this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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There's no reason it couldn't work with any animal.
Ethical research guidelines bar any attempts to culture human embryos beyond 14 days of gestation, so as usual it’s clickbait and not something that will be explored anytime soon.
All it takes is one eccentric billionaire that wants to clone themself.
Any animal we have DNA for, I assume.
Do we have any dino DNA? Cave bear? Mammoth?
We have mammoth DNA and scientists have been working to restore them for at least a couple of decades now. Every few years you'll see an article about how it's just around the corner to clone one.
Lol, it’s click-bait garbage.
Sure, we’ve sequenced the genome, but they’ve tried somatic cell nuclear transfer only to find out that the cell dies with the mammoth nucleus. Unless it was stored in cryogenic storage beneath lead shielding to protect from ionizing background radiation it’ll never work.
The only hope they have is cloning huge sections of the mammoth genome into the elephant genome, which is a project the size and scale of which will never be performed if we can’t even be fucked to properly care for their only surviving relative the elephants (or even care enough to do anything about global warming for that matter).
It being clickbait garbage was partly my point when I mentioned that there's an article every few years saying how it's just around the corner.
You know, I can't rule out billions of dollars being poured into resurrecting a species with nowhere to go. The human capacity for BS is truly enormous.
Getting a live mammoth, assuming we'd manage it would just get one sad and lonely animal which would be isolated from any other member of its species. For creatures that most likely had social structures as strong and important as those of elephants, it seems like you'd get a neurotic animal. It's not at all a given that it could integrate in an elephant group.
It kinda need stem cell for it to work.
Research in the last 5ish years has shown that "any" cell can be induced to change into a stem cell by changing its environment and adding specific growth factors.
Edit: I spent an hour looking for the research I was referring to. I found the papers and dissertation of the author who's talk I went to where the topic was discussed. Unfortunately, with a quick read I didn't find where the author talked about it, leading me to believe it was a discussion had at the end of their defense.
Although I couldn't find the research, [email protected] found what I was talking about (induced pluripotent stem cells)
Edit 2: As [email protected] points out the techniques are not currently at the level where induced stem cells can replace native stem cells.
I assure you that if the article you read was true, it’s a very niche case and not true in most contexts.
https://www.sciencealert.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-wipe-a-cells-memory-before-turning-it-into-a-stem-cell
This link is a relatively new development, but induced pluripotent stem cells have been in use since around 2006 for research purposes. They can be made from a variety of cell types.
There's so many "buts" attached to that it's not even funny. They don't work as well as an actual stem cell, for one thing. That's why there's still plenty of demand for the embryonic kind.
Person I replied to said it was niche creation case, I was simply showing that’s not the case. Nothing else.
The article I linked to does mention those things though. That’s part of why the advance is important.
It's a thing, but there's lots of catches with the technique. That's why stem cells are still in the laboratory.
Certainly. The research is still ongoing but shows promise and is making progress toward being a viable replacement.
I'll edit my original comment to clarify that point.
No, a critter is more than just DNA. And most genome sequences aren't complete, and DNA is currently slow to print artificially, and the OG samples from anything dead in ambient conditions for more than days are badly degraded.
If we have DNA we could maybe do it one day, in principle. Especially for critters like mammoths with living relatives. This particular tech from the story isn't highly related, though.
As a general concept, sure. Actually making it happen in a petri dish can be detail-intensive and unreliable, which is why we haven't been doing it routinely for decades.