CellBioGuy comments on An alarming fact about the anti-aging community - Less Wrong

30 Post author: diegocaleiro 16 February 2015 05:49PM

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Comment author: CellBioGuy 17 February 2015 04:24:33PM *  4 points [-]

You can get DNA from that easily but it's by no means living. You can't make a living cell from such DNA, you can just dissolve the tissue and get sequence data by running the resultant treated slurry into a sequencer. Hence the people who have been trying to clone mammoths for a decade failing - they can't find a single still-living culturable cell in any of those permafrost mammoth carcasses, despite trying and trying and trying, and thus can't do somatic cell nuclear transfer into an egg, even though they can get a complete set of mammoth sequence data.