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A company has been formed with $10 million dollars of funding to bring back the Woolly Mammoth, which has been extinct for perhaps 5-10 thousand years.
Here is Carl Zimmer's NY Times article on it.
The original idea I heard of was get an intact nucleus with intact DNA from a very well frozen mammoth and slip it into an anucleated elephant egg (no elephant DNA left except in mitochondria), and stick it into a female Indian elephant that is ready for it to be implanted. The baby born, should then be a clone of the frozen mammoth.
Frozen DNA containing mammoth remains are fairly plentiful, so DNA sequence can be compared with their closest existing ancestor (the Indian elephant). However it is not in such good shape it could be used as is. Too broken up into pieces.
This idea has been around for a long time (longer than Jurassic Park, I think).
The new idea is to put new genes into an Indian elephant genome to replace some of the genes )about 60) that have been determined are making a major difference between mammoths and elephants.
The is largely a project of George Church, a well known biologist at Harvard Medical School.
Repeating this would produce elephants that are gradually more mammoth-like over the project's generations. It is a slower but more feasible approach.
Because the reproductive biology of elephants is not worked out (no one has harvested elephant eggs or done in vitro fertilization in elephants for example) and it would take a huge elephant herd to supply enough surrogate elephant mothers for the project, they would like to raise the elephants in artificial elephant wombs created using stem cell technology.
A fetal lamb has been raised in vitro for 4 weeks (not to term), however bringing an elephant to term would require two years. The fetus would be ~200 pounds (90.7 kg). That would be quite an accomplishment.
Set backs should be expected.
In an undergraduate embryology class I once put several fertilized chick eggs into plastic bags and kept them in an incubator for about 2 weeks. The ones that did not get contaminated developed until about 16 days. When they died (of unnatural causes). I should taken their egg shells, ground them up sterilized them and added them to the egg containing bag. This is an important source of Calcium for the developing embryos which they were lacking in my experiment.
Justification for doing this:
Here is Carl Zimmer's NY Times article on it.
The original idea I heard of was get an intact nucleus with intact DNA from a very well frozen mammoth and slip it into an anucleated elephant egg (no elephant DNA left except in mitochondria), and stick it into a female Indian elephant that is ready for it to be implanted. The baby born, should then be a clone of the frozen mammoth.
Frozen DNA containing mammoth remains are fairly plentiful, so DNA sequence can be compared with their closest existing ancestor (the Indian elephant). However it is not in such good shape it could be used as is. Too broken up into pieces.
This idea has been around for a long time (longer than Jurassic Park, I think).
The new idea is to put new genes into an Indian elephant genome to replace some of the genes )about 60) that have been determined are making a major difference between mammoths and elephants.
The is largely a project of George Church, a well known biologist at Harvard Medical School.
Repeating this would produce elephants that are gradually more mammoth-like over the project's generations. It is a slower but more feasible approach.
Because the reproductive biology of elephants is not worked out (no one has harvested elephant eggs or done in vitro fertilization in elephants for example) and it would take a huge elephant herd to supply enough surrogate elephant mothers for the project, they would like to raise the elephants in artificial elephant wombs created using stem cell technology.
A fetal lamb has been raised in vitro for 4 weeks (not to term), however bringing an elephant to term would require two years. The fetus would be ~200 pounds (90.7 kg). That would be quite an accomplishment.
Set backs should be expected.
In an undergraduate embryology class I once put several fertilized chick eggs into plastic bags and kept them in an incubator for about 2 weeks. The ones that did not get contaminated developed until about 16 days. When they died (of unnatural causes). I should taken their egg shells, ground them up sterilized them and added them to the egg containing bag. This is an important source of Calcium for the developing embryos which they were lacking in my experiment.
Justification for doing this:
- Hey, its cool. I could finally get my mammoth ride!
- Mammoths are hoped to turn the moss covered tundra into grasslands with scattered trees (more productive than now). There is a decent ecological argument for this.
- Develop news reproductive technologies, for the good of all humanity (and mammoths too). this is how the company (Colosal) hopes to make money.
- There are probably better things to spend money on.
- Is it right to introduce animals new to an ecology and change it?
- How will the babies be raised without parents (no surrogates remember)? Elephants have strong, long term family relationships that are important to their growing up.
- Will this technology be developed to raise humans like to Brave New World or The Matrix?
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