Woolly Mammoths For Sale

I don't know. Well, I just have this menagerae of animals in my backyard and that would be great to add the wooly mammoth too, Oh yes, yeah, with the Dodo bird two would be pretty great too, yeah. Or the Neandertal, our old friend, Oh yeah, Neider Tall of the awesome Roman around. Yeah. It seems like if you, if you pay any attention to the science news, there are all these stories coming down the pike pretty regularly, and it's always, let's bring We're bringing back the Neandertal.

Wooly mammoth's coming. We're going to clone them, clone them up, fill our backyards with them, put them on display, study of them, and everyone gets really excited about it because it is a fantastic idea. Here's this extinct creature that we all grew up looking at in picture books and uh and suddenly it might actually be around us very own Jurassic Park, so to speak, exactly the Jurassic Park factor without the dinosaurs. Yeah, and people get pretty up

in arms about it. Actually, Yes, so we're gonna talk about that today. Um, but also talking about like maybe how they shouldn't get so up in arms, but that there is a possibility that the wooly mammoth could be coming to a backyard near you pretty soon. Yes, yeah, um, and we have the Genome Project to thank for that. Yeah.

And this is all about just just just meticulously mapping, um, the genomic structure behind basically the recipe for the mammoth in the same way that we've we've taken the human genome and and looked at that, in the same that we the way that we event analyze the Neanderthal genome and uh and in various either there's like the canine Genome project, there's a uh, there's also the that the

one related to two chimps. I mean that it's all about taking these species and just understanding them at very small levels and very detailed levels, right, and just to get you know, a little bit more specific about it, where he has a handle on the Human Genome Project, which really helped to drive a lot of what astrobiology

is doing these days. So the Genome Project, what it meant to do is to basically take the complete string of nucleotide letters that make up the DNA sequence in ourselves, um, which is referred to as the genome. And this DNA sequence contained in a genome contains the complete code that determines which genes and proteins will be present in human cells. Basically what sort of attributes we have that are going

to turn on and off, right. Um. So that project started in the nineties and it ended about two thousand and one. And so you do see this field of astrobiology really benefiting from this, and paleontologists in particular really saying okay, now now we can take all these different cells that we have, you know, we've thought this trilobyte sample, and we can try to map this on other organisms, you know, just from really simple life forms to like you said that the humans, um, the human humans and

the inner tools um. So it's brought us to this present point where we have this Jurassic Park like possibility looming ahead of us. Yeah, the Jurassic Park factor is pretty big here. Um. And on one hand, I do have to point out Jurassic Park, the movie, the book, both of those. The big draw there was was the fact that people were going through this park and seeing these animals. Then the chaos happens by necessity, since it's you know, it's a fiction, it's a novel, it's a thriller.

But with both of them, like when I watched them and read them as a as a kid, I didn't want anything bad to go wrong. I was like, let's let's just continue this ride. This sounds like a great place, right. Uh. And they they've introduced a number of of scientific ideas, So I mean, this was not Carnossaur. This was Jurassic Park. This was you know, Michael Crichton, So there was there. He put a great deal of scientific thought into this.

One was looking at actual actual research. But still it paints a very optimistic picture of what bringing back an extinct animal would be like. Um. Like, basically, as I recall, they uh, they weren't able to they were able to extract DNA from blood in a mosquito that is preserved in amber. Now, of course DNA degrades over time, so you would have to fill in the blanks. And this is a sixty five year old, million million old sample that we're talking ancient, ancient, and so it's pretty incomplete

in terms of having a good specimen to work with. Yeah, it's like having like, imagine the most waterlogged, raggedy um copy of The Great Gatsby. Imaginable, it's been in your grandparents basement and a waterlog Great, you get it out and you go to read it. Most of the words, most of the letters are just completely illegible. Whole chapters are missing. So you fill in the gaps, right, you

think the characters Daisy fuentas. Yeah, and you you might look at to look to more recent books and say, well, here's a book that was you know, obviously this is influenced by the Great Gatsby. Let me just fill in the blanks with that, and uh in doing in doing that with within this book. Example, Sure, you could you could put together a book, uh and that you could probably read. It would probably makes sense, but it wouldn't really be the Great Gatsby. So that's what the whole

Jurrassic Park thing was. Well, let's go to amphiby ends. We're gonna fill in the blanks. We're gonna somehow get this a genetic material into an egg. I don't remember the detail on how they got the eggs, because, as we'll discuss, that's a big thing once you know, how are you where are you going to grow this? Um? And uh And then they were, you know, they were hatching these things dinosaurs everywhere, et cetera. Yeah. Well, and in the case of the mammoth creation project, which sort

of takes off that same idea. Um, you know, of course we've got the mammoth which have been extinct for ten years, but we do have frozen mammoths. We have exactly from the Russian permafrost. So these are well preserved, far far better preserved preserved than you'll find any kind of dinosaur remains. Um, you know, much more recent, much much better material to work with, which gives us that promise.

Right and Professor Akira Irtani in Japan has been working on bringing back the Wooly for about thirteen years, and once Wooly Mammoth's yesterday Yeah, he does. He does, and he's uh, I don't really know what his exact intentions are, it's hard to say, but he does have a sort of line of logic and saying, well, you know, humans might have been responsible for um, for them going extinct, so we have to pay them back by resurrecting them, which sounds just like really like a bad version of

pet cemetery to me. Yeah, indeed, I had to look up pet cemetery again when we were talking about it, just to mind every been Stephen King novel Pets Die see Barium in the Indian burial ground news a wind to go or something, and they come back to life and they're they're not right, and they're potentially evil. And this is where we have the quote sometimes dead is better and another great quote that I got off good Reads.

What's been tried once has been tried once before and before and before, so I need to read it again. It was really disturbing book. Yeah, and it also flies in the face of like Stephen Jay gold Gold, Who's who's saying, like, you know what, all all of what is happening in the genes and an evolution is by chance essentially um not necessarily by chance, but survival of the fattest um and all these different conditions. You can't recreate this. So it's definitely flying in the face of

what we've thought about what evolution is. Yeah, and it's all I mean, I don't know how much we want to get into it at this point, but just the idea of of bringing back wooly mammoth's in an age where we don't really have room for elephants anymore. You know. It's like the the elephants of their territory greatly reduce their animals that basically need like a large portion of a continent to roam around on, and they're even in

the best of situations, they're they're greatly confined. Their numbers are often really endangered. Yeah, I mean we've seen examples of like marauding gangs of them invading villages and it's a territorial thing. They're not looking for beer as as we might have previously thought. Yeah, and so suddenly we're like, oh, let's bring some moy mamoths back to It's kind of like you if you encounter like that family member who who has like a perfectly good car that is that

needs some attention. And then then suddenly they were like, I'm going to restore this, uh, you know, nineteen fifties. What have you like pay attention to that? You don't. You can't even take care of this car. Why what are you gonna get this one for? You're not even taking good care of the elephants we have, right, so

why are you bothering with the mammoth? Well, and this is the problem, right because professor a cure Tommy, he is, he's doing this, right, he's his His idea is to remove the nucleus from an egg cell of an elephant and replace it with DNA from a frozen wooly mammoth like you mentioned. Huh, and so this could theoretically create an embryo which would be implanted into an elephant uterus. Yeah.

This is another really key advantage of cloning the wooly mammot is that it has a very close relative still alive and driving today, despite our best efforts to make an extend. Actually they're divergent species, right, yeah, yeah, so

much closer relative. Whereas a dinosaur. You know, good luck, you know, getting a chicken to lay a dinosaur egg, and you know it's there's just a lot a lot more distance there between the the thing we're trying to clone in the more recent model, right, And so I mean a cur aritany is really he's making steps towards us, and he feels like he'll be able to do this in the next five years. And many people in the science community and helieve well, no, they believe that it

can happen. And sort of people are on the on different sides of the front. Some sometimes justs are like, Yeah, that's great, that's awesome, we should do that. We should we can study this like we've got the closest living relative living right now, and if we resurrect this ancient creature, then we can study them side by side and learn maybe a little bit more about life, you know, back in the day um, and other people are saying, well,

that's not really necessary. Um. But in the meantime, there's something called Pisascene Park and there's a man named Sergey Zimov who's a conservationist who runs the park, and he's actually trying to recreate the natural habitat that existed in the area ten thousand years ago by reintroducing animals that were indigenous to that area, including reindeer, wild horses, and bison. And he says, my responsibility is to prepare the mammoth

ecosystem a landscape typical for the mammoth. Therefore, if some crazy people have found enough money and they revived the mammoth, we will be ready. You know. He has he has a letter room to throw crazy does what I thought too. I was like, oh, yeah, they're they're the crazy people.

And and again it comes down to like, let's why why maybe he should help focus our energy and preserving existing environments that are vanishing and disappearing rather than ones that are long gone right, right, And actually there's a man named Adrian Lister. He's a paleontologist and in London, I believe, and he says that it's natural habitat of

the mammoth has more or less disappeared. That's probably why it went extinct extinct in the first place, many thousands of years ago, because the kind of grassland habitat of the far North that it formerly lived in doesn't exist anymore, so you would have to keep it in captivity. Yeah. It's kind of like if someone was like, we're going to bring Ragtime back, and you'd be like, well, good luck finding a market for that. That's why it's not

around anymore, because nobody wants it. Oh no, I'd listened to some ragtime. A few people will listen to some ragtime, but I don't see it. You know, shot popping up on the top four you like me? Some tinny piano ever went in a while. This presentation is brought to you by Intel, sponsors of tomorrow. But again, you know, the only mammoth has huge potential here in scientists in two thousand and eight have already sequenced the wooly mammoth

genome so um. What was cool about that part of it is that they were able to find out more about the wooly mammoth's um with their environment might have been like, and why they went extinct. So here's here's the other side of the fence where people are saying, yes, let's pursue this path, not necessarily resurrect them, but let's, you know, map the genome and let's find out more

about the circumstances. Because ultimately, astrobiologists want to get to the down to the brass tacks here of life as it originated, as it survived, as it when extinct in how that implicates our universe, not just our Earth. Are there space mammoths maybe there could be, could be? Yeah,

they're out fair right now, little helmets on. Well, the other thing that I like about like speaking of it in terms of not necessarily putting putting the genetic material into the living packet arm and having it to give birth to holy math. Because our cloning technology continues to advance, but it's not perfect yet. I mean, we're we're it

still has has very high percentage levels of failure. Um The embryos are often either not suitable from planning into the fetus or they die sometime during gestation or shortly after birth. So I like elephants, and you know, I'm not really crazy about the idea of let's let's impregnate this artificially impregnate this elephant with some offspring that is arguably doomed to die. You know, I have to say that when I worked at the zoo, or worked at a zoo, I should say, the zoo views you in

the world a zoo. I would have these nightmares every once while, and they always involved elephants, and it was like messages from the elephants saying like, you gotta get us out of here, or we're going to just run wild and uh, you know, run over all the monkeys and the small children. Um. But it was always like that. In fact, Steven Tyler once showed up in the dream riding the horse, like the horse excuse me, and there's odds, yeah,

riding the elephant out of the zoo. So yes, I mean I feel, you know, at least if I haven't thought about it consciously, subconsciously, it does seem like there's for me at least a problem with that scenario of resurrectoring the wooly mammoth because you hate just for our pleasure. No, no, I hear them. No, I like them. I like him. That's how I felt that I was sort of connecting

to them in that vel. So it's like, let's create this animal and then put in a zoo or a lab or some crazy dudes recreation of his reindeer infested recreation of prehistoric times. Yeah, I don't. I don't really know how that would go down. Is what I'm saying is is that these elephants were sending me messages when I worked at the zoo and telling me do not put Steven Tyler on my back, um, and do not

make my ancestor the wooly mammoth do the same. Yeah, well they traveling and the monkeys, though the monkeys probably had it coming. Yeah, a quick plug for an upcoming Discovery show and let's Discovery BBC product. But Human Planet about all these like amazing things that indigenous groups and tribes continued to perform in the world. One of them. Uh, one of the sequences shows this, uh, this tribesman who's like taking out he's a farmer, not a farmer, he's

a hurd herdsman. He's hurting these cows and he has to take him to this one watering hole otherwise they're all going to die. And he gets there and the elephants have already claimed it and he has to drive the elephants away with like a stick. And there's a huge chance he's gonna get trampled. It's it's it's great, you should all right the promise of trampling. Yell. But

back to back to cloning. Another interesting thing about our our buddy Akira here is that is that in Japan, human cloning is currently severely frowned on illegally even punishable by ten years in prison. Uh so he's just kind of working this out of his system with Wooly Mammo. Maybe the hand of humans maybe, Yeah, that's a whole

ethical quagmire in and of itself. But but but even that, like human cloning, you can you can get more into the the the idea that this is something that can that can benefit humanity, that we can learn a lot about about our ourselves, of our bodies and the treatment of diseases. But that's completely off the table. So let's clone Willie mammoths. Where it seems like the area of of really beneficial scientific achievement is um it's maybe a

little slimmer, Yeah, definitely. In fact, there's a woman name by the name of Patul kiss Arslan and she's a postdoctoral fellow UM with NASA Astrobiology Institute Center for Reallybisomal Origins and Evolution. And she actually gave a talk at the Atlanta Science tavern Um a couple of days ago. It was really interesting, And she works with ancient genes and ancient genes as you know, exactly a super very holy um that ancient geans, as you know, are are in all of us, right in all life forms. Um,

there's the whole thing. Like like, the most relatable example is why like a fetus early early in its development looks the same and numerous species exactly why it might have a tail, right or actually it does have a tail. So if you see that in mammals right, Um, it could end up being a fish or it could end up being a human. So there's this the ancient genes that are either going to um turn off or turn

on depending on what the species is. It could grow up to be Richard Harris, it could grow up to be a killer whale. You never know. Film reference. But but Arslin, she was actually saying that they're basically using these ancient genes as a genetic alphabet. It's it's a

common language for them to decode with. And so they're taking ancient genes and they're taking something like a modern day equal I, right, and they're putting those ancient genes in with that, and they're looking to see what it does, how it evolves, how how does it react to its environment, and so, like you said, on a smaller scale or like a less pacadermal um there they want to find out with these ancient genes how they're going to react because they feel like this can tell us something about

ourselves here on Earth, but also again out in the universe. You know, if the primal life forms, UM, they're basically

evolving before our eyes. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's it comes down to the whole principle of an understanding life and contemplating life out of the world's the only model of life that we have is the one we have here, So we need to really understand that model and all that it entails, UM and understand all the details, many of the details as we can possibly uncover regarding its genesis and it's uh in its development over time, and

then we can apply the same standards to contemplating what may or may not be forming elsewhere in the universe. Yeah, and Arsenin was actually um, she had a lot of questions from the audience about the ethics of this because and she basically said, look, I'm not doing the willing mammoth here. What we're doing is we're just really trying to find out where life came from, how did it emerge. Picturing them is like sort of drunken accusations of like, hey,

where you get off cloning the mammoth man. No, it was much more like, can you explain the rabbisome will reaction and the extremphile environment so on and so forth and how it um? But no, there was there was no no drunkard heckling or anything like that. Um. Yeah, no, it was all very civil. But there was beer and that was nice. Um basically, I mean she didn't field a lot of those questions. And what she said is, look,

scientists are pretty much self regulating. And when I when I heard her say that, I thought, you know, that's a lot of what we're talking about right now, is um the same sort of topic that came up when cloning was first put on the table, right we were all scared that we were going to have versions of ourselves out there or you know, all sorts of tinkering that can go in. In fact, they are probably still

shoes surrounding that. But we have a better hold on it now and we can see that you know, as you said, like in Japan, it's against the law to clone humans. So the idea is that this technology is here, I's you used for exploration, but you know, when when everything settles down, most likely you won't be creating these Jurassic parks and you know, charging fifty dollars for admission. But the hope at least, well that's yeah, that's the hope.

I don't know. You can you can sort of nitpick, I guess, and make arguments about you know, various situations where some sort of scientific achievements sort of leap frog a little ahead of the common sense to keep it in check, you know, like like looking back to days when say cocaine was completely legal in the States, and like people were drinking it and their soda water and and buying it, you know before they go out and

work at the docks. And then eventually people are like, oh, maybe we should out love this or granted, these are very different issues, you know, very different social issues than than cloning, but but also like got when you look at at music on the internet, the pirrating of music and the whole argument that well, we just we let it get ahead and get ahead of ourselves and suddenly everybody sharing music and we didn't even think about putting the various rules in place and the various barriers in

place to to shape it the way we wanted to shape it. So the cart before the horse Yeah, but I I guess so far, I mean, with cloning, it seems like we've done a good job of staying staying ahead of the technology, uh and keeping it sort of closed in so it doesn't just go wild. Yeah, and so again that's the hope here. Yeah, but someone like myself doesn't have anyander tall or wily mammoth or dodo

bird in their backyard. Well, here's the thing too, about about neandertals and and dodo birds and the idea of bringing them back because we had a well, because we had a hand in their extinction, um, in which you can make a better case with things like dodos, which you can clearly say, yes, humans kill off the dodo Neander tolls is a little more complex issue, as we

discussed in our up plant in the Andertals podcast. But but then you have thinks like just today, at the day we recorded this, New York Times had an article of the Eastern cougar being officially declared extinct um. And then and then there are there are other more recent uh extinctions that can be laid at the feet of humans, such as the Asiatic cheetah and the Tasmanian tiger, and both of those, there are efforts in place to to collect the genetic information we would need and prepare to

clone them. And of course even if you could clone them, there they're huge obstacles to to bringing an extinct species back. I mean, they're huge obstacles to to bringing a near extinct species back. The genetic diversity will be shrunk down so much that you know, it's like, oh, well, now we have a million deer, but they're also in bred that it's just ridiculous. So but but I'm kind of rambling, but my point is the mammoth is slightly old news, so I can I can more easily get behind efforts

to bring back more recently extinct species. No, and that's a lot of people, actually, that's what they say when they were there were being critical of um bringing back the wooly mammoth. This are saying, why don't we just concentrate on what we have right now and try to preserve as much as possible, you know, our existing biodiversity.

So we'll let me I'm in the last person to accuse scientists of playing god, but I mean it is one of those things where it's like wooly mammoth extinct, not if I have anything to say about it, and then you know, push the button bring them back. It's kind of like, you know, just completely you know, sticking it to fate and sticking it to history saying yeah, I'm I'm human, I'm awesome, and I just brought back

a wooly mammoth. That's right. Yeah. Next thing, you know, Ted Turner has a has a line of steak restaurants. Open the big big statue of wooly mammoth out front. You're gonna each mammoth burger and guys are going crazy because it's the most masculine thing ever. And I actually saw this spoof online. I'm hoping it's a spoof, and it was like Ted Nugent is just giving like tenta and dollars to the research of bringing back the wooly mammoth so that he can hunt them. Hunt okay, yes,

hunt okay to hunt them? Yes. Yeah, sorry, I'm a little kneedsal, a little colder hunt. Well, I mean Ted's pretty wild dude, so so yes. But Ted Nugent is exactly the type of person I'm talking about. You can easily see him either hunting or a mammoth once it's been cloned, hunting or or indeed making beef turkey out of it and selling it online. Right, you know that's the dark side of this. I suppose, yes, the nugent factor,

but we need to start using the the nugent factor. Yeah, there's the Branson factor, which is like the more benign and the nugent factor not sup benign. All right, then there you go. Yeply mammoths, ancient jeans, and hey, I think we have some listener mail to wash all that down with. Let's check it out, all right, um, our listener j writes in, and Jay says, Jays from Arkansas. By the way, I just finished listening to your podcast

on doppelgangers, and I really enjoyed it. I have an additional phenomenon to mention that I believe falls into a into a category all its own when talking about doppelgangers. I have experienced this three different times that I can remember. In each time it happens, it really creeps me out. Here it goes. I will be walking through a public place such as a mall or grocery store, when I see something, when I see someone that I hadn't seen in a long time, An old friend, a former teacher,

a co worker, someone from my childhood, et cetera. However, when I get closer to them and prepare to greet them, I realized that it's not them at all. It's someone that looks very much like them. They're doppelganger, I suppose. So I turned and going about my business, shopping or whatever I'm there to do. But the really creepy twist is that before I leave this place, I run into the person that I thought I saw earlier, the real

person this time. Three times this has happened to me, and it's forced me to think, Okay, was it the real person the first time and I just thought it was someone else because it has has been a long time since I've seen them, Or was it really adoptel ganger that reminded me of an old friend? And then by chance, I ended up seeing the very person the same day in the very same place. Whatever it was, it really makes me wonder. It's sort of a surreal experience. Huh.

You know, I I've had I've had similar experiences, but it's not that I've run into the person that's but I was really thinking a lot about that person, and then all of a sudden, they turned up out of nowhere, and it's someone who hadn't been in my life for a long time. Yeah, well, that's just your mental powers of reality, right right, that's just the um visible strings pulling them towards me. Right. Well, now Jay doesn't mention

um and he just says he's from Arkansas. If Jay were perhaps from a small like a really small town in Arkansas, and I could see where one could potentially have one of these and mis identification syndromes going on, and and then we're actually run into the people that they're misseeing. I don't know, that's that's a very nonclinical look at the situation. It's a nice shot though. Yeah, but I would I would say it sounds like this is more just sort of a curiosity in Jay's life.

But but again I will stress that if you do have a situation where you really think you're encountering double gang ers are mysterious doubles, are weird twins that shouldn't exist, you should definitely go to a doctor about it because it's probably a probably some sort of mental disturbance, and it might be there are many of these that are easily treated too, So it's not necessarily like if I go to the doctor about this, my life is over

and I'm gonna be an institution. No, there there's a way out on Yeah, there's there's our treatments for these types of things. But hey, j thanks for sharing that

with us. We'd love to hear about about really cool, kind of weird experiences like this because the and you know when and and we've been completely non judgmental about these because because we've discussed in a number of these there are there are things that can go on in in in life, in in your in your head that are just that're gonna be a little weird and uh

and they're they're they're tied to natural phenomena. But but but they'll they'll really throw you for a yes, And I have to say, I'm probably the last person that can judge in this area, um as I've already talked about my own weird dreams and experiences. So yeah, there you go. Non judgment zones. So hey, if you have any coppelganger experiences in your life, if you have thoughts on bringing back wooly mammoths, um, if you would like to ride, hunt, or eat a wooly mammoth hunt. Then

let us know. You'll find us on Facebook and Twitter as blow the Mind, and you can always drop us a line at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.