Cloning Mammoths

Anonym Feigling writes "For your consideration... An article over at the New Zealand Herald discusses some of the challenges a japanes team faces as it attemps to develop a system to create a clone from 20,000 year-old mammoth tissue samples discovered in Siberia. It seems to me that shortly after death, any animal's/plant's "cellular repair mechanisms" (for the lack of a better...) will fail, and thus the probability of finding a single cell with perfectly intact DNA from which to create a clone is pretty well zero. Interesting stuff, but it seems that practical considerations (think code rot) would make it difficult."

Comments

Huh?

[FroMan]

IANAMolecularBiologist

I wonder why it is so hard to find a full set of DNA.

I'd have thought that we had the tech to get gobs of DNA from all the different cells that we can salvage then take peices, even if from different cells, and then recombine them to get one full peice?

In theory the DNA should be the same in each cell, so if you take just find where the overlaps are between broken peices... Ah, what do I know, I'm just a code monkey...

Re:Would you want to?

[mess31173]

But ask yourself: Why did they die out?

Odds are, the reason that they died out, along with around 70 other species of giant mammals around that time is us. Although some claim it could be weather. The article addresses both possiabilities.