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Mammoth meatballs—no, wait—meatballs *from* mammoths, are on the menu

This is how it starts:

A woolly mammoth meatball has been created from the animal’s DNA — 4,000 years after the beast went extinct.

It gets worse:

Vow, the Australian company that created the food, made the meat by isolating genetic material found in mammoths that gives flavor to red meat and filled in gaps with DNA from an elephant.

It's a chimera! What's next? Human-horse combinations? Humans and mice? And will they make meatballs out of us? We should have listened to the right-wingers who warned us about this, folks.

13 thoughts on “Mammoth meatballs—no, wait—meatballs *from* mammoths, are on the menu

  1. jte21

    C'mon. It's just like if we could clone a dinosaur. Some genetic sequences would be missing, but you could just fill them in with amphibian or reptile DNA. What could possibly go wrong?

  2. different_name

    Soylent Green is Mammoth!

    Hm, I see why they went with people for that one.

    Also from the article, this was a publicity stunt, not a product launch.

    saying it was meant to fire up public debate about the hi-tech treat

    Well, think that part worked.

  3. lawnorder

    Mammoths and elephants are VERY closely related. A mammoth/elephant chimera is more analogous to a zebra/horse chimera than to a human/horse chimera.

  4. mmcgowan1

    I'm not quite sure how to react to this. Copying and pasting DNA sequences is hardly new, and you'd have to understand the exact sequences taken from both mammoths and elephants to know if this combination is something very new or just the fundamentals needed to grown muscle cells (i.e., meat). I'm reminded of shampoo makers who extol the virtues of some botanical inclusion in their product, and then you read the list of ingredients to discover that the botanical inclusion is trivial, while all the other ingredients by far match every other shampoo on the market.

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