we can use genome editing technology to basically cut and paste our way to a mammoth from an asian elephant. this can be done in a dish, in a lab, growing on the surface, without involving asian elephants at all right now. just using the dna. just using the dna. which would then be injected into explain the process. after one edited the asian elephant genome so it contained fragments of mammoth dna, we have a cell growing in a dish in the lab that is mostly asian elephant but a bit mammoth. hopefully an important bit mammoth. you would have to take that cell and clone it, use somatic cell nuclear transfer, the process that brought us dolly the sheep in the mid 1990s. that would involve an asian elephant as a maternal host for an embryo that was developing that was mostly asian elephant but a little mammoth dna.
and more and more, then you take that creature and put in a little more mammoth? one could do it that way or you could simply change as much as you wanted to in that first step. it would require doing this more than once. elephants and mammoths, we assume, are highly social creatures. you wouldn t want to bring one back. you would have to bring back populations, families, lots of individuals who could pass on the knowledge that it is to be a mammoth. this really is where i have the most issues with this particular process. explain. you re fascinated by the science of it. you do think technically it s possible to do what you just described, but you don t think we should. for mammoths, i don t. the reason that i don t think it would be fair right now to bring mammoths back to life doesn t have to do with mammoths, but with em fants. elephants. we noel fants fare poorly in cap fifth, often fail to reproduce even with our help. if they do reproduce, they re often mean or even ki
island off the coast of siberia called wrangel island. scientists including our group, have been able to extract high quality dna from these preserved bones of things like mammoths and mastodons. so what can we do? so the technology to bring an extinct species back to life is very much in its infancy. what we can do now is extract dna from bones and piece together genome sequences. in the case of a mammoth we could compare that genome to the genome sequence of the closest living relative which is the asian elephant. they differ by only 1%. with an asian elephant we already have a 99% mammoth, just because evolution is so slow and the differences accumulate over a long period of time. by comparing these two genomes, we begin to make a list of those genes, where an asian elephant is different from a mammoth.
this summer s blockbuster hit jurassic world is the third highest grossing movie of all time. if the world learned anything at all from the jurassic movies, it should have been never try to bring back an extinct animal, right? my next guest wants to do just that, and not just one species. beth shapiro is professor of biology at uc santa cruz. she wants to recreate all manners of creatures, at least the traits of those creature s that have gone the way of the dodo starting with the prehistoric beast the mammoth. her new book is called how to clone a ma am mammoth, the science of de-extinction.