Full Frame: The Return of the Woolly Mammoth?

since the beginning of time man has searched the earth for evidence of its past while Jurassic Park was fantasy 20 years later in real life a Russian team uncovered a 39 thousand-year-old wooly mammoth in Siberia the Ice Age creature was neatly preserved in permafrost its DNA could lead to the rebirth of the massive elephant like animal that disappeared 10,000 years ago George church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School when you get into the freezing category there's a wishful thinking that someday you'll find a cell that's intact or a nucleus from a cell a little piece of the cell is intact but these specimens have been dead for so many years there's been no repair processes and they're constantly being bombarded by cosmic radiation and even if they were intact nucleated cells with DNA in them a DNA could still be but so damaged that it can't live so we don't depend on getting intact DNA or intact cells we just need enough information to read it into the computer and the computer puts it together and then you synthesize it all the breaks are are healed by the synthesis while the likelihood of finding an intact cell is low professor Church believes there are still ways to read the DNA map its genetic code and take the process one step further we may use cloning as part of the procedure cloning is simply the so you might engineer a cell that is not reproductive take the nucleus out of that cell and put it into an egg from say an African elephants that then will be implanted into a surrogate mother and that's very similar procedure we've used with pigs where we've done dozens of modifications to the pig genome in somatic cells take a nucleus out Lanford that then we can have living large numbers of living pigs that are from that procedure another possibility is using synthetic biology a cutting-edge science combining engineering with biology to create living organisms from chemical ingredients professor Rebecca Rogers studies the evolution of genome structure and new gene formation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the department of bioinformatics and genomics the other possibility is to use genetic modification things like CRISPR or other genetic tools to take an elephant genome I then changed the DNA of the elephant in order to make it look more like a mammoth one of the problems with this approach is that you have to change one gene at a time or a very few genes at a time and then there's the chance that you could have off-site effects off-target effects where you didn't plan on making a mutation but you did just by accident and that can cause genetic modifications that you don't want this the initial bowl would be to make something that is a hybrid that takes the best features in one species and another all of these species were probably capable of making fertile offspring and in hybrids you could come up with an elephant that has long hair instead of the short hair that elephants have now you could also have it put on more fat and and insulate itself from the cold and then there are some other changes in terms of the veins and the arteries and the mammoths that were different from elephants that helped them live in the cold and while scientists may be on the verge of resurrecting the woolly mammoth it's not without controversy one of the biggest questions is what's going to happen along the way if you end up with mistakes in the genome modifications elephants are extremely intelligent they're very social they have this emotional capacity and a huge capacity for suffering and so I think it's inevitable that someone will try this trick to make something that looks like a woolly mammoth but I hope they'll think about the animals and you have plans along the way of what they would do in certain scenarios professor Church says he's not trying to bring back the extinct mammoths but he's hoping a hybrid animal could save the living Asian elephant the genes can help currently endangered species to survive by giving it the ability to live in the cold where many of its cousins have have lived in the past mammoths and the Asian elephant is is quite endangered it's at risk both because of being in conflict with humans being in close proximity with high population density and also with herpes virus which is killing off up to 80% of the newborns on weaning it's also a benefit to the into the environment that we care about which is the Arctic which is about 19 million square kilometres of very deep carbon soil so what we specifically need in the Arctic is to keep the temperature low and the carbon sequestration high so you want it to photosynthesize to turn the sun's light into a way of capturing the carbon into the roots and the roots each year they the permafrost grows and stays frozen it so herbivores are needed for maintaining the grass otherwise the dead grass are kind of covered up and doesn't photosynthesize well if you're confused you're not alone grass is good for preventing the melting of the permafrost professor Church believes by introducing large grazers like hybrid elephant the Arctic twould be converted back to productive grasslands which would prevent greenhouse gases from being released back into the atmosphere and so it switched from grass which was very good at fixing carbon to trees it's very good at helping the snow melt and the snow to insulate in the winter keeping the cold air out and so mammoths are one of the few herbivores you know that are capable of knocking down trees into it quite readily the hybrid mammoth sounds like a remarkable animal but Rebecca Rodgers has concerns about what George Church is trying to do some of this synthetic biology in theory could be used to rescue animals that have genetic defects and anytime we see population sizes get very small then they start to accumulate bad mutations and it's more likely that all of the animals in your population will be related to one another and will have the same bad mutations which leads to negative effects there's in theory the possibility of doing some sort of gene therapy for animals just like people have proposed for humans again that's going to be very very tricky [Music] humans don't really have a great record with manipulating nature in the wild sometimes we bring one species in to take out another invasive species and then the thing we brought in reeks more havoc than we ever thought it could and there are these unintended effects that we see where we've made mistakes if this does succeed and scientists return these woolly mammoths hybrid type creatures to Siberia Rebecca Rodgers has concerns who's going to protect them from predators what other effects will they have on the terrain that we didn't anticipate what if they spread diseases from one type of animal to another where there's a pathogen some bacterium or fungus that infects one type of mammal and it also infects the manless and then they spread it all over the Russia you know you can see how things could go wrong in ways they you know maybe you didn't plan on do you have contingencies in place for all of those situations professor Church is aware of the issues that could arise but seems confident with responding to the potential negatives a negative would be if the environment had changed enough that they weren't ready for it from where of course we're not trying to make something with ancient we're trying to make a hybrid that has all the advantages of the modern plus all the events of the Ancients a negative would be what if it's not diverse enough what we have unprecedented diversity which includes all of the ancient species all over the world while in practice they usually were only breeding with their contemporaries in time and they're nearby neighbors in space well that's no longer that's just a diversity something negative that we can lack of diversity so negative that we can fix hybrid mammoths could grow as big as three and a half meters and weigh about six tons with their long curved tusks reaching over two and a half meters long the herbivores yes but are certainly not an animal you want interacting with people but we're proposing move them to the largest ecosystem in the world with the lowest human population densities I think every talons [Music] the last remaining wooly mammoths fell extinct 4000 years ago scientists have now deciphered the probable reasons one thing that happened is that the climate team and it got much warmer and trees started to grow up over the Siberian stuff and woolly mammoths unlike mastodons and some forest elephants could not forage in the forest they needed grasslands and their teeth were flattened and they were made to grind up grasses so that they could chew cud but so as the forest grew up over Siberia then they lost their habitat and couldn't live in the space that they had anymore one of the other factors is that humans started to hunt the woolly mammoth and reduced their numbers today it seems humans may wind up bringing the long extinct behemoths back to life in a groundbreaking experiment earlier this year Japanese and Russian researchers took 28 thousand-year-old woolly mammoth cell parts and say they found biological activity preserved for millennia so there was a recent paper that said that they had found DNA intact in large pieces in cells of a mammoth that was found frozen in the permafrost when they sequence the DNA they still found that it was mostly in small pieces they then tried to transfer that mammoth DNA into a mouse cell and this would open up a lot of doors for molecular biology if you could get it to work it would put mammoth DNA into a mouse cell and you could do all your lab work in your molecular biology to see how the mammoth DNA behaves differently in herself compared to the mouse DNA while the mammoth cells did not come back to life to create a clone mammoth the study although controversial is noteworthy they say that they got a whole chromosome into the mouse but it's difficult to see from their photographs how they determined that that was actually the mammoth chromosome instead of a highly mutated Mouse chromosome so it's a little bit difficult to see how well it worked but they got to the first cell division and then the cell recognized that something was very wrong and so it shut down the cell and induced cell death so that didn't progress very far it's a very interesting idea and it could lead to a lot of molecular biology in the lab getting from the lab to living off the land will take many steps but could be just a few years away once we have the nucleus completely programmed and been tested for its viability then developing it into an embryo could happen within a year so we could be a couple of years away from testing in embryos and then if that works we might be doing implantation before they after that takes 22 months for gestation to occur and then baby elephant that has woolly mammoth genes in it even though bringing back the woolly mammoth from extinction could cause unknown circumstances professor Church believes the benefits far outweighed the risks I myself point out that every new technology every new the more radical the innovation more you should be skeptical and concerned in this particular case the the questions that I've raised as well as other people is is are we helping modern species and the answer is yes this is a asian elephant that we're focusing on are we helping modern environments yes the Arctic has problems especially big problems when we're talking about 1,400 gigatonnes of carbon at risk are we going to be able to make enough of them that they will be herds of them yes that's the intention what if he succeeds a herd of hybrid mammoths once again roaming the Arctic raises all kinds of questions it's important to keep asking these questions and see if we can think of it is it possible we want to reverse it yes we might want to reverse it so for example goats were accidentally introduced into the vodka goes that was reversible these are large herbivores so it's not like we're introducing bacteria or mold or insects these things are very easily identified so when Professor Church finishes creating his massive herd of L mammoths what's next the ROI and restore is a non-profit group that I work with they have about a hundred extinct species the Henry's arguments for and various other scientific teams ready to do it once we demonstrate the basic methods I would look forward to those but I think that I'm gonna have my hands full just making sure that the Arctic is taken care of with him like every since the end of the last ice age 130,000 years ago 300 mammal species have died off in the next 50 years humans will cause so many mammal species to go extinct that researchers found replacing them will take the earth 3 to 7 million years perhaps professor George church and science will get us there just a bit faster [Music]

Channel: CGTN America

Views: 55,071

Rating: 4.8638573 out of 5

Keywords: @cgtnamerica, CGTN, China news, China, Global, Television, Network, Fossils, dinosaurs, Dinosaur Fossil, Paul Sereno, Paleontology, George Church, Rebekah Rogers, Woolly Mammoth, Jurassic Park, Super Croc, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triassic, Climate Change, Harvard, Asteroid, Mike walters

Id: UwfrNXTGPWI

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2019