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Scientists Optimistic About Getting a Mammoth Genome Complete Enough To Clone

Posted by samzenpus on from the one-piece-at-a-time dept.

Clark Schultz writes The premise behind Jurassic Park just got a bit more real after scientists in South Korea said they are optimistic they can extract enough DNA from the blood of a preserved woolly mammoth to clone the long-extinct mammal. The ice-wrapped woolly mammoth was found last year on an island off of Siberia. The development is being closely watched by the scientific community with opinion sharply divided on the ethics of the project.

4 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Unethical? by xigxag · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not saying I agree, but from a link in the article:

    Dr Herridge questioned "whether or not the justifications for cloning a mammoth are worth the suffering, the concerns of keeping an elephant in captivity, experimenting on her, making her go through a 22-month pregnancy, to potentially give birth to something which won't live, or to carry something which could be damaging to her. And all of those aspects... I don't think that they are worth it; the reasons just aren't there."

    --
    There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
  2. Re:huh? by hodet · · Score: 1, Informative

    you know when you crack an egg in the pan and there is a little spec of blood. Quite common right? Well that is a fertilized egg. More common with free range chickens, because when chickens and roosters run around loose then...chickens gonna be chickens. Fertilized chicken egg, just as delicious and I don't lay awake at night thinking about it.

  3. Re:huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    You have been misinformed.

    1. Commercial laying houses do NOT have roosters running around with the hens. This would be pointless and uneconomical. When you buy a dozen eggs from the store, there is a zero percent chance that they will be fertilized.

    2. My family eats fertilized eggs daily. I cannot remember the last time I saw a speck of blood in an egg.

    Blood specks have nothing to do with the egg being fertilized.

  4. Re: huh? by davidrgreenberg · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not blood. It's a protein spot. It's more common in brown eggs because they're harder to screen with a backlight to weed out those eggs, although the spot is harmless.