Geneticist Looks Forward To Cloning A Mammoth

Now this is certainly a mammoth sized task – in every sense of the world, literally and figuratively. Basically, Hwang Woo-Suk is not a person without controversy – his claim to fame would be the false claims of having cloned human stem cells. Well, the South Korean researcher happened to be in Siberia not too long ago, having drilled cells from the bones of a 28,000 year-old frozen wooly mammoth, and it is through the drilling process that Hwang intends to locate the DNA required to bring back this mammoth to life. Sounds very Jurassic Park-like, don’t you think so?

It has been said before that this is not a very good idea at all despite being a possible task, at least the world’s best biologists do agree that cloning a mammoth would involve having the right minds in place, with the right technologies. However it will require an intact strand of mammoth DNA for this to happen, and if you were to take into consideration the amount of time that this frozen mammoth carcass has been out there for so long, what are the chances of that happening? Still, we have seen how perseverance in the name of science have brought about the next breakthrough in the past, so who knows what the future will hold?

Edwin Kee
Categories: General
Tags: clone, Science