Woolly Mammoth On Verge of Resurrection, Scientists Reveal (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering. Speaking ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the "de-extinction" effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant. "Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo," said Prof George Church. "Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We're not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years." The creature, sometimes referred to as a "mammophant," would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr. Until now, the team have stopped at the cell stage, but are now moving towards creating embryos -- although, they said that it would be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature.

Comments

Re:wonder why asian elephant?

[geantvert]

The answer is likely in there: http://news.nationalgeographic...

The relevant bit is "At that time African elephants branched off first. Then just 440,000 years later, a blink of an eye in evolutionary time, Asian elephants and mammoths diverged into their own separate species."

Re:Why not go the whole nine yards?

[jandersen]

As others have already said, we don't really have a whole, undamaged genome for a mammoth, but an artificial uterus is technologically still very far beyond our capabilities. The only option is to implant the fetus in an existing animal, in which case there may be compatibility issues - the fetus has to be a reasonably close match to the mother, immunologically speaking. A hybrid may be close enough for it to be feasible, and perhaps it is possible to get closer and closer to 100% mammoth by adding more and more for each generation, who knows.

CRISPR for the masses

[mi]

Why? It's a waste of money and resources that could be focused on actually contributing to society.

The technique they are using — CRISPR — is what we just discussed as applicable to humans. If splicing mammoth into elephant yields a viable organism, some day it may be possible to splice useful features of Neanderthals and other extinct human species, or even apes into humans — yielding strength, resistance to diseases, or adaptability to uncomfortable conditions (think Antarctica or even Mars).

Eugenics became a dirty word because of Nazis, who would improve humanity by killing off the "degenerates". But there is nothing wrong with improving the human stock per se... For example, Heinlein in "Beyond This Horizon" describes a society, where this was done successfully — while also explaining, how it can be done (very) wrong as well.