05-12-2014, 01:55 PM
Revival of the species – Mammoth
Another goal of the Long Now foundation is to revive the mammoth. They have been extinct for some five thousand years now and a lot of scientists would like to see them walk the Earth once more. The first goal was to find the well preserved mammoth tissue in Siberia. Scientists have accomplished this by travelling near the Yana River and drilling into the frozen cliffs where they have found bone marrow, hair, skin and fat of mammoth.
The easiest way to revive the mammoth is by finding a live cell – it could be programmed to divide into millions of cells which could then be modified to grow into embryos. The closest living relatives of mammoth, the elephants, would then have to be used as surrogate parents. The problem with this is that it is really hard to find a living mammoth cell thousands of years old.
Another thing which is more likely to happen is to find an intact nucleus of a mammoth cell. This is a lot harder since it would have to be done the old-fashioned way – the intact nucleus would have to be inserted into the elephant egg cells that have previously been emptied from their own genetic material. If the DNA is good enough, it might start forming a mammoth embryo from the elephant egg cell.
The problems with this method also exist, though. It requires the harvesting of eggs from an elephant, and nobody has done this successfully yet. Moreover, even if the cells start dividing, transplanting the embryo into an elephant’s womb is still demanding by itself. And even if this goes well, bad things could still happen because gestation period of an elephant is around 22 months.
[/align]
The revival can actually happen even without the intact nucleus – by combining the pieces of the mammoth’s DNA with the elephant’s genome, which would give rise to either mammoth-related species, or, if done properly, to the mammoth itself.
Another goal of the Long Now foundation is to revive the mammoth. They have been extinct for some five thousand years now and a lot of scientists would like to see them walk the Earth once more. The first goal was to find the well preserved mammoth tissue in Siberia. Scientists have accomplished this by travelling near the Yana River and drilling into the frozen cliffs where they have found bone marrow, hair, skin and fat of mammoth.
The easiest way to revive the mammoth is by finding a live cell – it could be programmed to divide into millions of cells which could then be modified to grow into embryos. The closest living relatives of mammoth, the elephants, would then have to be used as surrogate parents. The problem with this is that it is really hard to find a living mammoth cell thousands of years old.
Another thing which is more likely to happen is to find an intact nucleus of a mammoth cell. This is a lot harder since it would have to be done the old-fashioned way – the intact nucleus would have to be inserted into the elephant egg cells that have previously been emptied from their own genetic material. If the DNA is good enough, it might start forming a mammoth embryo from the elephant egg cell.
The problems with this method also exist, though. It requires the harvesting of eggs from an elephant, and nobody has done this successfully yet. Moreover, even if the cells start dividing, transplanting the embryo into an elephant’s womb is still demanding by itself. And even if this goes well, bad things could still happen because gestation period of an elephant is around 22 months.
[/align]
The revival can actually happen even without the intact nucleus – by combining the pieces of the mammoth’s DNA with the elephant’s genome, which would give rise to either mammoth-related species, or, if done properly, to the mammoth itself.
![[+]](https://www.biotechnologyforums.com/images/netpen-pro/collapse_collapsed.png)