From Mammoth Blood to Living Mammoth Clone, Step By Step

Can a mammoth with blood flowing from its 10,000 year old carcass be the secret to cloning the extinct species that was wiped out, possibly by human Ice Age hunters, around 4,000 years ago?

As I previously reported, this week Siberian researchers headed up by Semyon Grigoriev, head of the Museum of Mammoths, claimed that they’d recently discovered a well-preserved female Siberian woolly mammoth. They supplied photographs to The Siberian Times, and there’s really no reason to doubt that they did find a mammoth.

Many well-preserved mammoths have been discovered in the frozen wastes of Siberian before, including at least one specimen with meat fresh enough that people ate it. Well, they tasted it anyway. And maybe it wasn’t that fresh, since Russian zoologist Alexei Tikhonov has been quoted as saying that it tasted like it had freezer burn.

However, Russian scientists don’t always enjoy a great reputation for veracity. In a 2012 scandal, a Russian team claimed that they’d drilled into a frozen Antarctic lake. They even presented Russian premier Vladimir Putin with water from the drilling effort — almost a year before they actually reached Lake Vostok in January 2013.

Earlier this year, Russians also claimed to have a discovered a new bacteria unrelated to almost all Earth bacteria in Antarctica — again, a “discovery” that was either a publicity stunt, an exaggeration, or an out-and-out hoax.

So the first hurdle we have to pass before we get DNA from the new mammoth find is to learn whether or not the blood really exists. It was supposedly flowing at 10 degrees below Celcius, well below freezing. Grigoriev waved that off by saying that the mammoth blood “had some cryo-protective properties.”

Assuming the blood is the real deal, the next step is to determine if it actually contains intact cells. A University of California, Santa Cruz ancient DNA expert, Beth Shapiro, told National Geographic that, “Without an intact, functional cell — one that can be de-differentiated into a stem cell in a petri dish — one cannot clone this animal.”

And Dr. Shapiro is skeptical that any intact cells could be found in a specimen, however well frozen, that’s 10,000 years old.

But say the South Korean specialists who are working on the project do get intact cells. What then?

Actually, from there, the project may then suddenly get really workable. If we knew more about the mammoth’s DNA, scientists might be able to piece together a genetic profile and then a living baby with the help of sex cells from Asian elephants, the Siberian woolly mammoth’s closest living relatives.

A recent success in recreating the complete genome of Neanderthal humans suggested that this step might be difficult but far from impossible.

An Asian elephant female would likely be used as the surrogate mother to any baby mammoth produced by cloning.

National Geographic pointed out that a recent attempt to clone the Pyrenean Ibex, which went extinct in 2000, failed when the baby died only minutes after birth. To me, that would suggest that it’s only a matter of better technical techniques before that cloning project will succeed.

Whether or not the recent find is exactly as described, the cloning effort will go forward with whatever material the Russians supply to their South Korean partners, Sooam Biotech Research Foundation.

And other teams may be hunting the mammoths too, although not with such lofty goals. As the glaciers retreat in the face of global warming, other mammoth hunters are seeking the woolly mammoth tusks as a form of legal ivory that they can sell for $400 a pound.

Wildly popular living animals can be even more profitable. China leases each pair of pandas that it sends around to the world’s zoos for almost one million dollars a year.

What would you pay to see a living Siberian woolly mammoth? That blood, if it really exists, is worth more than gold.

[Woolly mammoths in Europe as they might have looked in life painting by Mauricio Antón and the 2008 Public Library of Science via Creative Commons]

[woolly mammoth reconstruction photo by Flying Puffin via Wikimedia Commons]