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Efforts To Turn Elephants Into Woolly Mammoths Are Already Underway
Jason Koebler writes: "Researchers are working to hybridize existing animals with extinct ones in order to create a '2.0' version of the animal. Using a genome editing technique known as CRISPR, Harvard synthetic biologist George Church has successfully migrated three genes, which gave the woolly mammoth its furry appearance, extra layer of fat, and cold-resistant blood, into the cells of Asian elephants, with the idea of eventually making a hybrid embryo. In theory, given what we know about both the woolly mammoth genome and the Asian elephant genome, the final product will be something that more closely resembles the former than the latter."
Shouldn't they be concentrating on turning Americans into decent people instead?
Where's my cat-girl?
Maybe we shouldn't be making woolly mammoths just now, with climate change and all that apocalyptic-ness right around the corner.
Just sayin'.
why are they doing this?
Really though, we're trying to genetically resurrect an animal that died off likely due to human depredation and the end of the ice age. Now there are 7 billion MORE humans and the earth is getting warmer.
Way to jam a genetically square peg into a round hole.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
why are they doing this?
Its funded by "traditional medicine" merchants. The poachers will soon have killed off the real elephants for their ivory tusks so a replacement is needed. Might as well use mammoths rather than modern elephants since the mammoths will have larger tusks, more ivory to harvest, more "tradition medicine viagra" to sell.
Mammoth and elephant DNA just won't splice!
Where's my elephant? - Bart Simpson
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One step closer to the egg-laying wool-milk-pig.
When Intel buys or invents some kind of a new chip process, everyone applauds. When engineers use 3D printing to save a crippled boy's life, everyone celebrates technology. Stick an arduino in a tumor and people scream in ecstasy.
But when the item of cloning comes in the news, suddenly people back away and ask what it's all good for. Because us humans are not allowed to mess with that.
Come on people. We invested thousands of years trying to understand the tricks of physics and evolution. We have now got to a stage where we can apply these tricks ourselves and see what we can make of the world.
Will it turn out for the better? Absolutely nobody knows. But telling scientists not to mess with this takes us back to the middle ages, where scientific incentives were influenced heavily by religious and cultural beliefs.
Let us show ourselves that we no longer need that. This is the time to end that society of religion and culture. Messing with life, and bringing back the extinct, those are exactly the kind of things that go against all rules of religion that we have adhered to for the past x thousands years. Humans are the new god on planet earth (and beyond?).
Nothing could possibly go wrong.
I for one welcome our new hybridized mammoth overlords!
Come on, you know you wanted to post this first.
1 Rub giant balloon on elephant
2 Walk it through my house
3 have a wooly mammoth
4 (optional) help me move to other location, thanks a lot
no profit, sorry.
That would be way cooler than a fat hair elephant
Just let me know when I can buy a mammoth steak for the BBQ. Sounds tasty. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Fat hair elephants, made by fat hair elephants for fat hairy elephants
We are making elephants more resistant to cold, just as they don't really need it anymore.
Maybe they should ask the elephants if this is a good idea before they strap on a wool coat to their DNS.
For Global Warming!
We're experiencing a global warming trend, and you want to resurrect a species of large mammal that was adapted to cold climates?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
These scientists need to start genetically engineering tiny elephants we can keep as pets.
Perhaps by using pot-bellied pig DNA?
And they sue you when it tramples your house.
What you're talking about is basically natural crossbreeding, not the type of genetic engineering that involves modifying the DNA itself of an organism. By "natural" I include such mechanical techniques as artificial insemination, extracting the sperm and eggs from mature adults and mixing them up. With natural crossbreeding you get the whole shebang, you let nature decide which genes become active and dominant. In theory, with DNA level genetic engineering you can specify which traits you want to get. I'm not saying this is a good thing, only that you can potentially get more control by "editing" (the word used in the article) the genes that simpy mixing the semen and egg of two different species.
I can't wait for the guy from Bizarre Foods to share his experience eating Mammoth penis, testicles, and anus.
I don't understand the catch phrase:
If it looks good, eat it!
The man's eating animal penises, testicles, and other strange parts of an animal's body - do these 'look' good to him and others?
For the first pot head to show up in a home-spun woolly mammoth sweater.
Or Woolly Shit!! This should be interesting. Hybrid walking giants!
They're already working on the solution of a runaway mammoth population:
http://news.nationalgeographic...
I do remember reading reprints of this quite prescient April 1st article 30 years ago.
http://www.textfiles.com/humor...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
everyone's guilty but some are more guilty than others...
This is why you start with Mammoth. It's not like you are going to misplace them, or walk out our BSL2 with one stuck to our shirt. And we know they are habitat limited and that we can hunt them to extinction.
But seriously, we genetically engineer lab mice and rats all the time, even hybridising them with human genes, and no-one bats an eyelash. This is the same process, just using elephants with specific mammoth genes.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
[Flintstones] Can't wait for that mammoth burger.
However that is not the case when we blindly throw genes from one species into another. Just because we have the ability to do something doesn't mean that we have the knowledge to use it appropriately.
Except the technology being used here is the same as is routinely used to genetically engineer lab animals with genes from other species, even (and especially) human genes, in order to explore gene functionality.
The only difference is that it's using elephants with mammoth genes, instead of rats, mice, pigs, dogs, monkeys, etc, with human or jellyfish genes. It even sounds like they've mapped the function of the first three genes they've chosen, and they've started in a cell culture to test their technique. Wow, it's almost like they're being scientific about it.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Just what a warmer earth needs, a creature that died out when the Ice Age started to decline.
How do these experiments benefit mankind, other than manufacturing a new zoo attraction?
-Bryan
Lets look back at the records. As the mammoth population declined, temperature increased. Obviously we need more mammoths.
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Didn't we learn a lesson from this from a movie once?
The geneticist works quietly at some titrations, making small adjustments and jotting down notes in his notebook, it's late, the geneticist hot caught up in a task and lost track of time. Suddenly, Jeff Goldblum appears behind him and gently places his hands on the scientists shoulders. "Oops, didn't mean to frighten you." He says as his right hand snakes down into the pocket of his black leather jacket. He extracts a small dropper filled with water, slowly raises the dropper just above the geneticists hand and squeezes out a single drop. Which rolls down. And then another in the same spot, which rolls down a different route. "Life finds a way." he whispers and disappears as quickly as he arrived. The geneticist chuckles to himself as wipes off his hand, he'd heard of other geneticists getting "Jurassic Parked," but just had not believed that Goldblum would have that kind of free time.
...engineer an ape by modifying human DNA to have hair all over its body. Sounds like pretty much the same idea.
Ah yes, lets create cold-weather suited animals when the entire planet is warming up, great idea.
Really? Do we honestly think that creating animals/bringing them back is that great of an idea?