What if I told you that a single sheep
brought us closer to a real-life Jurassic Park
than mosquitoes frozen in amber ever did?
The two are more closely related than you think,
and it's all thanks to cloning.
In 1996, scientists created Dolly the Sheep,
a health clone born using the cells of other sheep.
But since Dolly, cloning hasn't really
come back to the spotlight.
Despite this, scientists have been hard at work,
trying to resurrect extinct species
like wooly mammoths and even dinosaurs.
Today, we're gonna break down how this tech works,
how long it'll take before we can bring back
prehistoric beasts.
- And whether it's possible to clone ourselves.
- [Together] So ...
What does the future of cloning look like?
(upbeat electronic music)
- Okay, so it's a little complicated.
There isn't just one type of cloning.
(intriguing electronic music)
There are actually three different types:
gene cloning, therapeutic cloning, and reproductive cloning.
Gene cloning, unfortunately, doesn't reproduce an animal.
Boo!
Then there's therapeutic cloning,
which can eventually help human beings
and its process is used in reproductive cloning,
so we should elaborate a little bit.
Scientists replace the nucleus of an egg cell
with materials found inside the nucleus
of a somatic cell taken from a patient.
I know, I know, there are a lot of cells.
But a somatic cell is any cell
that isn't a reproductive cell.
The egg cell is then stimulated to divide.
Almost a week later, the cell is harvested
for new stem cells during the division process.
And, since these cells were taken form the original patient,
they're automatically a genetic match,
so their body gladly accepts them.
Therapeutic cloning uses a process known as SCNT,
or somatic cell nuclear transfer,
a process that led to the eventual cloning
of Dolly the Sheep.
This leads us to my favorite kind of cloning.
(gentle music) Reproductive cloning.
Reproductive cloning is the process by with clone animals.
Just like in therapeutic cloning,
a somatic cell's DNA is implanted
into an egg cell without a nucleus.
After the egg is stimulated, it develops
into an early stage embryo inside of a test tube.
Then it's implanted into an adult female's womb.
This embryo then develops into a baby,
which is born a clone of the animal
that the somatic cell was taken from.
This process gave us the world's most famous sheep
all the way back in 1996.
(upbeat electronic music)
Dolly the Sheep was the first successfully cloned mammal,
but she technically wasn't the first animal to be cloned.
Scientists had clones a tadpole back in 1952,
using a version of nuclear transfer.
However, these tadpoles suffered abnormal growth
due to the fact that the embryos used
were in the later stages of development,
which was kind of a big deal.
To give you a scope of how rare a successful clone is,
let's take a look at the numbers.
It took 277 tries for scientists to create an embryo
that would successfully grow into a baby sheep.
This process was also the first to be successful
using an adult somatic cell.
Scientists actually never thought this could be possible,
so it was a huge deal.
Dolly lived a relatively long life,
giving birth to six lambs, before eventually dying
of lung cancer in 2003, only six years old.
And since Dolly, scientists have cloned
all kids of animals: cows, rabbits,
horses, and even monkeys.
Reproductive cloning has become more refined
as the years have passed, to the point
where special labs offer cloning services for pets.
Barbara Streisand famously cloned her dead dog, Samantha,
in 2017, using cells collected from her mouth and stomach.
And if you have a cool $50,000
just bruning a hole in your pocket,
you can clone your pet too,
and it only takes about 121 days,
so something to mull around in your head.
I don't know.
The ability to clone pets is impressive,
but scientists want to do more with it.
In 2009, a team at the Center
for Agro-Nutrition Research and Technology in Spain.
That's a mouthful.
Cloned a Pyrenean ibex, an animal
that was pronounced extinct just nine years earlier.
Unfortunately, the newborn ibex died
of respiratory failure minutes after it was born
due to abnormalities in its lungs.
Golf clap for the little guy.
The only one to make it out after 208 attempts.
But you know what?
What about the prehistoric creatures?
Get to the good (bleep)!
(intriguing bass music)
Well, besides the Pyrenean ibex,
cloning extinct animals,
especially from prehistoric eras,
seemed out of reach, an impossibility
due to lack of DNA left behind by these ancient beasts.
But just last years, in April 2018,
Harvard scientists revealed how close they were
to cloning wooly mammoths.
Well, wooly mammoth-elephant hybrids.
Mammophants.
That's what they're calling them.
Mammophants.
Scientists finally have access to their DNA
thanks to a mammoth that was found frozen in Siberian ice.
(ice rattling)
The traits that are responsible
for mammoth's abilities to survive in extreme cold
were found held in the genes of their DNA,
which scientists have been able to splice
into elephant DNA.
Long, shaggy hair, cold-resistant blood, and small ears
are all trying to be replicated
in an entirely new animal
within the womb of a present-day elephant.
The team at Harvard already plans
to insert the mammoth DNA into Asian elephant embryos
by 2020, so we could be a year away
from seeing a real life ..
(smacks)
mammophant.
Okay, mammoths are cool, but when the hell
am I gonna be able to ride a T. Rex to work?
Unfortunately, we're not as close as we'd like to be.
The movie Jurassic Park explains how scientists
cloned dinosaurs by extracting the DNA
from blood that mosquitoes trapped in amber were carrying.
Sounds like everything you need to clone them, right?
Well, unfortunately, this is only fiction.
DNA cells inside of mosquitoes
are destroyed during the fossilation process
because their soft organic tissue is hardened.
This makes it almost impossible to retrieve those cells.
But, notably, dinosaur bones with soft enough tissue
have been discovered, meaning DNA
could have survived this process.
It hasn't been extracted yet, but it means
that we might not be completely shut out
from dinosaur DNA in the future.
Now, theoretically, it could be possible
to sequence the DNA of a dinosaur in order to replicate it.
The problem is dinosaur genomes are incomplete.
We just don't have enough information
to create the DNA sequence from scratch.
It literally took us 13 years to sequence the human genome,
and we are notable not extinct.
Speaking of humans, let's talk about
when we can expect that.
I hate to burst your bubble, but probably no time soon.
Ethical concerns aside, we haven't developed a surefire way
to clone human embryos.
This is all thanks to a special protein
in human and primate eggs called spindle proteins,
which are responsible for cell division.
Spindle proteins are found in a number of places
within other animals as well.
In humans, however, spindle proteins
are located dangerously close
to the chromosomes inside the egg.
In order to clone a human,
you need to remove the egg's nucleus,
then replace it with a donor nucleus.
But because the spindle proteins are positioned
near the nucleus, they get removed as well,
making it impossible for the cell
to divide and form an embryo.
So, unfortunately, it'll be a long time
before you can clone yourself, send it to school,
and play video games at home all day.
Personally, I'd love to see a dinosaur walking around
in my lifetime, but there are five whole movies
that basically give us a reason not to do that.
(dinosaur roaring) (children screaming)
Scientists, government officials, and the general public
still have a lot of ethical questions to answer
before we decide whether we're gonna clone
dinosaurs or people, answers I frankly don't have.
I'm just a host for a mildly entertaining tech show.
But we'd love to hear what you think in the comments.
(static crackling)
Hey, guys, thank you so much for watching ConTECHtual.
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