Reacción a "Mice with fur reminiscent of extinct woolly mammoth created"

Seeing these mice is a bit like looking back at the past, but with a highly selective telescope. This technology offers an exciting opportunity to test some of our ideas about extinct organisms.

It is an interesting piece of work, but the idea that we could bring something back from extinction is false hope.

What has been done here is not trivial, but of the ten different mutations engineered into the mice, only a few actually make the mouse gene closer to a known mammoth gene. The result does show that it is possible to genetically engineer many genes at once and still produce some live mice at the end of the process, though. The researchers have succeeded in nudging the mouse genome in the direction of a mammoth genome, which is a first.

If we have an idea of what a gene might do in an extinct mammal, this technology can produce powerful results by introducing a very similar sequence into a mouse. But in this particular case, most of the mutations are chosen just because they are already known to make mice have longer, coarser, wavier hair. You could, in theory, produce mice like this by just breeding mice with weird hair together.

In theory, you could introduce a gene for hairiness into an elephant and it would look quite mammoth-like, but it wouldn’t be a mammoth in any meaningful way. Elephants would be a terrible species to do this research with – they are huge, have long gestation periods, and require highly specialist housing and care. The mouse is a brilliant lab animal, and we know a lot about the mouse genome and how to alter it effectively. 

You do have to know a bit about how the extinct genes might work. For example, it was already known that the genes for coat colour and texture were similar in the mammoth and the mouse. Being able to create and introduce a mouse gene that is somewhat the same as the mammoth opens up a new way to look at evolutionary genetics.