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Wooly Mammoth Extracted Intact From Siberian Ice
Lawrence_Bird writes ... a group of scientists have extracted a wooly mammoth intact from a Siberian icefield. "They used a radar imaging technique to `see' the mammoth in its icy grave, then excavated a huge block of frozen dirt around it to preserve the 23,000-year-old creature." See the dailynews.yahoo story. Naturally, there's talk of cloning the thing. If the effort succeeds, will McDonald's sell McMammoth burgers?
Did you notice that the Dolly clone was NOT the same size? There was a BIG size difference. Identical twins are usually about the same size. OK so they shared the same womb and womb environment, but I doubt such a significant size difference can be explained by different womb environments.
Are you a complete idiot?
First off, Dolly and Dolly's clone are NOT TWINS! Twins implies birth together. Dolly is two years (?) or so older than the clone. Could this possibly explain size difference? Hmmmm?
And Mitochondrial DNA has next to no effect on the animal's development. If you really cared, you could have the mDNA identical simply by:
a) using fertilized eggs from the animal to be cloned to transplant into as well as from (assuming it's female).
b) same as above, but using fertilized eggs from the mother of the clone to transplant into (since mDNA are passed through the mother's side only).
Most people agree that it doesn't really matter that much.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Cloning is not perfected by any means. And it's already been determined that Dolly wasn't an exact clone. The mitocondrial DNA (I think this is it) was from the cell that Dolly's DNA was moved into. While the technique used to clone Dolly is supposed to be quite easy, it isn't terribly reliable. And this is with nice fresh DNA. Who knows about stuff from an animal that's been dead for a long time, and not intentionally preserved.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Carbon dating showed that it was 3,000 years old, not 20,000 (according to the article). That's in the accurate range of carbon dating, since we have known-age tests from that long ago. (Darn, that was RECENT.)
I hope they post followups about what they find. That's a BIG freezer out there! What was the diet of the old wooly mammoths? How did this one die? So many cool questions...
-Billy
Bringing back the wooly mammoth population is pretty much a statistical impossiblity, even with a subject to clone.
Why? Well, for starters, it's a subject. Without at least one male and one female, there's not going to be much hope for that species.
Let's say we overcome that obstacle, though, and engineer a mammoth of opposite gender to the one that was found. You've still got the problem that the mammoths are essentially twins. Mate them, and you've got a handful of inbred mammoths. Actually, this goes beyond inbreeding, because even among siblings there's some genetic variance; between these mammoths there would be none. Eventually you'd get to the point where no mammoths could survive for very long, and the species goes extinct a second time.
Theoretically you could engineer enough differences into many clones and start the species that way. Just one problem: to do that you have to understand the genome. To understand the genome you need living mammoths, so you're in a chicken-and-egg situation.
Maybe if scientists found a couple hundred more mammoths, then we might have something feasible. But to try with only one specimen simply isn't going to work.
Argghh! We've been through this.
Of course the mitochondrial DNA was from the host cell. They knew it would be and didn't really care. It's not a big thing. Mitochondria are mitochondria, they change tranportable blood fuel into usable cell fuel (I'm just not up to big words like glucose tonight). A mammoth with modern elephant (or cow, or pig, or sheep) mitochondria is a mammoth as far as I'm concerned.
(now that that's out of my system...)
The Dolly technique is crusty in other ways, but it should work well enough to get some hairy elephants walking around northern Asia. Well, not quite the Dolly technique... this requires something a little more complicated, but IMHO doable in a year or two with enough money (or ten years from now in somebody's back yard).
I'd agree with you on the DNA bit, but they've got a whole mammoth. That's one heck of a DNA sample! They should be able to patch up the cracks with that big a sample.
While inbreeding can cause problems, often severe ones, it is not a death sentence. You can create an entire population from a single pair of siblings. Release a mating pair of rabbits on an island with no predators and lots of food, and come back in a few years; if you don't find rabbits, you probably won't find anything green either.
And I'm not talking ethics here...
Why would you use an infant technology to create copies of dead Mammoths if there was a possibility that they had pure, frozen GAMETES?
With the in-vitro fertilization we have today,
Here's a recipe for baby Mammoth:
Preheat Elephant Uterus to 100 degrees or so,
1 part frozen Mammoth sperm
1 frozen Mammoth egg,
thaw,
stir,
let incubate in a test tube for a short while, place in elephant uterus and let bake for 1.5 years or so.
We've had the technology to do this for quite some time, again, it's just a matter whether the gamete material has decayed in the past 3,000 years. But from what I know, sperm and eggs are frozen and thawed all the time without damage.
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If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?
Introducing an element that was once part of [an ecosystem], but is no longer is does just as much harm to an ecosystem as introducing a specimen that has never been there at all.
That's speculation. The former has never been done before. The latter has been done many times (sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently; sometimes by humans, sometimes by wind, ocean currents, etc.) with varying results.
Speculation is a good thing - we ought to consider all the possibilities before reintroducing an extinct species - but it's still speculation. It is by no means certain that it will be disasterous, as the introduction on non-native species has frequently been.
If we re-introduce Wooly Mammoths into nature, we don't know how well they will adapt, and we don't know how well nature will adapt around them.
True, but consider. Mammoths are much like present-day elephants. Megafauna. Long-lived. Few predators. Slow maturation. Slow reproduction. What population biologists would call K-strategists. Introduced species that become a problem for native ones are almost invariably r-strategists (A notable exception being the most invasive species of all - humans). R-strategists are typically small creatures. Short-lived. Normally subject to intense predation in their native environment. Rapid maturation. Very rapid reproduction. These things combine to give introduced species an edge in their new, predator-free environments. They're not likely to be a problem in the case of wooly mammoths.
Cloned wooly mammoths would probably not be released into the wild right away, but kept in zoos, or penned up on research farms for study. Given their slow rate of reproduction, it'd be a very long time before there were enough of them to have much of an impact on their environment.
One more thing - wooly mammoths have probably been extinct for only a few thousand years. As no other creature has appeared to fill the niche previously occupied by the mammoths in that short time, I suspect their reintroduction to Siberia would have little negative impact, assuming they ever were released (or escaped) into the wild.
So far as I've read, one of the biggest obstacles in undertaking this whole cloning thing is that it's going to take a long time before we see any results. Assuming we are able to impregnate an elephant with a mammoth or half-mammoth zygote, the gestation period of an elephant is anywhere from 600 to 760 days(!), and it takes ten or twelve years for an elephant calf to reach sexual maturity. Even if everything goes according to plan, we won't know if we have a viable mammoth (or half-mammoth) for well over a decade after conception.
Regards,
You can download the video of them pulling it out and all that at Msnbc.com, fairly interesting. http://www.msnbc.com/news/292726.asp
I am unsure what science you are using here. Mammoths were an adaptive change dating to the beginning of the last ice age. They died out towards the end, although their may have been a few kicking around still 5-6 thousand years ago.
Using generational dating from the King James Bible? That's questionable even among die hard creationists. I would suggest you take a closer look at the Talmud before jumping into any strange forays into highly dubious math.
Oh yeah and all the evidence the universe is billions of years old. I alway find it amazing that people seem to think that God is a rather limited thinker and something as complex and novel as evolution would utterly impossible for him to think up. Exactly why should we trust a text so crusty and old that we can't properly translate the original language. God is a lot smarter than you, me and the guy who wrote the Bible.
Thalasar
I'm skeptical about cloning ancient things from their DNA. DNA, even more than most macromolecules, needs to be constantly repaired. If you leave DNA sitting around it will slowly lose its properties. For example, UV light causes a process called pyrimidine dimerization where adjacent pyrimidine bases fuse in a specific manner. It is estimated that we have over 10,000 pyrimidine dimerization events that happen every day in our bodies, all of which are quickly and systematically repaired. This is simply one example of a way in which DNA can become damaged if not fixed constantly -- there are others. Something I never hear from the proponents of such techniques is how they get the info INTACT.
Granted, the DNA may be good enough to do RFLiPs or other restriction enzyme digestion technique and get reasonable data. But, and this is a big but, for a diploid organism to work properly we need (two) copies of each gene that will be used to work. I, as a biochemist, don't believe that we have the ability to isolate two copies of nearly perfect DNA....
-- Moondog