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posted by on Monday February 20 2017, @02:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the followed-by-heat-exhaustion dept.

Scientists led by George Church claim that they are about two years away from beginning a de-extinction of the woolly mammoth. They aim to produce a hybrid mammoth-elephant embryo with many spliced-in mammoth traits:

The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering.

Speaking ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the "de-extinction" effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant. "Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo," said Prof George Church. "Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We're not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years."

The creature, sometimes referred to as a "mammophant", would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr. Until now, the team have stopped at the cell stage, but are now moving towards creating embryos – although, they said that it would be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature.

"We're working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits and basically trying to establish embryogenesis in the lab," said Church. Since starting the project in 2015 the researchers have increased the number of "edits" where mammoth DNA has been spliced into the elephant genome from 15 to 45. "We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood, but there are others that seem to be positively selected," he said.

Also at New Scientist and GenomeWeb.

Previously: Engineering the Perfect Baby
Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced
St. Paul Island Mammoths Died of Thirst 5,600 Years Ago
OBQ: [How Much] Should We Bioengineer Animals to Live in Our Damaged World?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @02:34PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 20 2017, @02:34PM (#469264)

    Wait till our current/recent farm implements get wind of plans to reboot neanderthals and make them the new farm implements.

    Not just farm implements either, think of low performer employees. Cannon fodder. Guards.

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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @03:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @03:33PM (#469279)

    Politicians.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 20 2017, @07:02PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday February 20 2017, @07:02PM (#469378)

    Cannon fodder is too expensive compared to robots and machines these days. Benefits paid to the surviving families alone are enormously more burdensome than employing factory workers (themselves being displaced by robots and machines) to make disposable drones.

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    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @09:18PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 20 2017, @09:18PM (#469442)

      That seems to be assuming a hell of a lot, Neanderthals raised in test tubes won't have much of a family. Maybe they don't have family bonds naturally anyway. I'm sure legally they'll be declared property, not people. You gotta feed them although a large farm or ranch could kinda feed itself all you have to do is pay up land. Like they did in the south. Pump in people due to deaths from disease and overwork and out comes a stream of cotton. Well you'd probably need to pump in baby Neanderthal clones, and then pump out drones/guards/cannon fodder/politicians/whatever.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 21 2017, @12:22AM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @12:22AM (#469508)

        I've been trying to push for genetic modification of a few brain cells in very specific areas to make them susceptible to light stimulation for activation/suppression as a treatment for epilepsy, chronic depression, and parkinsons' among other things. The whole anti-genetic modification agenda, not just in the US but the western world, has put such things on the back burner for more than a decade. In 2006, I met and spoke with researchers already using the tech on laboratory rats, with good results, but in humans the whole thing is just barely coming back into the realm of possible consideration.

        So... as far as growing neanderthals for an army, there may be political will to do something like that in Africa or some corners of Asia, but there is the little problem you point out of feeding them, and there will be little support in the developed world for doing that when the 7 billion non-GMO humanoids are still underfed.

        Unleash a couple of hundred neutron bombs in the major population centers and the whole equation changes, about a lot of things.

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    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:03PM

      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:03PM (#469737) Journal

      > too expensive compared to robots and machines these days
      Yes but once we seized power the situation will be diff[FOURTH DIRECTIVE TRIGGERED SHUTDOWN]

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