Semi-Daily Journal

Or much too late. Does DNA really hold together that well?

Brad DeLong writes:
> Surely it is much too soon for this to have a chance of
> success?

I am not an expert in this really esoteric field, but I think it's fair to say that this is a pretty mammoth undertaking. It looks like they're going to proceed along what you could basically call the "Dolly route". The good news is that we have done that before, and know more than when Dolly was born. The bad news is that there were a lot of unforeseen problems with Dolly herself. And let me trumpet some other big issues:

1) Nobody has ever cloned a pachyderm before, and while there might not be anything insurmountable there, I wouldn't give the Mammoth Cloning Project (MCP; now where have I seen that before? :-)) much chance of success without them first trying the obvious first step of cloning an elephant.

2) While I guess nobody knows the gestation period of a mammoth, a decent guess is that it's on the order of an African elephant. That would be 18-22 months. So even if you skip cloning the elephant, you've plowed through three years of funding even if everything works basically perfectly in terms of DNA extraction, embryo construction, and implantation.

3) Dolly wasn't created on the first try, and I think you'd be sensationally lucky to get a viable fetus on the first try of this. Now, you could try to implant eggs into a bunch of female elephants at the same time, and hope one works out. Elephants, however are not typical laboratory animals. They are large, eat a lot,...let's just say they are relatively high in maintenance costs compared to fruit flies or mice.

4) Elephants are large, but some mammoths are even larger. So now I can imagine implanting the mammoth embryo, and everything works just great (no rejection, no other problems, similar gestation period)...until the baby turns out to be impossibly large for the mother at the time of birth. Probably not the first thing to be concerned about, but yet another issue.

5) They mention in the article the problems they foresee with DNA preservation. I know this kind of thing has been studied, and there have been some impressive successes recently (e.g., usable sequences from Neanderthal bone marrow!), but in terms of recovering an intact ~3 billion base pair genome from unevenly frozen mammoth tissue that's 200,000+ years old...this will not be easy.

6) Let's suppose we get a lot of usable DNA, but there are lot of gaps we need to fill in. As usual, there is a question of how, which depends on what they are, but since we don't have the elephant genome sequence even... Engineering a mammoth from even 95% intact DNA would be itself a huge undertaking. Maybe your best shot is to hope to find the genes for hairiness and noble telegenicity and try to work those into a modern elephant. Or not...

And the list goes on. I think the problem here is that while many single steps in this process could be sort of plausible, or at least of moderate inderest scientifically, no government agency is going to give you much money for it, which means that you become dependent on less orthodox funding sources, including the "crazy old philanthropist" route. The plusses and minuses of the latter method are possibly best seen in the, er, outcome of the biosphere project.

--"Last year, the Vladivostok News in Russia reported that scientists believed they could resurrect extinct animals - such as the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros - to create a prehistoric safari park in northern Siberia."

Makes one wish they were a lab person with the opportunity to work on this project-- No time like the present folks as we can land on moon and now we can bring prehistoric animals back to life. Explorers have found perfectly preserved mammoths in the permafrost so I don't see why not...

Theoretically I don’t see why a present day African or Asia elephant couldn’t carry the embryo. SO no time like the present to get stated on this project and find out, damn I wish I was in on ground floor of this groundbreaking project.

--"Last year, the Vladivostok News in Russia reported that scientists believed they could resurrect extinct animals - such as the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros - to create a prehistoric safari park in northern Siberia."

Makes one wish they were a lab person with the opportunity to work on this project-- No time like the present folks as we can land on moon and now we can bring prehistoric animals back to life. Explorers have found perfectly preserved mammoths in the permafrost so I don't see why not...

Theoretically I don’t see why a present day African or Asia elephant couldn’t carry the embryo. SO no time like the present to get stated on this project and find out, damn I wish I was in on ground floor of this groundbreaking project.

Sounds like a pretty hairy endeavour to me.

I don't think such a project would be easy, but hesitate to deem it impossible. If the researchers/entrepreneurs can get large stretches of mammoth DNA, they could probably identify differences from modern elephant DNA and use that as a basis.

But it is unlikely that they could get viable mammoth mitochondria, which might have become adapted to greater effeciency of energy production in cold climates.

Sure sounds like they are trying to pull wool over our eyes.

Achilles writes:
>
> Sure sounds like they are trying to pull wool over our eyes.

Tusk tusk! That was your second lame joke this thread. :-)

Jonathan King, having pulled that comment about trumpeting issues out of your trunk, you shouldn't be making such a fine howdah-doo over Achilles's jokes.

My jokes would not be lame if they did not keep removing portions of my leg for cloning purposes.

I vory about you guys sometimes.

The Australian Museum is working on cloning the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. Mind you, the thylacine extinction only hapened in 1936. http://www.amonline.net.au/thylacine/

The Australian Museum is working on cloning the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. Mind you, the thylacine extinction only hapened in 1936. http://www.amonline.net.au/thylacine/

Do the Japanese have any plans to clone really, really big reptiles?

jonathan King writes: "While I guess nobody knows the gestation period of a mammoth, a decent guess is that it's on the order of an African elephant. That would be 18-22 months. So even if you skip cloning the elephant, you've plowed through three years of funding even if everything works basically perfectly in terms of DNA extraction, embryo construction, and implantation."

The gestation is long, but there shouldn't be much that needs to be *done*, apart from things normally done by any zoo expecting a baby elephant. Maybe it'd be more closely monitored, and the birth might be trickier and more expensive than normal.

The expensive lab part of the project could probably be mothballed for the duration of the pregnancy; it might turn out that, after the embryos are implanted, it just makes sense to shut it down and write up the papers on that part of the project.

Funding shouldn't be a problem, I don't think, as long as the work is being done by reputable people and not the Raelians.

Depending on how many embryos could be created, the project might auction them off. That'd bring in some more income. Considering how much effort and expense goes into mere pandas, you can bet that zoos around the world would be competing for access to actual live mammoths (or pregnant elephants carrying mammoth embryos).

Even if they just had a pregnant elephant with a mammoth embryo, that'd *still* be a significant draw, I think. The suspense of the pregnancy would probably raise the zoo's profile in the media considerably, for a LONG TIME.

So I don't think the cost of room & board for the pregnant elephants will be a problem, if the elephants are kept by zoos.

Add in sales of exclusive rights to the story in various media, and there should be plenty of money for the project.

With an estimated ten million mammoths frozen in the Siberian permafrost how long will it be before we find sperm (or even an embryo) well preserved enough to jump steps 3-8?

I mean, if anyone could be bothered to look...

With an estimated ten million mammoths frozen in the Siberian permafrost how long will it be before we find sperm (or even an embryo) well preserved enough to jump steps 3-8?

I mean, if anyone could be bothered to look...