Russian Scientists Say They'll Clone a Mammoth Within 5 Years

Many scientists (mainly Japanese and Russian) have dreamed of cloning a mammoth over the years. When the mammoth genome was partially reconstructed in 2008, that dream seemed a bit closer. Besides the millions of dollars needed for such a project, the biggest hurdle was the lack of a good sample of mammoth DNA. That hurdle has now been cleared, thanks to the discovery of well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues from Japan's Kinki University say that within 5 years they'll likely have a clone. From the article: "What's been missing is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei since the late 1990s. Now it sounds like the missing genes may have been found."

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Re:Ice Age Park

[Anonymous Coward]

I think those numbers are for different things.

Something like this:
40 is for individes with diverse genes and with careful planing. ("generation ship" with 40 carefully chosen people for all over the world)
150-200 is for randomly chosen individuals (almost) randomly fucking each other. ("new world ship" not filled with sects members)
1700-2700 is for individes that already live close to each other and where most individes have a few relatives, (A small town getting isolated when the zombies attack.)