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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."
"furry appearance, extra layer of fat"
Sounds like they are trying to make more Americans
Maybe we shouldn't be making woolly mammoths just now, with climate change and all that apocalyptic-ness right around the corner.
Just sayin'.
For the circus of course....
I heard it was paid for someone called John Hammond, a billionaire CEO.
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I would definitely be interested to learn what mammoths tasted like.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
One step closer to the egg-laying wool-milk-pig.
Shouldn't they be concentrating on turning Americans into decent people instead?
Nah; they don't have any fossil DNA from humans or other critters known to be decent.
But we can look forward to Americans who are furry and have an extra layer of fat. And this can be exported to any other part of the world where there's a market for such people.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Probably similar to bison - the only real ice age megafauna left.
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?).
I for one welcome our new hybridized mammoth overlords!
Come on, you know you wanted to post this first.
Umm.. 'cause we can?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
why are they doing this?
Why not? Where elephants live, they are a keystone species. They preserve the savanna by knocking down trees, and they dig waterholes that are used by many other animals. Once they are gone from a region, the entire ecosystem can drastically change. It is likely that mammoths had a similar effect in the arctic.
Watching Monty python too many times is an asymptote i can only get infinitely close to watching it too many times
But they are all several thousand years past their "Best if used by" date.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Indian elephants..
You're describing African elephants.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The whole plan seems pretty sketchy. You can't just create a mashup of two distantly related animals and automatically expect to get something viable out of the mix. Mammoths and Asian elephants aren't actually that closely related- African elephant, Asian elephant, and mammoth are thought to have diverged around six million years ago, so mammoths are about as close to Asian elephants as chimps are to humans.
Hybridization can result in improved fitness if the parents aren't too distantly related. However, the more distant the relationship between the parents, the less likely the offspring are to be viable. Humans and Neanderthals split around 600,000 years ago and were able to successfully interbreed. However, horses and asses split around four million years ago. The offspring- mules and hinnies- are healthy, but they are either sterile or have reduced fertility. Breeding more distantly related animals produces non-viable offspring.
The article does mention that there have been hybrids between Asian and African elephants, which are slightly more distantly related than Asian elephant and mammoth. What the article neglects to mention is that the only known example of an African-Asian hybrid died several weeks after birth; there are other reports of hybrids being born but strikingly no reports of any surviving. This suggests that mixing mammoth and Asian elephant DNA is going to produce an unhealthy or non-viable offspring.
Maybe they should ask the elephants if this is a good idea before they strap on a wool coat to their DNS.
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.
It doesn't make me angry that people have tried to create greater biological diversity, it makes me sad that they have failed. If they fail, then I will be sad, but if they succeed then I will be happy that the world holds something amazing which might help lead to the development of a world where rhinos and mammoths contribute to something even better: a world where the mistakes of our ancestors can be mended.
They're already working on the solution of a runaway mammoth population:
http://news.nationalgeographic...
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.
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.
Spared no expense.
Mostly because they've been domesticated thoroughly, unlike the African elephant.
No, we're not going to be releasing Mammoths (even fake ones) into the wild. Because they'd essentially be an invasive species anywhere we dropped them, and screw up what ecosystem we released them into.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"