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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.
Different people, different interests. If you would rather help existing species, go right ahead.
It's news for NERDS dude. If you don't think this is at least interesting you can hand in your nerd card.
Oh yes, the end of Science. Thank you Lord Kelvin.
For one thing we still don't have a clue how owls fly so silently but there are some people working on it with very simplified wing models, so relatively simple stuff from the world around us is still outside our grasp without a lot of time, effort and dead ends. The idea of "that if we throw enough money at something we can make virtually anything we want" is an incredibly toxic cargo cult piece of shit that you should cure yourself of if before it backfires on you (that's if it wasn't an attempt at a joke). I've met people that disconnected from reality and they kept lurching from one fuckup to the next.
Dreaming is great, taking fantasy from granted not so much.
Really? There have been instances of almost intact mammoths being found in receding glaciers, how bad does DNA get degraded from freezing? Heck, in this find blood was actually flowing out of the carcass as it thawed. If we can sequence the neanderthal genome using much older samples I don't see a reason we couldn't sequence the much more recent mammoth genome.
Enigma