Can you imagine the clones at war with the 'bots?

The people in my research group meet every Friday to discuss a recent journal article pertaining to the research we do. A few weeks ago our class was cancelled because most everyone was going to be out of town, so the grad student who was assigned to lead the discussion postponed her paper for a couple weeks. Her paper was to be on a study that used the entire mitochondrial genome to examine population structure of woolly mammoths. Once class was cancelled for the week, I decided to put off reading it until the week that we were going to discuss it.

The following week, another grad student (who studies birds) was having some difficulty settling on a paper, so called me to see if I had any suggestions. She mentioned that she wanted to have us read a paper that used the entire mitochondrial genome to address similar questions with bears. All I could remember was the journal and the complete mitochondrial genome part, so told her I thought that was the one the other grad student had already picked, so she decided to go with a different paper instead. It turned out that I was wrong, so the following email exchange went over our listserv.

Student 2: Hi. Sorry it's late, I wanted to do the bear papers but [Minnow] said [Student 1] was going to do, so found something else.

Student 1: What bear paper??? Unless bear = mammoth...

Advisor: Bears, Mammoths...all the same to bird people...

Student 3: Or fish people...

Me: You mean bears aren't mammoths? I thought they were the same species. My bad.

Student 4: When I read the email I assumed there must have been a new statistical phylogeography study on bears; that concluded mammoths were in fact nested in with the bears. [Minnow] confirmed to me that he knows mammoths aren't bears.

When we finally got around to discussing the mammoth paper, we ended with a discussion about the possibility of cloning a mammoth. One of the professors had this to say afterward: "Cloning a mammoth. That's not interesting. Cloning a Neanderthal, now that's interesting. Maybe we could clone eleven of them and see if they could play football. I'd pay to watch that."

So now we have a practical application and wouldn't be cloning Neanderthals just to see if it could be done.

Morning comes twice a day or not at all

Over the past few days I've been reading a lot about extinctions, specifically those that occurred in North America at the end of the last ice age. Any time I think about this the woolly mammoth comes to mind. I remember several years ago when researchers discovered a mammoth that had been frozen in ice in Siberia. At the time there was talk about trying to clone a mammoth by transplanting a nucleus from a mammoth cell into an elephant's egg. I'm assuming this never went anywhere, at least not with any success, being as we haven't heard anything about it since then.

I had a friend who talked about how cool it would be if they were able to successfully clone a mammoth ,and about how funny it would be if they just started reproducing like crazy and their numbers got out of control.

In his words:

"It'd be cool at first, but wouldn't it be funny if they eventually just became a nuisance. They'd be getting into your garbage cans during the night and knocking them over. Every time they did it would wake you up and you'd think 'there's those damn mammoths again, why'd they have to bring those stupid things back' before you rolled back over and went back to sleep."

Maybe we should all be glad that the cloning attempts haven't been successful.