A Living Mammoth in 5 Years?
“Playing God” is an exhausted phrase often meretricious in debate and argument. Too many fall by their emotions when hearing it. But, for what the phrase is still worth, God is the only game worth playing.
From dust and savanna, humans have created an El Dorado where anthropomorphic robots walk down Japanese corridors, ailments and maladies of worldly proportions can be treated and even eradicated, and all the time we know with more certainty that Mars at some point past had rivers and lakes of water and possible vegetation. Now, the time has come for Lazarus the mammoth to ride into the city.
Scientists have found another frozen mammoth in thawing Siberian permafrost, and they believe this one can have DNA extracted for creating a living mammoth. Since cloning was first dreamed of, it has been believed that the nuclei from an egg of the mammoth’s closest living relative, the elephant, can be replaced with mammoth cell nuclei. If you view the cell as the building material that can create a body type – in this case elephant-like – the nuclei are the blueprints that determine what the body will end up being from these materials.
It’s obviously more complicated and that’s not quite how it works, but it is the basic idea of cloning that has been well tested over decades of work. The team from Russia and Japan have announced that they think they can use the mammoth DNA to clone a mammoth, if the method allows, given the advances in cloning from the last two decades. They reckon it could be as little as 5 years before you can go and visit a mammoth down the zoo. Maybe extinction in the future will occur most regularly to expressions like “dead as the dodo”.
22 animals have been cloned so far, from an ibex to a cat to a rhesus monkey. The reason it is cloning is because the DNA extracted from an animal will be the DNA unique to that individual animal, so when this is planted in an egg and grows, the characteristics the DNA encodes for: eye and hair colour, and to some extent personal traits, will be the same. Many things like personal traits and abilities are formed during an animal’s lifetime, though, so you don’t get an exact replica of the original animal. So with a cloned mammoth, you would get to see an animal that, in many ways, really walked the Earth. For more detail on the intricacies of cloning, this is a good article.
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