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Cloning From The Grave

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Anonymous

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Cloning from the grave: Scientists create new life from a mouse that has been frozen for 16 YEARS.



Scientists have created clones of a mouse that had been dead and frozen for 16 years.

It is the first time they have been able to clone a frozen animal.

The Japanese researchers say their work will benefit mankind - and could be used to bring back extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth or sabre tooth tiger.

The latest experiment comes more than 11 years after British scientists stunned the world with Dolly the cloned sheep. Although scientists have since cloned a host of different animals, using genetic material from single cells, they have always used living cells.

It had been thought that ice crystals destroyed the DNA in frozen cells, making them unusable. But the Japanese team used brain cells and believe the high fat content of brains and the protection of the skull reduced the damage.

Josephine Quintavalle, an expert on the ethics of fertility and reproduction, said the experiment pushed the boundaries of acceptable science even further.

She said: 'This kind of research raises disturbing questions about what happens to our bodies - and any tissue we leave for medical science - after we die.

'It means that tissue donated for medical research or stored in laboratories could be used many years later for cloning research.

'It has never been more important that when people leave tissue for research, the consent should be very specific given the potential for all kinds of scientific developments in the future.'

But British scientists welcomed the breakthrough.

Professor Malcolm Alison, biologist at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, said: "It is absolutely fascinating.

'The researchers obtained cell nuclei from mice that had been deep-frozen for 16 years and then generated new mice by the same technology that created Dolly.

'While 16 years is not a long time for cells to be frozen - IVF clinics often have viable sperm frozen for longer periods - there are no scientific reasons why extinct animals like mammoths could not be similarly generated.'

The research was carried out by Dr Teruhiko Wakayama and colleagues at the Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan.

They took brain cells from ordinary dead male mice stored in a freezer for up to 16 years and removed their nuclei - the blobs in the centre of cells that contain DNA.

Each cell's nucleus was injected into a hollowed-out egg cell from a female mouse.

When the egg was 'triggered' with electricity, it began to divide and grow just like a newly-conceived embryo.

After a few days, the embryo clone was implanted into the womb of a surrogate mouse and three weeks later, the clone was born.

'These cloned mice did not show any abnormalities and grew to adulthood,' the researchers report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today

Cells to be frozen are normally treated with chemicals called cryoprotectants-beforehand, to prevent-damage. But this had not been done on the Japanese mice.

The researchers tried to clone mice from other parts of the body, but found that brain cells were the most successful.

Even using brain cells, however, the success rate was low.

More than 1,100 attempts produced just seven healthy clones. More than 500 embryos died after being implanted into the wombs of the surrogate mothers.

Helen Wallace of Genewatch UK said: 'Cloning produces high failure rates because many eggs and foetuses do not develop normally.

'It would be extremely dangerous for both mothers and their babies to attempt this kind of experiment in humans.'

'There might be human material stored by laboratories that you could work on.

'If it came from people with genetic diseases, it could help explore the causes of those disease.'

However Dr Robin Lovell-Badge said he suspected the technique would have most use in the research on extinct animals, such as mammoths, whose bodies are preserved for thousands of year in ice or frozen tundra.

The Japanese scientists said the bodies of large animals like mammoths frozen under natural conditions would freeze more slowly, possibly reducing cell damage.

They also suggested that other sources of frozen nuclei, such as white blood cells, might be as useful for cloning as brain tissue.

They added: 'This would increase the chances of finding tissues in good condition'.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... YEARS.html
 
Just an idle thought, but human cloning could end a lot of nature vs. nurture arguments. What if you cloned Einstein, and he showed no skill at physics? etc
 
H_James said:
Just an idle thought, but human cloning could end a lot of nature vs. nurture arguments. What if you cloned Einstein, and he showed no skill at physics? etc
Well, if you were to believe at least one of his teachers, he didn't. Some talents don't show up until somewhat later.
 
You have to be careful with some of those stories about Einstein. He wasn't really that bad a student, but it suits our preconceptions that he was either a late bloomer, or so far ahead of everyone else someone as pedestrian as his teacher didn't understand him.

Then there's the story about someone complaining about his sense of time when playing music. I've heard that from many people, and it's always someone else they attribute it to.
 
I remember a long time ago hearing on TV about plans to clone mammoths.
 
And there are plans to clone Thylacines. (Except they haven't been frozen, they're preserved in formaldehyde. Much nastier for genetic material.)
 
The story on this linked to the breaking news feature doesn't include the really wild stuff in the New York Times article, so I thought I'd better get it on here. Now this is what I call SCIENCE!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this long time 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 can 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 which 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, but ethically more challenging.

A scientific team headed by Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller at Pennsylvania State University report in today’s 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.

Dr. Schuster and Dr. 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 genes differ at around 400,000 sites on its genome from that of the African elephant.

There is no present way to synthesize a genome-sized chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. 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. Dr. Schuster’s laboratory has two, known as 454 machines, each of which costs $500,000.

Another problem has been that ancient DNA in bone, the usual source, is heavily contaminated with bacterial DNA. Dr. Schuster has found that hair is a much purer source of the host’s DNA, with the keratin serving to seal it in and largely exclude bacteria.

A third issue is that the DNA of living cells can be modified, but only very laboriously and usually at one site at a time. Dr. Schuster said he had been in discussion with George Church, a well known genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School, about a new method Dr. Church has invented for modifying some 50,000 genomic sites at a time.

The method has not yet been published and until other scientists can assess it they are likely to view genome engineering on such a scale as being implausible. Rudolph Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said the proposal to resurrect a mammoth was “a wishful thinking experiment with no realistic chance for success.”

Dr. Church, however, said there had recently been enormous technical improvements in decoding genomes and that he expected similar improvements in genome engineering. In his new method, some 50,000 corrective DNA sequences are injected into a cell at one time. The cell would then be tested and subjected to further rounds of DNA modification until judged close enough to that of the ancient species.

In the case of resurrecting the mammoth, Dr. Church said, the process would begin by taking a skin cell from an elephant and converting it to the embryonic state with a method developed last year by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka for reprogramming cells.

Asked if the mammoth project might indeed happen, Dr. Church said that “there is some enthusiasm for it,” although making zoos better did not outrank fixing the energy crisis on his priority list.

Dr. Schuster believes that museums could prove goldmines of ancient DNA because any animal remains containing keratin, from hooves to feathers, could hold enough DNA for the full genome to be recovered by the new sequencing machines.

The full genome of the Neanderthals, an ancient human species probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals.

But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Dr. Church said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it,” Dr. Church said.
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PeniG said:
NY Times said:
...“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable...
There are a number of estates all over the UK already host to large populations of them.

And no, many of them aren't acceptable.
 
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