Resurrecting the Woolly

  The Woolly Mammoth is an animal often associated with the Ice Age. It is speculated to have diverged from its elephant like ancestors around 400,000 years ago. The last know mammoth is thought to have died 10,000 years ago. This was after the Ice Age. The Ice Age dropped the population of woolly mammoths down to around 1,000 and this population was specifically found of Wrangel Island, an island found in the East Siberian Sea situated between Russia and Alaska. Scientists still dispute the question of what brought the mammoth to extinction. Originally researchers thought that inbreeding was the culprit of extinction due to the small gene pool. However according to this BBC interview with Scientist Love Dalen he states, “they only seem to have lost 30% of their genetic differences which is probably not enough to wipe them out.” Other scientists speculate that the warming climate or that human hunting did them in. Although bones of both humans and mammoths were found on the island around the same period there are no signs of hunting. This leads most people to believe that the climate played the biggest role in the mammoths’ demise.    

Mammoth DNA is found more and more recently because the rise in temperature. To bring back the mammoth there are two different camps of thought. The first camp of thought is to find enough mammoth DNA that is in tact to piece together the entire genome of the mammoth or to find a pure intact nucleus that contains an entire genome. The benefit to this method is that it would make a pure genetically identical clone of the mammoth. The problem is to find enough DNA that is not already broken down. According to this article by live science the half-life of DNA is 521 years, meaning half of the bonds in the entire genome will be broken within 521 years. This is caused a big part by UV light destruction. The renowned biotech cloning company SOOAM in South Korea is using this approach. They had recovered a mammoth that was in a good condition as to provide them with liquid blood. This mammoth did not provide them a full genome and they are thus trying to piece it all together. The second approach to resurrecting the mammoth is to alter the genome of its closest living relative the Asian Elephant and insert the traits of the woolly mammoths most distinct features. The strengths of this approach are that there is more DNA available from the Asian Elephant that there is on the mammoth. The risks of this approach is that they must obtain stem cells of the Asian Elephant in order to introduce your modified genome into it and on top of that they must find a willing surrogate to carry this mammoth to term. This is the method tried by a team at Harvard. They ran into the problem that they could not get stem cells from an Asian Elephant and they found it unethical to use one as a surrogate. According to the book Woolly (2017) by Ben Mezrich the team ended up inducing specialized cells back into nondifferentiated cells, and then they were creating an artificial womb to bring this mammoth to term.     

The need for a pack of woolly mammoths can be traced back to Pleistocene Park in Russia. There Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita Zimov have found some very convincing evidence that says if we can get animals to graze the land there just like they did in the Pleistocene Era, it can bring down the temperature of the artic and lower the effects of global warming. They do not at the moment have an animal as big as the woolly mammoth to emulate its niche in the park. Therefore if a genetically engineered woolly was brought back they could fill that rule. Also it would bring about a boost in tourism to Russia because who would not fly to Russia to see a woolly mammoth.    

With great need we also have to weigh in the cons of bringing back the woolly mammoth. One risk is genetic diversity. We would require a herd of mammoths if we would want them to be able to reproduce with out any inbreeding. The mammoths that are created must contain different alleles as well. On top of that, who would raise the mammoth and teach it it’s role in the ecosystem. Could humans control such a big animal that is used to roaming free? Last the cost of de-extinction is a unknown at this point but should be looked at as a weakness to this experiment.  

If you would like more resources on this material please check out:   Woolly by Ben Mezrick Or here is an article on the obstacles of the woolly mammoth De-extinction. https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/de-extinction-probably-isnt-worth-it  

Picture was found on History.com