Man vs. mammoth: Is a face-off like this in our future...again?
Courtesy redskunkScientists are another step closer to making Jurassic Park a reality. Well, not quite Jurassic Park, but certainly Pleistocene Park.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have decoded 80 percent of the DNA for the woolly mammoth, an elephant ancestor that went extinct about 10,000 years ago. The results of their study appear in the journal Nature.
The DNA was extracted from actual mammoth hair found preserved in the permafrost of Siberia. Hair encapsulates DNA, providing a purer source of the genetic material than that found in fossil bones that are vulnerable to contamination by bacteria and other creatures involved in decomposition. We covered this in a previous post.
About six million years of evolution separate the wooly mammoth from its modern descendents the Indian and African elephants. And so far they appear genetically to be very similar, although a complete assessment of differences won’t be available until the complete genomes of mammoths and modern elephants are mapped. The data sets for each is comprised of about 4 billion DNA bases.
But even then you don’t have to worry about rogue mammoths running amok on the interstates (have you ever hit a moose? Multiply that experience by about 15). Science is still decades away from cloning an actual specimen – or even a hybrid with a living elephant - from the genetic material. The technology just isn’t there yet. But that’s not the only thing in the way.
"It could be done,” said co-author Stephan Schuster, a biochemistry professor at Penn State. “The question is, just because we might be able to do it one day, should we do it?"
Sounds familiar doesn’t it? The same question was posed by one of the characters in Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park just before things got really hairy.
SOURCES and LINKS
Penn State's mammoth research page
Live Science story
Previous Buzz story on mammoth cloning
I always run into a dead end on the ethical issues of cloning things like mammoths (i.e. "Even if we could, should we?").
I start to think along the lines of, "Well, these are creatures that went extinct a long time ago, and probably not just because they were hunted by ancient man, so maybe we..."
And then that train of thought is gone, because I'm thinking, "Heck yeah! Let's clone one now! I wanna see a mammoth!"
Seriously. I want to see a freakin mammoth.
Yeah We dont have the ability to recreate an organism of that magnatude with legitamate success. We have been able to constuct a heart from heart cells by using cells from a living one and placing them on a dead skeleton...
Even if this animal could be cloned, why would it be done? So we could look at these animals in a zoo? I don't see a lot of value in the cloning, but it's interesting.
i think it would be interesting to see an animal which had been extinked so many years ago. But i don't think cloning is nessesary. what are they going to do with the mammoth after they clone it??? why would they want to clone a mammoth anyway..in my opinion, it is unesessary.
i think it would be a grreat idea to clone a mammoth
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