From the International Hearald Tribune, so this may also be in the New York Times.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/19/healthscience/mammoth.php">Coming to a zoo near you: Mammoths (Maybe)NEW YORK: For the first time, scientists are talking about resurrecting an extinct species as if this longtime staple of science fiction were a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.
The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one could obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years. Though the stuffed animals in natural history museums are not likely to burst into life again, these old collections are full of items that may contain ancient DNA that can be decoded by the new generation of DNA sequencing machines.
If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are now discussions of how to modify the DNA in an elephant's egg so that, generation by generation, it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes. The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly. Ethically, that would be more challenging.
A scientific team headed by Stephan Schuster and Webb Miller at Pennsylvania State University report in the Thursday issue of Nature that they have recovered a large fraction of the mammoth genome from clumps of mammoth hair. Mammoths were driven to extinction toward the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, after the first modern humans learned how to survive and hunt in the steppes of Siberia.
Schuster and Miller said there was no technical obstacle to decoding the full mammoth genome, which they believe could be achieved for a further $2 million. They have already been able to calculate that the mammoth's genome differs at around 400,000 sites from that of the African elephant.
There is no way at present to synthesize a genome-sized chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Schuster said a short-cut would be to modify the genome of an elephant's cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth's genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million.
Such a project would have been judged entirely impossible a few years ago, and is far from reality even now. Still, several technical barriers have fallen in surprising ways. One is that ancient DNA is always shredded into tiny pieces, seemingly impossible to analyze. But a new generation of DNA decoding machines uses tiny pieces as their starting point. Schuster's laboratory has two, known as 454 machines, each of which costs $500,000.
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Alternately, they could use some Washington area tissue samples. (And they could get Dino DNA, too!)
--p!
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