March 10, 2011 • 28 mins
You haven't misread the title; rest assured that woolly mammoths are still extinct. However, there are several scientists trying revive mammoths -- and they might just succeed. Tune in to learn more about mammoth cloning.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. And
you know what's making a comeback, Julie m m Jean shorts. Well, yes,
but what else? Asid washed geen shorts. Yes, asid washed
(00:25):
gean shorts. But what else? The wooly mammoth? Possibly? Okay,
all right, that's good. That's good news. Well is it?
I don't know. Well, I just have this menagerae of
animals in my backyard and that would be great to
add the wooly mammoth too, Oh yes, yeah, with the
Dodo bird two would be pretty great too, yeah. Or
the Neandertal, our old friend, Oh yeah, Neider Tall of
(00:46):
the awesome Roman around. Yeah. It seems like if you,
if you pay any attention to the science news, there
are all these stories coming down the pike pretty regularly,
and it's always, let's bring We're bringing back the Neandertal.
Wooly mammoth's coming. We're going to clone them, clone them up,
fill our backyards with them, put them on display, study
of them, and everyone gets really excited about it because
(01:07):
it is a fantastic idea. Here's this extinct creature that
we all grew up looking at in picture books and
uh and suddenly it might actually be around us very
own Jurassic Park, so to speak, exactly the Jurassic Park
factor without the dinosaurs. Yeah, and people get pretty up
in arms about it. Actually, Yes, so we're gonna talk
(01:29):
about that today. Um, but also talking about like maybe
how they shouldn't get so up in arms, but that
there is a possibility that the wooly mammoth could be
coming to a backyard near you pretty soon. Yes, yeah, um,
and we have the Genome Project to thank for that. Yeah.
And this is all about just just just meticulously mapping, um,
(01:50):
the genomic structure behind basically the recipe for the mammoth
in the same way that we've we've taken the human
genome and and looked at that, in the same that
we the way that we event analyze the Neanderthal genome
and uh and in various either there's like the canine
Genome project, there's a uh, there's also the that the
(02:11):
one related to two chimps. I mean that it's all
about taking these species and just understanding them at very
small levels and very detailed levels, right, and just to
get you know, a little bit more specific about it,
where he has a handle on the Human Genome Project,
which really helped to drive a lot of what astrobiology
is doing these days. So the Genome Project, what it
(02:33):
meant to do is to basically take the complete string
of nucleotide letters that make up the DNA sequence in ourselves, um,
which is referred to as the genome. And this DNA
sequence contained in a genome contains the complete code that
determines which genes and proteins will be present in human cells.
Basically what sort of attributes we have that are going
to turn on and off, right. Um. So that project
(02:56):
started in the nineties and it ended about two thousand
and one. And so you do see this field of
astrobiology really benefiting from this, and paleontologists in particular really
saying okay, now now we can take all these different
cells that we have, you know, we've thought this trilobyte sample,
and we can try to map this on other organisms,
you know, just from really simple life forms to like
(03:19):
you said that the humans, um, the human humans and
the inner tools um. So it's brought us to this
present point where we have this Jurassic Park like possibility
looming ahead of us. Yeah, the Jurassic Park factor is
pretty big here. Um. And on one hand, I do
have to point out Jurassic Park, the movie, the book,
(03:40):
both of those. The big draw there was was the
fact that people were going through this park and seeing
these animals. Then the chaos happens by necessity, since it's
you know, it's a fiction, it's a novel, it's a thriller.
But with both of them, like when I watched them
and read them as a as a kid, I didn't
want anything bad to go wrong. I was like, let's
let's just continue this ride. This sounds like a great place, right. Uh.
(04:00):
And they they've introduced a number of of scientific ideas,
So I mean, this was not Carnossaur. This was Jurassic Park.
This was you know, Michael Crichton, So there was there.
He put a great deal of scientific thought into this.
One was looking at actual actual research. But still it
paints a very optimistic picture of what bringing back an
(04:21):
extinct animal would be like. Um. Like, basically, as I recall,
they uh, they weren't able to they were able to
extract DNA from blood in a mosquito that is preserved
in amber. Now, of course DNA degrades over time, so
you would have to fill in the blanks. And this
is a sixty five year old, million million old sample
(04:43):
that we're talking ancient, ancient, and so it's pretty incomplete
in terms of having a good specimen to work with. Yeah,
it's like having like, imagine the most waterlogged, raggedy um
copy of The Great Gatsby. Imaginable, it's been in your
grandparents basement and a waterlog Great, you get it out
and you go to read it. Most of the words,
(05:03):
most of the letters are just completely illegible. Whole chapters
are missing. So you fill in the gaps, right, you
think the characters Daisy fuentas. Yeah, and you you might
look at to look to more recent books and say, well,
here's a book that was you know, obviously this is
influenced by the Great Gatsby. Let me just fill in
the blanks with that, and uh in doing in doing
that with within this book. Example, Sure, you could you
(05:25):
could put together a book, uh and that you could
probably read. It would probably makes sense, but it wouldn't
really be the Great Gatsby. So that's what the whole
Jurrassic Park thing was. Well, let's go to amphiby ends.
We're gonna fill in the blanks. We're gonna somehow get
this a genetic material into an egg. I don't remember
the detail on how they got the eggs, because, as
(05:46):
we'll discuss, that's a big thing once you know, how
are you where are you going to grow this? Um?
And uh And then they were, you know, they were
hatching these things dinosaurs everywhere, et cetera. Yeah. Well, and
in the case of the mammoth creation project, which sort
of takes off that same idea. Um, you know, of
course we've got the mammoth which have been extinct for
(06:07):
ten years, but we do have frozen mammoths. We have
exactly from the Russian permafrost. So these are well preserved,
far far better preserved preserved than you'll find any kind
of dinosaur remains. Um, you know, much more recent, much
much better material to work with, which gives us that promise.
Right and Professor Akira Irtani in Japan has been working
(06:29):
on bringing back the Wooly for about thirteen years, and
once Wooly Mammoth's yesterday Yeah, he does. He does, and
he's uh, I don't really know what his exact intentions are,
it's hard to say, but he does have a sort
of line of logic and saying, well, you know, humans
might have been responsible for um, for them going extinct,
so we have to pay them back by resurrecting them,
(06:50):
which sounds just like really like a bad version of
pet cemetery to me. Yeah, indeed, I had to look
up pet cemetery again when we were talking about it,
just to mind every been Stephen King novel Pets Die
see Barium in the Indian burial ground news a wind
to go or something, and they come back to life
and they're they're not right, and they're potentially evil. And
(07:11):
this is where we have the quote sometimes dead is
better and another great quote that I got off good Reads.
What's been tried once has been tried once before and
before and before, so I need to read it again.
It was really disturbing book. Yeah, and it also flies
in the face of like Stephen Jay gold Gold, Who's
who's saying, like, you know what, all all of what
is happening in the genes and an evolution is by
(07:33):
chance essentially um not necessarily by chance, but survival of
the fattest um and all these different conditions. You can't
recreate this. So it's definitely flying in the face of
what we've thought about what evolution is. Yeah, and it's
all I mean, I don't know how much we want
to get into it at this point, but just the
idea of of bringing back wooly mammoth's in an age
(07:53):
where we don't really have room for elephants anymore. You know.
It's like the the elephants of their territory greatly reduce
their animals that basically need like a large portion of
a continent to roam around on, and they're even in
the best of situations, they're they're greatly confined. Their numbers
are often really endangered. Yeah, I mean we've seen examples
of like marauding gangs of them invading villages and it's
(08:16):
a territorial thing. They're not looking for beer as as
we might have previously thought. Yeah, and so suddenly we're like, oh,
let's bring some moy mamoths back to It's kind of
like you if you encounter like that family member who
who has like a perfectly good car that is that
needs some attention. And then then suddenly they were like,
I'm going to restore this, uh, you know, nineteen fifties.
What have you like pay attention to that? You don't.
(08:36):
You can't even take care of this car. Why what
are you gonna get this one for? You're not even
taking good care of the elephants we have, right, so
why are you bothering with the mammoth? Well, and this
is the problem, right because professor a cure Tommy, he is,
he's doing this, right, he's his His idea is to
remove the nucleus from an egg cell of an elephant
(08:57):
and replace it with DNA from a frozen wooly mammoth
like you mentioned. Huh, and so this could theoretically create
an embryo which would be implanted into an elephant uterus. Yeah.
This is another really key advantage of cloning the wooly
mammot is that it has a very close relative still
alive and driving today, despite our best efforts to make
an extend. Actually they're divergent species, right, yeah, yeah, so
(09:19):
much closer relative. Whereas a dinosaur. You know, good luck,
you know, getting a chicken to lay a dinosaur egg,
and you know it's there's just a lot a lot
more distance there between the the thing we're trying to
clone in the more recent model, right, And so I
mean a cur aritany is really he's making steps towards us,
and he feels like he'll be able to do this
(09:40):
in the next five years. And many people in the
science community and helieve well, no, they believe that it
can happen. And sort of people are on the on
different sides of the front. Some sometimes justs are like, Yeah,
that's great, that's awesome, we should do that. We should
we can study this like we've got the closest living
relative living right now, and if we resurrect this ancient creature,
then we can study them side by side and learn
(10:01):
maybe a little bit more about life, you know, back
in the day um, and other people are saying, well,
that's not really necessary. Um. But in the meantime, there's
something called Pisascene Park and there's a man named Sergey
Zimov who's a conservationist who runs the park, and he's
actually trying to recreate the natural habitat that existed in
(10:23):
the area ten thousand years ago by reintroducing animals that
were indigenous to that area, including reindeer, wild horses, and bison.
And he says, my responsibility is to prepare the mammoth
ecosystem a landscape typical for the mammoth. Therefore, if some
crazy people have found enough money and they revived the mammoth,
we will be ready. You know. He has he has
(10:44):
a letter room to throw crazy does what I thought too.
I was like, oh, yeah, they're they're the crazy people.
And and again it comes down to like, let's why
why maybe he should help focus our energy and preserving
existing environments that are vanishing and disappearing rather than ones
that are long gone right, right, And actually there's a
man named Adrian Lister. He's a paleontologist and in London,
(11:08):
I believe, and he says that it's natural habitat of
the mammoth has more or less disappeared. That's probably why
it went extinct extinct in the first place, many thousands
of years ago, because the kind of grassland habitat of
the far North that it formerly lived in doesn't exist anymore,
so you would have to keep it in captivity. Yeah.
It's kind of like if someone was like, we're going
to bring Ragtime back, and you'd be like, well, good
(11:29):
luck finding a market for that. That's why it's not
around anymore, because nobody wants it. Oh no, I'd listened
to some ragtime. A few people will listen to some ragtime,
but I don't see it. You know, shot popping up
on the top four you like me? Some tinny piano
ever went in a while. This presentation is brought to
you by Intel, sponsors of tomorrow. But again, you know,
(11:57):
the only mammoth has huge potential here in scientists in
two thousand and eight have already sequenced the wooly mammoth
genome so um. What was cool about that part of
it is that they were able to find out more
about the wooly mammoth's um with their environment might have
been like, and why they went extinct. So here's here's
the other side of the fence where people are saying, yes,
(12:18):
let's pursue this path, not necessarily resurrect them, but let's,
you know, map the genome and let's find out more
about the circumstances. Because ultimately, astrobiologists want to get to
the down to the brass tacks here of life as
it originated, as it survived, as it when extinct in
how that implicates our universe, not just our Earth. Are
(12:40):
there space mammoths maybe there could be, could be? Yeah,
they're out fair right now, little helmets on. Well, the
other thing that I like about like speaking of it
in terms of not necessarily putting putting the genetic material
into the living packet arm and having it to give
birth to holy math. Because our cloning technology continues to advance,
but it's not perfect yet. I mean, we're we're it
(13:01):
still has has very high percentage levels of failure. Um
The embryos are often either not suitable from planning into
the fetus or they die sometime during gestation or shortly
after birth. So I like elephants, and you know, I'm
not really crazy about the idea of let's let's impregnate
this artificially impregnate this elephant with some offspring that is
(13:25):
arguably doomed to die. You know, I have to say
that when I worked at the zoo, or worked at
a zoo, I should say, the zoo views you in
the world a zoo. I would have these nightmares every
once while, and they always involved elephants, and it was
like messages from the elephants saying like, you gotta get
us out of here, or we're going to just run
(13:47):
wild and uh, you know, run over all the monkeys
and the small children. Um. But it was always like that.
In fact, Steven Tyler once showed up in the dream
riding the horse, like the horse excuse me, and there's odds, yeah,
riding the elephant out of the zoo. So yes, I
mean I feel, you know, at least if I haven't
thought about it consciously, subconsciously, it does seem like there's
(14:09):
for me at least a problem with that scenario of
resurrectoring the wooly mammoth because you hate just for our pleasure. No, no,
I hear them. No, I like them. I like him.
That's how I felt that I was sort of connecting
to them in that vel. So it's like, let's create
this animal and then put in a zoo or a
lab or some crazy dudes recreation of his reindeer infested
(14:33):
recreation of prehistoric times. Yeah, I don't. I don't really
know how that would go down. Is what I'm saying
is is that these elephants were sending me messages when
I worked at the zoo and telling me do not
put Steven Tyler on my back, um, and do not
make my ancestor the wooly mammoth do the same. Yeah,
well they traveling and the monkeys, though the monkeys probably
(14:53):
had it coming. Yeah, a quick plug for an upcoming
Discovery show and let's Discovery BBC product. But Human Planet
about all these like amazing things that indigenous groups and
tribes continued to perform in the world. One of them. Uh,
one of the sequences shows this, uh, this tribesman who's
(15:14):
like taking out he's a farmer, not a farmer, he's
a hurd herdsman. He's hurting these cows and he has
to take him to this one watering hole otherwise they're
all going to die. And he gets there and the
elephants have already claimed it and he has to drive
the elephants away with like a stick. And there's a
huge chance he's gonna get trampled. It's it's it's great,
you should all right the promise of trampling. Yell. But
(15:34):
back to back to cloning. Another interesting thing about our
our buddy Akira here is that is that in Japan,
human cloning is currently severely frowned on illegally even punishable
by ten years in prison. Uh so he's just kind
of working this out of his system with Wooly Mammo.
Maybe the hand of humans maybe, Yeah, that's a whole
(15:56):
ethical quagmire in and of itself. But but but even that,
like human cloning, you can you can get more into
the the the idea that this is something that can
that can benefit humanity, that we can learn a lot
about about our ourselves, of our bodies and the treatment
of diseases. But that's completely off the table. So let's
clone Willie mammoths. Where it seems like the area of
(16:18):
of really beneficial scientific achievement is um it's maybe a
little slimmer, Yeah, definitely. In fact, there's a woman name
by the name of Patul kiss Arslan and she's a
postdoctoral fellow UM with NASA Astrobiology Institute Center for Reallybisomal
Origins and Evolution. And she actually gave a talk at
the Atlanta Science tavern Um a couple of days ago.
(16:41):
It was really interesting, And she works with ancient genes
and ancient genes as you know, exactly a super very
holy um that ancient geans, as you know, are are
in all of us, right in all life forms. Um,
there's the whole thing. Like like, the most relatable example
is why like a fetus early early in its development
(17:03):
looks the same and numerous species exactly why it might
have a tail, right or actually it does have a tail.
So if you see that in mammals right, Um, it
could end up being a fish or it could end
up being a human. So there's this the ancient genes
that are either going to um turn off or turn
on depending on what the species is. It could grow
up to be Richard Harris, it could grow up to
(17:24):
be a killer whale. You never know. Film reference. But
but Arslin, she was actually saying that they're basically using
these ancient genes as a genetic alphabet. It's it's a
common language for them to decode with. And so they're
taking ancient genes and they're taking something like a modern
day equal I, right, and they're putting those ancient genes
(17:48):
in with that, and they're looking to see what it does,
how it evolves, how how does it react to its environment,
and so, like you said, on a smaller scale or
like a less pacadermal um there they want to find
out with these ancient genes how they're going to react
because they feel like this can tell us something about
(18:08):
ourselves here on Earth, but also again out in the universe.
You know, if the primal life forms, UM, they're basically
evolving before our eyes. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's it
comes down to the whole principle of an understanding life
and contemplating life out of the world's the only model
of life that we have is the one we have here,
(18:28):
So we need to really understand that model and all
that it entails, UM and understand all the details, many
of the details as we can possibly uncover regarding its
genesis and it's uh in its development over time, and
then we can apply the same standards to contemplating what
may or may not be forming elsewhere in the universe. Yeah,
and Arsenin was actually um, she had a lot of
(18:51):
questions from the audience about the ethics of this because
and she basically said, look, I'm not doing the willing
mammoth here. What we're doing is we're just really trying
to find out where life came from, how did it emerge.
Picturing them is like sort of drunken accusations of like, hey,
where you get off cloning the mammoth man. No, it
(19:14):
was much more like, can you explain the rabbisome will
reaction and the extremphile environment so on and so forth
and how it um? But no, there was there was
no no drunkard heckling or anything like that. Um. Yeah, no,
it was all very civil. But there was beer and
that was nice. Um basically, I mean she didn't field
(19:37):
a lot of those questions. And what she said is, look,
scientists are pretty much self regulating. And when I when
I heard her say that, I thought, you know, that's
a lot of what we're talking about right now, is
um the same sort of topic that came up when
cloning was first put on the table, right we were
all scared that we were going to have versions of
ourselves out there or you know, all sorts of tinkering
(19:58):
that can go in. In fact, they are probably still
shoes surrounding that. But we have a better hold on
it now and we can see that you know, as
you said, like in Japan, it's against the law to
clone humans. So the idea is that this technology is here,
I's you used for exploration, but you know, when when
everything settles down, most likely you won't be creating these
(20:19):
Jurassic parks and you know, charging fifty dollars for admission.
But the hope at least, well that's yeah, that's the hope.
I don't know. You can you can sort of nitpick,
I guess, and make arguments about you know, various situations
where some sort of scientific achievements sort of leap frog
a little ahead of the common sense to keep it
in check, you know, like like looking back to days
when say cocaine was completely legal in the States, and
(20:42):
like people were drinking it and their soda water and
and buying it, you know before they go out and
work at the docks. And then eventually people are like, oh,
maybe we should out love this or granted, these are
very different issues, you know, very different social issues than
than cloning, but but also like got when you look
at at music on the internet, the pirrating of music
(21:05):
and the whole argument that well, we just we let
it get ahead and get ahead of ourselves and suddenly
everybody sharing music and we didn't even think about putting
the various rules in place and the various barriers in
place to to shape it the way we wanted to
shape it. So the cart before the horse Yeah, but
I I guess so far, I mean, with cloning, it
seems like we've done a good job of staying staying
(21:26):
ahead of the technology, uh and keeping it sort of
closed in so it doesn't just go wild. Yeah, and
so again that's the hope here. Yeah, but someone like
myself doesn't have anyander tall or wily mammoth or dodo
bird in their backyard. Well, here's the thing too, about
about neandertals and and dodo birds and the idea of
(21:46):
bringing them back because we had a well, because we
had a hand in their extinction, um, in which you
can make a better case with things like dodos, which
you can clearly say, yes, humans kill off the dodo
Neander tolls is a little more complex issue, as we
discussed in our up plant in the Andertals podcast. But
but then you have thinks like just today, at the
(22:06):
day we recorded this, New York Times had an article
of the Eastern cougar being officially declared extinct um. And
then and then there are there are other more recent
uh extinctions that can be laid at the feet of humans,
such as the Asiatic cheetah and the Tasmanian tiger, and
both of those, there are efforts in place to to
collect the genetic information we would need and prepare to
(22:29):
clone them. And of course even if you could clone them,
there they're huge obstacles to to bringing an extinct species back.
I mean, they're huge obstacles to to bringing a near
extinct species back. The genetic diversity will be shrunk down
so much that you know, it's like, oh, well, now
we have a million deer, but they're also in bred
that it's just ridiculous. So but but I'm kind of rambling,
(22:51):
but my point is the mammoth is slightly old news,
so I can I can more easily get behind efforts
to bring back more recently extinct species. No, and that's
a lot of people, actually, that's what they say when
they were there were being critical of um bringing back
the wooly mammoth. This are saying, why don't we just
concentrate on what we have right now and try to
(23:12):
preserve as much as possible, you know, our existing biodiversity.
So we'll let me I'm in the last person to
accuse scientists of playing god, but I mean it is
one of those things where it's like wooly mammoth extinct,
not if I have anything to say about it, and
then you know, push the button bring them back. It's
kind of like, you know, just completely you know, sticking
(23:33):
it to fate and sticking it to history saying yeah,
I'm I'm human, I'm awesome, and I just brought back
a wooly mammoth. That's right. Yeah. Next thing, you know,
Ted Turner has a has a line of steak restaurants.
Open the big big statue of wooly mammoth out front.
You're gonna each mammoth burger and guys are going crazy
because it's the most masculine thing ever. And I actually
(23:53):
saw this spoof online. I'm hoping it's a spoof, and
it was like Ted Nugent is just giving like tenta
and dollars to the research of bringing back the wooly
mammoth so that he can hunt them. Hunt okay, yes,
hunt okay to hunt them? Yes. Yeah, sorry, I'm a
little kneedsal, a little colder hunt. Well, I mean Ted's
pretty wild dude, so so yes. But Ted Nugent is
(24:16):
exactly the type of person I'm talking about. You can
easily see him either hunting or a mammoth once it's
been cloned, hunting or or indeed making beef turkey out
of it and selling it online. Right, you know that's
the dark side of this. I suppose, yes, the nugent factor,
but we need to start using the the nugent factor. Yeah,
there's the Branson factor, which is like the more benign
(24:39):
and the nugent factor not sup benign. All right, then
there you go. Yeply mammoths, ancient jeans, and hey, I
think we have some listener mail to wash all that
down with. Let's check it out, all right, um, our
listener j writes in, and Jay says, Jays from Arkansas.
(25:01):
By the way, I just finished listening to your podcast
on doppelgangers, and I really enjoyed it. I have an
additional phenomenon to mention that I believe falls into a
into a category all its own when talking about doppelgangers.
I have experienced this three different times that I can remember.
In each time it happens, it really creeps me out.
Here it goes. I will be walking through a public
place such as a mall or grocery store, when I
(25:22):
see something, when I see someone that I hadn't seen
in a long time, An old friend, a former teacher,
a co worker, someone from my childhood, et cetera. However,
when I get closer to them and prepare to greet them,
I realized that it's not them at all. It's someone
that looks very much like them. They're doppelganger, I suppose.
So I turned and going about my business, shopping or
whatever I'm there to do. But the really creepy twist
(25:43):
is that before I leave this place, I run into
the person that I thought I saw earlier, the real
person this time. Three times this has happened to me,
and it's forced me to think, Okay, was it the
real person the first time and I just thought it
was someone else because it has has been a long
time since I've seen them, Or was it really adoptel
ganger that reminded me of an old friend? And then
by chance, I ended up seeing the very person the
(26:06):
same day in the very same place. Whatever it was,
it really makes me wonder. It's sort of a surreal experience. Huh.
You know, I I've had I've had similar experiences, but
it's not that I've run into the person that's but
I was really thinking a lot about that person, and
then all of a sudden, they turned up out of nowhere,
and it's someone who hadn't been in my life for
a long time. Yeah, well, that's just your mental powers
of reality, right right, that's just the um visible strings
(26:30):
pulling them towards me. Right. Well, now Jay doesn't mention
um and he just says he's from Arkansas. If Jay
were perhaps from a small like a really small town
in Arkansas, and I could see where one could potentially
have one of these and mis identification syndromes going on,
and and then we're actually run into the people that
(26:50):
they're misseeing. I don't know, that's that's a very nonclinical
look at the situation. It's a nice shot though. Yeah,
but I would I would say it sounds like this
is more just sort of a curiosity in Jay's life.
But but again I will stress that if you do
have a situation where you really think you're encountering double
gang ers are mysterious doubles, are weird twins that shouldn't exist,
(27:13):
you should definitely go to a doctor about it because
it's probably a probably some sort of mental disturbance, and
it might be there are many of these that are
easily treated too, So it's not necessarily like if I
go to the doctor about this, my life is over
and I'm gonna be an institution. No, there there's a
way out on Yeah, there's there's our treatments for these
types of things. But hey, j thanks for sharing that
(27:34):
with us. We'd love to hear about about really cool,
kind of weird experiences like this because the and you
know when and and we've been completely non judgmental about
these because because we've discussed in a number of these
there are there are things that can go on in
in in life, in in your in your head that
are just that're gonna be a little weird and uh
and they're they're they're tied to natural phenomena. But but
(27:58):
but they'll they'll really throw you for a yes, And
I have to say, I'm probably the last person that
can judge in this area, um as I've already talked
about my own weird dreams and experiences. So yeah, there
you go. Non judgment zones. So hey, if you have
any coppelganger experiences in your life, if you have thoughts
on bringing back wooly mammoths, um, if you would like
(28:19):
to ride, hunt, or eat a wooly mammoth hunt. Then
let us know. You'll find us on Facebook and Twitter
as blow the Mind, and you can always drop us
a line at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
(28:40):
the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper
right corner of our homepage. The how stuff Works iPhone
app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. And
you know what's making a comeback, Julie m m Jean shorts. Well, yes,
but what else? Asid washed geen shorts. Yes, asid washed
(00:25):
gean shorts. But what else? The wooly mammoth? Possibly? Okay,
all right, that's good. That's good news. Well is it?
I don't know. Well, I just have this menagerae of
animals in my backyard and that would be great to
add the wooly mammoth too, Oh yes, yeah, with the
Dodo bird two would be pretty great too, yeah. Or
the Neandertal, our old friend, Oh yeah, Neider Tall of
(00:46):
the awesome Roman around. Yeah. It seems like if you,
if you pay any attention to the science news, there
are all these stories coming down the pike pretty regularly,
and it's always, let's bring We're bringing back the Neandertal.
Wooly mammoth's coming. We're going to clone them, clone them up,
fill our backyards with them, put them on display, study
of them, and everyone gets really excited about it because
(01:07):
it is a fantastic idea. Here's this extinct creature that
we all grew up looking at in picture books and
uh and suddenly it might actually be around us very
own Jurassic Park, so to speak, exactly the Jurassic Park
factor without the dinosaurs. Yeah, and people get pretty up
in arms about it. Actually, Yes, so we're gonna talk
(01:29):
about that today. Um, but also talking about like maybe
how they shouldn't get so up in arms, but that
there is a possibility that the wooly mammoth could be
coming to a backyard near you pretty soon. Yes, yeah, um,
and we have the Genome Project to thank for that. Yeah.
And this is all about just just just meticulously mapping, um,
(01:50):
the genomic structure behind basically the recipe for the mammoth
in the same way that we've we've taken the human
genome and and looked at that, in the same that
we the way that we event analyze the Neanderthal genome
and uh and in various either there's like the canine
Genome project, there's a uh, there's also the that the
(02:11):
one related to two chimps. I mean that it's all
about taking these species and just understanding them at very
small levels and very detailed levels, right, and just to
get you know, a little bit more specific about it,
where he has a handle on the Human Genome Project,
which really helped to drive a lot of what astrobiology
is doing these days. So the Genome Project, what it
(02:33):
meant to do is to basically take the complete string
of nucleotide letters that make up the DNA sequence in ourselves, um,
which is referred to as the genome. And this DNA
sequence contained in a genome contains the complete code that
determines which genes and proteins will be present in human cells.
Basically what sort of attributes we have that are going
to turn on and off, right. Um. So that project
(02:56):
started in the nineties and it ended about two thousand
and one. And so you do see this field of
astrobiology really benefiting from this, and paleontologists in particular really
saying okay, now now we can take all these different
cells that we have, you know, we've thought this trilobyte sample,
and we can try to map this on other organisms,
you know, just from really simple life forms to like
(03:19):
you said that the humans, um, the human humans and
the inner tools um. So it's brought us to this
present point where we have this Jurassic Park like possibility
looming ahead of us. Yeah, the Jurassic Park factor is
pretty big here. Um. And on one hand, I do
have to point out Jurassic Park, the movie, the book,
(03:40):
both of those. The big draw there was was the
fact that people were going through this park and seeing
these animals. Then the chaos happens by necessity, since it's
you know, it's a fiction, it's a novel, it's a thriller.
But with both of them, like when I watched them
and read them as a as a kid, I didn't
want anything bad to go wrong. I was like, let's
let's just continue this ride. This sounds like a great place, right. Uh.
(04:00):
And they they've introduced a number of of scientific ideas,
So I mean, this was not Carnossaur. This was Jurassic Park.
This was you know, Michael Crichton, So there was there.
He put a great deal of scientific thought into this.
One was looking at actual actual research. But still it
paints a very optimistic picture of what bringing back an
(04:21):
extinct animal would be like. Um. Like, basically, as I recall,
they uh, they weren't able to they were able to
extract DNA from blood in a mosquito that is preserved
in amber. Now, of course DNA degrades over time, so
you would have to fill in the blanks. And this
is a sixty five year old, million million old sample
(04:43):
that we're talking ancient, ancient, and so it's pretty incomplete
in terms of having a good specimen to work with. Yeah,
it's like having like, imagine the most waterlogged, raggedy um
copy of The Great Gatsby. Imaginable, it's been in your
grandparents basement and a waterlog Great, you get it out
and you go to read it. Most of the words,
(05:03):
most of the letters are just completely illegible. Whole chapters
are missing. So you fill in the gaps, right, you
think the characters Daisy fuentas. Yeah, and you you might
look at to look to more recent books and say, well,
here's a book that was you know, obviously this is
influenced by the Great Gatsby. Let me just fill in
the blanks with that, and uh in doing in doing
that with within this book. Example, Sure, you could you
(05:25):
could put together a book, uh and that you could
probably read. It would probably makes sense, but it wouldn't
really be the Great Gatsby. So that's what the whole
Jurrassic Park thing was. Well, let's go to amphiby ends.
We're gonna fill in the blanks. We're gonna somehow get
this a genetic material into an egg. I don't remember
the detail on how they got the eggs, because, as
(05:46):
we'll discuss, that's a big thing once you know, how
are you where are you going to grow this? Um?
And uh And then they were, you know, they were
hatching these things dinosaurs everywhere, et cetera. Yeah. Well, and
in the case of the mammoth creation project, which sort
of takes off that same idea. Um, you know, of
course we've got the mammoth which have been extinct for
(06:07):
ten years, but we do have frozen mammoths. We have
exactly from the Russian permafrost. So these are well preserved,
far far better preserved preserved than you'll find any kind
of dinosaur remains. Um, you know, much more recent, much
much better material to work with, which gives us that promise.
Right and Professor Akira Irtani in Japan has been working
(06:29):
on bringing back the Wooly for about thirteen years, and
once Wooly Mammoth's yesterday Yeah, he does. He does, and
he's uh, I don't really know what his exact intentions are,
it's hard to say, but he does have a sort
of line of logic and saying, well, you know, humans
might have been responsible for um, for them going extinct,
so we have to pay them back by resurrecting them,
(06:50):
which sounds just like really like a bad version of
pet cemetery to me. Yeah, indeed, I had to look
up pet cemetery again when we were talking about it,
just to mind every been Stephen King novel Pets Die
see Barium in the Indian burial ground news a wind
to go or something, and they come back to life
and they're they're not right, and they're potentially evil. And
(07:11):
this is where we have the quote sometimes dead is
better and another great quote that I got off good Reads.
What's been tried once has been tried once before and
before and before, so I need to read it again.
It was really disturbing book. Yeah, and it also flies
in the face of like Stephen Jay gold Gold, Who's
who's saying, like, you know what, all all of what
is happening in the genes and an evolution is by
(07:33):
chance essentially um not necessarily by chance, but survival of
the fattest um and all these different conditions. You can't
recreate this. So it's definitely flying in the face of
what we've thought about what evolution is. Yeah, and it's
all I mean, I don't know how much we want
to get into it at this point, but just the
idea of of bringing back wooly mammoth's in an age
(07:53):
where we don't really have room for elephants anymore. You know.
It's like the the elephants of their territory greatly reduce
their animals that basically need like a large portion of
a continent to roam around on, and they're even in
the best of situations, they're they're greatly confined. Their numbers
are often really endangered. Yeah, I mean we've seen examples
of like marauding gangs of them invading villages and it's
(08:16):
a territorial thing. They're not looking for beer as as
we might have previously thought. Yeah, and so suddenly we're like, oh,
let's bring some moy mamoths back to It's kind of
like you if you encounter like that family member who
who has like a perfectly good car that is that
needs some attention. And then then suddenly they were like,
I'm going to restore this, uh, you know, nineteen fifties.
What have you like pay attention to that? You don't.
(08:36):
You can't even take care of this car. Why what
are you gonna get this one for? You're not even
taking good care of the elephants we have, right, so
why are you bothering with the mammoth? Well, and this
is the problem, right because professor a cure Tommy, he is,
he's doing this, right, he's his His idea is to
remove the nucleus from an egg cell of an elephant
(08:57):
and replace it with DNA from a frozen wooly mammoth
like you mentioned. Huh, and so this could theoretically create
an embryo which would be implanted into an elephant uterus. Yeah.
This is another really key advantage of cloning the wooly
mammot is that it has a very close relative still
alive and driving today, despite our best efforts to make
an extend. Actually they're divergent species, right, yeah, yeah, so
(09:19):
much closer relative. Whereas a dinosaur. You know, good luck,
you know, getting a chicken to lay a dinosaur egg,
and you know it's there's just a lot a lot
more distance there between the the thing we're trying to
clone in the more recent model, right, And so I
mean a cur aritany is really he's making steps towards us,
and he feels like he'll be able to do this
(09:40):
in the next five years. And many people in the
science community and helieve well, no, they believe that it
can happen. And sort of people are on the on
different sides of the front. Some sometimes justs are like, Yeah,
that's great, that's awesome, we should do that. We should
we can study this like we've got the closest living
relative living right now, and if we resurrect this ancient creature,
then we can study them side by side and learn
(10:01):
maybe a little bit more about life, you know, back
in the day um, and other people are saying, well,
that's not really necessary. Um. But in the meantime, there's
something called Pisascene Park and there's a man named Sergey
Zimov who's a conservationist who runs the park, and he's
actually trying to recreate the natural habitat that existed in
(10:23):
the area ten thousand years ago by reintroducing animals that
were indigenous to that area, including reindeer, wild horses, and bison.
And he says, my responsibility is to prepare the mammoth
ecosystem a landscape typical for the mammoth. Therefore, if some
crazy people have found enough money and they revived the mammoth,
we will be ready. You know. He has he has
(10:44):
a letter room to throw crazy does what I thought too.
I was like, oh, yeah, they're they're the crazy people.
And and again it comes down to like, let's why
why maybe he should help focus our energy and preserving
existing environments that are vanishing and disappearing rather than ones
that are long gone right, right, And actually there's a
man named Adrian Lister. He's a paleontologist and in London,
(11:08):
I believe, and he says that it's natural habitat of
the mammoth has more or less disappeared. That's probably why
it went extinct extinct in the first place, many thousands
of years ago, because the kind of grassland habitat of
the far North that it formerly lived in doesn't exist anymore,
so you would have to keep it in captivity. Yeah.
It's kind of like if someone was like, we're going
to bring Ragtime back, and you'd be like, well, good
(11:29):
luck finding a market for that. That's why it's not
around anymore, because nobody wants it. Oh no, I'd listened
to some ragtime. A few people will listen to some ragtime,
but I don't see it. You know, shot popping up
on the top four you like me? Some tinny piano
ever went in a while. This presentation is brought to
you by Intel, sponsors of tomorrow. But again, you know,
(11:57):
the only mammoth has huge potential here in scientists in
two thousand and eight have already sequenced the wooly mammoth
genome so um. What was cool about that part of
it is that they were able to find out more
about the wooly mammoth's um with their environment might have
been like, and why they went extinct. So here's here's
the other side of the fence where people are saying, yes,
(12:18):
let's pursue this path, not necessarily resurrect them, but let's,
you know, map the genome and let's find out more
about the circumstances. Because ultimately, astrobiologists want to get to
the down to the brass tacks here of life as
it originated, as it survived, as it when extinct in
how that implicates our universe, not just our Earth. Are
(12:40):
there space mammoths maybe there could be, could be? Yeah,
they're out fair right now, little helmets on. Well, the
other thing that I like about like speaking of it
in terms of not necessarily putting putting the genetic material
into the living packet arm and having it to give
birth to holy math. Because our cloning technology continues to advance,
but it's not perfect yet. I mean, we're we're it
(13:01):
still has has very high percentage levels of failure. Um
The embryos are often either not suitable from planning into
the fetus or they die sometime during gestation or shortly
after birth. So I like elephants, and you know, I'm
not really crazy about the idea of let's let's impregnate
this artificially impregnate this elephant with some offspring that is
(13:25):
arguably doomed to die. You know, I have to say
that when I worked at the zoo, or worked at
a zoo, I should say, the zoo views you in
the world a zoo. I would have these nightmares every
once while, and they always involved elephants, and it was
like messages from the elephants saying like, you gotta get
us out of here, or we're going to just run
(13:47):
wild and uh, you know, run over all the monkeys
and the small children. Um. But it was always like that.
In fact, Steven Tyler once showed up in the dream
riding the horse, like the horse excuse me, and there's odds, yeah,
riding the elephant out of the zoo. So yes, I
mean I feel, you know, at least if I haven't
thought about it consciously, subconsciously, it does seem like there's
(14:09):
for me at least a problem with that scenario of
resurrectoring the wooly mammoth because you hate just for our pleasure. No, no,
I hear them. No, I like them. I like him.
That's how I felt that I was sort of connecting
to them in that vel. So it's like, let's create
this animal and then put in a zoo or a
lab or some crazy dudes recreation of his reindeer infested
(14:33):
recreation of prehistoric times. Yeah, I don't. I don't really
know how that would go down. Is what I'm saying
is is that these elephants were sending me messages when
I worked at the zoo and telling me do not
put Steven Tyler on my back, um, and do not
make my ancestor the wooly mammoth do the same. Yeah,
well they traveling and the monkeys, though the monkeys probably
(14:53):
had it coming. Yeah, a quick plug for an upcoming
Discovery show and let's Discovery BBC product. But Human Planet
about all these like amazing things that indigenous groups and
tribes continued to perform in the world. One of them. Uh,
one of the sequences shows this, uh, this tribesman who's
(15:14):
like taking out he's a farmer, not a farmer, he's
a hurd herdsman. He's hurting these cows and he has
to take him to this one watering hole otherwise they're
all going to die. And he gets there and the
elephants have already claimed it and he has to drive
the elephants away with like a stick. And there's a
huge chance he's gonna get trampled. It's it's it's great,
you should all right the promise of trampling. Yell. But
(15:34):
back to back to cloning. Another interesting thing about our
our buddy Akira here is that is that in Japan,
human cloning is currently severely frowned on illegally even punishable
by ten years in prison. Uh so he's just kind
of working this out of his system with Wooly Mammo.
Maybe the hand of humans maybe, Yeah, that's a whole
(15:56):
ethical quagmire in and of itself. But but but even that,
like human cloning, you can you can get more into
the the the idea that this is something that can
that can benefit humanity, that we can learn a lot
about about our ourselves, of our bodies and the treatment
of diseases. But that's completely off the table. So let's
clone Willie mammoths. Where it seems like the area of
(16:18):
of really beneficial scientific achievement is um it's maybe a
little slimmer, Yeah, definitely. In fact, there's a woman name
by the name of Patul kiss Arslan and she's a
postdoctoral fellow UM with NASA Astrobiology Institute Center for Reallybisomal
Origins and Evolution. And she actually gave a talk at
the Atlanta Science tavern Um a couple of days ago.
(16:41):
It was really interesting, And she works with ancient genes
and ancient genes as you know, exactly a super very
holy um that ancient geans, as you know, are are
in all of us, right in all life forms. Um,
there's the whole thing. Like like, the most relatable example
is why like a fetus early early in its development
(17:03):
looks the same and numerous species exactly why it might
have a tail, right or actually it does have a tail.
So if you see that in mammals right, Um, it
could end up being a fish or it could end
up being a human. So there's this the ancient genes
that are either going to um turn off or turn
on depending on what the species is. It could grow
up to be Richard Harris, it could grow up to
(17:24):
be a killer whale. You never know. Film reference. But
but Arslin, she was actually saying that they're basically using
these ancient genes as a genetic alphabet. It's it's a
common language for them to decode with. And so they're
taking ancient genes and they're taking something like a modern
day equal I, right, and they're putting those ancient genes
(17:48):
in with that, and they're looking to see what it does,
how it evolves, how how does it react to its environment,
and so, like you said, on a smaller scale or
like a less pacadermal um there they want to find
out with these ancient genes how they're going to react
because they feel like this can tell us something about
(18:08):
ourselves here on Earth, but also again out in the universe.
You know, if the primal life forms, UM, they're basically
evolving before our eyes. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's it
comes down to the whole principle of an understanding life
and contemplating life out of the world's the only model
of life that we have is the one we have here,
(18:28):
So we need to really understand that model and all
that it entails, UM and understand all the details, many
of the details as we can possibly uncover regarding its
genesis and it's uh in its development over time, and
then we can apply the same standards to contemplating what
may or may not be forming elsewhere in the universe. Yeah,
and Arsenin was actually um, she had a lot of
(18:51):
questions from the audience about the ethics of this because
and she basically said, look, I'm not doing the willing
mammoth here. What we're doing is we're just really trying
to find out where life came from, how did it emerge.
Picturing them is like sort of drunken accusations of like, hey,
where you get off cloning the mammoth man. No, it
(19:14):
was much more like, can you explain the rabbisome will
reaction and the extremphile environment so on and so forth
and how it um? But no, there was there was
no no drunkard heckling or anything like that. Um. Yeah, no,
it was all very civil. But there was beer and
that was nice. Um basically, I mean she didn't field
(19:37):
a lot of those questions. And what she said is, look,
scientists are pretty much self regulating. And when I when
I heard her say that, I thought, you know, that's
a lot of what we're talking about right now, is
um the same sort of topic that came up when
cloning was first put on the table, right we were
all scared that we were going to have versions of
ourselves out there or you know, all sorts of tinkering
(19:58):
that can go in. In fact, they are probably still
shoes surrounding that. But we have a better hold on
it now and we can see that you know, as
you said, like in Japan, it's against the law to
clone humans. So the idea is that this technology is here,
I's you used for exploration, but you know, when when
everything settles down, most likely you won't be creating these
(20:19):
Jurassic parks and you know, charging fifty dollars for admission.
But the hope at least, well that's yeah, that's the hope.
I don't know. You can you can sort of nitpick,
I guess, and make arguments about you know, various situations
where some sort of scientific achievements sort of leap frog
a little ahead of the common sense to keep it
in check, you know, like like looking back to days
when say cocaine was completely legal in the States, and
(20:42):
like people were drinking it and their soda water and
and buying it, you know before they go out and
work at the docks. And then eventually people are like, oh,
maybe we should out love this or granted, these are
very different issues, you know, very different social issues than
than cloning, but but also like got when you look
at at music on the internet, the pirrating of music
(21:05):
and the whole argument that well, we just we let
it get ahead and get ahead of ourselves and suddenly
everybody sharing music and we didn't even think about putting
the various rules in place and the various barriers in
place to to shape it the way we wanted to
shape it. So the cart before the horse Yeah, but
I I guess so far, I mean, with cloning, it
seems like we've done a good job of staying staying
(21:26):
ahead of the technology, uh and keeping it sort of
closed in so it doesn't just go wild. Yeah, and
so again that's the hope here. Yeah, but someone like
myself doesn't have anyander tall or wily mammoth or dodo
bird in their backyard. Well, here's the thing too, about
about neandertals and and dodo birds and the idea of
(21:46):
bringing them back because we had a well, because we
had a hand in their extinction, um, in which you
can make a better case with things like dodos, which
you can clearly say, yes, humans kill off the dodo
Neander tolls is a little more complex issue, as we
discussed in our up plant in the Andertals podcast. But
but then you have thinks like just today, at the
(22:06):
day we recorded this, New York Times had an article
of the Eastern cougar being officially declared extinct um. And
then and then there are there are other more recent
uh extinctions that can be laid at the feet of humans,
such as the Asiatic cheetah and the Tasmanian tiger, and
both of those, there are efforts in place to to
collect the genetic information we would need and prepare to
(22:29):
clone them. And of course even if you could clone them,
there they're huge obstacles to to bringing an extinct species back.
I mean, they're huge obstacles to to bringing a near
extinct species back. The genetic diversity will be shrunk down
so much that you know, it's like, oh, well, now
we have a million deer, but they're also in bred
that it's just ridiculous. So but but I'm kind of rambling,
(22:51):
but my point is the mammoth is slightly old news,
so I can I can more easily get behind efforts
to bring back more recently extinct species. No, and that's
a lot of people, actually, that's what they say when
they were there were being critical of um bringing back
the wooly mammoth. This are saying, why don't we just
concentrate on what we have right now and try to
(23:12):
preserve as much as possible, you know, our existing biodiversity.
So we'll let me I'm in the last person to
accuse scientists of playing god, but I mean it is
one of those things where it's like wooly mammoth extinct,
not if I have anything to say about it, and
then you know, push the button bring them back. It's
kind of like, you know, just completely you know, sticking
(23:33):
it to fate and sticking it to history saying yeah,
I'm I'm human, I'm awesome, and I just brought back
a wooly mammoth. That's right. Yeah. Next thing, you know,
Ted Turner has a has a line of steak restaurants.
Open the big big statue of wooly mammoth out front.
You're gonna each mammoth burger and guys are going crazy
because it's the most masculine thing ever. And I actually
(23:53):
saw this spoof online. I'm hoping it's a spoof, and
it was like Ted Nugent is just giving like tenta
and dollars to the research of bringing back the wooly
mammoth so that he can hunt them. Hunt okay, yes,
hunt okay to hunt them? Yes. Yeah, sorry, I'm a
little kneedsal, a little colder hunt. Well, I mean Ted's
pretty wild dude, so so yes. But Ted Nugent is
(24:16):
exactly the type of person I'm talking about. You can
easily see him either hunting or a mammoth once it's
been cloned, hunting or or indeed making beef turkey out
of it and selling it online. Right, you know that's
the dark side of this. I suppose, yes, the nugent factor,
but we need to start using the the nugent factor. Yeah,
there's the Branson factor, which is like the more benign
(24:39):
and the nugent factor not sup benign. All right, then
there you go. Yeply mammoths, ancient jeans, and hey, I
think we have some listener mail to wash all that
down with. Let's check it out, all right, um, our
listener j writes in, and Jay says, Jays from Arkansas.
(25:01):
By the way, I just finished listening to your podcast
on doppelgangers, and I really enjoyed it. I have an
additional phenomenon to mention that I believe falls into a
into a category all its own when talking about doppelgangers.
I have experienced this three different times that I can remember.
In each time it happens, it really creeps me out.
Here it goes. I will be walking through a public
place such as a mall or grocery store, when I
(25:22):
see something, when I see someone that I hadn't seen
in a long time, An old friend, a former teacher,
a co worker, someone from my childhood, et cetera. However,
when I get closer to them and prepare to greet them,
I realized that it's not them at all. It's someone
that looks very much like them. They're doppelganger, I suppose.
So I turned and going about my business, shopping or
whatever I'm there to do. But the really creepy twist
(25:43):
is that before I leave this place, I run into
the person that I thought I saw earlier, the real
person this time. Three times this has happened to me,
and it's forced me to think, Okay, was it the
real person the first time and I just thought it
was someone else because it has has been a long
time since I've seen them, Or was it really adoptel
ganger that reminded me of an old friend? And then
by chance, I ended up seeing the very person the
(26:06):
same day in the very same place. Whatever it was,
it really makes me wonder. It's sort of a surreal experience. Huh.
You know, I I've had I've had similar experiences, but
it's not that I've run into the person that's but
I was really thinking a lot about that person, and
then all of a sudden, they turned up out of nowhere,
and it's someone who hadn't been in my life for
a long time. Yeah, well, that's just your mental powers
of reality, right right, that's just the um visible strings
(26:30):
pulling them towards me. Right. Well, now Jay doesn't mention
um and he just says he's from Arkansas. If Jay
were perhaps from a small like a really small town
in Arkansas, and I could see where one could potentially
have one of these and mis identification syndromes going on,
and and then we're actually run into the people that
(26:50):
they're misseeing. I don't know, that's that's a very nonclinical
look at the situation. It's a nice shot though. Yeah,
but I would I would say it sounds like this
is more just sort of a curiosity in Jay's life.
But but again I will stress that if you do
have a situation where you really think you're encountering double
gang ers are mysterious doubles, are weird twins that shouldn't exist,
(27:13):
you should definitely go to a doctor about it because
it's probably a probably some sort of mental disturbance, and
it might be there are many of these that are
easily treated too, So it's not necessarily like if I
go to the doctor about this, my life is over
and I'm gonna be an institution. No, there there's a
way out on Yeah, there's there's our treatments for these
types of things. But hey, j thanks for sharing that
(27:34):
with us. We'd love to hear about about really cool,
kind of weird experiences like this because the and you
know when and and we've been completely non judgmental about
these because because we've discussed in a number of these
there are there are things that can go on in
in in life, in in your in your head that
are just that're gonna be a little weird and uh
and they're they're they're tied to natural phenomena. But but
(27:58):
but they'll they'll really throw you for a yes, And
I have to say, I'm probably the last person that
can judge in this area, um as I've already talked
about my own weird dreams and experiences. So yeah, there
you go. Non judgment zones. So hey, if you have
any coppelganger experiences in your life, if you have thoughts
on bringing back wooly mammoths, um, if you would like
(28:19):
to ride, hunt, or eat a wooly mammoth hunt. Then
let us know. You'll find us on Facebook and Twitter
as blow the Mind, and you can always drop us
a line at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
(28:40):
the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper
right corner of our homepage. The how stuff Works iPhone
app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!