This is happening way sooner than
I had anticipated. The road appears clear to resurrect the mammoth species at
this time, or at least it is down to working out the details. I hope we do not have to master the art of creating
a viable nucleus from component parts.
Four years may be optimistic and
it may still end up been four years spread over ten. Yet it is time to think about we will do with
a resurrected herd of at least fifty animals we will want to produce some
genetic diversity. The Peace River Delta
sounds like a good plan to me and I am sure that the Russians will have some
great locates.
More importantly, this also opens
the door for the resurrection of the whole Pleistocene menagerie including dire
wolves, cave bears, and giant everything else.
It also opens the possibility of the resurrection of recently extinct
species such as the dodo and giant auk.
More poignantly, I would like to see the passenger pigeon restored.
A lot will not make it, but we
will feel far less guilty over our past behavior if we can create great refugia
holding such populations.
And then we have the curious observation
of soft tissue recovery from large dinosaurs.
Who knows where we will end up?
Mammoth 'could be reborn in four years'
The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought
back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning
technology.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo
Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin
and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because
they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.
But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the
Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from
the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.
Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University
"Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a
good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily
Telegraph.
He intends to use Dr Wakayama's technique to identify the nuclei of
viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.
The nuclei will then be inserted into the egg cells of an African
elephant, which will act as the surrogate mother for the mammoth.
Professor Iritani said he estimates that another two years will be
needed before the elephant can be impregnated, followed by the approximately
600-day gestation period.
He has announced plans to travel to Siberia
in the summer to search for mammoths in the permafrost and to recover a sample
of skin or tissue that can be as small as 3cm square.
If he is unsuccessful, the professor said, he will ask Russian
scientists to provide a sample from one of their finds.
"The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently
but now stands at about 30 per cent," he said. "I think we have a
reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or
five years."
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