43,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Remains Offer Strong Chance of Cloning

EwanPalmer sends a followup to a story from last year about a team of Siberian scientists who recovered an ancient wooly mammoth carcass. It was originally believed to be about 10,000 years old, but subsequent tests showed the animal died over 43,000 years ago. The scientists have been surprised by how well preserved the soft tissues were. They say it's in better shape than a human body buried for six months. "The tissue cut clearly shows blood vessels with strong walls. Inside the vessels there is haemolysed blood, where for the first time we have found erythrocytes. Muscle and adipose tissues are well preserved." The mammoth's intestines contain vegetation from its last meal, and they have the liver as well. The scientists are optimistic that they'll be able to find high quality DNA from the mammoth, and perhaps even living cells. They now say there's a "high chance" that data would allow them to clone the mammoth.

Comments

Can't wait

[Anonymous Coward]

For mammoth burgers.

Re:Can't wait

[NotDrWho]

Screw that, I want some of those cool tusks for the front of my truck.

Re:Can't wait

[tom229]

The logical person in me says this probably isn't a good idea. But then the mad scientist in me completely takes over and can't wait to eat a mammoth burger.

Shouldn't they start out small first?

[wcrowe]

I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?

Re:Shouldn't they start out small first?

[drinkypoo]

I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?

We already know cloning works. Welcome to the 1990s. Sorry about your internet connection.

Re:Shouldn't they start out small first?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no point in cloning a chicken. We already _know_ what chicken tastes like.

Re:Shouldn't they start out small first?

[qazsedcft]

We have been able to clone several species already. That's not the problem. The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago. From TFA it seems they are already working on cross-species clones but they are still a long way off.

Re:Shouldn't they start out small first?

[qazsedcft]

It doesn't matter that the donor is dead. The process of cloning involves taking out DNA and inserting it into another cell. All that matters is that enough DNA can be collected for a complete organism. Freezing is completely irrelevant as even human embryos used for in-vitro fertilization are routinely frozen.

The Crichton Diet

[rmdingler]

Free-range grass fed mammoth might still taste like elephant, so don't get your hopes up.

"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[jeffb (2.718)]

A few thousand years isn't "long".

Compared to the other changes humans wreak over decades, bringing back mammoths would barely cause a ripple.

"Contain these creatures forever and ever"? We already extinguished them once, without even the help of gunpowder. If you're looking for things to worry about, you can do much better than this.

Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[Tx]

Yeah, considering how many species humans have (directly or indirectly) wiped out, developing the skills to bring some of them back might be prudent.

" We already extinguished them once, without even the help of gunpowder."

However I believe the current thinking is that mammoths are not amongst our victims, and were wiped out by natural climate change instead.

Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[mark-t]

If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.

Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.

This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.

Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[Big Hairy Ian]

Could we bring enough back with a diverse enough gene pool to actually repopulate a reserve?

Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[NatasRevol]

Would a nearby supernova that happened to sterilize Earth be evil?

From our point of view, yes.

Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[Savage-Rabbit]

If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.

Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.

This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.

Mammoths survived until at least 2500 years ago on Wrangel island where that particular population was probably wiped out by modern humans so at least the habitat question is a non issue.

Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[BergZ]

I was going to make a very similar comment to yours, but the more I thought about it the more the mammoth seems like a good test case.

It seems to me that we're just starting the testing & experimentation phase of resurrection technology. To be cautious I think we should start testing this new technology on extinct species that meet both of the following conditions:
(1) Are unlikely to escape captivity (ideally test species should be unable to survive outside specially designed enclosures).
(2) Are big, lumbering, and slow breeding. Even if such a species somehow escapes captivity (and manages to survive in the wild) we can still hunt them down and eliminate them.

So far as I know mammoths meet both of these conditions making them good test subjects for resurrection technology.
"... bringing [the mammoth] into an environment that it was not evolved to handle" - That's a feature, not a bug!

Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me and a couple of grad students at the applied time-travel facility.

But what does it taste like

[u38cg]

Hot pan, salt, pepper, enquiring minds want to know.

Re:Hmm

[SecurityGuy]

Sure. Woolly mammoths are pretty big. One might even call them mammoth. If one gets out, it won't be that hard to find.

Besides, we shouldn't be talking about creating a population of these things yet. Lets create one and see how that goes. It's not like it's going to run off into the forest and sprout more.

Seems logical

[Kokuyo]

We can't keep elephants and rhinos alive, so let's clone us some mammoths...

Global Warming!

[flyingfsck]

Well, obviously the melt of the ice age and all the the global warming problems since then were started off by Woolly Mammoth farts and now they want to bring them back?

The end game

[paiute]

They need to clone dwarf mammoths and sell them as house pets.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like it's going to run off into the forest and sprout more.

I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.

Re:Hmm

[DrXym]

My understanding is that mammoths are fairly conspicuous creatures, what with them being giant hairy elephants.

Re:Sexist much?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does your mom have to do with this?

Re:Hmm

[SecurityGuy]

Mammoths don't travel at 500+ mph. Planes don't leave footprints or take great, big dumps on the ground to announce where they've been. Now, if they create a mammoth that can travel at 500 mph across water, I concede that yes, we may lose track of it.