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Special | 3m | Video has closed captioning.
In the format of a cooking show, this episode delves into the difficulties of resurrecting extinct animals from remnant DNA. While the science fiction is famous, the reality is more complex and maybe impossible, but the science behind why it will likely stay science fiction is revealing.
Aired: 04/23/21
From:
(audience clapping) - Welcome back, folks.
I got the king of protein for you today.
It's meaty, it's hairy, it's 10,000 years old.
Mammuthus primigenius, or like Grandma used to make, wooly mammoth cobbler.
Mm-mmm!
You remember sitting around the cave with the family once a year to get a little scoop of that wooly, and a steaming heap of mammoth.
Well today, I'm gonna show you how to get that mammoth in your mouth.
That's right.
(audience laughing) Okay, we've got all the ingredients here.
We're just missing one, the wooly mammoth.
So let's head up to the nearest glacier with an ice pick and whack us out a mammoth flank.
Here's the problem with that, frozen, not fresh.
We don't cook that way.
So we're gonna have to make our mammoth from scratch.
First let's sequence that mammoth genome.
Gather up a piece of mammoth that paleontologists have found.
Toss it into this absurdly capable pressure cooker for a while.
(chef humming) No, a little while longer.
That's better.
There we have it!
The mammoth genome.
Now it doesn't look like much, but it's full of mammoth flavor.
Next, we're gonna need a couple of things from this elephant here.
A skin cell and an egg.
First, we slurp out all of the elephant DNA from that elephant skin cell nucleus, so we can put in the mammoth DNA.
And then we'll yonk out the nucleus of the egg, slip in our creation from the skin cell, and slap the whole thing back inside that elephant to cook for about, oh, two years.
(calm music) Oh yeah, that is smelling like something that doesn't smell too good.
It smells a little like the DNA didn't get switched on to do its work on the cell.
Well, that's the tricky part.
Like Meemaw used to say, DNA's easy to put in, but tough to switch on.
(audience laughs) Well, let's plate this up and see how it tastes.
(audience screeching) Oh, mm, yeah, that is rancid.
Well, you get the basic idea.
We might need to wait a bit for science to catch up before we make a mammoth.
Next week, the dunkleosteus casserole.
That's gonna be dunkle-o-licious.
(jazzy music)
The Gene.
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