The people who are getting good at genome tinkering are setting their sights high. Over thirteen feet high, to be precise, if they succeed in producing a woolly mammoth in the next six years. There are ethical and practical considerations to the venture, of course, but many in the field have reached the consensus that such an achievement would be “neat-o.” I agree. I’m all for it.
In order to achieve a mammoth, and get it paid for, though, they have to come up with a different rationale. The goal is to produce a “cold-resistant elephant,” some say, after having suggested and rejected the version with smooth, fine-pored skin, or the one with uncarvable tofu tusks. A cold-resistant elephant can be manufactured and sent off to Siberia, which is thought to be a more favorable fate for a mammoth than it is for a human dissident. In fact, the place they have in mind is already called Pleistocene Park, and nobody can imagine anything going wrong in a place with a name like that.
The ultimate rationale is that an introduced mammoth population might be just the thing to re-engineer the tundra ecosystem that has long since given way to moss and methane. The mammoths would break up the moss, knock down the trees, and reinvigorate the original grasslands using advanced stomping technology and mammoth poop. They’ve already jammed a bunch of bison into the Park for the same purpose but it is thought that mammoths—once spliced, created, implanted, and delivered in sufficient numbers—might do it more efficiently. Also, they’re neat-o.
They’ve got the genome pieces pretty well knocked together already from the long fur to the domed skull, and all that remains is to locate a suitable elephant surrogate mother, fend off the ethicists who object that the elephant is not capable of informed consent, and of course figure out how to do an in-vitro fertilization on a pachyderm, which requires sound ladder skills. But in order to be effective at reconfiguring the ecosystem they’re going to need a lot of mammoths, and that’s going to take a lot of surrogates. So they’re looking into other options.
What with one thing and a mother, it just seemed more practical to develop a prototype stand-alone ex-vivo artificial woolly mammoth uterus capable of nurturing a two-hundred-pound woolly baby for two years—a roomy womb indeed—using plastic and stem cells from uterine tissue, and then make a whole bunch more of them.
Modern elephants, it has been pointed out, have a very strong mother-baby bond, and it is not known what a motherless mammoth might be capable of. We have no idea if ancient mommoths used to hum You Are My Sunshine to their developing fetuses, and so we have no idea if an artificial uterus might engender a sociopathic mammoth—not a trait you want in a six-ton beast with a pointy face.
So there’s a lot to consider in this enterprise. Unlike the mammoth remains being mined for genetic information, the subject is not cut and dried. “You want to fertilize the tundra with poop,” groused one biologist unable to land a grant, “bring back the passenger pigeon.” Biologists everywhere nod in agreement for the cameras. But off the record, they’ll tell you ethicists are annoying. And mammoths are neat-o.
Y’know what would be even MORE neat-o? I’ve read that the chicken is the closest relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Maybe they could kind of retro-jigger the chicken DNA and bring HIM back! We don’t seem able to check our population growth our own selves; what we need is an awesome predator! Our only predator seems to be viruses, and scientists are always finding a way to disable them. It’s nice to know that scientists are FINALLY focusing on what is REALLY important, instead of trying to find cures for diseases. TOTALLY awesome ways to meet one’s doom!
They had to be toothy because they can’t cut their meat with their little arms.
And anyway, we’re pretty awesome predators of ourselves already.
I vote for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker instead. Hairy elephants are so cliche.
Do we have to pick just one?
They may be able to re-fertilize the tundra, but how much would they need to eat to be able to poop enough. Who is going to provide that amount of food per Mammoth? It’s a bit like us having Chinese pandas in our Adelaide Zoo. The cost of supplying them with Bamboo is enormous and they aren’t even fun to watch since all they do is sit around eating or lie around sleeping.
That’s why I’m not much fun to watch, also.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Maybe we should send the politicians to Siberia, if it’s poop we want there; everyone knows they’re full of shit.
It’s part of the job for sure, but…may I go all iconoclastic on your ass and say I like and appreciate many of them? And I can name them. The icon in question being the idea that politics is a worthless endeavor.
Mea culpa for painting them all with the same brush. I tend to focus on the negative end of the spectrum (*coughcough* trumpists…) but Volodymyr Zelensky gives me hope. Some. Just a smidge. Plus, as Bill Maher would call it, a “ladyboner.”
Cloning the mammoth involves collecting eggs from Asian elephants (an endangered species) and injecting small lengths of mammoth DNA at a time to step-wise create something like a mammoth. So many things wrong with that. No one has ever collected elephant oocytes, no one has ever produced an elephant embryo in vitro, no has ever attempted embryo transfer in elephants. The science is just not there. This is a dangerous stunt for publicity.