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."
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Cloning wooly mammoths! Now that is cool.