Mammoth 'could be reborn in four years' (Cloning)

reply to post by TheWill


when people cross their paths yes, like any animal.

There are no herbivores out there that hunt down and gore people to death for fun.

We should probably just go back in time to stop that person from ever creating fire as well, right?

I mean fires are dangerous and kill thousands of people every year!

I think the interest is in the fact they can possibly bring back an extinct species... I am postulating the possibility of the return of say the frozen remains of previous versions of the homosapien, there are a few still frozen in laboritories. We could learn alot about our own origins from such an endevour.

I beleive there are also samples of other species gone extinct that would be interesting to clone in this manner. I can't wait to see where they take the experiments in the futur.

reply to post by KingAtlas


Good luck getting the cloning of humans past an ethics committee!

Not only cloning it, but choosing an appropriate surrogate. If you choose an ape, you'll have ethics issues because we accept that they are so similar to humans, and you'll have religious groups down your throat for saying that apes are close enough to humans to surrogate for our ancestors. If you choose a human, not only do you have to find a woman willing to carry a human whose real parents have been dead for a million years, but you have to get ethics committees to agree that you should clone a child who is going to be poked and prodded in a laboratory even more than Genie was in the 1970s, and is definitely going to be called a troglodyte and other insulting names when he or she goes to school.

Also, most cloning attempts end in miscarriage (although not so frequently with Wakayama's technique of making a second nuclear transfer after the embryo has undergone a couple of divisions), so you'll need to find a whole bunch of women ready to potentially miscarry, or potentially have to raise and care for a child who isn't just from another country, but potentially of a different species.

So yeah, good luck with that.

When they create it could they change the DNA a little bit and patent it?

What would the patent on a Wooly Mammoth be worth? You could start up a new company kinda like the AKC, American Kennel Club and make hundreds of thousands selling each mammoth. Then move on to other animals.

Trillion dollar industry nobody's tapped....well except for the featherless chickens:

I think this is just amazing.

I posted a thread, in error. Thankfully the Mods caught it. Nice to see someone else likes the concept etc.

S&F.

I bet they can't but... you never know.

I have always seen cloning as bad news. Doesn't anyone else think that it would be a soul-less thing? I mean, only something that is actually BORN could have a soul, right?

Originally posted by Whitbit
I have always seen cloning as bad news. Doesn't anyone else think that it would be a soul-less thing? I mean, only something that is actually BORN could have a soul, right?

Said cloned beings are embryos that are implanted into a the uterus of a viable surrogate and are thus "born".

Wiki: Cloning Essentially, complicated Invitro, ethical implications aside.

I'm very excited that they are planning to do this. We live in a time when our past doesn't necessarily have to stay in the past, for example, bringing back the woolly mammoth. If this works, we may be able to bring back other extinct animals such as Tasmanian Tiger. Hmmm, now where to keep a woolly Mammoth. I may have some room in my yard!

Every time I read about this as something they actually want to do, I can not help but think of this scene from the movie Jurassic Park.lol

reply to post by Whitbit


What, so my sister (C-section) has no soul? After all, she was not born but, "From [her] mother's womb untimely ripp'd."

As to cloning... well, MZ twins are clones. Then there's parthenogenic animals (insects, lizards, snakes, I think some fish), and all the sponges, anemones and corals, as well as plants that reproduce by asexual budding without anyone's help - that's cloning for you. When single-celled organisms replicate, they tend to so so clonally.

Cloning's been going on since the dawn of life. Humans have been cloning plants for as long as they've been taking cuttings. We're just branching out.

reply to post by CaptGizmo


Yes, we get it. You're the third or forth person to mention "oh noes! Jurassic Park!" but Goldblum's character's rant is as much, if not more about how they were cloning creatures en mass and throwing them into an amusement park/zoo for the public to see.

The message is about reckless behavior with power; Hammond had created populations of animals and set them loose into a large preserve type of area. Malcom wouldn't have had a point if they were all gathered around 1 animal in a lab.

reply to post by eNumbra

Well I guess you don't get it then. The point being is that it make not a bit of difference multiple animals or one. Once you do it with one then were does it stop when there are no regulations in place. Not to mention it is playing GOD if you are a believe in GOD. Bringing back something that as said in the movie; had it's shot and natural selection has deemed it so. Bringing it back is just plain wrong!

reply to post by CaptGizmo


You know something else we did that interfered with the balance of nature, and we never stopped once to consider whether we should or not, or if we were interfering with "God's" plan?

We started giving sick people medicine, fixing bits of them that were broken and making them live longer than "God" intended, and, what's worse, we even started washing our hands when we were doing it, to stop them dying, as "God" had intended, through infections caught from having a hand in their guts.

Oh, and we went and domesticated dogs. Darn, that must have upset God. And we started storing grain so that when the winter came, people who didn't have the fat reserves to keep warm didn't die of starvation. And what's even worse, is we globalised the internet so that people who God never wanted to come into contact with one another could communicate. So much for the tower of Babel, huh?

Playing God is what makes us human. It may be bad, it may be good, but it's very difficult to just draw a line and say "this is too far".


EDIT: And by the way, we've already brought an animal back from extinction - the Pyrenian Ibex was cloned in the 2000s, after the last surviving individual was crushed by a falling tree (now that's ironic... I lost marks for saying that being crushed by a tree was a form of natural selection in an exam around about the same year that it died... huh.). It died of respiratory problems a few minutes after being born, but it still happened.

And who's to say that the white rhino is any different? Down to 20-odd individuals at one point, now thousands of 'em. Was that interfering with God's plan, or just undoing the damage caused by firearms?

This is really interesting, and it makes you wonder what other extinct species they will be able to bring back from the dead. Saber tooth tiger, Dodo birds, maybe one day even homo-erectus and neanderthals.

Talk about social problems though... No one would know whether to treat them as humans or animals.

Originally posted by CaptGizmo
reply to post by eNumbra

 

Once you do it with one then were does it stop when there are no regulations in place.

Which is why we should put regulations in place rather than just shout about playing god.

We play god whenever we use invitro on people who have trouble getting pregnant naturally. We play god with abortion, with the death penalty.

We as a society play god as it is far more than people realize.

Won't this Mammoth just think it's an elephant? Unless they create two from different DNA to create a breedable pair then this will just be a Woolly Mammoth that believes it's an elephant. It should be accepted by it's mother as she will just have the maternal instinct regardless of what it looks like.

reply to post by fiftyfifty


Seeing as it's easier to sequence DNA than clone animals, and they've recently been able to insert artificially created sections of code into an actual animal, I suspect that the actual success of this project will come when they start splicing mammoth genes into Asian elephant genomes - that's their closest (and very close indeed) living relative. Scarcely qualifies for a different subspecies, last I read. Wouldn't take more than a couple of years, with the right staffing and the right equipment.

Once you've got one, whatever the method, provided that it really is same species as the asian elephant, you just outbreed with asian elephants to get rid of any iffy genes, and then inbreed to get homozygotes for all the "mammoth" traits. That would take the best part of a century, probably, but not much of an issue.

What would be very entertaining would be if they found that all the "mammoth" traits are just phenotypic plasticity of asian elephants, and they could have just translocated a couple of elephants further north and been done with it.

Originally posted by eNumbra

Originally posted by CaptGizmo
reply to post by eNumbra

 

Once you do it with one then were does it stop when there are no regulations in place.

Which is why we should put regulations in place rather than just shout about playing god.

We play god whenever we use invitro on people who have trouble getting pregnant naturally. We play god with abortion, with the death penalty.

We as a society play god as it is far more than people realize.

I see your point and understand the desire to further science and our general understanding of what may have caused their extinction and I hope you understand my view as well. We can only hope that they will discuss the pros and cons as we have been doing here.It will hopefully lead them down a careful path and not a dangerous one.