Cloneable Mammoth Cells Discovered in Russia 70
orthogonal writes "Animal Planet reports, in this article, that 'Russian scientists said Wednesday that they've found living cells in a frozen ice-age mammoth' which could be cloned, and gestated in an elephant. I see a new Republican mascot in this."
Republicans (Score:4, Funny)
New mascot? (Score:5, Funny)
What? Bigger, stupider, but forgets nothing and thinks the best solution is to trample everything underfoot that can't be eaten? Oh, all that, AND a bad ass fro for the extra 'bad hair day' bonus?
Re:New mascot? (Score:2)
Or perhaps to make fur coats out of.
Re:New mascot? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: New mascot? (Score:1)
> And in America, a new food product.
The SUV of hamburgers!
Obligatory Southpark (Score:3, Funny)
interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:interesting... (Score:2, Informative)
Of course the real problem is that the DNA is not likely to be in very good shape. I bet 100% of the clones would die before birth.
Re:interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think that's what he didn't understand.
I think he hadn't seen Scientific American [sciam.com], or any of the other coverage [advancedcell.com].
Save the woolly mammoth! (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously though, does any country want herds of 10,000 lbs mammals running around eating 400lbs of vegetation a day? Sounds like some new kind of plague, or the SUV of the animal kingdom energy source. I don't think either of those countries really need to revive that species. As for keeping it in captavity... we all know how well _that_ works. If they reconstitute that species, they better reconstitute it's least powerful predator as well.
-malakai
Re:In Soviet Russia.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, because we all know how difficult it has been to controll the elephant populations of the world. Without any preditors, they are multiplying uncontrollably.
---Lane
Re:In Soviet Russia.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother? Its most effective predator is alive and well. And now instead of spears, they have firearms.
Re:In Soviet Russia.. (Score:1)
Republican Mascot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Republican Mascot (Score:1, Funny)
and I see... (Score:1)
Re:and I see... (Score:1)
New republican mascot (Score:4, Funny)
On the mascot question (Score:3, Funny)
Oh and it eats Greens. This joke is starting to get sick.
Re:On the mascot question (Score:1)
Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:1, Informative)
"Escaped mammoth goes on rampage, destroys Burger King. 18 injured, 4 dead."
Seriously though, I don't think this is a good idea. What possible purpose (save entertainment value) could be served by reviving a long extinct species? (A species which has been long extinct for a reason, I might add.)
I'm a firm believer in the Darwinian process and sometimes a little extinction is a good thing. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should.
I would be interested in hearing people's thoughts on this subject and if a reasonably intelligent discussion breaks out, I'll expound on my thinking.
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are really two reasons, the entertainment/turist value and as an experiment. You need more reasons to get turists to go to Syberia aside from prison camps and cold weather. The experiment part is that we don't have any experience with interspecies cloning to date and there are likely to be significant hurdles. If you don't have a mammoth egg you will be trying to create a creature with part elephant and part mammoth DNA. This means there will probably be essential mitochondria missing. We'll need to figure out where we can get the missing ones, either by repairing the elephant copies that no longer function or by finding similar DNA/RNA in other creatures. There is also the question of knowing if you really are missing something. What if the creature looks like a mammoth but can't digest the syberian vegitation, is that because the vegitation has changed or because the animal is missing some enzyme?
While you might believe in extinction always happens for good reasons. In this case, there is good reason to believe it was simply the result of bad land management by the ancient human inhabitants who overhunted the creature to extinction. The had depended on it and there were probably mass starvation of humans once they eliminated their source of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Not only is there evidence of the overhunting, but there were isolated islands where the mammoth lived into historic times simply because they weren't hunted. But this isn't going to bring the mammoth back, very few creatures have any chance of survival once their genetic pool gets constricted to a few hundred creatures. It would take another 10,000 years for them to recover their genetic health if we had that many, and frankly that is impossible. The best we could hope for is some DNA that could help us save the Asian or African elephants if it comes to that. (The plains African elephant is in a healthy recovery in enough countries but that may change with AIDS, and we just don't know enough about the forest elephant, which we just realized was a different species last year. The Asian elephant may be genetically saved through domestication, but it's wild cousin is practically gone.) But, there are big cats that have had hardly recovered from the feline AIDS pandemic before humans started burning down the land to create farms, the techniques learned with mammoths might be able to save them genetically from extinction do to our early inefficient farming efforts. This would save us the effort of trying to successfully introduce new predators to their ranges, something we've not had great success with before.
While I'm sure ADM and the Sierra Club both have uses for interspecies cloning the main arguement for learning how to do it is just for the basic knowledge of how we work, using mammoths is not only going to give them headlines, which are essential to getting funding, but is also practical because we actually do have some from over 10,000 years ago, providing a great snapshot into the past.
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:2)
Where have you been?
It has been widely publicized [advancedcell.com].
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:2)
It has been widely publicized
s/any/much
There is still a big difference between trying to clone a wolly mammoth and a the still living gaur. With the gaur you still have all the genetic material and get to chose which cells you use, and still only get a 1 in 700 chance of the creature even living to birth. With the mammoth it's more of a challenge, and that's the point. This is especially important after birth, the gaur-cow probably has most, if not all of it's immune system. Even if this is true of the mammoth it may be maladapted to today's germs, or maybe germs are maladapted to attack it, there's only one way to find out. I just don't understand how this couldn't be fascinating to anyone who still has any scientific curiosity.
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:2)
Oh, it's certainly fascinating!
My point was that we do have experience with interspecies cloning. If the original post had replaced "any" with "much", as you suggest, I would not have been moved to comment.
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:4, Informative)
It depends how many hundreds. This relates to a concept called minimum viable population size [iastate.edu]. According to a site about elephant conservation [ifawct.org]:
Other species seem to be able to get around with much smaller populations, less than a hundred in some cases.
what? (Score:1)
Prove it. I've seen multiple studies that shown that that dang old end-of-the-ice-age had a small hand in their extinction. As they were pushed farther and farther north into unfertile lands, not by humans, their numbers started to thin.
There's no substantial evidence to the overhunting claim. Yes, we have over-hunted species; that wasn't until the exploration ages, though. American Indians lived in peace with the wolf, the coyote, the buffalo, the moose, the elk; I fail to see why they couldn't reach an agreement with the mammoth.
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:2)
Humans are part of nature *too*, dammit! (Score:2, Interesting)
Except for the inconvenient little fact that it was humans who wiped out the wooly mammoth. If we hadn't hunted the things into extinction, they would probably survive quite well in areas like Siberia.
So what? We're a part of nature, too. The mammoths ran up against nature's fair-haired boys (who may or may not have actually been fair-haired), and got their asses handed to them. How's that any different than if some species were driven to extinction by any other means, or by some other species? I'm so tired of this "nature good, humans evil" crap!
Yes, we have a mean streak a mile wide. Better hope we still have it when the Bugs come for our planet...
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:2)
Re:Darwin must be rolling in his grave. (Score:1)
And I'm not really waiting to see my weekly Crispy Chicken Burger go down the drain
Tourism Dollars (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bet Russia could really use the eco-tourism money that this would generate. I wouldn't mind a vacation package to see these things up close.
This guy shouldn't be cloning mammoths. (Score:5, Funny)
I hear that Goto is considered harmful.
Re:This guy shouldn't be cloning mammoths. (Score:1)
Mmmmm! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Mmmmm! (Score:1)
Re:Mmmmm! (Score:1)
Tastes like chicken?
If nobody else is gonna then I will (Score:1)
And she's a member of the East German Olympic swim team... (ba dum ching)
Just you wait! (Score:1)
It's gonna get weird people. I'm tellin' ya WEIRD.
The good news is that I'll be safely dead and gone before this really takes off, but somebody is gonna have to deal with this stuff eventually, and some of it is going to be most unpleasant.
How will it interact with the other animals (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How will it interact with the other animals (Score:2, Interesting)
Pretty much like the African elephant and lions, I guess. How mammoths affect the vegetation and the habitat of other herbivores is a different matter.
Re:How will it interact with the other animals (Score:2)
There are lots of plants that seem to be adapted for seed dissemination by "megafauna" -- the big mammoths and so on of the past. Take a look at honey locust trees -- they've got seed pods nothing in the Western Hemisphere really eats. (People don't plant the female trees nearly as often as the males, because the pods are big, plentiful, and hard to clean up after.) Or durians -- there's a fruit that's way the heck overengineered, so to speak. Turns out, where there are still elephant populations, they eat seeds similar to the honey locust's or the durian's. There are a couple of interesting pop science books that just look for plants that might be evolutionary leftovers -- based on seed type, how the populations spread, and so on.
So does Siberia really still have huge stands of those sorts of plants around? 'Cause it's going to take a heck of a lot to keep mammoths fed. Don't worry about the population-out-of-control problem; they'll die with or without big cat predators if they can't eat.
(But leave all that -- this is a sci-fi fantasy by a mad Japanese scientist. If they get out of control we'll send Mothra to clean up.)
I hope is a male Mammoth (Score:3, Funny)
Since they have somatic cells (ie normal cells not eggs or sperm) if they clone it into an elephant egg they will get an baby mammoth of the same gender and the original.
I really doubt that mammoth and elephant are more cross fertile that horse/donkey and the offspring will be sterile which means that the only way to perpetuate the species is by continued cloning.... However if the mammoth is male it could be possible to deactivate the 'male gene' (SRY [nih.gov] in humans) and create a female mammoth.
I know a Song about that
(to Home on the Range)
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when she is grown,
My very own clone,
We'll be of the opposite sex.
Chorus:
Clone, clone of my own,
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when we're alone,
Since her mind is my own,
She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.