IndianCurry2010
Registered Senior Member
How far are we from bringing back animals from the dead ? or animals that have become extinct using DNA technology ?
How far are we from bringing animals back from the dead ?
- Thread starter IndianCurry2010
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
We have intact mammoth DNA in the frozen corpses. They keep talking about using it to create an embryo and implanting it in the uterus of an elephant.
But of course that's not bringing an animal back from the dead, that's creating a new animal of the same species and even identical DNA: cloning.
The problem with literally bringing one of the more advanced vertebrates (mammals and birds) "back from the dead" is that what makes us truly alive is the ongoing programming in our brain synapses. I generally use as the definition of "death": Irreversible degradation of the synapses. Irreversible means just that: the information is scrambled and lost. This degradation starts to happen after just a couple of minutes of oxygen deprivation. After, say, five minutes without oxygen the brain is just a big hunk of meat. There is no way to restore the programming because there's no backup copy.
The same is true of all the vertebrates because we all have forebrains with rather complex dynamic programming. You can keep the body of a human with a hopelessly degraded brain--or any other vertebrate--"alive" by keeping the lungs working mechanically and pumping the blood full of nutrients and extracting the waste. But all you've got is a big hunk of meat that you have prevented from spoiling and starting to smell. You haven't got a living thing.
The more primitive vertebrates like eels and sharks might last a few minutes longer without oxygen because their brains are not as complex, but nonetheless the same fate awaits them in due time.
As for the lower animals without a central nervous system, you probably have to look at each one individually. In some worms the processing of "intelligence" is so distributed that you can cut it in half and wind up with two worms that function more-or-less as well as the original.
And let's not talk abouth plant life
But to answer Indiancurry2010, january 2009 is a good bet at that moment the a pyrenean ibex was born afther the species had been extinct for around 9 years... However it died afther 7 minutes because of lung problems.
My gues without any real knowledge on the field is thatany year now (<5)scientist will have revived a healthy capable of reproducing when matured species
Note that this species will have been only recently became extinct and will had been extensivly studied when it was endangered whilst taken ample supplies of blood (and DNA) stored under the best conditions
I doubt anyone could predict the day someone will be able to resurrect a extinct species of wich we do not have prestine DNA (like the dodo, neanderthal ,wooly mammoth)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_Ibex
But to answer Indiancurry2010, january 2009 is a good bet at that moment the a pyrenean ibex was born afther the species had been extinct for around 9 years... However it died afther 7 minutes because of lung problems.
My gues without any real knowledge on the field is thatany year now (<5)scientist will have revived a healthy capable of reproducing when matured species
Note that this species will have been only recently became extinct and will had been extensivly studied when it was endangered whilst taken ample supplies of blood (and DNA) stored under the best conditions
I doubt anyone could predict the day someone will be able to resurrect a extinct species of wich we do not have prestine DNA (like the dodo, neanderthal ,wooly mammoth)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_Ibex
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Actually we have mammoth DNA. Many specimens have been nicely preserved in ice.
I said prestine DNA. As good as it is, the DNA is not longer perfect en has deteriorated to the point that we can still make up the whole picture but none (or a undetectable amount) of completly undamaged material can be found on it.
From what I can make up out of news articles scientist are able to read the fragments and paste them together in a form that useless for cloning (yet good for analysing) and any cloning atempt begins with obtaining this pristine DNA or as a alternative it might be possible to look for a cousin species (mammoth -> african elephant) analyse the DNA differences take the DNA of a african elephant that over 99% Identical and basicly start cut and pasting and in fact this genetic engineering or introgressionis already used to plants with unique qualities .Obviously the technique is far from perfect but who knows
Can't be too far off because the J. Craig Venter Institute recently grew bacteria with completely synthesized DNA. However, humans might get too cocky and not worry so much about species going extinct because they can always "be brought back" later. It's probably not as simple as this, however, because it would seem that higher-order species also involve behaviors that are probably learned from one generation to the next, and this learned behavior is not in the DNA. We might find that they are too susceptible to modern diseases, and we might also discover why some species went extinct in the first place. However, mammoths etc would make impressive zoo exhibits (read $$$).
I dunno...Maybe it tastes good?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Bacteria are not animals. They are a separate Kingdom like Plants, Fungus, Algae and Arachaea. (Well, Arachaea is probably a catch-all for several different primitive lifeforms that aren't even clearly related.)
Bacteria are much simpler in structure. For example they only have one cell, that cell has no nucleus, and they reproduce asexually by simply dividing in half. So, to revive a bacterium is qualitatively different from doing it for an animal. Even plants won't be as difficult as animals.
We could start with the ones that we removed! I haven't got the numbers handy, but at least a thousand species of the various Kingdoms become extinct every year. Most of that is due to our effect on their environment, although in the past it was often deliberate killing for meat and sport, to convert forest to farmland (which is still being done, mostly to feed beef cattle, arguably the most resource-inefficient of all human foods), or to clear farmland of predators and grazing competitors.
The entire island of Borneo is being clear-cut, pushing the beloved orangutan toward extinction.
"Scrap the civilization, Clyde!"
Apart from the simple reason because we can, their are still some valid reasons to bring a species back from the death.
For example people have always been fasinated by intelligent alien life and let's be honest we have no idea how we could possibly pull that off. So apart from them contacting us we're sorta limited to inventing some brain cap that can read toughts and turn then into speech whilst it can interpred what's said to it and put it on a dolphin and hope for the best or you could revive a neanderthal (and hope for the best). ALso going further back then neanderthals might teach us something abouth the evolution of sentients as a whole
Some other animals like the sable tooth tiger are yust plain cool. And I imagen some people will pay a lot of money to have dodo eggs/mammoth steak on their plate
lastly their most probably some extinct coral species that used to live in a time when oceans where warmer and more acid that could life and replace the current species when they are dying out (doing this without genetically engineering and thus playing god)
Then isn't that where we should be spending our money? Saving them and not bringing back the dodo? :shrug:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Sure, but how? One lady has been slowly buying land on Borneo and establishing it as an orangutan habitat, but it's a tiny fraction of the island, which is larger than Virginia. It's really difficult to convince people in a Third World country that saving a species (one that their parents and perhaps even they themselves regard as food) is more important than raising their own truly pathetic standard of living.
Converting a big chunk of a nation (Borneo is the world's third largest island, after Greenland and New Guinea) into a wildlife preserve is several orders of magnitude more expensive than any project that can be performed in a laboratory, no matter how big the laboratory. It would probably even cost more than a war.
Besides, the last stuffed dodo began to rot about a hundred years ago and was thrown away. I wonder if we have any of its DNA left.