I do think we are going
to nail the Mammoth and the complete Ice Age menagerie before too long. We may even recover viable stem cells to make
our life easy. I also think everything
else will be devilishly difficult in comparison but also not impossible either.
Others are also much
more optimistic but here we have a clear skeptic coming on side.
What I do know for sure
is that the birth of a fresh herd of living mammoths will be the news story of
the decade and will receive constant media attention. Maybe we should try to create a herd in the
Great Bear Rain Forest or better yet in the Appalachians. It is actually time to start thinking about
this.
Scientist:
e
by Staff Writers
London (UPI) Jul 31, 2013
A British researcher whose team cloned Dolly the
sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, says the technology could clone an
extinct woolly mammoth.
While a mammoth is unlikely to be cloned in exactly
the same way as the sheep, Ian Wilmut said, modern technology could convert tissue
cells from frozen mammoth carcasses into stem cells.
"While unlikely at present, the development of
some form of mammoth creature or hybrid might be possible in the longer term,
the research of which could lead to major biological discoveries and advances,"
he said on The Conversation, an academic website.
Mammoths lived in the late Pleistocene, tens of
thousands of years ago, before going extinct due to hunting and environmental
change.
Cells harvested from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses
might one day help resurrect the ancient animals, Wilmut said.
"I've always been very skeptical about the
whole idea, but it dawned on me that if you could clear the first hurdle of
getting viable cells from mammoths, you might be able to do something useful and
interesting," he told The Guardian newspaper.
"I think it should be done as long as we can
provide great care for the animal.
"If there are reasonable prospects of them
being healthy, we should do it. We can learn a lot about them," he said.
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