Will Woolly Mammoths walk the Earth again?

Some years ago in this group I mentioned that one of my lifelong
ambitions since I was a child was that before I died I might see a
living Woolly Mammoth and that moreover, I believed, given the rapid
advance of science in the 20th century, there was an excellent chance
I might.

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~aviva/mammoth1.htm

Today, that childhood hope has come a great deal closer to fruition as
may be seen at the foot of this near-essay!

Indeed, such 'recoveries' were foreshadowed in 'Jurassic Park', filmed
on Isla de las Cocas; a Pacific Ocean possession of Costa Rica, where
the late Robert Arias, husband of the late, great Margot Fonteyn of
ballet fame was president and which is crawling with British and
Canadian ex-pats.

JurrassicPark/Isla de las Cocas still has a bay named after Willie
Paterson's drinking pal, William Dampier, the adventurer and sometime
pirate who gave Willie the idea of creating a Scottish colony in the
district of Darien in modern Panama.

Given enough DNA of any creature to sequence, it would seem that any
creature which once lived might be cloned back into existence. One
might muse on the possibility of some day watching the likes of Bill
Gates (via the ubiquitous CCTV security cameras) being selected as
dinner by the velociraptors which would eventually replace German
Shepherd/Alsation watchdogs on his island estate after expensive
scientific research to recreate the miniature flesh-eating theropods.

(In fact, to keep the record straight, Jurassic Park showed alleged
velociraptors actually modelled after a larger relative, Deinonychus
and not Velociraptor mongoliensis which is the dinosaur that actually
filled the niche portrayed in the movie/film.)

Human ingenuity being what it is, there will almost certainly come a
time when re-worked DNA will be produced by reverse-sequencing to
recover long extinct species, as is being suggested by just-announced
possible plans for the recovery of the Woolly Mammoth, whose closest
modern relative is the Indian elephant.

By using modern DNA and making appropriate alterations in its coding,
I also have a sincere hope that defects found in many families from
areas with a small or inadequate genetic database such as the people
of the Hebrides. When my mother was a director of Craig Dunain
Hospital in Inverness, she told me that the patient population, which
in most areas would have an incidence of 1/2 to 1% who were there
because of inbreeding problems, was as high as 80% at Craig Dunain,
mostly people from the Hebrides who tend to have a high incidence of
Involutional Melancholia, a tendency to deep depression, common among
older Islanders and requiring treatment to avert suicidal tendencies.

There were also physical deformities and as always with inbreeding,
some rare cases of extraordinary beauty and intelligence, which is
precisely why a farmer suddenly blessed with a perfect bull calf, will
breed it with its sisters and not worry too much about the fact that
the resulting calves seem even less intelligent than the average cow.

Given the weather and midges of the Hebrides, one can only sympathize
with local depression and wonder what on earth ever persuaded our
ancestors to leave Spain and cross the Atlantic to settle in Ireland
and then in a moment of the triumph of hope over experience, giving in
to raving madness and moving to the Highlands and Islands...

Inbreeding is usually involuntary but communities where it occurs are
usually highly alert to the possibility. Excellent examples are seen
in the clan systems still adhered to by Canadian natives in British
Columbia, where young people cannot marry a partner from the same
clan. In the old Highlands and presentday Hebrides, people still
maintain the tradition of keping close tabs on their and their
neighbours' ancestry, so that what may seem like a distant, but not
genetically acceptable relationship betwen two people contemplating
marriage can at least be noted before formalizing the relationship.I
believe I'm correct in saying that Scotland still will not accept
marriage between first cousins, unlike Canada, for example.

In my childhood this was covered by the term 'Consanguinity', a term
which then induced the same horror in people as does HIV and AIDS
today. It means simply that one is too close by blood to a planned
marriage partner to be allowed to marry and therefore have children.

Given that Scotland has set benchmarks in the past for illegitimacy -
and despite a Victorian commission's attempts to discover why one in
three Scottish brides came to the altar already visibly pregnant - the
commission pointed to such old-fashioned practices as bundling, etc.,
whereby courting couples could court in bed to remain out of the cold,
separated by whatever barricade the parents thought necessary.

Overly close relationship marriages seems to have been a given in some
areas, and my mother spoke of known marriages where the partners were
genetically as close as brother and sister. Many children are either
brilliant (a Hebridean commonplace with its high IQs and frequency of
university degrees) or stumbling idiots, hidden from view. Tradition
said that the average family had three sons, a doctor, a teacher and
an idiot.

Sadly, that cruel remark ignores genuine familial tragedies, often
leading to early deaths and physical and mental problems, such as the
early deaths suffered by my wife's family and their children and
descendants, as well as the estimated 15,000 families genetically
linked to my wife's family who share her defective genes and who die
in their 30s and 40s as did my dear wife.

Once this happens, any gentic flaw can be magnified, as happened with
Queen Victoria's male descendants from her daughters. Haemophilia is
passed on through females but only presents in males, which is why the

British royal family escaped it, but the Russian royal family didn't.

My wife's family has a defective gene which presents in both males and

females, and causes polyposis (polyps growing in the large bowel)
between the age of 18 and 30. Normally, polyposis is only found in
elderly people and this alone made it tough for us to find an expert
who could tell us what her problem was, her family having kept the
secret to themselves and only telling their children about it after
someone died and an explanation was unavoidable. (Wonderful... I asked

why - because who would marry our children if they knew, was the
answer.)

Untreated, there is a 95% chance of the polyps becoming cancerous and
eventually killing the victim, as happened with my wife. Bowel cancer
grows extremely slowly and she had no pains until two years before her

death, at which point the resulting cancer was estimated to be perhaps

12 years old and too widespread to halt.

Our children were checked annually, but none showed any signs of it.
Soon it will be time to start checking our grandchildren. The cure is
to remove the large bowel and connect the small bowel directly to the
sigmoid colon. The real cure will be to manipulate the defective gene
and stop it from running amok. Coming soon, we hope.

And this is consanguinity's greatest curse, genes going bad. A classic

example is the Thomas family, originally from Wales, with about 15,000

members in the US (all these defective genes are familial - that is,
they are only found in specific families), whose children can age
rapidly from about six years on and die of old age in their early
teens with all the signs of old age; baldness, wrinkled skin,
rheumatism, liver spots, bent bodies, etc. No cure available.

A lot of illnesses are genetic and I become enraged when I read about
people saying that genetic manipulation should be banned. Why should
peope be condemned to an early death or years of anguish when what
will inevitably be a simple procedure can solve their problems?

I should like to say that I personally exhibit some signs of
inbreeding with the usual mix of good and bad; a large skull, a high
IQ, a heart a third larger than normal for someone of my size which is
completely reversed; in that the tubes all enter and return the wrong
way round - but on the other hand, the fact that two cardiac
specialists have confidently assured me that I will live to see 120
years, barring accidents. It was on their advice that I stopped
smoking, to avoid the possibility of spending 40 years in bed with a
tube up my nose and galloping emphysema, waiting for my heart to stop
or an impatient heir to drive a stake through it, as one of the
specialists was at pains to tell me...

I am still at a loss to understand why I should be thrilled by that
prospect - I suppose I can probably make a living by unveiling the
mysteries of the 20th century on 3-D TV, revealing the purpose of the
signet ring and musing about the then-popular fantasy that there was
something special about Royalty - unless of course DNA has made living
to be that old is a normal part of the human function - or at least
those humans with sufficient money and ambition to pay for it.

I can't imagine what sort of sex life one would have by then - there
isn't much happening now beyond a tendency to eye pretty girls
surreptitiously - maybe I could go on game shows and compete for a
cash prize if I can identify the parts of the female body from memory.

Anyway, I am no drooling idiot clutching my bouzouki and showing
George Zambetas (probably the world's finest bouzouki player) how to
really get the instrument moving! But I do seem to have more than the
usual share of odd talents, none of which have proved especially
useful other than creating more trouble for myself than I might have
expected from a less exotic existence... As an old man said in
Georgia, where Duelling Banjos was shot, "That danged movie done more
damage to Georgia's reputation than the Civil War."

I want also to mention one of the oddest dilemmas confronting Canada
during a time when its rules for marriageability have been
dramatically expanded to include those of the same sex and as yet,
same species. The dilemma relates to the surprisingly common problem
of identical twins marrying identical twins. Identical twins are
really one person, whose egg split into two to create two identical
people.

So when a male identical twin falls in love with a female identical
twin. there is a very high probability that his brother will fall in
love with her sister.

Not a problem until they have children, who are legally cousins but
genetically siblings. Because they are really clones of the parents if

you like, the chances of them marrying each other are even higher -
many people tend to marry their mirror image - and then one can
anticipate inbreeding problems.

I understand that 18 families in Canada are in this predicament.

Despite all the "jokes" about inbreeding, it is a tragedy for people
who find themselves suffering from inbreeding or its euphemism,
"consanguinity". It's particularly noticeable among religious groups
such as the Amish in Eastern Canada and the Northeastern US,
Hutterites in northern Sakatchewan at Carrot River and some Mennonite
colonies in Paraguay.

Note that all these are religious groups who, by reason of their
beliefs, consider themselves exclusive - just like Queen Victoria's
descendants who thought of theor blood as 'royal' - and therefore do
not marry outside their genetically limited religious circle. In their
case, a self-induced tragedy which can be squarely laid at the door of
sectarianism and in the case of the Victorian family members, a very
ancient belief that kings and queens were appointed by God and are
therefore not mere mortals.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Mammoth plan for giant comeback
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 20/12/2005)

The first serious possibility that the woolly mammoth, or something
like it, could walk on Earth again was raised yesterday by an
international team of scientists.

Woolly mammoths died out approximately 10,000 years ago
A portion of the genetic code of the mammoth has been reconstructed
and, to the surprise of scientists, the team that carried out the feat
believes that it will be possible to decode the entire genetic
make-up.

The tusked beast stood 12-feet tall, weighed up to seven tons and had
a shaggy dark brown coat that hung from its belly.

DNA was extracted from a well-preserved 27,000-year-old specimen found
in the Siberian permafrost. So far, about 30 million "letters" of the
genetic code have been read, albeit in small pieces, representing
around one percent of the entire code.

The team says it could take as little as a year to finish the
estimated 2.8 billion-letter code that provides the genetic
wherewithal to create the animal.

Scientists in Japan and Russia have announced plans to attempt to
clone woolly mammoths with the help of living relatives and, despite
scepticism that they will be successful, today's work will renew
interest in the idea.

Dr Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University, one of the team
that announced the new work in the journal Science, said last night
that it may also be possible to genetically alter an elephant to turn
it into a mammoth.

The work is described by an international team of researchers,
including one from Oxford University, who sequenced a chunk of ancient
DNA belonging to the mammoth and "fellow travellers" from its remains,
including bacteria, fungi, viruses and plants that lived at the same
time as the mammoth.

The team extracted nuclear DNA from the mammoth's jawbone,
concentrating it before it was amplified and sequenced by a relatively
new technique called pyrosequencing.

The researchers say nearly half of the "metagenome" they sequenced
belongs to the mammoth and is very similar to the African elephant.

The techniques produced an impressive amount of nuclear DNA, which is
normally less prevalent than mitochondrial DNA - found in the "power
packs" of cells and the usual target of such studies - and thought to
be more difficult to extract from ancient remains.

Dr Hendrik Poinar, a molecular evolutionary geneticist at McMaster
University, said: "To acquire the genome of an extinct species is a
rare feat. With this level of genetic data we can begin to look at
genes to determine what makes a mammoth a mammoth.

We can finally understand the subtle differences between a mammoth and
its closest living relative, the Indian elephant. But more importantly
our discovery means that recreating extinct hybrid animals is
theoretically possible."

Woolly mammoths, which have become symbols of the Ice Age, died out
10,000 years ago.


MacP
"Mur a bi i gun tarrag, 's ann LEAMSA!"
"If she ain't nailed down, she's MINE!"

.

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