Cloning Extinct Critters

[Smeghead]

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I find the whole concept of cloning fascinating. But there are several questions I don’t quite have a grasp on:

1. Say we are successful in cloning an extinct animal. How do you get from one (or several) animals to a survivable group? With a limited amount of genetic material, how does one avoid the problems of interbreeding on the species?

2.What are the more general effects on the existing ecosysytem? I mean, extinct animals died off for a reason. We have plenty examples of what non-native flora and fauna can do in the right situation : from zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, to kudzu in the American South,etc.,etc… Why would we want to reintroduce mammoths, for instance? Is this just a case of intellectual arrogance?
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1. Short answer - we don’t. This is a problem that is still far off. I think most scientists would be thrilled just to get one living animal. I haven’t heard anything about attempts to start breeding colonies. The closest thing would be the idea of getting mammoths to interbreed with elephants, which wouldn’t face this problem. You’re right. To get a healthy breeding population, you’d need the DNA of lots of unrelated individuals. Considering the difficulty of getting enough for just one individual, this isn’t likely in the near future.

2. Again, you’re right. And again, this is a problem not likely to be faced for a long time. Assuming cloning extinct animals ever becomes a success, it will still be an expensive process. It would be a long long time until they’re cheap and plentiful enough for the companies or universities that made them to consider throwing them away out into the wild, losing their scientific and entertainment value.

[Smeghead]

Oops. I forgot I was also going to respond to ZenBeam.

There are almost as many methods of infection as there are pathogens. I won’t even try to start to get into all the mechanisms. But viral infections ultimately rely on some type of molecular “lock and key” type interaction. Viral proteins react with host proteins in some way that leads to infection. There are also innumerable ways of avoiding immune responses. Herpes, for instance, stays entirely in the nerve cells. It never gets into the bloodstream where the immune system lives.

Viruses like those mentioned by Wood Thrush that can infect lots of different types of animals have either a “skeleton key” protein that can interact with lots of different locks, or have a key that opens a common and evolutionarily conserved lock. In reality, of course, it’s a bit of both. So the question is whether the keys available to viruses today will fit the dinos’ locks. And as you can see from this board, that’s still up in the air.

My opinion, for the record, is that no virus would be able to infect a dino the day it was hatched, but one or more would quickly adapt. Viruses are nasty, resourceful little buggers. Actually, now that I think of it, the necessary adaptation would be due to a random event, so really there’s no reason why the dinovirus wouldn’t be around right now - just with nothing to infect. Hmmmm. I’ll have to think on that one some more.

[Chronos]

As regards the “dinovirus” question, (great word, BTW, Smeghead), my guess would be that dinosaurs would be immune to almost all modern pathogens, but there’s a few that are pretty broad-band. Vira are usually pretty picky, as are many bacteria, but there’s some protozoans and simple animals that’ll infect just about anything. The trichasomething worms that are so common in pigs, for example, don’t care about keyholes or binding sites-- They just want meat. I imagine that a few such critters would be able to easily overwhelm Barney’s old-fashioned defenses (Barney with a necrotizing facitis… Truly, a beautiful thought :). But I digress.)