likely have a clone. From the article: "What's been missing is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei since the late 1990s. Now it sounds like the missing genes may have been found."

Comments

Ice Age Park

[alen]

Just like Jurassic Park, but colder

Re:Ice Age Park

[bobcat7677]

Seems less likely than Jurassic Park to attract enough tourists to keep such a venture solvent. Besides...what can they really do with one set of DNA? You bring one back from the dead as it were, but wouldn't you need at least two (male and female) to re-start the species...and several to have any remotely healthy genetic diversity? Frozen specimens have shown what the animal was like...not sure what more could be learned from a living example?

Re:Ice Age Park

[Anonymous Coward]

the roseanne ref is almost as old as the mammoth :)

Re:Ice Age Park

[GNious]

Mix with current age elephants and unix-gurues - should make for diversity, while keeping the hairyness.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Hentes]

It might be possible to crossbreed them with elephants, but even one animal would be a huge success, as it would lead to the development of methodology to revive an extinct animal, and with the global extinction of today, there will be need for such technology.

Re:Ice Age Park

[StikyPad]

Or you could just clone the one indefinitely. It's already being done in other animals. The important of genetic diversity should not be forgotten, though in the case of an extinct animal, it's probably not the primary concern.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Archangel Michael]

I've noticed, the more proficient I get at Linux, my beard grows thicker and greyer ... I'm no longer thinking it is coincidence.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Archangel Michael]

Then we'll kill it for dinner. Back to Extinct for you!

Re:Ice Age Park

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"Can" and "Should" are seldom in agreement.

How cruel this would be, cloning an individual or two.

If the Mammoth is anything like the Elephant, it has a sophisticated intelligence and psychology - intimately linked with the social and familial bonds in its herd.

A lone mammoth or two, without mature, bonding mdels? It is similar to breeding a captive human on a distant asteroid, from an in vitro culture.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Anonymous Coward]

I think those numbers are for different things.

Something like this:
40 is for individes with diverse genes and with careful planing. ("generation ship" with 40 carefully chosen people for all over the world)
150-200 is for randomly chosen individuals (almost) randomly fucking each other. ("new world ship" not filled with sects members)
1700-2700 is for individes that already live close to each other and where most individes have a few relatives, (A small town getting isolated when the zombies attack.)

Re:Ice Age Park

[Kenoli]

Go extinct twice; achievement unlocked

I wonder

[Dunbal]

What the giants will have to say about that.

Putin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will have shot it five minutes later...

All this in the mist of global warming.

[jellomizer]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat. They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age. So lets bring them to life and stick them in a post/anti-Ice Age environment... Brilliant!

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Each one will be issued a heavy-duty electric razor and a bottle of SPF-50 sunscreen, along with an umbrella in one of five ridiculous novelty prints.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[0123456]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.

Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.

In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Palshife]

We have penguins at the St. Louis zoo.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[MikeyO]

They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age

I thought they were done in by humans hunting with clovis point spears. They should be fine now, nobody uses spears anymore.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[sexconker]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.

Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.

In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.

Fucking Starks and their "winter is coming" doom and gloom bullshit.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Samantha Wright]

You had me at "one of five ridiculous novelty prints." Where does one apply to be a mammoth? Is there a BSD convention nearby?

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[thomasw_lrd]

Actually according to the Poncas there were a few woolly mammoths left around until about the 1200's. At least one tribe has a story of an extremely long winter when food supplies were running low, and they then went hunting and killed a woolly mammoth, and it saved the tribe.

Who knows what animals survived in small herds in the America's until the Europeans arrived.

Source:
http://www.helium.com/items/2119958-sightings-of-living-woolly-mammoths

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[jd]

Humans had a huge impact on Mammoths, that's well-established. The standard hunting technique for big game appears to have been to trigger a stampede off a cliff. You should also remember that humans primarily hunted Pygmy Mammoth, not the giant kind, and that humans lived right up to the ice sheet during the Ice Age (and even hunted beyond it). Neandertals and Denisovians were the primary hominids living in extremely cold climates, but modern humans were quite capable of enduring extreme climates provided some sort of food existed. (Fishing from boats turns out to have been an extremely ancient technology.)

Having said that, Mammoth diversity was dropping long before humans even reached places like the Americas, so there were clearly other factors involved.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

Uh, no.

Look people like the image of the stone-age human hunter taking the huge bull mammoth down with a spear, perhaps working in groups... it's a very popular image for that reason. But it's utter nonsense. There's no hard evidence mammoths were ever hunted by humans. There is some evidence that mammoth meat was consumed by humans, which is often conflated, but scavenging food isnt the same thing as hunting. There is even some evidence that mammoths may occasionally have been killed by humans - but it was more likely an opportunistic event than a planned hunt. A small, young mammoth that happened to get cut off from its group? An isolated individual that got stuck in a bog? Sure, some of that would have happened, and humans would certainly seize the opportunity, but that's a far cry from actually going out to hunt healthy, full-grown mammoths with a stone spear.

Wooly mammoths were quite a bit larger and more dangerous than todays African elephant. And we have one and only one known case of a human group hunting African elephants without firearms. Pygmy hunters in central africa do it and have apparently done it for centuries. BUT they dont do it with stone spears - they use bows and arrows coated with a potent poison. And even so, they often lose hunters. For even a large group of humans armed with Clovis technology to attack a full grown african elephant, let alone a mammoth, would be suicidally foolish.

Elephants arent just HUGE animals, they are also quite intelligent. They are also social animals and move in groups. Another large (though much smaller) animal that also moves in groups and certainly WAS hunted at the time is the bison - but not only are even the extinct, gigantic species of bison still much smaller than a mammoth, there is a huge difference in their group behaviour. Bison are much more cow-like, and can be stampeded easily. And THIS is how they were actually hunted - whole herds were stampeded into fatal falls, then the humans went in to salvage meat and other material from the corpses afterwards. This is a much smarter tactic than trying to take one down with a spear (though also extraordinarily wasteful,) and in fact we know that is exactly how our ancestors did it. But that tactic just doesnt work on elephants.

So, no, mammoth extinction did not come at the tip of a spear. If human action helped to bring about mammoth extinction, it was not in such a direct fashion.

Kinki University?

[cashman73]

Now, I really don't want to know WHY they're cloning a mammoth,. . .

I dunno

[Megahard]

Sounds like a mammoth project.

Wired

[kodiaktau]

Wired Mag had their article about this back in September.
I believe this to be an ethical issue that really needs to be thought through before folks go off tinkering with genes. As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation? In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment? Hell we cannot even keep from releasing invasive species to control other species without completely screwing it up. This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence.

mammoths are dumb

[MikeyO]

Mammoths are dumb, If they are going to pick a species to bring back from extinction, they should pick something cooler, like a mermaid or a unicorn or something.

Re:Steak

[Culture20]

Of course they taste great. We hunted them to extinction!

This and Fusion Power

[paleo2002]

Every few years someone announces that they'll clone a mammoth within the next few years. I remember writing a science report about this in the 6th grade, around 1990-91. It'd be great if they finally do it, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm sure they'd make good eating, though.

Nucleic DNA is not the whole story

[nut]

So they have the nucleic DNA - what about DNS from other intra-cellular bodies such as mitochondria? What about the epi-genetic effects of bringing a mammoth fetus to term inside another species? (Presumably an elephant.)

I think what they will end up with is an approximation of a mammoth, not an true instance of the species that became extinct 10,000 years ago.

Re: beard

[toastar]

Yeah.... and the longer I do systems administration on Microsoft Windows based networks, the more of my hair turns gray. No beard though....

I would think that would make one bald.