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Subscribe to RSSHendrik Poinar, a scientist who believes he is close to cracking the woolly mammoth's genetic code, says that cloning extinct species is now possible. NBC's Jim Maceda reports.
Reports from Japan suggest that long-extinct woolly mammoths could be cloned back into existence within five years, but don't hold your breath.
"C'mon, it'll never happen. Not in my lifetime," said Webb Miller, a Penn State computer scientist and genomicist who helped decipher the genetic code of a woolly mammoth.
Japanese and Russian researchers have been working for years to find a suitable woolly mammoth specimen in the Siberian permafrost, and they recently told Japan's Kyodo news service that they recovered what they hope will be viable bone marrow from a frozen thigh bone recovered near Batagay in eastern Russia's Sakha Republic (a.k.a. Yakutia).
Their plan is to take the nuclei from bone marrow cells, transplant them into egg cells extracted from elephants, and implant the cloned embryos into the wombs of mama elephants for gestation. This is the technique that has given rise to cloned mammals ranging from Dolly the sheep to pigs, cats, dogs and monkeys.
Kyodo's report says "there is a high likelihood" that biologically active nuclei can be extracted from the frozen marrow. Researchers on the case include Russian experts from Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum and Japanese biologists from Kinki University in Osaka Prefecture. Kyodo said a full-fledged joint research project would be launched next year.
Woolly mammoths haven't walked the earth for thousands of years, but the idea of resurrecting the species seems to have a powerful hold on the collective psyche. Some folks have even talked about setting aside a "Pleistocene Park" for mammoths and other Ice Age animals.
Miller, however, isn't buying it.
"DNA from a woolly mammoth is a mess," he explained. "It's fractured into very short pieces, and there's a lot of postmortem DNA damage other than just breakage. The code gets damaged a lot."
Even if the DNA is intact and the nuclei are successfully merged with elephant egg cells, the success rate for cloning animals — and particularly extinct and near-extinct species — is not good. Generally speaking, there are scores of failures for each successful pregnancy brought to term.
A couple of years ago, scientists succeeded in producing a Pyrenean ibex from tissue that was taken from the last representative of the subspecies in 1999, but the cloned progeny survived for only seven minutes. Attempts to clone an Asian gaur didn't end much better. Australian researchers had to scrap plans to clone the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction, although they later succeeded in transferring part of a Tasmanian tiger gene into mouse embryos.
These cases suggest that there's not much of a chance of re-creating the mammoths. Genetic engineering may eventually produce a "hairy elephant" with mammoth-like characteristics. But a creature genetically identical to the behemoths of the Ice Age? "If somebody does that, I will eat my hat," Miller said. "And I'll wonder why they did it."
Miller said studying the DNA of long-extinct species has value, even if the efforts don't result in a resurrection.
"I'm looking out my window, and 13,000 years ago, there were some really interesting animals out there," he mused. "They're gone now, and I'd like to know why. ... Understanding which species survived and which ones didn't, looking at their genome and trying to figure that out, that's interesting to me."
But when it comes to living, breathing animals, "I'm personally more interested in keeping the species we have," Miller said. "I'd like to keep tigers around for a while."
Despite Miller's qualms, the quest to re-create the woolly mammoth could well continue for the next five years or longer. And that's not all. Paleontologist Jack Horner is moving ahead with his plan to modify chicken DNA and make the barnyard birds look more like the dinosaurs they descended from. Dino-chickens vs. woolly mammephants? That sounds like a great plot for the next "Jurassic Park" sequel. ...
More about mammoths:
- X-ray scans reveal baby mammoth mysteries
- Dog skull found with mammoth bone in mouth
- Mammoths mated with a different elephant species
- Mammoth resurrection on the way?
- Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped
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cp from PA
But we have been doing that for the last several millennia: when you are going out to pick up a date, do you go for the really ugly one, or try for the cute chick? And how many of us say "I want to marry someone really dumb"? We are doing selection, used to be a very natural process. The strong survive and have many children, the weak are weeded out - works in nature, worked in humans until we decided to over-ride the natural consequences and preserve EVERY life, good, bad or indifferent.
So, what is so terrible about a conscious effort in this line? Just think about all the domesticated animal sub-species that have been selectively bred for some specific characteristic. Do you think that we are so different?
I'm sorry but I find natural selection to be so intuitively obvious I am at a loss as to why they make such a big deal out of it. The Strong survive? Really!?! Gee whoda thunk it! Now compare that to grasping the concepts of Einstein
As for evolution you either believe that a web spinning spider has a LOGICAL plan and that my digestive system is quite a complicated one too ,or you don't. In fact I see NO randomness out there, just logical plans. Hell even the laws of nature follow perfect logic, not just mother nature's life forms
Just the fact that math works means there is a logical order to the universe
One question
WHY?
Do they know what it requires in terms of food, What about climate compatability, One lonely mammonth...again...WHY?
"Cloning".....I have had a long speech with the idea with my father. In one way, we are really intrigued, in another I am disgusted. As humans we are so greedy, taking lives of others and using it as we please. Mammoths were not ment to live in this time and place in our life time.
Cloning is unfair, "a cheat," really. If people pratice cloning, think of how wars would turn out then? What would this econamy turn into then?
The fact that it is so difficult should make people think before extincting all of the current biota of mammals that are on the brink of extinction right now. This also suggests that science still has a long way to go before completely understanding the mechanisms that takes place at the cellular level for production.
While examining the possibility of whether they can, they never stopped to contemplate whether they should!
I'll just be content to watch the animated movie Ice Age for now.
Maybe it's the Japanese "Godzilla Fascination."
Or...maybe it's just a ploy so that we won't link Fukushima to what's gonna be running around the Japanese countryside about ten years from now.
Then again...huge methane producing machines with a huge grocery bill.
But...most likely a glimpse into the past, with an eye on our future. Science is spectacular.
I think that Miller misses the point, although he come very close to it. No, from a scientific point of view, bringing back mammoths isn't in itself much of a goal, as cool as it would be. But it isn't about creating a pleistocene park, it's about learning how to bring back animals from extinction. At a time when we are losing species faster than we can count them, it i inevitable that we will lose some about which we care dearly. When Miller mentions tigers, he hits very near the mark of why this research is important. If we lose tigers, or maybe even all big cats, wouldn't it be great if we could get them back in the future when conditions are more conducive to keeping them alive? By carrying out this project we gain technological expertise that might one day help us to make extinction a recoverable event, instead of permanent oblivion.
Man cannot plan to undue their mistakes this way. When I make a bad decision, I live with it, pay the price, and learn from it. If we can undo our wrongs we don't learn a thing from them...we would just keep messing up.
Extinction is a natural phenomena. Nature makes no mistakes.
Perhaps man's REAL purpose in the Big Picture is to bring back extinct animals, even the ones caused by him. Mother nature is far better at logic than either Newton or Einstein
Most of the time, not this time though...They were too docile/slow moving and early man with their primitive spears were able to decimate them for food. Kind of like a lot of things in our history (buffalo, wolves, tigers, whales...). If blue whales were to be gone soon, it would be because of man, not natural selection.
Man's presence and needs are part of nature; therefore, natural selection process.
No ecosystem for mammoths??? What are the vast wildernesses of Canada, Siberia, and Alaska, chopped liver?
We all assume that everything came from a single ancestor over the course of millennia -----but perhaps many of them arose at the very same time due to a life form that mutated its dna continually as bacteria do today. And then natural selection took over, the environment forcing species via adaptations and variety. So there could have been a God Bacteria that started most of everything via constant mutation
The Earth was once a Plant Paradise. And then some bacteria's spore hitched a ride in frozen water after an asteroid bounced off Mars, and splashed down on Earth, and things have been going downhill for the plants ever since. Except for the enslaved domesticated ones
Well scratch that last part. We DO give plants lots of CO2 and I can't think of any plant that has gone extinct due to predators.--- how many bugs have we managed to kill off besides small pox?
Sounds to me the American scientists is "sour grapes". Is he suggesting that the Japanese and Russian scientists are not as smart as he is? That is what it sounds like to me. His father must have worked at GM and when it was announced that the Japanese were going to export cars to the U.S. he just laughed it away as nonsense. More patents are made in the U.S. from Japanese companies than American companies. The Russians also have excellent scientists (remember Sputnik?). The Japanese and Russians may fail but if you never try you are sure to fail.
If they really want to study a live Mammoth why don't scientist carefully preserve what tissue they have and save it for a time when advances in technology might make cloning more plausible? I have to wonder. Do the researchers want to study live Mammoths or do they just want to be famous as the first people to clone them? The rush when the odds are bad make me guess the later.
i hopey the mammuts no make boom boom in my yard so me no haf to clean it up
The chances might be better than he thinks. Rather than find intact DNA, the successful way will probably be to decode the genome, then completely reconstruct intact DNA base-pair-by-base pair from scratch. A lot of work, to be sure, but really just a matter of scale. You still have the problem of bringing the egg to term, but that is prolly just engineering as well.
Alan, you're a little off about the thylacine. You were referencing information from '05 as if time stopped in '05. Feel free to read PSU's opinion here:
http://thylacine.psu.edu/restore.html & http://thylacine.psu.edu/ for a mammoth reference as well.
"The sticking point for resurrecting the thylacine is likely to be the absence of a sufficiently close living relative to supply eggs and act as a surrogate. If, however, it were somehow possible to boot up the thylacine genome in a living cell, then things would be looking up. The interesting thing about marsupials as opposed to other mammals is that pregnancy is so short, usually lasting just a matter of weeks. This means the thylacine's dependence on a surrogate mother would be much less than for mammals with a long gestation period. Once born at only a few millimeters in size it might be possible to feed a baby thylacine milk in an artificial pouch"
You were correct that the Austrailian Museum dropped the project, but a dropped project doesn't mean something is out of the question, just beyond the scope/range/imagination fo the foundation that dropped the project. There were plenty of scientist who had all the math they needed to "know" we'd never make it to the Moon, but we made it to the Moon due to determination, passion, and creative thinking.
If, as scientists, we attack cloning with the same vigor as the Apollo program results will be sooner and not later. Of course limitless cash helps anything, ask NASA during the Apollo program or DARPA now!
""C'mon, it'll never happen. Not in my lifetime," said Webb Miller, a Penn State computer scientist and genomicist who helped decipher the genetic code of a woolly mammoth." +++++ Those of us who are scientists find statements like this idiotic. This is like wanting to find the the best recipe for beef Stroganoff, so you ask the guy raising the cattle! The titles "computer scientist and genomicist" may sway some people, but most people who have such titles have never taken a course in cell and sub-cell biology, let alone majored in it. Unlike the TV scientists who know everything about every science, today's scientists are specialists. I majored in chemistry and physics with a minor in biology. But I don't know much about the ceramics chemistry, electricity production in photocells, or the pyruvic acid and Krebs cycles that produce energy in muscle cells, though I might full others who haven't studied those areas by that fact I do have a superficial understanding of them.
math proof of god( really short version-1 page- to get you interested)
onision.net/index.php?/topic/41844-math-proof-of-god-really-really-short-version/page__fromsearch__1
math proof of god (short version)
onision.net/index.php?/topic/41841-math-proof-of-god-short-version-update-all-youtube-videos-now-from-regular-site/page__fromsearch__1
math proof of god (normal version)
www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1616159/pg1
a response to a set of objections
onision.net/index.php?/topic/42010-math-proof-for-cleb-answered-your-new-questions/page__fromsearch__1
A lot of evidence is provided in these documents--the second link, that shows how science is agreeing with these assessments.
Many respectable scientists and mathematicians, such as stephen wolfram, have also suggested this.
Many others object to the idea of a computation based universe due to
quantum computers, postulating that if a universe can allow for such a
computer, the universe would need to allow the computer to have a whole
other universe just to exist---I think this is wrong because even though
the quantum computer can simulate more information than all the
particles in the universe, as a higher level of complexity, it cannot
simulate anything higher, which the universe does. However, if this
trajectory of complexity were continued, such as the omega point
concept, you would get to a point of infinite complexity where the
universe and computer would both merge, being able to simulate the same
thing as it is simulating on the very wave function of the universe
itself.
If this indeed pans out, we may be able to tap into reality with our
mind and control it---I pose a simple thought experiment for this: in
any game ,if you know the optimum strategy it becomes meaningless to
play--like tic tac toe...perhaps this seperation we have of 'outside'
and 'inside' is what is causing our problems in physics...by behaving
and realizing the source code in the same way that 'reality ' does, we
then are functionally and on an information level, the same thing. Think
of 'Robert Heinlein's' 'groking...
with enough thought sharing between two people, if such were possible,
they would evcentually become one mind. Similarly, it is not irational
to assume that the more knowledge we attain of the universe the more we
will be able to manipulate it to such an extent that we merge with
it...like a computer program.
every trime we know more about biology or any other discipline, our
ability to control our environment increases. It makes sense that
eventually we will be able to control reality itself--the energy
requirement to do so decreases when you realize that intelligence is
just an energy efficiency function---the more intelligent we become as
we approach something like the singularity, the more of a 'cataylst; we
will be to any desired action with the level of energy required a
minimum, because the universe is essentially information.
The ultimate end then, will be our merging with it. That is the end
point of science ,as empiricism and tautological mathematical thought
merge.
Trust this; It can be done. Morality and money are the only are the only problems. The 2nd morso than the 1st.
It would be really neat, but what a can of worms.