Freethought & Rationalism Archive

bluefugue · 08-21-2002, 03:46 AM

<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/08/21/clone.mammoth/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/08/21/clone.mammoth/index.html</a>

This would be so cool, if they could actually pull it off...

edited to add: I suppose this should be in S&S, but it has a vaguely evolutionary ring to it...

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: IesusDomini ]</p>

Quetzal · 08-21-2002, 04:30 AM

That's odd. There's an "evilutionist" on another board who works with mammoth DNA. He has said they are WAAAAY far away from cloning one since the only thing they've been able to recover are bits and pieces - not enough for anything remotely resembling a complete sequence.

Blinn · 08-21-2002, 04:49 AM

Here's the original article from the Times:

<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-3-387635,00.html" target="_blank">web page</a>

Seems like there are a lot of "ifs." And I have a little bit of familiarity with sperm cryopreservation. It's not as simple as just freezing and thawing - at least with the taxa I'm familiar with.

Quetzal · 08-27-2002, 03:11 AM

I asked an acquaintance - a mammoth specialist - about this topic on another board. My question revolved around: "is it possible or are they talking out their collective cloaca?". I thought you all might be interested in his reply:

Quote:

Originally posted by Mammuthus:

I would have to go with the "collective cloaca". CNN is a fountain of misinformation (or at least poor presentation) and their science reporting is horrid. I did see the article and have to assume that it is the same Japanese group that has made this claim in the past. Susumu Goto was a fertility specialist in the dairy industry in Japan as I recall and his claim is that since he under controlled lab conditions could freeze bull sperm and later use it to successfully fertilize cow eggs in vitro, that mammoths could be cloned. This ignores several relevant facts. First, the cow experiments were done under highly controlled lab conditions designed to prevent the sperm from degrading during freezing and thawing. Second, the tissues from which the sperm derived had not rotted. Third, the freezing temperature was stable.
Mammoth samples were not frozen under controlled conditions. An animal as large as a mammoth when it dies will take a very long time to freeze allowing for necrophilic bacteria and fungi to consume large parts of the animal (including DNA). DNA in post mortem tissues is subject to hydrolysis and oxidative damage that DNA repair mechanisms no longer fix for obvious reasons. Also, permafrost is not like a freezer. The temperature can vary and large portions can freeze and thaw repeatedly...let's see them clone a cow from a 10 year old piece of freezer burned steak much less a 50,000 year old freezer burned mammoth meat!

My own experience with mammoth material, including very well perserved samples with flesh attached to the bones demonstrates that only fragments as long as about 200 bp can be retrieved for nuclear DNA...about double this for mitochondrial DNA but you won't clone anything with mtDNA. The proteins are also in horrible shape with tremendous amounts of cross linking and degredation down to single amino acids for the most part. A study from the 80's also showed that many essential elements were at concentrations much lower than normal for living tissues most importantly phosphorous was at about 0.1%. This sucks for large scale DNA retrieval.

However, the concept of cloning mammoths really grabs peoples attention so this exact same type of article pops up at least once every year and has done so since Dolly was cloned. I loved in that article how they mentioned the park in Siberia where musk ox have been transferred as if this is a testament to cloning success! Musk ox are not extinct! They flew the darn things in from Alaska...unless cloning is being defined as flying heavy mammals in FedEx planes by the media, this hardly justifies opening a Pleistocene Park.

There is another extinct animal cloning project in Australia where they say they will clone the Tasmanian wolf. The CNN report announced as a major breakthrough that they had obtained DNA strands (believe mtDNA) and that this was the beginning they needed. Well, in about 1992 Alan Cooper published DNA sequences from this species so it is not such a novelty. In addition, when has anything ever been cloned from a simple fragment of DNA?

Personally I wish they (they being CNN and several of the other news outlets) would refrain from doing the yearly extinct animal cloning story since it makes any serious research on the subject look really flaky. If they actually do nuclear transfer and get cell division then that would warrant a story. But otherwise they might as well talk about cloning Elvis from a potato.

There is a book called Mammoth: The resurrection of an Ice Age giant by Richard Stone that came out last year that does a very thorough job discussing this very issue with a more heavy focus on why mammoth went extinct in the first place.

Sorry for such a long (mammoth) post

From <a href="http://www.evcforum.net/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000075.html#2" target="_blank">here</a>. Sounds like the science isn't quite there, yet. In spite of this Japanese guy's contention.

08-21-2002, 03:46 AM	#1
bluefugue Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Los Angeles Posts: 1,427	Mammoth cloning update <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/08/21/clone.mammoth/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/08/21/clone.mammoth/index.html</a> This would be so cool, if they could actually pull it off... edited to add: I suppose this should be in S&S, but it has a vaguely evolutionary ring to it... [ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: IesusDomini ]</p>

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08-21-2002, 04:30 AM	#2
Quetzal Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Ecuador Posts: 738	That's odd. There's an "evilutionist" on another board who works with mammoth DNA. He has said they are WAAAAY far away from cloning one since the only thing they've been able to recover are bits and pieces - not enough for anything remotely resembling a complete sequence.

08-21-2002, 04:49 AM	#3
Blinn Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Ohio, USA Posts: 1,162	Here's the original article from the Times: <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-3-387635,00.html" target="_blank">web page</a> Seems like there are a lot of "ifs." And I have a little bit of familiarity with sperm cryopreservation. It's not as simple as just freezing and thawing - at least with the taxa I'm familiar with.

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