posted by admin on May 23

Would You Spend $155,000 to keep your dog forever?

Well, news has it that an American couple did just that!  5 years ago, they decided that they loved on of their pets so much, that they were willing to pay to have it’s DNA cryogenically frozen so that when the technology had improved enough – that they could get their little bundle of joy to walk again!

And the technology was improved last year – and so now they have a little puppy which is exactly the same genetically as their first one!  It was the first single-birth commercially cloned puppy in the world.

But why stop there?

There are plans afoot to clone animals that have been dead for some time – and in the case of the woolly mammoth – 40,000 years of it!

Cases in Japan recently have allowed scientists to clone mice that have been ‘dead for 16 years’ – so why not other extinct animals?

San Diego zoo have been busy with cloning – but with live animals.  They are not just cloning something normal like a sheep from a sheep – a la Dolly from the UK, they are cloning an endangered animal and crossing the species barrier by allowing the eggs to develop inside a bog standard domestic cow!

They basically made it possible for 2 south-east Asian oxes (Banteng) to be born through a cow mum.  Therefore paving the way for an elephant to give birth to a baby mammoth!

The Mammoth Task:
In December 2008, 70% of the mammoth genome was published from frozen specimens which had ‘fallen out’ of the permafrost in remote parts of Russia.  Obviously there is still 30% missing – but expert say that this won’t take long to overcome.

Basically, experts are claiming that the cloning of a mammoth will happen – it is just a matter of when!  The technology exists to re-create long dead animals – someone just needs to foot the bill.

They have several ways to clone the mammoth (or Tasmanian Tiger, or Dodo, etc..) and all depend on the getting the frozen cells to replicate and grow inside another animals womb.

They don’t actually need any sperm or mammoth eggs to perform this cloning (although that is a viable option) as they can electrically or chemically stimulate any cell into dividing sexually – so one dead mammoth can offer them goodness knows how many attempts at this!  All they need is the DNA – and this is found in every (non-sexual) cell of every living animal.  It’s just not always 100% there in long dead ones!

And Then?
Obviously, they need an animal from a similar taxonomic group and of a similar size, but everything else is a bit of guess work!

They also have no real idea of what they will need to don once the animal is born – as they have no ‘real’ mammoth breast milk to use – in-fact no idea at all about what it should contain – other than basing it on it’s only realistically useful relative – the elephant.

Another potential ethical issue at this point would be that there is only one – or a very small group, and possibly they are all the exact same animal genetically.  Needless to say, this won’t create a viable ‘herd’ or ‘flock’ of clones.  They would be just ‘something to look at’.

We are also going to be bringing them back into a world that they no longer live in!  Yes, it is possible that humans were the main reason for their decline and extinction in the first place – but how do we know that they will survive in a new and changing world when we get them back?

Some people don’t even want beavers to be re-introduced into their neighbourhoods – so who is going to want a few giant hairy elephants roaming about their woods?

And are we not in a recession, with environmental issues all around us and medicine in desperate needs of funds?  Children starving, wildlife made extinct and forests being destroyed?

Would spending a fortune on raising the mammoth be a wise choice right now?