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Comment by johnthuss | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean we have the genetic material to clone one of these now?

Each cell that was preserved well enough to get DNA out of will still have plenty of damaged DNA. There are millions of copies, so probably plenty of good copies of any stretch, but it is an enormous job to stitch up a good one, and chromosomes packaging it all.

Then, if you can get it substituted into a zygote from an elephant and bring that to term (far from guaranteed, the nucleus could be subtly incompatible), you still have only one individual that will get old and die. A viable breeding population needs many other, different individuals.

It might be possible several or many decades from now. Pray elephants have not themselves been driven to extinction by then. If they have, bringing them back would be both more valuable and responsible, but even harder with nothing to gestate in.

No. Preservation of the physical form and preservation of the underlying DNA are two different things. Even then, we cannot just combine DNA from random animals spread apart by thousands of years and expect it all to just work. The number of failed embryos would be immense. Just look to the failure rate at the dog cloning services. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to handle hundreds of failed elephant pregnancies, spread across decades, that it would take to follow through with this idea.

What is the failure rate in dog cloning services?

The quoted number is 20% but that is success of each procedure, each of which might involve multiple embryos being implanted. Remember though that dog cloning is working with perfect and complete samples, not degraded DNA from a frozen bog body.

I've never heard of this. What is the market? Who wants a cloned dog?

Rich people who will pay 50k for a copy of thier dead dog rather than adopt one from a shelter.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60924936

A lot of behaviors are genetic, it’ll probably behave quite similar to the cloned dog.

YouTubers with famous pets are supposedly doing this. The mind boggles.

In case someone wants to read more - a person who did this with their cat recently gave an AMA on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uupphp/i_cloned_my_la...

Some service dogs are really unique. I watched a program last evening. A young lady has a condition where she can pass out without warning. This caused her to be house-ridden. She got a dog as a pet and it turns out her dog can sense an oncoming episode and she gets a 5 minute warning. She can now rejoin society. Until the dog dies. A clone and some socialized training with the first dog could enable her to continue being outside the house.

Getting the original to actively train their clone replacement? That is some black mirror-level creepy.

haha, I've been in that situation myself. The replacement was born a couple of years ago, and I'm being forced to change her poop-filled diapers, teach her how to talk..

Why would you need to combine the DNA of random animals? Surely a well enough preserved specimen will have endless cells from which to sample DNA and piece together a full sequence.

Why because of all those holes in sequence, of course! Gotta add some frog DNA if you don't want any gaps. Mr. DNA explained it all very clearly back in 1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUaFYzFFbBU

My understanding is that genetic material needed for cloning is more complex than just the DNA sequence. The epigenetics (e.g. chemical modifications of the bases, histone-mediated packing of the DNA) aren't necessarily easy to examine or replicate in the best of cases with fresh material. DNA is like source code that requires a compatible compiler (i.e. everything around it in real life) to actually build.

Thank you for this.

Jurassic Park is not real. Those dinosaurs would be on life support, not vigorously chasing and eating people. Their lungs would not be sufficient in today's relatively thin atmosphere.

Cretaceous oxygen levels were at times comparable to those today, and possibly lower. In any case dinosaurs probably had very efficient lungs, as birds do. Unfortunately there's no way to get DNA that old.

From bioenergetics, fluid mechanics and aerodynamics, we show that if the atmospheric pressure was higher at the time of the dinosaurs than it is today, we would be able to resolve a number of anomalies which puzzle scientists today. These concern how a giant pterosaur (quetzalcoatlus, with a 12-15 m wingspan) had enough power to fly; also, how a giant dinosaur (apatosaur, with a 12.5 m long neck) was able to pump blood up to its brain.

http://levenspiel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/DinosaurW.p...

Double or triple atmospheric pressure would have lowered evaporation to such an extent that it would have had many other geological and botanical effects that are not seen.

Rather surprisingly, I just found that different oxygen fractions do cause different atmospheric pressures, by altering the density of air, but it's a 15% to 25% difference, not 200%. Maybe it's possible to use this to resolve tensions in estimates of how much oxygen there was. See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1260670

There are buffalo on Catalina Island. About 15 head were brought there to film a movie and they've multiplied.

Like a lot of island species, they are smaller than their continental counterparts and when relocated to the continent, they gain on average about 100 pounds and grow thicker fur.

https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2004/12/16/Catalina-buffalo-ret...

Humans who live at altitude for any length of time can see their lung capacity increase. Human sub populations that have lived at altitude for generations also have other adaptations, such as thicker blood, more small blood vessels, etc.

That's in the current world for just a couple of species.

As far as I understand reality, dinosaur physiology is not adapted or suitable to current conditions on planet earth, including but probably not limited to the way their lungs work and differences in atmosphere.

It literally cannot be answered with certainty, barring some passing ancient aliens giving us the DNA sequences they took last time they were in the neighbourhood. But as a matter of speculation, dinosaurs seem like they were pretty adaptable. Penguins can live in the Miami Seaquarium – I don't see why a dromaeosaurid would do so much worse.

I agree: it cannot be answered with certainty.

This is probably a good time to agree to disagree about the rest of it.

One of my favourite scifi books when I was young was 'End of an Era' by Robert J Sawyer. It had an interesting answer to some of the dinosaur puzzles.

Every few years a frozen mammoth is found and somebody says they are going to clone it.

I want to say first article I read claiming this was 20ish years back. No cloned mammoths yet.

have you checked the islands around Costa Rica?

I have heard the rumors about Costa Rica.

You'll know I make it there, if I stop posting here.

There's nothing at Isla del Coco, all the almost living mammoths are found at the New Siberian Islands, because this area is cold enough to preserve them. There is a whole industry to sell them to rich Chinese.

They even found frozen mammoths with still intact liquid blood, and couldn't restore DNA from that. So why should they be able to restore from this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_2.0

Yes. There are billions of cells; collectively DNA degradation will average fine. Now it is just a matter of time and money.

Woolly mammoth habitats don’t exist anymore nor do their social structure. We might be able to guess at their habitats but we know very little about how they lived. I would think it’s cruel to try and bring another mammoth back to what ever we currently think is a good for them, especially since the whole venture would be likely at least partially be driven by a quest for fame and profit.

If humans go extinct and some alien species works out how to clone us in vitro and put us in a breathable atmosphere, do you think that would be a life worth living? Hard pass for me, I can’t see that being an experience I would want to endure. It’s life Jim but not as we know it.

If governments or the super rich want a cause to spend their super profits on then working on human immorality or curing our current environmental/social ills would be much more moral.

> I would think it’s cruel to try and bring another mammoth back to what ever we currently think is a good for them

Bias for what is 'cruel' cannot exist without historical context, for Mammoths or even humans for that matter.

Any species (human or otherwise) is a product of its environment. We've seen this time and time again in historical examples such as human sacrifices, fights to the death, torture- all these ideals were cultivated and accepted by the majority at one point or another.

It's important to also recognise that mammoths only became extinct roughly 4000 years ago and that they are the closest ancestor to modern day elephants. Mammoths existed at the same point in time as bison, grizzly bears, and camels. Camels even predate mammoths and co-existed with species like the giant beaver.

In the timeline of evolution 4000 years is an extraordinarily short period. I'd wager that reintroducing mammoths into a suitable environment would go surprisingly smoothly.

> If humans go extinct and some alien species works out how to clone us in vitro and put us in a breathable atmosphere, do you think that would be a life worth living? Hard pass for me

This seems like a catch-22. In this example, you would be reborn in a new environment with zero historical knowledge of the human race.

As odd as it seems... Even if you were made to ride around an alien spaceship naked on a unicycle for your foreseeable lifetime, you would still have no context in the slightest for if this would be a life worth living for you, or if it is an experience you would want to endure.

You would be crafting and designing the social norms for your ancestors from scratch.

Kinda! https://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/

> Does that mean we have the genetic material to clone one of these now?

Have we learned nothing from Jurassic Park?

;)

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