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?

Comments

grrr...

[TheDullBlade]

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.

Discover magazine article on cloning mammoths

[psychonaut]

Actually, to circumvent some of these issues, scientists are considering creating mammoth/elephant hybrids. Sure, they'd be only half-mammoth, but it'd still be cool. Apparently, the whole thing is being financed by wealthy Japanese businessmen. For those interested in exactly how it's going to be done, check out "Cloning the Wolly Mammoth" which appears in the April 1999 issue of Discover Magazine . It was one of the most interesting biology-related articles I've read in months.

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,