I figure with all the pretty-well-preserved specimens of the wooly mammoth frozen in solid blocks of ice in Siberia, surely we can thaw one of them out long enough to find one intact strand of DNA. Then all we’d have to do is put the fertilized egg (with wooly mammoth DNA) into the uterus of a regular elephant (aren’t elephants distant cousins of wooly mammoths?) and wait for the results.
I’m sure there are ethical considerations, such as bringing back a critter whose species hasnt’t set foot on the earth for 10,000 (or is it 100,000?) years. Or the fact that, once he was born, he’d be the only one of his species. Or a host of other things…
Has anyone thought of this? Is there a team of scientists somewhere currently working on this? And more importantly, is it even possible?
A few years ago someone wrote a book about about making dinosaurs from DNA like they did in Jurassic Park. The book was written in response to the movie. The book showed that it would be virtually impossible - they went through all the steps needed and showed how hard each step would be.
I saw a documentary on this recently. There is a group of scientists that are trying to do this at the moment. They think that they only need half the DNA of a Mamoth. The plan is to get frozen Mamoth sperm and fertilise a female elephant. The resulting hybrid would then be fertilised with the sperm so that the next generation would be 3/4 manoth. They would keep doing this untill they had a load of mamoths with 99% Manoth DNA. The reason that they recon that this will work is that Sperm degrades at a much slower rate than normal cells and would have a much better chance of being intact when frozen (just like the sperm for test tube babies). As far as I can tell there are 2 problems with this theory. The first is that most hybrid animals are infertile (e.g. the mule) and wouldn’t be able to have offspring, however they might get lucky on this. The other is that if they use the same batch of sperm over and over again, the mamoths would be inbred leading to week animals that probably wouldn’t survive for long. Again, they might get lucky by finding a few batches of mamoth sperm. In any case, if they do succeed, due to the long life span and gestation period of elephants and presumably mamoths as well, it will be a very long time before we see real life mamoths.
As has been pointed out, they are trying to get this to work right now with a recently discovered frozen specimen. The breakdown of DNA would be greatly slowed by being encased in ice, so the hope is that they will be able to find some viable sperm somewhere in the mammoth. Hopefully, they’re looking in the testes. That’s where I’d look. But anyway.
The idea is to fertilize an elephant with mammoth sperm. Hybrid inviability is a concern, but the species are so closely related that it may work. This would give you a half mammoth / half elephant. You would then fertilize this creature with more mammoth sperm, giving a 75% mammoth / 25% elephant and so on and so on until you get something that’s almost entirely mammoth.
The case is very different than trying to do it with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs exist only in fossils that are millions of years old, while there are samples of frozen mammoth tissue available, which makes DNA recovery infinitely more possible.
If wooly mammoths prevailed in the height of the last ice age how in the world was there enough plant bio-mass in a near artic environment to support herds of creatures that large or is the mammoth = ice age assumption incorrect.
Mammoths weren’t strictly arctic creatures. You just can’t get frozen specimens of the elusive Mexican jumping-bean mammoth, get what I’m saying?
But, speaking as someone whose last name is Wooley…I’m down with this. If you can bring one back it can stay at my place. I’ve got acres of grassland…trees that he can pull down. Hell, I’ll even get a cow elephant so he can do the nasties!
Forgive my iggnorance on the subject, but I gather that we are talking about 1 “original” mammoth to donate sperm, aren’t we? If that is the case, aren’t we talking about some serious inbreeding here?
Well, yes. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, AFAIK, no one’s discussing trying to set up an active breeding population of mammoths, just a few laboratory specimens. Once that’s done, we can try and figure out what the next step is. Secondly, inbreeding isn’t necessarily a death sentence. Inbreeding doesn’t cause new problems to arise, it just allows expression of previously hidden problems. Since most genetic defects are recessive, as long as the elephant side of things is kept diverse, things should be OK for a while.
They have been talking bout this for years; however, there is one issue that I have never seen brought up. COrrect me if I am wrong, but it is my imoression that every complex organism is dependent upon multiple sybiotic relationships with simple organisms–bacteria, mostly. It has always been my understanding that these organisms were species specific. So I would worry that mammoth fetuses or claves would tend to die pretty quickly because we would not have recreated the bacteria that converts something they eat into some chemical that they need. Hopefully elephants are clsoe enough that their bacteria can do the job. But I see this as a perinnial problem with resurrecting species.
Cecil addressed this very question manny years ago; it may be older than 1994 which is why it doesn’t show up in the Archives. I’m pretty sure I read it in one of the books - any Doper out there with the set able to find it?
However, in addition to problems caused by recessive genes, excessive inbreeding can make a population very susceptible to disease. In a genetically diverse population there are usually some individuals who would be naturally more resistant to a newly introduced pathogen, and who would therefore survive and breed more resistant generations, until the pathogen is no longer a serious threat. In a population with very low genetic diversity, a newly introduced pathogen capable of killing one member might be capable of killing all.
nebuli - that’s a good point. But again, I don’t think anyone’s trying to set up a viable, breeding population. That’s one of the issues that would be addressed after they manage to get one animal going.
Manda - Endosymbiotic bacteria typically aren’t species specific. Well, OK, some are. But a good healthy environment like the gut of a large mammal could be colonized by any number of bacteria. Especially when we have the closely related elephants to provide a starting culture, and since we’re dealing with a hybrid, I doubt that would be a significant problem. It may suffer from the occasional bout of diarrhea until the bacterial balance is right, but it should be OK. And again, mammoths really haven’t been gone all that long. Bacterial species that are pretty closely related to those that inhabited the mammoth should still be around.
