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New Russian Laboratory To Study Mammoth Cloning
An anonymous reader writes: While plans to clone a woolly mammoth are not new, a lab used in a joint effort by Russia and South Korea is. The new facility is devoted to studying extinct animal DNA in the hope of creating clones from the remains of animals found in the permafrost. IBtimes reports: "The Sakha facility has the world's largest collection of frozen ancient animal carcasses and remains, with more than 2,000 samples in its possession, including some that are tens of thousands years old, such as a mammoth discovered on the island of Maly Lyakhovsky; experts believe it may be more than 28,000 years old."
He wants to ride a mammoth now!
Mammoth is not really a problem. a) we got them extinct the first time (if these rumours are true) and b) they are just elephants. We are very able to get them extinct in Africa, so no problem with that.
Yep, bringing back extinct megafauna with cloning and genetic engineering is no real worry.
It's the genetic engineering of microfauna that's more likely to go wrong and kill us all.
I knew I'd seen this: it was an April Fool's prank, in 1984. The paper has been cited repeatedly by foolish biology paper authors for the last 30 years.
http://hoaxes.org/af_database/...
I think it's time we admit to ourselves that sometimes, we want scientists to do certain things simply because they're cool. That should count as a perfectly adequate reason, so that we can stop this silly game of pretending that we need to do something cool because we inexplicably started caring a lot about settling some very small and boring scientific question.
I see this a lot when people discuss manned missions to Mars. It's a popular idea, but only because it's cool and full of symbolism we like. It's not because people suddenly became nerds about the history of the Martian regolith, and unmanned missions will simply not adequately satisfy their burning curiosity. Of course, the Mars mission would cost an insane fortune. I'm all for cool things, and humanity is pretty rich, but not that rich. Cloning a mammoth, on the other hand... We might be able to afford that!
here's a different perspective from someone who studies mammoths.
soylentnews.org