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AnonTechie writes:

Scientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late?

If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.

At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.

Article by Antonio Regalado, published in MIT Technology Review.

takyon writes:

An international team of scientists led by Dr. Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm has published [abstract] the complete genome sequences of two woolly mammoths. Their analysis found evidence of inbreeding among the final population of mammoths on Wrangel Island, as well as a genetic bottleneck around 300,000 years ago, before the arrival of modern humans in the region. Woolly mammoths went extinct around 4,000 years ago, and although Dr. Dalén's team is not attempting to revive the mammoth, they aren't dismissing the possibility:

Dr Love Dalén, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told BBC News that the first ever publication of the full DNA sequence of the mammoth could help those trying to bring the creature back to life.

"It would be a lot of fun (in principle) to see a living mammoth, to see how it behaves and how it moves," he said.
But he would rather his research was not used to this end.

"It seems to me that trying this out might lead to suffering for female elephants and that would not be ethically justifiable."

Dr Dalén and the international group of researchers he is collaborating with are not attempting to resurrect the mammoth. But the Long Now Foundation, an organisation based in San Francisco, claims that it is. Now, with the publication of the complete mammoth genome, it could be a step closer to achieving its aim. On its website, the foundation says its ultimate goal is "to produce new mammoths that are capable of repopulating the vast tracts of tundra and boreal forest in Eurasia and North America."

takyon writes:

Researchers have pinpointed the approximate date and cause of extinction of woolly mammoths on St. Paul Island, Alaska:

While the Minoan culture on Crete was just beginning, woolly mammoths were disappearing from St. Paul Island, Alaska, according to an international team of scientists who have dated this extinction to 5,600 years ago.

[...] In this study, three different spores from fungi that grow on large animal dung were extracted from lake cores and used to determine when the mammoths were no longer on the island. Proxies in sediments from cores from a lake near the cave were used to determine the time of the demise of the mammoth population. [...] Sediment DNA from the lake cores showed the presence of mammoth DNA until 5,650 years ago, plus or minus 80 years. After that time, there is no mammoth DNA and so no mammoths on the island. The youngest of the newly dated mammoth remains' dates fall within the mammoth DNA range and the fungal spore dates as well.

[...] The island, which formed between 14,700 and 13,500 years ago rapidly shrank until 9,000 years ago and continued slowly shrinking until 6,000 years ago and now is only 42 square miles in area. [...] The shrinking of the island concentrated the mammoths in a smaller area and diminished available water. Pollen from the lake cores indicate that the area around the lake was denuded of vegetation by the mammoths. Like elephants today, when the water became cloudy and turgid, the mammoths probably dug holes nearby to obtain cleaner water. Both of these things increased erosion in the area and helped fill in the lake, decreasing the available water even more. After the extinction of the mammoths, the cores show that erosion stopped and vegetation returned to the area. In essence, the mammoths contributed to their own demise. The researchers note that this research "highlights freshwater limitation as an overlooked extinction driver and underscores the vulnerability of small island populations to environmental change, even in the absence of human influence."

Timing and causes of mid-Holocene mammoth extinction on St. Paul Island, Alaska (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1604903113)

Related: Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In October, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released its biennial Living Planet Report, detailing the state of the planet and its implications for humans and wildlife. The report warned that two-thirds of global wildlife populations could be gone by 2020 if we don't change our environmentally damaging practices.

At the Singularity University New Zealand (SUNZ) Summit we met up with Dr Amy Fletcher, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Canterbury, who spoke on the topic of public policy and exponential technology at the Summit. As part of our regular "One Big Question [OBQ]" series we asked her whether we should consider bioengineering animals that could live in the world we're creating, rather than die in the one we're destroying?

That sort of relates to the whole de-extinction debate, and again, I would pay money to see a woolly mammoth. But I do take the point that the world of the woolly mammoth is gone, whether we like it or not, same with the moa – I mean this comes up a lot in criticisms of the bring back the moa project. You've got to have huge swathes of undeveloped space - maybe we still have that, but we don't have as much as we did in the 16th century.

I guess it comes back to not making the perfect the enemy of the good. Working in conservation, extinction issues like I do, I meet a lot of people who are deeply opposed, actively opposed, say to zoos. I think in an imperfect world, I'd rather have animals in a well run and ethical zoo than not have them at all. But I do have colleagues in the animal rights movement who say, if we don't value them enough to let them live in their natural environment, then we should pay the price of having them go. It's sort of that same thing, I mean, if the alternative to living in a world of simply humans, rats, cockroaches and pigeons is bioengineering animals, I would have to say, alright yeah, we're going to have to do that.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Following recent talk of resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a new analysis has poured cold water on the idea of de-extinction efforts, recommending that funding go to conservation efforts instead:

Ten days ago, science news media outlets around the world reported that a Harvard University–led team was on the verge of resurrecting the wooly mammoth. Although many articles oversold the findings, the concept of de-extinction—bringing extinct animals back to life through genetic engineering—is beginning to move from the realm of science fiction to reality. Now, a new analysis of the economics suggests that our limited conservation funding would be better spent elsewhere.

"The conversation thus far has been focused on whether or not we can do this. Now, we are progressing toward the: 'Holy crap, we can—so should we?' phase," says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. "It is like we've just about put the last stiches in [Frankenstein's monster], and there is this moment of pause as we consider whether it is actually a good idea to flip the switch and electrify the thing to life."

[...] the results also show that if instead of focusing the money on de-extinction, one allocated it into existing conservation programs for living species, we would see a much bigger increase in biodiversity—roughly two to eight times more species saved. In other words, the money would be better spent elsewhere to prevent existing species from going extinct in the first place [DOI: 10.1038/s41559-016-0053] [DX], the team reports today in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

[article abstract not yet available]

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

If you remember in 2017, it was predicted Resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth Could Begin in Two Years.

Well it's 2019, and now that it is two years later... and so they have, of course, accomplished nothing of the sort are working on it.

[...] researchers extracted cells from Yuka, a woolly mammoth mummy (Mammuthus primigenius) whose remains were discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2011. Then, the scientists recovered the least-damaged nuclei (structures that contain genetic material) from each cell and popped the nuclei into mouse eggs.

At first, this maneuver "activated" the mammoth chromosomes, as several biological reactions that occur before cell division actually happened within the mouse cell. But these reactions soon came to a crashing halt, probably, in part, because the mammoth DNA was severely damaged after spending 28,000 years buried in permafrost, the researchers said.

Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not part of the study, commented:

at first, the cellular machinery did try to fix damaged DNA within the chromosomes and piece together the broken bits [...] "But [the egg] can only do so much, [...] When the nuclei are badly damaged, then it's just not possible to reconstitute this to what you would need to do to actually bring it back to life."

According to Shapiro:

takyon and looorg write:

Firm raises $15m to bring back woolly mammoth from extinction

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra. The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.

The boost comes in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants. These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan – and the hurdles are far from trivial – the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

[...] The project is framed as an effort to help conserve Asian elephants by equipping them with traits that allow them to thrive in vast stretches of the Arctic known as the mammoth steppe. But the scientists also believe introducing herds of elephant-mammoth hybrids to the Arctic tundra may help restore the degraded habitat and combat some of the impacts of the climate crisis. For example, by knocking down trees, the beasts might help to restore the former Arctic grasslands.

Pleistocene Park.

Also at NYT and CNBC.

Previously: Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced
Resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth Could Begin in Two Years
Analysis Supports Conservation of Existing Species Rather Than De-Extinction of Mammoths
Mammoth DNA Activates Briefly in Mouse Eggs

Original Submission