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Scientists Hope to Clone Woolly Mammoth
&y writes "Yes, and they appear to be serious. Here's a quote from the Seattle Times article: "When asked why scientists are trying to bring back a mammal that lived so long ago, Agenbroad said: 'Why not? I'd rather have a cloned mammoth than another sheep.'" A very convincing argument indeed."
Recommend you look up the April 1984 issue of Technology Review, Pg. 85. Sorry, I don't believe that it's on line.
Also see an article by Reuter, dateline Thursday, September 18 1:48 PM EDT, 1997. I saw it on Yahoo news, at the time. It quickly disappeared.
you must realize that woolies were found on one remote island, between russia and the us and japan, to be alive only a few hundered (or was it a 1000), well in any case more recent than when they went missing in north america. So really they are not that fargone extinct. So I'll say go for it. As long as you only put it on some remote island.
Maybe your house is infested with puppies.
I don't have much knowledge in biology or ecology...but I think it's probably harder to control the spreading of a new plant rather than a single mammoth. New and unknown plants to a ecosystem are known for causing serious problems all the way up the food chain if unleashed in the wild. They grow where they shouldn't or take over other plants...
What a lovely sentiment for a geneticist to mutter. For someone who wields such a powerful tool/weapon it boggles my mind how he could say something so nonchalantly. This is exactly the reason that poeple are so hesitant when it comes to endorsing genetics. You'd think these guys would at least TRY to SOUND responsible, instead of like maniacal scientists bent on godly powertrips and having their 15 minutes of fame.
What can we get useful from a woolly mammoth?
Injured software engineer wins again Mattel! Ain't that swell?
Don't you find more and more of what you see in movies coming into reality. I really don't think this is a very good idea, this beast is 11 feet tall, which to my calculations will be big enough to kill humans. Why not clone a nice kitty cat or something. It might be boring but I don't see cats taking over the world anytime soon. What's next, dinosaurs? Jurassic park is a MOVIE and should remain that way.
thats what they said about space travel, landing on the moon, etc. Hey, things die, get over it. Survival of the fittest, natural selection. Bring back the woolie..... I wanna ride one.
I find that your words frighten and confuse me. This is to be expected, as I only have a primitive caveman's mind.
They were not well-adapted to human beings, anyway. Read Guns Germs and Steel --human beings hunted to extinction most large mammals shortly after colonizing their respective continents. Mammoths included.
We'll take them in the Canadian north and the foothills of the rocky mountains. They were here until a few thousand years ago until hunters killed them off (along with the two-hump camel, etc....)...
It was killed by hunters in North America... It's pretty clear.
How would you as a primative man coming across the Bering Strait think..."Ooogha...big hunter kill big beast, get big totem for necklace..."
If you think the hunter-gatherers of North America were in tune with nature, you're sorely mistaken. They most likely ran the mammoth off of jumps, similar to buffalo.
I assume you are referring in jest to that 2-bit Creation scientist who claimed that mammoths that had been "quick-frozen" by Noah's flood were in such good condition in the north that they could be served...
Damnit those people piss me off.
They just rebooted the system and it was open...no cracking needed.
Injured software engineer wins against Mattel! Ain't that swell?
It's just a secret plot by McDonalds so they can have a new specialty item:
"The McMammoth"
Just don't ask them to supersize it.
Upon being confronted with the horrible vision of the monkapotamus, a hybrid mutant created by the evil corporation the Lewis works for, Oswald had just one thing to say:
"Drew, I'm going to ride him."
This is going to sound, well, darned insensitive, but it must be said...
We can barely produce enough food to feed the people we have right now, so, lets find new ways to produce food, before we let more people live, ease their pain, but they are giving their life to cancer or chickenpox, or whatever, so that the rest of us blokes can have dinner.
Frankly I am devoutly against the blunt nosed ass worm in any way, shape, or form.
Endless opportunity for biologists. Maybe they could get PetSmart to do research funding for the process. You know, breed mammoths for parents to buy their upper middle-class children for a birthday/christmas surprise gift. Parents will do anything for their kids, and hey how about one of those hairy grunting things roaming the summer lodge in Montana or Canada. Buy one of those inflatable balls for the mammoth to play with. Sounds fun! Make an Ecommerce solution for woolies! I got some great ideas for icons and interfaces.
Make it combinatorial with THC and you have the "marijuana mammoth". Then clone some neanderthals and dress them in swat vests and send them on a wild hunt. The meeting of the modern and extinct world. Sheesh, I wonder if I want my tax dollars supporting this imagined scenario?
cloning a beowulf cluster of these things. Now that would be cool.
Brought to you by someone with too much time on his hands and the letter Q.
They should try cloning the dodo to save the trees that relied on their digestive track. I'd rather have a pet dodo than a wooly mammoth too.
Siberia has a very funky climate. Most of it is a big, very warm, bug infested swamp all summer, and gets insanely cold in the winter (which is why few people would willingly live there if they had somewhere else to be or weren't born there)
there has been a vaccine for chickenpox since the early 80's. I believe it might even be legal in the US by now. The disease is also easily treatable. The reason people die of it is because information about diseases and their prevention is not often given to the world's poor, and the money needed for vaccinations and treatment isn't being handed out. Then again, why should it be. I'll be damned if I want my tax dollars going to keep people I have nothing to do with alive simply because their own country doesn't have our level of money/technology. -suapbeast! @work
The US alone could grow enough food to feed the world. The US government PAYS farmers not to grow certain crops (to keep the prices up). We could easily feed the whole planet if some of america's wide open praries were used for farming. Even if the world population doubled it would be no problem to get the people of earth to stop eating meat and then use all the farmland wasted on low yield meat prduction (think about it grow grain>make cow feed>feed cow living in huge field>butcher cow> ship and store meat in big freezers) to produce more grain. If China would get its shit together they could produce shitloads of rice, as could people in many areas of south america (and I'm not talking about the people who cut down a ranforsest for farmland). anyway... -supabeast! @work
Maybe if we're someday able to completely map the Mammoth genome we could twiddle its bits a little to produce many slightly different clones that could then reproduce in suitable diversity to spawn a self-sustaining population. Shave the Mammoths!!!
Will there be a Second Impact to punish us for trepassing into the realm of God, i.e. using cloning technology? I worry about this every day. Really.
I wonder what sort of genetic behaviors this kind of animal would have that would even be applicable in the current status of earth? are we acctually setting it up to fail again just to prove we can? if so isn't that like punching someone in the face to prove that humans bleed?? seems like it could be a bad idea, I trust a system I do not fully understand (nature) in this case due to an overwhelming track record and would choose not to mess with it just yet. but then again I don't have to entertain people with money to keep my grants either.
>one completely reasonable step, after another completely resonable step,
/. crowd. Hoser.
Gah, the hoary ol' slippery slope argument. Think about it for a second--using that, you can get to whatever kind of hell you want from the most innocuous starting point. Works to convince the ignorant and unsophisticated, I suppose. Ya need better than that to bamboozle the
WHOA! I couldn't find any info on the site, but do you know if this is accually what they used on jurassic park or did JP just give these people the idea and it was created post JP??
or, as in the words of the much revered jeff goldblum, "life will find a way" ;)
;)
love to see that one happen, now wouldn't ya...
EEK!
A quote stolen from Darwin.
How do you get a pig and an elephant to make sweet love? Get them good and drunk! That's right, alcohol...helping ugly people have sex since the dawn of time. - Chef: Episode 105
I offer $50k for one of those elephants
In a word, yes. Plants don't have immune systems, so they pack themsevelves full of chemicals to ward off viral attack. Don't forget that tamoxifen (anti-breast cancer agent) was originally isolated from an obscure species of conifer. And going back a bit, good old asprin too. And anti-malarial quinines. Who knows what else is out there? There have been NO useful therapeutic agents derived from animals. (antibiotics originate from fungi, if you're wondering)
er, yeah. DNA don't work like that pal. Go out and read a copy of Watson. (Molecular Biology of the Gene, 4th ed). It's available from all good academic bookstores.
What a great Beowulf cluster a bunch of cloned Woolly Mammoths would make!
>My thinking is that they died out for a reason, >and they'll die out again In the case of some plant species that are currently threatened with extinction, it's the same basic cause - human beings. It's currently believed that the mamoth became extinct as a result of humans hunting them ( ie, over exploitation ). In the case of some plants ( such as the Madagascar periwinkle ) it's the same thing - over exploitation. Rather than growing them commercially for medicinal purposes, many companies continue to harvest the wild stock. In many cases, the cause of species extinction is us - human beings. Sorry if this post seems confused. It's just been a long day.
Because man killed them all, that's why.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye, We are now accepting investors for a company that wishes to go ane step further and clone Dinosaurs, yes Dinosaurs...
I'd rather see scientist investigate why half the keys i get copies of at the hardware store don't work once i get home!! grrrr.. :-(
dude, you forgot BananaCom.
Twiddle its bits? Yep, that's your motivation.
This is no more "flaimbait" than you are a genius.
Well if you know anything about the current means of cloning it seems to require a uterus and an egg and such, moron.
How about insulin. Derived from pigs. And many vaccines are produced by incubation in eggs. I'm sure there are more but I cant be bothered to think that hard this early on a Monday morning
Because the guy at your hardware store is a drunken idiot.
Bring back the Ice Man. Bring back Woolly. The worlds greatest event. ICE MAN VS WOOLY MAMMOTH. Somthing inside me really wants to see it. 40,000 years of hunting and eating Woolly Mammoth sticks with you.
Of course, it will be interesting to see whether the newly cloned mammoth will be an endangered species
this will certainly add alot of knowledge to a whole bunch of scientific fields. for instance, you have paleobiology, paleobotany (presumably, this mammoth will need to eat something), evolutionary mechanics (why was the mammoth deselected?), mammalian biology, etc. this is not to mention areas of science outside of biology such as retrieving the necessary genetic information from dead dna, filling in those gaps (hey fellas, don't use any frog dna please ;-), and other biochemical pursuits.
Wooly mammoths nearly hunted humans to the brink of extinction! This is the last thing we want to do! It was only by raising the temperature of the earth were we able to force them to flee to the outer solar system. If we cloned them, it would be easy for them to establish a base of operations here, from which they would lower the temperature of the earth and then signal for their comrades to return. If these scientists insist on cloning the mammoth, I suggest we all begin practicing our trampoline skills.
Fuck that... *I* want to be the only guy on the block with a pet velociraptor! "Go ahead, pet him... he probably won't kill you"
One thing that popped into my head first thing when I read this article was "What about disease (for mammoths and humans)?" This mammoth was adapted in live with bacteria, viruses, etc. from the world 23,000 years ago; it is very possible it could not survive in the wild today except in a controlled environment because of modern disease. Remember what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans came with their European disease.
OTOH, the mammoth itself could be a danger to humans for what its body may produce. A bacteria, virus, etc. could infect said mammoth, not effect, but mutate said bacteria/virus/fungus/whatever, infect a human and from there our hypothetical disease would destroy the human race.
Okay, so maybe I'm exagerating a little, but I can't believe no one has taken that into account the possble dangers to the mammoth and the environment it lives in before even considering this cloning experiment. Other than that these potential factors I think this is an interesting idea and I'm interested to see if they have any success.
-Alec C.
I just have some opinions about the past few articles of this nature that I've seen on /. (WARNING: I am a biologist in training, so I guess I have a bias)!
/.'ers on this topic. I think it's odd that an almost any tech(chem, phys, EE, etc.) topic, new discoveries/proposals are usually recieved with much hubris, but when it's a biological one, /.'ers seem to go into rant mode against it - usually without adequate scientific understanding of the issue!
/.'ers seems to be that extinction has some kind of "moral conciousness" - that a species is extinct for some kind of purposeful, rational reason. But I don't believe that! Species are extinct due to COMPLETELY ARBITRARY reasons!(with the exception of those which we have killed off ourselves). Species aren't made extinct because they "should have" or "it was their time" - they just went extinct. period!
I just don't have much of a problem with this idea, and don't understand many of the sentiments of
The opinion of many
It also seems that everyone has taken sci-fi movies a bit too seriously! I'm sorry but Jurassic Park is NOT a real valid reason to be against this kind of research! There are many valid technical and ethical reasons, but "because the dinos in JP/JP2 went nuts and killed everyone" in not one of them!
Now, about the aritcle, although I guess I could be counted as a supporter of this line of research (and others to restore both extinct/severely endangered species), but I believe that there are MANY more technical reasons that this isn't possible than ethical. I believe that if we could achieve this, it would be an absolute goldmine for biologists, paleontologists, paleobiologists, etc. But, as one stated earlier, the genetic damage from thousands of years frozen might have made cloning impossible(although I think I recall that elephants are VERY similar to mammoths and thus could help). I also believe that the lack of knowledge on the ecology and health requriements might hinder the project, but then again, our current understanding of elephant nutrition/physical requirements might be enough.
Also, as someone has previously mentioned, this would not be an attempt to bring a whole species back but a few individuals, so while this is still great for biologists, but ecologists can be assured that no rouge herd of rampaging mammoths will take over the siberian tundra! The ecological concerns are more important for species that are much harder to control, but a mammoth is NOT one of them (nor is the Tasmanian wolf). Look at elephant populations in Africa now - if we wanted too, we could probably kill the rest of the wild African elephant species in two decades at most. Thus even if we could bring back a mammoth species, it would not invade the world's ecosystem, as other alien, foreign-introduced species have (australian rabbits, cane toads, etc. Dutch Elm Fungus, etc).
In closing, I guess I see much more benefit from the knowledge that could be gained from even the attempt(I don't doubt that biologists would learn a lot about genetics/cloning even if the attempt ultimately failed), than possible harm. As for whether the research couldn't be better spent elsewhere, that issue does have some merit. However, the argument could be used against many other fields (space explorations, non-medical biology, heck, paleontology in general), also more $$ towards a research goal, or humanitarian goal in general (hunger, crime, etc) does not necessarily bring about faster, and/or more effective results. Oh well, I wish the researchers in this, and the many other similar projects the best of luck, and hey, in several years, maybe I'll join their research!
Respectfully,
Kevin W. Christie
kwchri@maila.wm.edu
Actually it was hunted to extinction
A biologist in africa is trying to recreate the quagga, a horse-like zebra (or a zebra like horse), by taking zebra's with some of the qualities of the quagga and interbreeding them.
This has obviously been possible for centuries, but he also has the benefit of being able to compare the original quagga DNA with his current generation.
I dont think it's going to be fast tho, iirc he's set up a foundation to carry on his work.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Because you don't have a SGI with a copy of this program.
Unfortunetly, it only works under Irix 5.3 and below, so I can't run it at work.
Well, the readme file for it gives me the impression that FSN was around before the movie, and was what was used in the movie.
The article doesnt mention anything about if the animal could survive. When I think of a wooly mammoth I think big hairy elephant that lives in the snow. Would it be able to eat etc? What would the effects of bringing this animal back have on its food source? (i.e What if it eats manatees or some other endangered plant/animal). Haphazardly bringing animals back to life just because it would be cool doesnt sound like a good idea.
..the Second Impact itself wasn't because of humanity(SEELE) playing around with cloning, it was when Adam was shrunken to embryo size. Adam _was_ there to tell humanity to stop dicking around with cloning, but got shrunken for his troubles(which then ended up killing half the world population).
--
(Damn, I hope someone knows what I'm talking about.)
My Freakin Blog
Assuming they can extract the DNA, insert it into an elephant egg, and grow the clone, it will have the nuclear genome of a mammoth... but the mitochondrial genome of an Asian elephant. Hopefully they'll at least sequence the mammoth's mitochondrial genome so that we know what we're missing.
I wonder how many of the important phenotype differences between mammoths and elephants can be (even partly) attributed to mitochondrial mutations?
Maybe it just from reading one too many Sci Fi books, but somehow the idea of bringing back an animal that had its chance and went extinct anyhow just seems plain wrong. I can't really intellectualize why it seems wrong, but it does.
Of course, it might just be that my racial memory is urging me to charge the beast and stick a spear into its side....
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Last I heard, the sheep clone began to age prematurely and could not be reproduced in any other experiment. Clones of smaller organisms since 1997 have only come from thousands of failed inoculations. The only improvement they've had is the number of postdocs they can fit into a lab inoculating eggs but the success rate is still 1 in 1000. It's a mindnumbingly tedious way to make a living in which there are more biology PhDs clawing for employment than ever before. Just get an engineering degree and save your sanity.
(sarcasm) YEAH LET'S HAX0R THE MOTHERSHIP WITH A POWERMAC FIZZNUGGETSDFWF#$@$! (/sarcasm)
Ahem.Now, I don't know much about genetics because I hate biology; however I don't see why we shouldn't do this. Let's see our arguments here:
I say just let the scientists do their jobs. I personally find it a little sicker to clone a human being. Besides what's the worst that can happen, they get foreign architects to build the cage in centimeters and provide the information in inches?
(hehe.)I'd like to see mamoths, sabre toothed cats, some of those horse/elephant type beasts they had there for a while, maybe some neaderethals (you know, the cats need to eat their natural food..)
compared to many of the ways I could die, an abbatoir sounds pretty nice. (non kosher, done correctly - kosher requires a slit throat, yuk, and in regular slaughterhouses, less panic the animals are in produces higher quality meat, something about hormones released when the animal is in abject terror).
I'd rather suffer a quick, semi painful electrical jolt, then loss of consciousness, than:
Slowly waste away over a period of months from cancer, after several unsuccessful years of chemo, radiation, and massive surgery. (as opposed to the Kervorkian alternative)
Bleed to death with my head sticking out of a shattered windshield, watching my insides ooze all over the dashboard, and onlookers in the other lanes creep by at ten miles an hour to get a peek. (because I couldn't afford a nice new Lexus with crumple-zones, antilock brakes, and airbags)
Hang by my entrails from a mountainside tree where my 737 crashed, and slowly roast as the spilled fuel burns below. (Because the govt. decided to not crack down on airline safety due to lobbying efforts of airplane manufacturers)
Suffer multiple gunshot wounds in my back from two LAPD police officers who didn't like the color of my skin.
Starve to death over a period of months because my government felt I should be a farmer instead of a grocer - even though there was no unfarmed land left.
Be the last in my village to be hacked to peices by machette due to tribal warfare.
As you can see - when you try to define the word "humane", if you really examine things, it's quite ironic.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
well, there will be many, many millions of copies. Is it not possible that we could find one copy intact? Or how about - with a technology a few decades away, reconstruct it from fragments from different copies?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Wool from sheep make nice sweaters.
Wool from woolly mammoth - probably a lot scratchier.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Wool from sheep make nice sweaters.
Wool from woolly mammoth - probably a lot scratchier.
- - the other thing they have to worry about is Mitochondrial DNA - will be from the mother, not from the DNA source animal.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
We either kill them or we let them die out. Doh. It's not a worse fate than ending up in the abbatoir anyway. Besides, the population of farm animals is not "rapidly increasing". Their reproduction is micromanaged by farmers.
If that was supposed to be an argument against vegetarianism, it's just about the silliest I've ever heard...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
It wouldn't help if they were trying to clone a female either. Actually, this isn't going to work out at all, even if they bring one or two back, you can't bring back a whole species without a lot of samples (and I doubt that enough samples of mammoth DNA that are still suitable for cloning are still in existence).
Otherwise, you get massive inbreeding. That would be even more destrictuve to the mammoths than unrestricted hunting would.
And the lord spoke unto Wolly "Go Screw yourself", and then it was so. And Wolly proliferated.
Meat industry animals eat somehwhere around ten times more food than they grow muscles. So to produce 1kg meat you use ~10kg soy, wheat, oil, etc.
Not that I think that is very important compared to the enormous suffering of the to-be-meat-persons, but still...
What an absolutley wonderful idea! Unfortunatley it will probably be hard to find a complete set of genes (or any at all).
And "flamebait"? Maybe, byt if some christians want to flame don't punish the poster. This is actually a cool idea worth considering!
enough said
http://sddt.com/files/librarywire/96wireheadlines/ 08_96/DN96_08_19/DN96_08_19_1b.html
dated august 19, 1996. thats over three years ago.
i had thought that intelligent people would be informed of such a thing and recognize that this is, in fact, very old news.
obviously i was mistaken.
Well, my experience has been that senators are pretty clueless in a lot of ways, but are quite active. It takes a lot of work to get elected for public office... sadly that work is more or less unrelated to what's required of a senator.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Hmm..this is interesting. However, in light of what's happening to Dolly the sheep (i.e. premature aging), I'd tend to want to play around more with genetic expression. This, I think, is a more beneficial and/or cool way to spend time and money. This is sort of a lame example, in the sense that it doesn't do anything benificial to the plant, but my biology book has a picture of a plant expressing the firefly's light gene...it's a big tobacco plant that's glowing yellow :) Anyway, there are more practical uses for this sort of thing; I know I'd for one like to spend a lot of time manipulating genes that control mental disorders. With only 4 nitrogenous bases in DNA, I can't believe it would be too dificult (once you figured out the respective base sequences) to isolate, say, the depression gene(s) and rearrange their sequences such that you eliminate the genetic predisposition to the depression, and make them immune to chickenpox in the process!
Save the children; quit overparenting!
I'm very taken with the idea of resurrecting the hulking, beautiful creature. But let's be honest with ourselves: this will never happen in an era where we still are losing a couple million a year to AIDS/cancer/Parkinson's/Leukemia. Hell, the US government has even been reluctant to maintain funding on even those vital projects as of late; how many budget spinsters on capitol hill are going to bite for this one? I guess maybe you could find an eccentric philahnthropist to finance it (Nathan Mhyrvold is supposed to be big into paleontology, isn't he?) This is a very Utopian project, one that makes me dream of a day when there is no poverty, disease, war, or any societal problems to worry about and all we have to do is resurrect dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and explore space. Makes you want to live forever, huh?
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I guess if it will work or not is just one of the questions that surface. How about: Why do we want to do this? If science _really_ is ready to bring back extint animals, it's a shame it's not focusing all it's efforts (and resources) on not letting people (esp. children, of course) die of chickenpox (or any stupid and easily preventable desease you'd like to imagine). Of course then the question becomes one of social fairness, not science (but someone had to scream "ethics" sooner or later on this thread (right?)).
--Moo
That's a very strange argument. What is "dying out naturally"? It's like when people say their grandparents died of "old age". Nothing happens without a cause.
While I agree that it would be interesting to see what such an animal would look like alive, I can't help but think that the last thing we need to be doing is re-introducing extinct species (which, arguably, are extinct for a good reason) when we can't 'take care of' the animals that already exist on this planet. How many endangered species are there that would not be endangered if not for the actions of man? Instead of trying to clone extinct species (which most likely went extinct due to natural selection), we should worry about preserving what we've already got, and more importantly, work to ensure that the growth of our species doesn't happen at the expense of other species.
Then again, it would be really cool to be the only guy on the block with a wooly mamoth! Hrm... wonder if the village has any laws about that....
Right, and if all else fails, you can engineer them with a build in lysine deficiency so that they die within a half day or so of escaping.
They're NEVER get past that. Har har har.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
"I don't think you can really look at scientists as a monolithic group who would be better off if they all focused on one problem at a time."
Absolutely not. The sharing of information between scientific disciplines is one of the main factors responsible for the rate at which our knowledge is advancing.
If all scientists were to focus in on one single issue, the solution would be found later, not sooner.
At least that's how it seems to me...
Seems to me that the reason quoted for doing this paticular cloning is just what those against cloning have been saying isn't a good enough reason... ie. We do it because we can. or We do it because we're bored with the old hat sheep cloning thing.
:)
I'm not against cloning, but I tend to agree that the reason that was quoted is simply not good enough. Cloning for the sake of cloning is asking for trouble. Moral and ethical issues aside, the tone of the argument suggests a blatant lack of consideration for the consequences and responsibilities that come along with trying to bring back a long dead creature, such as the mammoth. In the Seatle Times article they follow up the "Why not..." quote with another with another reason, to the effect of trying to find out what happened to the mammoth so we might be able to prevent it from happening to current species. While a more idealisting goal, I suppose, fail to see how the goal would be accomplished by this cloning.
Perhaps the second, more idealistic, reason is good enough. But the owner of the mindset that spawned the first argument probably should not be in the lead on this cloning project, nor any other. But then again neither should I, so who am I to say anything.
Oliver may or may not have used his Banana Junior, 6000 Series, 32 bit, 450 KByte, fully portable personal computer (with Bananawrite, Bananadraw, Bananamanager, and Bananafile) in his endeavours.
Remember kids, Gene Simmons never had a personal computer when he was a kid.
While the quotes may not be totally appropriate for a geneticist, please note that Agenbroad is identified as a geologist in the article. This is not to disparage geologists. However, it was clear to me that one should not necessarily believe nor take seriously the words of a non-expert when it comes to cloning. Agenbroad probably knows mammoths out his wazoo (he is a paleontologist) but he is not a geneticist.
If one wants more info about Agenbroad, go to the NAU web site and do a search.
Plants wouldn't be a problem. The current plants in any area in which prehistoric plants would be released have had a far longer time to better adapt themselves to their ecological niches through evolution. Prehistoric plants wouldn't stand a chance of taking over.
It is possible, but not (at this point) very plausible that this will work. After all the technology is still pretty young, the thing has been dead for a long time, and it does not help that they are trying to clone a male.
However this does raise the question of whether or not we should be establishing a bank of samples from endangered species. Even if they go extinct, we could still have the possiblity of bringing them back at some point in the future.
Does anyone know of any efforts along this direction?
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The expert they were quoting pointed out that cloning success rates are higher with females than males. The individual they are working with is male.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
This is one of the [many] things we learned not to do from the fine documentary Jurassic Park.
Mammoths have been dead for so long that "genetic damage" doesn't begin to describe what their DNA has suffered.
So runs conventional wisdom.
In reality, even "dead for 70 million years" T. Rex somehow managed to have whole blood cells survive to our time. Methinks it resembles a weasel - but stinks of fish. In particular, "dead for 70 million years" Coelecanth, which you can buy in Indonesian fish markets today.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Survival of the fittest is something that occurs on a large variety of traits. The most obvious of those are physical strength, reproductive strategy, environmental adaptation, etc. However, I don't see why there isn't a "coolness" trait as well. A T-rex would be evolutionarily superior to some boring dinosaur even though both are extinct exactly because it has a better chance of being resurrected.
Because humans exist as part of nature, anything we do is a completely natural process. In addition, let's define fitness as 'the ability to exploit natural processes for propagating DNA patterns'. This seems to imply that animals that are able to exploit the natural process of the human tendancy to ressurect animals and plants that we see as "cool" would be evolutionary fit.
As such, the cloning of 'extinct' species (which presumably means those species that don't currently have any living representatives) is every bit a legitmate method of DNA propagation as sexual reproduction. Given millions or billions of years of cloning being part of the natural process of DNA propagation, the ability to take advantage of that may be more important to long term survival than any other method. It's theoretically possible that life could develop, or we could develop life that relies completely upon cloning for survival (read: Terminator gene technology).
actually, it should be a pretty good test. if it comes out hairy, and grows to be 1.5 the size of a modern elephant, then there won't be much doubt about whether it worked or not.
the similarities between the elephant/mammoth should benefit the young mammoth, i would think, but shouldn't contaminate the young'n enough to raise much question about whether or not the experiment worked...scientists and journalists will just have to turn to other aspects of the experiment to flame each other over.
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
cause confused elephants are dangerous elephants?
:)
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
> My thinking is that they died out for a reason, and they'll die out again
It seems most likely they were hunted to extinction. They'd die out again now because there simply isn't enough gene stock for them to survive. That and it's just not cold where elephants would tend to feed now.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The modern elephant is really close to the Wooly mammoth. They even are wooly when born.
Hmmmm...
If "people kill all the XXXX" can be considered part of natural selection, then it only seems fair that "later people dig up some DNA and somehow come up with more XXXX" should also be considered part of natural selection.
Well, I am sure there are lots of problems with developing a breeding population of mamoths today (like, where are you going to put them? They are going to need *lots* of room, and *lots* to eat - what other animals are going to get squeezed if they wanted to do this?), but the number of individuals available may not be one of them (or not as big as one might think).
Cheetahs, for example, are all almost genetically identical. They come from an extremely small population that survived the last ice age (there are theories that it ws a single, pregnant female...). One effect of having a very inbred population is that genetic defects express themselves and "fall out" of the gene pool. You get a high attrition rate (probably) in the first N generations, but after that it stabilizes.
Of course, you have the long term problem of lack of variability in the species, and adaptability problems that come with it. The cheetah is very much a "niche" predator.
"Well it's not Victory - but then it's not Death either."
Wonder what he would say?
Blogging because I can...
For those of you who think that we shoudln't "toy with god's plan"....I have a comment. A lot of extinct animals are extinct because we killed them, I don't see how bringing something back that we killed would be bad. And if there is a god, and he has a plan, no one knows what it is, so would this post be violating "god's plan"? Makes you think doesn't it? It's not like were making 200 woolies anyway, it's just one, so go complain about the killing and extinction of current animals, and stop bitching about bringing some back.
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I like music
A better question is why the hell are there pengiuns in the Central Park Zoo?
My guess is that, since they are mammals, and thus warm blooded animals, that there is a certain threshold in which they can live.
Well, JESUS, it's good that there's no places left with anything other than a SoCal climate, now isn't it? We'd sure HATE to have to think about the consequences of less than a 70f temp all year round, wouldn't we? It'd be the end of the freaking world, wouldn't it? nosferatu-man (peeved 'cause it SNOWED on 1 October round here. Wooly Mammoths would be right at home.)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
A couple reality checks for you...
1. The Wooly Mammoth is extinct by the hand of man. Early man hunted the mammoth to extinction in a manner almost exactly the same as what we have done to several whale species.
2. Kindly define for me - in logical terms - the difference between "natural selection" and "destroyed by man". Man (homo sapiens) is an animal just like any other, and a very vicious predatorial one at that. Just as the wolf's superiority might lead to one of its prey's extinction while another (more adaptable) prey might survive, there are no animals that have become extinct for any reason other than Natural Selection. If man (the top of the food chain) changed their environment, and they were unable to adapt to the polluted environment, that's natural selection. If man hunted the whales to the brink of extinction because the whales couldn't figure out NOT to swim near the whaling boats, that's natural selection.
I can certainly understand your point, but you also have to realize that natural selection encompasses ANY reason a species goes extinct. Whether it is a predator hunting them down or an inability to cope with a changing environment, a species will either adapt itself (as many species have) or it will become extinct. To say that one species deserves "protection" over another is simply wrong. They are all equally extinct (or endangered).
Thrakkerzog, you have made an honest mistake. You probably think the wooly mammoth is...
Obviously, there would be grave risks in cloning such an animal. Fortunately, though, the animal you're actually thinking about is the wooly llama, not the mammoth. So I wouldn't worry.---
Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Are you more likely to get something medicinally useful from a given plant than from a given animal? I though the only reason so many medicines come from plants is because there are so many more of them and they move a lot less.
My thinking is that they died out for a reason, and they'll die out again (especially if there is only one!)
Wait a second--you can't clone a plant like this. So far as I know, this process only works for mammals, since they gestate in a womb.
That's just the way the world goes. 'Cute' has always been an important factor in the genetic evolution of man. 'Cute' and O-H bindings...
In other words - when evolution based on superficial cuteness and alcohol has done such a bang-up job - why worry? You just can't go wrong with nature. ;)
Where can a Wolly Mammoth even live? Arent they strictly cold weather animals?
Yeah! Who wants a stupid sheep when we could get a Wooly Mammoth?
But if that's the case, we could also clone rhinos and elephants and other rare/endangered species, right?
However, the shortened teleomeres thing might put a damper on things. Also the fact that we need to take into account the 1 successful birth out of like 11 successful implantations out of 200 eggs created out of like 1000 attempts, or whatever the astronomical odds are.
Plus, are we just going to use elephants as hosts?
What about genetic incompatibility or contamination? Elephant antibodies and such?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Actually, that's a good example of why security through obscurity doesn't work. Think what would have happened if they hadn't even had the source code available!
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Having two mammoths isn't enough to sustain a reproducing population. The bare minimum amount of unique genomes necessary to breed a single baby mammoths (from two mammoths) is 1, and it must be male so that you have a Y chromosome. However, the offspring will be inbred, and suffer from all sorts of horrible problems such that they are unlikely to reach the age of reproduction. Even if you have two unique mammoth genomes, the second generation will inbreed.
The figure I seem to remember for mammals is 500 unique genomes to sustain a population, and that's really the minimum. For a species that's been extinct for tens of thousands of years, I'd guess we'd need much more than that. The wider the gene pool, the more likely that natural selection will be able to pick genes that might have been rare at the time, but now would be helpful to our woolly friends.
So in other words, a single mammoth might be a neat little trick, and we might learn something from it, but don't expect to see them wandering in your national park of choice any time soon.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I'd like to suggest cloning a Dust Puppy. This would have many practical advanatages:
- code AIs for you
- fun at lan parties (plays a mean game of Quake)
- gets along well with sentient computers and RPN calculators
- doesn't like sushi
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Ideally, this should be fixable by comparing multiple strands of DNA against each other. Most likely, each strand will contain different mutations, and therefore different pieces of the original. Given enough strands (dependent on the average damage per strand), comparisons between strands should bring forth the original material.
Anm
And then of course, who's going to bring back the ugly stuff?
Leave that up to God.
GOD: "Noah."
Noah: "Who said that?"
GOD: "Noah, Its me, God."
Noah: "Yeah, right."
GOD: "Noah, the US government is going to wipe out most of the species on the planet using the guise of scientific research. I need you to build an ARC."
Noah: "Yeah, right. What's an ARC?"
GOD: "Its an Animal Retention Computer (ARC)"
Noah: "Yeah, right!"
GOD: "I need you to get two cells of every animal large and small, and scan the DNA into the ARC before the NSA destroys the world."
Noah: "Yeah, right! How will I make them all fit?"
GOD: "The ARC will be a quantum computer. You will make it 300 qubits by 50 qubits by 30 qubits."
Noah: "Right! What's a qubit?"
GOD: "Go search on slashdot."
What I want to know is what monsters are going to re-appear after this latest Japanese radiation leak. Mothra? Godzilla? Gamera? Ghidorah? Gyaos? Rhodan?
When that happens we can clone something REALLY impressive.
I find it somewhat ironic that you are talking about requirements for natural selection in a species currently extinct, and which will only be brought back into existence through artificial means.
:-)
Not that your point isn't valid. Just ironic.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If we start bringing back extinct species, what will happen to our outlook on extinction. We're pretty damn conscienceless when it comes to wiping species off the face of the earth. If we can bring them back at will, will we kill off even more species?
"Oh, go ahead and chop down the forest. We've got DNA samples of just about everything here..."
And then of course, who's going to bring back the ugly stuff? It's find and dandy to bring back the dodo, the spotted-buffeted snow pika, etc. Are we going to bring back the blunt-nosed, slime-covered ass worm once we kill it off? Or are we going to stick solely with creatures that look cute?
While this is an interesting science experiment, I think the resources could be better applied: Oct. 12th is Six Billion People Day. In 1960 we had 3 billion. We've doubled in 40 years. Better, cheaper, safer contraceptives would make the world a better place. Wooly mammoths would make one zoo a lot of money.
Let's try to keep things in perspective here.
-- I can't think of anything witty to put here. Sorry.
Amen. It's called Natural Selection... not Natural Preservation. You think any of the species that've gone extinct woulda thought twice about taking us out?
I think that's a fantastic outlook on life. It won't work! Nevermind the fact that it hasn't been tried yet. The genetic code must certainly be damaged. There's no proof of it, but dammit, it just won't work!
We wouldn't have the technology to do this if everyone immediately assumed it wouldn't work. Genetics would be nowhere. Along with most of medical science and computers/electricity/etc. Think a little, please... We didn't get to where we are today by only doing things we -knew- would work. We tried and failed, tried and failed, and finally tried and succeeded.
Sweet! I didn't know that really existed. Thought it was more along the lines of your standard generated-FMV that you see in flicks and games.
So, that being said, is there something similar for Linux, or a way to emulate Irix software on our favorite OS?
--sugarman--
Of course, they could just fill in those gaps with DNA from frogs...
Well, a Mammoth that can leap two and a half miles? Sounds like the people in Siberia better get their roofs strengthend.
Breace.
plus if you only have one wolly mammoth it can't reproduce.
char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
Wow, I never thougth that we will witness that movie heppen in real... But now I am quite sure of that (if only the world won't collapse because of a huge earthquake like in Turkish and Taiwan, or a tornado or something, and if people won't create "Terminator" before "Mamanth"... After all, Terminator came out before Jurasic Park ;)
-- Hiroshima '45... Chernobyl '86... Windows '95...
why dont they resurrect plants first ? I would think the medicinal value (more drugs etc) of plants which are extinct far outweighs the benefits of cloning a mammal or a dino.
This story sounds a lot like one from MIT's Technology Review magazine about ten years ago (unfortunately, the text doesn't seem to be online). The author was apparently mistaken in thinking that her story was obviously a hoax, as it ended up hitting the major newsfeeds and making national news. I wonder if anyone has double-checked AP's reporting on this...
I don't think so, haven't you hear that song "You Can't Splice Wooly Mamoth and Pot Belly Pig DNA"? If you want to try to get them in the mood, go ahead. I shudder to think of the amount of booze a wooly mamoth could hold though and I shudder even more when I think of what happens when it all comes back up.
--- Don't ever trust a woman until she's dead- B.B. King
What exactly qualifies as a good reason to be extinct? Climate change? Having your food and or area taken over by another animal?
What is the difference in whether that animal is man or some shitty rodant that started eating your eggs or another predator that was simply better than you?
The whole guilt issue over extinction caused by man is really just another ego trip trying to justify us feeling special and different in some way. Well we are not: we are just another element of nature, playing its game like a million species before us.
Its a shame when an animal goes extinct because there is much we can learn from, and of, that animal. This goes for any extinction - naked monkeys involved or not.
-
So, fellow
On the bright side you get to work in a cool 3D GUI and you can write code so sloppy that an eight year old kid can crack it!
-
Assuming that they can create this thing and it come out with little defects. What is going to raise this thing? Most likely the elephant that hosted the embryo I guess. From what I know elephants are similar to human children that they require a lengthily period to grow up and learn much of their behavior from the parents.
So all we can really learn about the mammoth is some facts about it's physiology and maybe some instinctual behavior that is unique to the mammoth.
So even if the genetics are great we still won't know much more about the behavior of the mammoth.
We'd get more info about animal behavior from simpler animals. How about bringing back the giant dragonflies?
It seems to be more of a bad argument. It's a lot like "Why would you bring home a puppy when you can bring home a ravenous death plant?"
Think how bland our food would be without any spices!!!
No it is not enough said. Point us to an older article or don't waste space on the comments page.
Well, two things:
This is not quite the same story. It says in the one you cite they would use elephant sperm to create an half-mammoth, half-elephant. The current article is talking about straight out cloning. However, you do have a point that it is not entirely new news.
Not all intelligent people hear about all the news in all the topics and remember all of it, give us some slack, please.
I personally would hold out for something better to clone like maybe a Serra Angel.
"Yeah! Who wants a stupid sheep when we could get a Wooly Mammoth?"
I think you underestimate this naughty, lovable creature. Here, I present to you the most articulate explanation of why sheep is the Ultimate Mammal(TM)
http://www.dotdotdot.net/pr0n/
I sincerely hope your views will undergo a profound change.
Thank you.
L.
Seriously, you have a kid that has been reading for the last couple years that this great creature walked the Earth and is now dead. Then he goes and watches Sesame Street. So, when he goes to the zoo, which is it? They better post big signs: "Not a snufalufagus!" cause I can see some kid losing an arm over the whole thing. Of course it would be kinda fun to be the adult and say "I don't see anything?" ;)
One thing I've always wondered ... If the whole planet stops eating meat, what do we do with all the animals whose population is rapidly increasing, despite the large numbers killed by the meat industry every year?
The only ethical problem I see with this (assuming it works) is that they'll have created an animal that they don't really know how to care for very well.
Does this really affect anything? Maybe we'll learn more about mammoths. What harm could it do? Well, the worst thing that seems likely to happen is that we make a unhealthy and unhappy mammoth, which would be unfortunate, but doesn't seem inherently evil to RISK that fate.
For whatever reason mammoths died out, I don't think it makes a big difference. We're not restoring their species or anything - one specimen would hardly be adequate to repopulate anything, you need at least two (for mammals). I don't really think that matters though. If they died out because they're ill-adapted, it's going to be expensive to keep them alive. If they think it's worth it, I don't object to them expending their resources on this project.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
If we can clone a Wooly Mamoth why cant we cross the DNA of a Pot Belly Pig and a Wooly Mamoth and get a Pot Belly Mamoth! Muhahaha! And better yet give it 2 asses!
In the 70's (I barely remember seeing the photos in the paper as a small child) A Japanese trawler caught something large in their nets. It was believed by some to be a dinosaur carcass, although some claimed it was a large sea turtle. Unfortunately, no definite claims either way can be made because the crew couldn't bear the stench and dropped the carcass overboard before it could be examined. These days you'll probably only here such claims made by groups like the Fortean Society, but I bring up this specific incident because I remember seeing a black&white photograph in a newspaper in the early 70's.
OK, most of us are familiar with the arguments about shortened telomeres, etc. leading to premature aging of clones.(Someone needs to write a sci-fi story about that.)
Anyhow, we hear about how cancer cells don't have that problem. Some people think you can build an organism from cancer cells, but then you just have a custom-built tumor.
Here's my idea, I hope someone with more biochemistry knowledge can respond: Instead of modifying the dna with cancer genes, inject the corresponding mRNA into the cell. This produces the enzymes, you basically regenerate the telomeres and create a growing tumor.
This is where things change: Because you used mRNA instead of DNA, the mRNA eventually breaks down. The enzymes are dispersed between the cells during replication, plus enzymes eventually become degraded. So at some point, The cells cease to be cancerous and revert to normal specialization and replication.
Are there any obvious gaping flaws in this idea? I know how we've recently discovered how to add the necessary genes to human cells to cause cancer, how much of a stretch is it to just add the mRNA or perhaps the enzymes themselves?
Although we already have a lot of animals that need help now it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring back a member of the megafauna. There aren't very many large land mammals left. Funny that most of them went extinct as homo sapiens experienced its first interglacial ? I think it is a reasonable possibility that humans had some hand in the original extinction of the mammoth, bringing them back could then be considered retroactive rescue attempt.
Besides nothing much lives in the tundra areas even now. I'm sure the native people of those areas wouldn't mind the extra tourism.
The reality is however, that even considering the rapid freezing there is bound to be considerable genetic damage.
Bitter and proud of it.
I think the question isn't "could we?", but "should we?". Coolness (pun intended) factor aside, this sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. This wasn't an animal that was killed off by greedy industries polluting its habitat, or by villainous poachers killing it for it's gallbladder, etc., but an animal that died out naturally. I think we should leave it that way.
I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't a cruel joke from people who would rather we not be able to lift off this rock. Space corrupts absolutely I suppose.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
cancer or anything for that matter?
No.
They have dna from wooley mammoths cause some were frozen.
/.post#4
Openwolly in 2.3 . . yea. yea. yea. we could Beowulf them muthas.
/.post#1
I bet the black helicopters are behind this. The big Wolly Mamouth, Mr. Shufulufagas, comes to visit cute little school kids and out pops drunken waco ATF agents, smoking Ruby Ridge cigars, and HRF gun the local school LAN.
/.post#2
I bet Bill Gates is behind all this. Wolly 1.0b is just vaporware to mask that fact the Micros~1 doesn't have coherant software service portal stratagy.
/.post#3
I hear Linus is going to incoporate OpenWolly in 2.3 ;)
If science _really_ is ready to bring back extint animals, it's a shame it's not focusing all it's efforts (and resources) on not letting people (esp. children, of course) die of chickenpox (or any stupid and easily preventable desease you'd like to imagine).
Yes, but different scientists always have and always will focus on different things. I understand what you're saying, but you can apply this to any situation, such as "Why do we waste money on a space program when we don't have a cure for AIDS?" I don't think you can really look at scientists as a monolithic group who would be better off if they all focused on one problem at a time.
The cloned animals won't really be able to mate, even assuming we have a couple of Male and female WR's that won't be enough for them to procreate and potentially bring the species back. It would be really just an oddity, something we can say "We did that" about. So, why not?
I agree, it became extinct for a reason. God or science. Please don't clone at all.
It's all a conspiracy against you, isn't it?
Some pretty rational arguments. But I still don't see a reason to. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of knowledge however And I would love to learn more about them (what, why, how)
One has to wonder if there are significant frozen specimens of other animals - dire wolves and sabre-toothed tigers come to mind. The latter might be a mistake; those kitties actively hunted humans. And people complain about cuegers *shiver*.
EvilSoloman
I heard of a similar project before for Tasmanian wolves, and that particular article brought up a good point. Why spend all this money on the possibility of bringing back one species, on a limited basses, instead of putting that money into saving many of the spices we already have that are near extinction? I mean it's pretty much common sense that saving a spices that already exists is going to cost less than a spices already dead, and that kind of money could go a long way for that cause.
I guess, like a certain Spealberg movie mentioned here a few times before, it's purely capitalistic. They care nothing about what they are doing and just want to make money.
Just think of the commercial possibilities of a restaurant featuring the meat of an extinct species. Now if i can just get Dodo eggs for breakfast......
--Have a Johsonville brat.
Of course, they could just fill in those gaps with DNA from frogs...
I can't wait till we start mass producing these bad boys. Imagine all the new products! McMammoth burgers, Mammoth leather jackets, Mammoth fur coats, carved Mammoth tusks, the "new Buick LeSabre, with all Mammoth interior", the list is endless. I can't wait for the circus to come to town and have mammoth rides for the kiddies. And I really want a lucky mammoth foot key chain.
If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?
Go here for the original...sheesh.