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South Korean Scientists Prepare To Clone Wooly Mammoth
An anonymous reader writes "Last year Russian researchers discovered a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone and announced plans to clone a mammoth from the bone marrow within — and they just signed a deal with South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation to bring the project to fruition. The Sooam scientists plan to implant the nucleus of a woolly mammoth cell into an elephant egg in order to to create a mammoth embryo, which would then be placed in an elephant womb. 'This will be a really tough job,' Soaam reasearcher Hwang In-Sung said, 'but we believe it is possible because our institute is good at cloning animals.'" Not to be confused with a similar mammoth effort at mammoth-cloning at Kyoto University.
the elephant might go extinct like the rhino due to poachers. At least we'll have mammoths. >.>
I guess the optimist would go,"If we have the tech to do it for mammoths, we can get back other extinct life forms."
God spoke to me
There's not really any way to know for sure without trying it. But there are a few reasons to be optimistic. We're talking genetically very similar animals (consider all the viable hybrids which occur naturally), and, when you think about it, the womb is a controlled environment. Once you have a highly evolved gestation system in place, selective pressure will tend to favor the existing system. (Look how similar embryos are, even across genetically distant species.)
If it doesn't work, well, now you figure out where things went wrong and try again. Hopefully you at least have a new batch of cell nuclei to work with.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
And what exactly do you think the mammoth ate? Snow and ice? How did the mommoth bodies get under the snow and ice? By digging through?