A Living Breathing Wooly Mammoth Clone In 5 Years

Michael Crichton’s masterful Jurassic Park series, other than creating piles of cash for him and Universal Studios, brought the idea of cloning extinct creatures into a mainstream fascination. Since researchers recovered intact bone marrow from the thigh bone of a wooly mammoth found partially mummified in the Siberian permafrost, there have been whispers of bringing the extinct back to life through the wonders of genetic cloning. Now, according to a team of Russian and Japanese scientists that will be working on the project, we may have a living, breathing mammoth in five years.

Russia’s Sakha Republic Mammoth Museum and Japan’s Kinki University have project team to resurrect the wooly mammoth, which has been extinct for 10,000 years. They will do this by reconstructing the proteins within mammoth DNA, some of which they’ve already done. One the DNA sequence has been replicated, one can grow the nuclei of a mammoth cell, placing that nuclei inside a modern-day elephant’s egg (you take the elephant’s nuclei out, of course). This exchange will, supposedly, allow the birth of the first wooly mammoth in ten millennia. Kind of a crazy thought, right?

Here’s another one, that mammoth lived in an era characterized by an ice age. Human activity was miniscule compared to what it is now. During the last ice age much of the world’s fresh water, including much of the world’s bacteria, viruses, and other mono-cellular organisms were locked up in that ice. In addition, much of the world’s biomass has evolved and changed since the era of the mammoth. Today we are at the advent of the next large warming trend (like the one that supposedly killed off the mammoths in the first place), and live in a world that is very very different than the one in which the mammoth had been intended by nature to live. What’s to say that the first breath this mammoth calf takes doesn’t give it a life-ending case of bronchitis? Scientists have postulated that the elephant mother’s genetic material may help to afford some immunities that the wooly mammoth DNA may not provide itself.

Finally, there’s the moral question. We have hundreds of pieces of extracted DNA from various now extinct creatures. We have postulated about everything from the return of the mammoth to recreating an ancient ecosystem (a la Jurassic Park). However, at the same time, some scientists are discussing the use cryogenics to preserve the last the nearly extinct species that are native to our time. This shows a kind of sick dischord in priorities, we’re looking at freezing (killing) the last members of a dying species, and reanimating the long dead specimens of an extinct one.