FICTION MADE INTO REALITY!
Jurassic park imagined a time in the future where it was possible bring back the extinct dinosaurs back to life. Now, the geneticists at Harvard seek to resurrect the prehistoric Woolly Mammoth.
“Woolly” Mammoths?
Roughly the size of the modern African elephants and closely related to the Asian elephants, these ice age herbivores lived from the Pleistocene to early Holocene epoch(120000 to 4000 years ago), millions of years after the dinosaurs met their fate. People also existed during the time of mammoths(and hence the cave paintings). The current revolution in genetics which is combating various things like aging , curing and even cloning your pet dog, may bring back these shaggy animals to life.
The science behind is really cool! First, the team sequences the genome from the frozen carcasses of this prehistoric mammoth that are brought up from the ice. Now they know the genome of a mammoth, so they choose the important characteristics that make a mammoth a mammoth. Since they are closely related to the Asian elephants , most of their genome is similar to these current elephant species. Unlike Jurassic park, they are not cloning these woolly mammoth but instead they aim to synthesize the genes and place them into the embryo of an Asian elephant. They put this embryo back into the Asian elephant and (tada!), a baby woolly mammoth or (is it a Mammophant?) is born. The team is also planning on synthetic womb though, because Asian elephants are on the endangered list.
Why bring the dead animals back?
The answer happens to be in Russia. The Siberian plains are vast tract of lands made of permafrost( basically frozen soil, rock over a very long period). It has been found that the tundra is a ticking time bomb. Trapped within the permafrost is more carbon than if we burned the Earth’s forests three times. Due to global warming, the world is getting closer and closer to the point where the permafrost will melt and boom! They have discovered that just by re-introducing these large herbivores the temperature of the permafrost can be decreased by 15 degrees(that is a lot!!). Wonder how? These now-extinct giants encourage the growth of steppes grasses, which in turn have a high albedo effect ( the grass reflects of the sunlight back into the atmosphere thereby reducing the heat absorbed) and thus would reduce the melting of the permafrost. Well, bringing them back could possibly save the human race from imminent death (touche).
So that is what happening in the woolly Mammoth project, from reading DNA to rewriting it! The world we live in is going to be a very different place in the next 50 or so years( maybe even less than that). With all the stuff that is happening in the laboratories we might as well live forever(imagine!).
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