The first pictures of blood from a 10,000 year old Siberian woolly mammoth | Hacker News Reader

The first pictures of blood from a 10,000 year old Siberian woolly mammoth

siberiantimes.com

132 pointsphowat50 comments

The most interesting part of that article is the non-chalant last line: "Once the [wooly mammoth's] tissues have been treated to a nuclear transfer process, the eggs will be implanted into the womb of a live elephant for a 22-month pregnancy."

Cloning wooly mammoths! Now that is cool.

Hold onto your butts...

I say this line nearly every chance I get. I find it's useful in almost every situation where the return button need be pressed.

An extinct ibex was successfully cloned in 2009 using the same technology. It died shortly after birth due to breathing problems. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_ibex#Cloning_project

The line before that is even more interesting:

Stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk's private bioengineering laboratory confirmed he is poised to make a bid to return the extinct Siberian mammoth to the planet.

Hwang Woo-suk is an extremely famous scientific fraud.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/asia/0,16641,20060109,00.htm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/asia/27clone.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2006/11/28-01.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk

SEOUL, South Korea — Hwang Woo-suk, a disgraced cloning expert from South Korea who had claimed major breakthroughs in stem-cell research, was convicted Monday of falsifying his papers and embezzling government research funds. A judge sentenced him to a suspended two-year prison term, saying Dr. Hwang had shown remorse and had not taken research money for personal use.

Dr. Hwang was once hailed as a national hero in the South. His school, Seoul National University, disowned him in 2005, saying that he had fabricated the papers he had published to global acclaim.

One wonders though, his research was shown to be fraudulent but is his skill fraudulent? I mean guy the might be an excellent cell biologist that tried to short cut his way to fame and got caught, or he might be a complete fraud and not even be a passable biologist. Trying to find stuff about the man is difficult through all the articles about his downfall.

or he might be a complete fraud and not even be a passable biologist

He's genuinely one of the top researchers in the field (see: cloned dog).

The first cloned dog, in fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuppy

I remember reading about that plan when I was a kid. Twenty years later, I'm still all for it, but when articles like this appear I don't hold my breath either.

The problem here is, we don't have land for mammoths.

Mammoths need tundra steppes to live on subarctic grains, and they all converted to unproductive swampy tundra :(

There is a project to recreate tundra steppes tho: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park

That's only a problem for getting them back into the wild.

I'd suspect cloned mammoths would be a zoo feature first.

I'm a little but confused by the nature of how further research/experimentation will proceed. Namely why the rights to clone were sold after the discovery.

Presumably, given how radical this discovery is, the opportunity to clone an extinct species would be given to the most capable scientific institution on the planet, not for the highest bidder... Maybe the South Koreans qualify as the most capable, I don't really know. Or perhaps my vision of the international science community is just naive.

They were sold because that body belonged to someone (or some group) due to it being on their property. One cannot just go on somebody's property and take whatever they find and give it to anyone else in the name of "scientific discovery".

No, I get that, sorry if I didn't make my understanding clear. I had just previously assumed that discoveries of this magnitude are treated with a degree of import that supersedes commercial interest. I don't find it unethical or anything like that. As you say, it's their property.

After reading this [0], found from an above comment, it's clear that cloning endeavors are generally private initiatives. In my mind, this discovery was similar to unearthing ruins or something, but nothing's sacred [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_ibex#Cloning_project [1] http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-3743-peru-heavy-machinery-d...

How many clones of different DNA would you need to produce a viable herd? Otherwise wooly mammoth coats and steaks will be really expensive.

They should be able to simply basically guess and check with the DNA, making small manipulations and seeing if it is enough to produce a viable herd.

Also inbreeding might work itself to produce a viable herd.

It's much more difficult than that. The biggest issue is finding where exactly to make the changes. Even then, we don't necessarily know what the phenotype, the eventual outcome, of making a change will be.

There are two versions of each gene (because there are two of each chromosome), what often happens is that even if one version of the gene is defective, the other version is enough to compensate.

Now, say you have two individuals, each one has one working and one defective version of a gene. If you cross those individuals 25% of the offspring will have two copies of the "good" version, 50% will have one good and one defective copy, and 25% will be unlucky and have two versions of the defective version. This is just regular Mendelian genetics so you might have heard all this before. However, it sets up why crossing two clones can be risky.

So, in the above example 75% of offspring will be fine. Sounds pretty good, right? But that's only when considering one gene. A mammoth likely has tens of thousands of genes. This particular one can be carrying any number of defective versions of each of those genes. Crossing it with an exact genetic copy would mean that the risk of having an offspring with a genetic defect is that much higher.

However, it might not be all that bad. Entire viable populations have likely descended from something like a pregnant female floating on a raft to a new island. If they can extract blood from even one other mammoth, that might be just enough to create healthy enough offspring. The main barrier is the gestation time and generation time. Two fertile rats stranded on an island with plenty of food can reproduce fast enough to quickly create a good population that might be able to overcome low genetic diversity through sheer numbers. Trying to raise enough mammoths will be much more expensive and much more time-consuming.

Isn't the lack of an opposite gender DNA a problem?

> Also inbreeding might work itself to produce a viable herd.

I didn't get the impression that they had DNA from more than a single animal (a female in this case), making breeding unlikely.

Wow, that would be so cool - imaging going to the zoo to see one, something people 20 years ago had absolutely no hope of doing.

well, there was this guy who made a movie on the subject...

I seem to recall the outcome was poor

They made movies about "wars" amongst the "stars" too, but both were considered science fiction.

Thankfully, unlike with dinosaurs we know that humans are quite capable of hunting mammoths to extinction if we want to.

I have absolutely no doubt that humans could effectively eliminate a wild dinosaur population in short order. Think of the trophy mounts!

Hear, Hear. If there's one thing we humans are good at, it's genocide and slaughter.

Well, you don't rise to the top of the food chain unless you're able to kill every other animal out there.

Hail to the king, baby.

I recall 20 years ago we had hope of this. Bringing back mammoths and other extinct species has been part of the discussion of animal cloning from the beginning.

Anybody know if the DNA structure of species that are approaching extinction being preserved for possible regeneration at some point in the future?

I'm not certain, but they're probably stored in that facility in northern Norway, Svalbard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

I'm not sure if this is fair, but it strikes me as somewhat slapdash to take a sample right there in the field. Also, while there is red liquid, what's the chances it contains actual viable DNA, rather than what amount to DNA fragments and a bit of haemoglobin?

> I'm not sure if this is fair, but it strikes me as somewhat slapdash to take a sample right there in the field.

It makes sense to take a sample immediately and preserve it ASAP.

With modern sequencing, are a large quantity of 'DNA fragments' sufficient for full nuclear genome replication?

edit: Make that two questions: one for 'full nuclear genome replication' and one for 'full nuclear genome sequencing'.

It actually is possible to recreate the full genome and sequence it from just fragments. In fact Craig Venter's strategy during the Human Genome Project used this idea. They made countless copies of the full genome, then fragmented each copy at different points. They then sequenced each fragment, since it's much faster to sequence short ones. After that they looked at all the overlaps in these fragments to create longer, continuos sequences.

When you sequence a new species (like when cannabis was sequenced last year) with a modern sequencing technique, you break up the large DNA strands into many small ones and then use a massive cluster to assemble the strands afterwards with statistical methods. It'll be more complicated here because you will have many varied samples with varying degrees of degeneration across different chromosomes, sequences, and samples but the basic concept is the same.

So how about for replication?

Have we developed the tech to go from mammal -> digital genome sequence -> physical replicated chromosome -> egg implanted with chromosome -> developmentally normal mammal -> fertile offspring, yet, or is that somewhere in the future?

No. That chain ends at the second step "digital genome sequence". In principle, we could synthesize a bunch of DNA strands corresponding to the genomic sequences and ligate them all together (although it would be absurdly expensive and laborious), but this would not constitute a chromosome. Eukaryotic chromosomes are organized in the nucleus by a huge variety of scaffolding and modifying factors (histones, etc.) into structures called chromatin. Recapturing this from sequence data is impossible, even in principle; the information is just not there. Indeed, understanding nuclear organization at a bunch of different leves is one of the big challenges of modern genetic research.

Worse: red blood cells contain no DNA, right? No nucleus. So they're depending on finding the much-scarcer white blood cells?

Yeah, that's true for mammals, which happens to be the case.

The chances of finding a strand of DNA for replication in that is next to none...

But i'll keep my fingers crossed

Audio of Stewart Brand's recent Long Now Foundation talk about reviving extinct species:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/may/21/reviving-extinct-sp...

when does Jurassic Park: Woolly Mammoth 3D come out now?

What if the electricity goes out in the park?!

That's why we put it on an island.

But don't you know. They adapt and will grow wings!!

Life will find a way.

Elephants can swim. Like, really well.

They use their trunks as snorkels

Then the fences will stop working and the Gulag prisoners will successfully escape.

That would be more like Magdalenian Park.

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