Within 5 years, a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned, according to
scientists who have just recovered well-preserved bone marrow in a
mammoth thigh bone. Japan's Kyodo News first reported the find. You
can see photos of the thigh bone at this Kyodo page.
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/12/129557.html
Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha
Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues are now analyzing the
marrow, which they extracted from the mammoth's femur, found in
Siberian permafrost soil.
Grigoriev and his team, along with Japan's Kinki University, have
announced that they will launch a joint research project next year
aimed at recreating the enormous mammal, which went extinct around
10,000 years ago.
Mammoths used to be a common sight on the landscape of North
America and Eurasia. One of my favorite papers of recent months
concerned the earliest known depiction of an animal from the
Americas. It was a mammoth engraved on a mammoth bone. Many of our
distant ancestors probably had regular face-to-face encounters with
the elephant-like giants.
http://news.discovery.com/history/earliest-american-art-mammoth-110622.html
The key to cloning the woolly mammoth is to replace the nuclei of egg
cells from an elephant with those extracted from the mammoth's bone
marrow cells. Doing this, according to the researchers, can result in
embryos with mammoth DNA. That's actually been known for a while.
What's been missing is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes.
Scientists have been on a Holy Grail type search for such pristine
nuclei since the late 1990's. Now it sounds like the missing genes
may have been found.
In an odd twist, global warming may be responsible for the break-
through.
Warmer temperatures tied to global warming have thawed ground in
eastern Russia that is almost always permanently frozen. As a result,
researchers have found a fair number of well-preserved frozen mammoths
there, including the one that yielded the bone marrow.
Is it such a good idea, however, to clone animals that have long been
extinct? For a while there's been some discussion of a real life
Jurassic Park setup containing such animals. Introducing these beasts
into existing ecosystems could be like bringing in a potentially in-
vasive species that would try to fill some space presently held by other
animal(s). Even if the cloned animals were contained in special parks,
there could still be a risk of spreading.
So if the woolly mammoth is successfully cloned sooner rather than later,
we'd probably be left with more questions and controversy than answers,
at least in the short term.
http://news.discovery.com/animals/woolly-mammoth-cloned-111205.html
