This guy remembers seeing a mammoth somewhere...
Posted on 12/18/2005 9:21:33 PM PST by planetesimal
Scientists have pieced together part of the genetic recipe of the extinct woolly mammoth.
The 5,000 DNA letters spell out the genetic code of its mitochondria, the structures in the cell that generate energy.
The research, published in the online edition of Nature, gives an insight into the elephant family tree.
It shows that the mammoth was most closely related to the Asian rather than the African elephant.
The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.
"We have finally resolved the phylogeny of the mammoth which has been controversial for the last 10 years," lead author Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told the BBC News website.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
We have more people. Lots of them. Even useless people, like democRats and Moslems.
We don't have any mammoths. Yet.
Yeah - it's like all that money we waste on studying history. What's the point? It's already happened! We should spend it on shopping malls and nuclear fusion instead.
I wonder if they have any tissue samples from Siberia - or better yet - frozen ovaries.
I wonder if they have any tissue samples from Siberia - or better yet - frozen ovaries.
And mammoths have more in common with Ted Kennedy than they do with Asian elephants.
Just the mitochondrial DNA? Come on...crank out a new copy of the nuclear DNA. And then let's build us some mammoths! :-D
White elephants are useless gifts. This case would be a mammoth fraud.........
No, no. He only proposes that the scientists stop, think again and say, "Gee whiz. People are starving while we diddle with wooly mammoth mitochondria. Let's give it all to the starving poor, eh?"
Yes, people are starving in foreign nations, where the tyrants there pocket the foreign aid money meant for the starving people and destroy any non-state-run farms.
Unless you want to have the military invade those nations, which I am not completely against, there is nothing we can do for them with our money. So let's instead use our money to advance science and improve the quality of life for us.
That would be the coollest thing ever.
My point is the funds should be used for something contructive, not uniting some geek with his child hood dream of petting a furry elephant.
but imagine how many of them we could feed with a mammoth?
Are they particuraly edible? (Is this cost effective?) Wouldn't eating extinct meat violate animal protection laws?
You can harvest frozen ovaries from a frigid...oh never mind.
That'd be cool, but the damned thing would shed to much. It'd be fun to drop off at the groomer though.
i'd assume they'd be as edible as an elephant, cost effective? possibly, can you imagine how much some people would pay for the chance to hunt these? and animal protection laws? if they successfully cloned one or two of these, there wouldn't need to be any more animal protection laws. ever. if we wipe something out, we can always make more :)
If you wish to line the pockets of tyrants with money, do so with your money, and not with mine.
To bring that which is lost is not only contructive, but grand. It is important for two reasons.
One, it let’s scientists learn and create new techniques in genetic manipulation and engineering in mammals without getting into ethical issues because it is not experimentation humans, but animals instead.
The medical applications in such research is already bearing fruit in geneslicing to treat and cure some hereditary diseases and some types of cancers like leukemia.
Two, it will give a deathblow to the environmental movement because “extinction” will no longer mean permanently lost.
If you wish to line the pockets of tyrants with money, do so with your money, and not with mine.
To bring back that which is lost is not only contructive, but grand. It is important for two reasons.
One, it let’s scientists learn and create new techniques in genetic manipulation and engineering in mammals without getting into ethical issues because it is not experimentation humans, but animals instead.
The medical applications in such research is already bearing fruit in geneslicing to treat and cure some hereditary diseases and some types of cancers like leukemia.
Two, it will give a deathblow to the environmental movement because “extinction” will no longer mean permanently lost.
knowledge is a funny thing in that it has the ability to be a force multiplier.
Knowing about the similarities/differences in the genetic make-up of various critters gives a ton of insight as to how the Maker put all this together.
At some point we might prosper from this knowledge so that we might again throw a bunch of money down the hole called Mogadishu.
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