43,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Remains Offer Strong Chance of Cloning 187
EwanPalmer sends a followup to a story from last year about a team of Siberian scientists who recovered an ancient wooly mammoth carcass. It was originally believed to be about 10,000 years old, but subsequent tests showed the animal died over 43,000 years ago. The scientists have been surprised by how well preserved the soft tissues were. They say it's in better shape than a human body buried for six months. "The tissue cut clearly shows blood vessels with strong walls. Inside the vessels there is haemolysed blood, where for the first time we have found erythrocytes. Muscle and adipose tissues are well preserved." The mammoth's intestines contain vegetation from its last meal, and they have the liver as well. The scientists are optimistic that they'll be able to find high quality DNA from the mammoth, and perhaps even living cells. They now say there's a "high chance" that data would allow them to clone the mammoth.
Can't wait (Score:5, Funny)
For mammoth burgers.
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Screw that, I want some of those cool tusks for the front of my truck.
Re:Can't wait (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sexist much? (Score:5, Funny)
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No supervillain named 'Madam' would be pretty enough for today's comic readers. A 'Madam' doesn't have huge yet perky breasts or a tight bottom that she can bend to point at the reader while also looking the same way.
At most, we'd get something like 'Mammatha', or maybe a 'Mammoth Girl'.
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and only cost as much as finding, excavating, and cloning a mammoth!
Shouldn't they start out small first? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?
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Its not as if they cloning lab gets charged by the pound. If they've got better preserved mammoth DNA then clone that - the final size of the animal is sort of irrelevant.
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I didn't mean literally the size of the animal. What I meant is that there is only going to be so much 43,000-year-old DNA to go around. You wouldn't want to waste it on a process that didn't work. You'd want to start out small, with a dead, frozen chicken that had been on ice for a year or so. Extract its DNA, and then see if you could get a live chicken out of it.
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Why do so many people keep missing the point that Dolly wasn't dead when cloned? Or frozen?
Also, I didn't realize Dolly was named after Dolly Parton because the cloned cells came from the mammary gland of the donor.
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Also, directly to wcrowe's point, from that article:
Making cloned mammals was highly inefficient (Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts - although by 2014 Chinese scientists were reported to have 70-80% success rates cloning pigs[21])
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Its not as if they cloning lab gets charged by the pound.
The heck they don't; any idea how much a mammoth eats?!
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...the final size of the animal is sort of irelephant.
FTFY.
Re:Shouldn't they start out small first? (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?
We already know cloning works. Welcome to the 1990s. Sorry about your internet connection.
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I know they have cloned live sheep. Has anyone cloned a frozen, dead animal yet? That I haven't heard about.
Re:Shouldn't they start out small first? (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't think they freeze the embryos, do they?
Just the separate zygotes.
Not sure it really matters either way, but some people get squeamish about such things.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
They use additives to prevent formation of ice crystals, but the temperatures are certainly what you would call freezing, and the preserved objects (embryos, here) are solidified.
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Good to know.
I'm no scientist (Score:2)
but I would imagine you try an elephant first, and then a more recently frozen elephant, and go from there...
Re:Shouldn't they start out small first? (Score:4, Funny)
There is no point in cloning a chicken. We already _know_ what chicken tastes like.
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People have been cloning mammals for 20 years now.
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People have been cloning live, unfrozen mammals for 20 years now.
FTFY.
Re:Shouldn't they start out small first? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago.
Seems there are enough examples of using surrogate mothers of a similar/related species to think that if you can create a viable embryo then the surrogacy might be successful.
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We have been able to clone several species already. That's not the problem. The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago. From TFA it seems they are already working on cross-species clones but they are still a long way off.
That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible. The up side of a project like this is that if we can solve the problem do cloning a mammoth it we can start harvesting the DNA of many individuals of species like tigers and rhinos that are about to be become extinct thanks
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That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible.
Keep cloning them from the same DNA sequence for zoos and such? Wildlife that's threatened by extinction because of us is fine, reintroducing wildlife that died out many thousands of years ago due to natural selection seems like an overall bad idea. Despite there being cave paintings of them, there's no place on current day earth where they belong in the natural environment. And even if we could set up such a preserve it'd have to be huge to function.
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I have to admire the technology behind cloning, but to clone a dead chicken is one thing, but cloning some dead mammal would be a better example. Whether this be a rat or something of that nature, we need to consider what we are doing. How do we gestate that clone? Japan is working on technology to carry a human fetus to term, this should be adapted to larger creatures.
Yes, I know a seeded comment says that size is irrelevant, but I have to counter that point and say, "Size is very important."
If we spend
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It is small...compared to a brontosaurus. Everything's relative.
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With a dead extinct animal? No. The closest thing is an extinct ibex cloned in 2009 (hardly "a decade"), and it only lived for a few minutes --- not exactly a success in my book.
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Don't be so hard on him. He's been hanging around Slashdot so long that he's forgotten that 'sheep' is actually an animal, not a term of derision used to identify life forms only slightly smarter than a paramecium.
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considering we can already clone dead chickens
Source?
It does explain a few things [mcdonalds.com].
The Crichton Diet (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't know. These things were basically hunted to extinction. So they may be pretty delicious or it might just be that a Mammoth hunt was a comparatively easy way to get the whole tribe fed all at once, with left overs to store.
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I don't know. These things were basically hunted to extinction. So they may be pretty delicious or it might just be that a Mammoth hunt was a comparatively easy way to get the whole tribe fed all at once, with left overs to store.
For people who lived on the prehistoric tundra, anything they could get was pretty delicious.
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That's what breeding is for.
Evil spirits (Score:2)
I predict that the cloned animal will be possessed by either the Devil or some other evil spirit.
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But what does it taste like (Score:3, Funny)
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I don't care who ya are, that's funny. If only I had mod points...
Off topic (Score:2)
Off topic, but if you're into making stuff like I am... the only legal way to get ivory anymore (besides an insane permitting process) is tusks dug up from mammoths in the arctic. I suspect that if they start re-introducing them to the wild, that will become illegal to... which would be super lame. Also, the ivory found in bogs and such usually absorb minerals and stuff making it very unique looking.
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Seems logical (Score:3, Insightful)
We can't keep elephants and rhinos alive, so let's clone us some mammoths...
Global Warming! (Score:3)
The end game (Score:5, Insightful)
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Treasure trove of information (Score:2)
Wecome to Jurassic Park (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Why? (Score:2)
Clone the Mammoth? Half the deal (Score:2)
I'm equally interested in cloning its last meal.
Living Cells... I call BS. (Score:2)
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I have personally frozen cells in a step-down freezer, then submerged them in liquid nitrogen for years, taken them back out, thawed them, implanted them, and had them grow. So...way.
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See cryopreservation [wikipedia.org] and suspended animation [wikipedia.org]. Not only is it possible - it's been done. It's not the temperature itself that kills cells, it's the effects of lowering the temperature that causes damage. If you can mitigate these effects (such as the formation of ice crystals), you can prevent cell death.
And you might want to turn the temp down in your fridge.
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I read that as "Offer Strong Chance of Clothing" (Score:2)
I can't wait for Mammoth wool for next winter, or the spring's fresh and cool nights.
Mine! (Score:2)
That was the one that got away from me as a kid, herding them, and I was punished for loosing her. They belonged to us, and so any offspring are *mine*.
And you kids these days, think spring is bad when the dogs and cats start shedding, we needed *rakes* when out mammoths started shedding....
mark "and my folks still had the bones of the dinosaurs they helped get rid of...."
Last meal (Score:2)
More problematic, I imagine, is mitochondria, etc. Cross-species cloning puts DNA from one beast into the cells (facto
"High Chance" more like 'Fat Chance' (Score:2)
why not in greenland, North America? (Score:2)
"LONG extinct"? Hah. (Score:5, Insightful)
A few thousand years isn't "long".
Compared to the other changes humans wreak over decades, bringing back mammoths would barely cause a ripple.
"Contain these creatures forever and ever"? We already extinguished them once, without even the help of gunpowder. If you're looking for things to worry about, you can do much better than this.
Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, considering how many species humans have (directly or indirectly) wiped out, developing the skills to bring some of them back might be prudent.
" We already extinguished them once, without even the help of gunpowder."
However I believe the current thinking [slashdot.org] is that mammoths are not amongst our victims, and were wiped out by natural climate change instead.
Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah. (Score:4, Insightful)
If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.
Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.
This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.
Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah. (Score:5, Informative)
If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.
Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.
This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.
Mammoths survived until at least 2500 years ago on Wrangel island where that particular population was probably wiped out by modern humans so at least the habitat question is a non issue.
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While there appears to be broad agreement that Mammoths did exist on Wrangel as recently as 2000 BCE (4000 years ago), I cannot find any scholarly research to suggest that they co-existed with humans; or if they did, that they were hunted by those humans.
Can you offer more recent research?
Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah. (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that we're just starting the testing & experimentation phase of resurrection technology. To be cautious I think we should start testing this new technology on extinct species that meet both of the following conditions:
(1) Are unlikely to escape captivity (ideally test species should be unable to survive outside specially designed enclosures).
(2) Are big, lumbering, and slow breeding. Even if such a species somehow escapes captivity (and manages to survive in the wild) we can still hunt them down and eliminate them.
So far as I know mammoths meet both of these conditions making them good test subjects for resurrection technology.
"... bringing [the mammoth] into an environment that it was not evolved to handle" - That's a feature, not a bug!
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And, of course,
(3) are potentially edible.
Yabba Dabba Do!
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From a scientific perspective, yes.... but what about from an ethical one?
Is it ethically justifiable to permanently subject wild animals to such conditions?
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I'm more interested in seeing mammoths used as safe scientific test subjects for experimenting with the technology to revive extinct species.
Once the process of reviving extinct species is understood well enough that it can be done safely: Species that I would like to see revived (and released into the wild) are ones that were recently driven to extinction by human activity (by over
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Is it ethically justifiable to permanently subject wild animals to such conditions?
Yes. As restored species they would be protected by man and then have a shot at continued existence in the event humans die off or evolve passed the necessity for a biosphere.
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but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.
Your logic seems to be that it's unethical to bring them into a world that they can't survive in. But they all endured the waxing and waning of ice ages before that. The current thinking is that either humans or some sudden climate catastrophe caused the Holocene megafaunal extinctions, and not an inability to adapt to post ice age climate conditions. The only thing that seems to be preventing most of these species from thriving today is humans themselves.
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If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.
I suspect that there is a significant difference between sustaining themselves in the wild in a climate they have trouble handling and being raised in essentially what will be a zoo which is where they are going.
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If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.
The modern climate has changed many times since they went extinct, and we don't even know that there weren't any places where they couldn't have survived back then - it could simply be that their populations got stuck too far away to migrate in time.
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Yes.
But the problem is there is no uterus on earth big enough to gestate a mammoth.
It will have to wait until an artificial uterus can be developed. I'm led to believe it's not that far off, but that's the sticking point right now.
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Me and a couple of grad students at the applied time-travel facility.
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Would a nearby supernova that happened to sterilize Earth be evil?
From our point of view, yes.
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More like "Long overdue" at this point. The experiment failed, time to wipe the slate and start fresh.
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Would a nearby supernova that happened to sterilize Earth be evil?
Depends on whether your definition of "evil" requires malicious intent or is just anything that turns out really badly for you. A natural supernova would be extremely unfortunate. Aliens causing the supernova to wipe out competition would be evil.
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Because they're cool (literally ;).
Who says natural selection should have the final word? Or perhaps the concept of "fitness for survival" should be expanded to include "cool enough that some other advanced species will want to resurrect it." Mammoths, saber-tooth cats, & T-Rex all fit this bill; the Prehistoric Instant Death Mosquito doesn't.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure. Woolly mammoths are pretty big. One might even call them mammoth. If one gets out, it won't be that hard to find.
Besides, we shouldn't be talking about creating a population of these things yet. Lets create one and see how that goes. It's not like it's going to run off into the forest and sprout more.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
It's not like it's going to run off into the forest and sprout more.
I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.
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We lost a 770 airplane loaded with passengers.
i give the mammoth 50/50 odds of escaping and finding a new home in india with a couple of young lady elephants, who are looking for a big hairy man.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Mammoths don't travel at 500+ mph. Planes don't leave footprints or take great, big dumps on the ground to announce where they've been. Now, if they create a mammoth that can travel at 500 mph across water, I concede that yes, we may lose track of it.
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Best make them lysine dependent and all female, just in case.
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shh don't talk about the hairy elephant in the room
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Giant hairy elephants, or just hairy elephants?
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I mean, just look at the devastation non-native species are causing in various nations. They certify they can contain these creatures forever and ever?
Notice that it's small animals being invasive while the megafauna are often endangered even on their home ground?
Megafauna move slowly, breed very slowly and are easy to spot. So it's pretty easy to hunt and kill them at a rate much faster than they can breed.
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That's why we need to fit out lasers to them.
Look, there is probably nothing that could help a small population of megafauna survive better than than equipping them with lasers.
Just 'sayin.
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Because it's not there.
Seriously, it could be a form a preservation for species that are currently endangered, plus for something that was alive as recently as mammoths (2500 years ago), the Earth's climate in total hasn't changed that much (current warming trend notwithstanding) since when they roamed freely. So why not?
When you see those skeletons of extinct animals in the museums, does no part of you yearn to see a living, breathing, specimen, just to see it and how it behaves? Don't you want to know??
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Well, do be fair to Dr. Malcolm, I think he was referring to the phenomenon of life in general, not particular lives. Thus the extinctions that wiped out 99% (or whatever) of all life forms still resulted in the flourishing of the other 1% (or whatever), resulting in the planet teeming with life. No matter the circumstances, something finds a way to thrive.