Russian and Korean Researchers Will Inject Mammoth DNA Into Elephant Eggs, Resurrecting 10,000-Year-Old Beast

How many times do they have to tell us they are going to do this??

can't wait to buy my mammoth skin boots in 30 years ^_^

World hunger solved: Mammoth Farms

So since this is possible it should be possible to extract DNA from Dinosaur Bone Marrow and clone them, right? Just would take a couple of years for the Tech. to advance for this type of procedure.

@Eric18
No. DNA degrades over time, no one has ever found viable dinosaur DNA.

@Mensketh: That's not true at all.. I saw it in a documentary film that was publushed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP2m95JAD4g

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In space, no one can hear a tree fall in the forest.

You can't argue with the evidence of a live Mammoth. It's unproductive to speculate on the actual outcome. I hope they can do it.

I keep (unscientifically) envisioning either a woolly elephant or naked mammoth here-I know, it's a clone, not a hybrid- I just have a feeling nature will cause features &/or results that no one predicts.

@pioneer10: That's the next step.

As they introduce that mammoth DNA into the elephant DNA, what is a mystery bug DNA gets put into the mix and we end up with an elephant mosquito!
JUST IMAGINE HOW BIG THIS MOSQUITO WILL SUCK!! SLURP!

Suddenly before the mammoths gestation is complete, the mother elephants seems to be madly shrinking in sike. Then all of a sudden, this giant elephant mosquito breaks out of the skin and the begins to attack everyone in the room.
Everyone is left dead and all remains is a busted out door!

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Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.

Yeah, I'll have the McMammoth burger Happy Meal with fries and a shake.
Would you like that super sized sir?

YUM!

22 months for gestation to occur and a mammoth is born, the pandora box or all living creators of the past can be born to for the sake of science, till it kills us, thank you very much, 14March2012bg...

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Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.

Can't help but remember the line spoken by Jeff Goldblum's character (Dr. Ian Malcolm) in the first Jurassic Park movie that goes: "God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs..." Okay, in this case, "mammoths."

Oh boy...today's sci-fi, tomorrow's reality. But then again, it would seem that tomorrow's already knocking at our door!

Ah, the Malcolm quote that comes me is this one:

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

@DirtySquirties - "World hunger solved: Mammoth Farms"

Close enough, this research should, in some small ways, help further In-vitro meat production. If nothing else it will provide Mammoth meat to the potential proteins we can make.

GMarsack is correct. We have plenty of viable dinosaur DNA. People need to do research first before commenting. Everyone knows Jurassic Park is 100% fact.

Since they found the mammoth frozen I'm not sure how good that antifreeze is.

What could go wrong?

You knew some fool would do this...yeah right people are next..the urge is to great to resist...and yeah right nothing could go wrong~...famous last word...oops~

With all of these teams giving it a try, the world will have a Mammoth again before 2020.

Actually they have recovered dinosaur dna from unfossilized bone marrow. Enough was found to show definitively the relation to modern birds but not enough was recovered for cloning or genome mapping.

But who knows perhaps future advances or better preserved specimens perhaps from a defrosted Antarctica will let us clone them.

How many times do I have to tell you, Elephants don't lay eggs!! ;)

This living mammoth will be one of a kind. Imagine the unique value $$$ that will be applied to it from so many different perspectives. Even the tusk and ivory will be unique, mammoth ivory.

This animal will be one and alone and the entire world will desire it and for many to kill it. If any intelligence is in our DNA and this animal will feel out of place and alone.

I feel sad and sorry for this mammoth.

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Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.

Shoudn't we try to prevent thousands of other species from going extinct before this?

@ Robot; While the critter would definitely be unique; mammoth ivory would definitely not be. It's rare, but can be had. The ivory, or bone; of a creature that massive is likely not as strong as that of a critter that actually functioned for these 10,000 years or so that this dna has been in relative stasis. Walrus, elephant, etc... I know the theory is that we generate a clone of the critter, but we see in practice that vital survival traits aren't always transferred. To me, the risk that we take on with this also includes possible diseases that may get re-introduced into the environment is a real worry. That this concern is never spoken of in any of these papers lets me know that we should not be doing projects on this scale yet. If the result of this project is a creature that breathes life into polio, smallpox-poxes of all kinds, influenzas, etc...; then the program was still a success. Even if it kills every other pachyderm, it's still a success. The engineered trout and salmon are good examples of the general state of the science. Though our government says these things are good to go, they really suck as fish. I'd never recommend someone eat one. They are mushy and nasty tasting. They destroy the foodchain and spawning beds of other, real, creatures. And are considered a success.

I believe it would be wrong of us as a species not to bring back the long extinct species of the past. We have long protected, bred, and relocated many species for their survival. And it being long argued that over hunting was a catalyst for the extinction of the mammoth. We, for one would only be correcting a critical mishap that the human species of the past caused.

The human species has been lucky in the lottery of evolution with our ever growing knowledge base and the tool to utilize and expand on what we have learned. The human brain. For anyone to believe it would be intrusive or playing the role of god could not be more wrong. It is moments in time such as this that the human species shines the most. We have been able to advance medically and scientifically far enough to begin returning many of the lost species of the past.

Many who feel that cloning dna to bring these lost beasts and many other species to life again is wrong because of ideas such as food or it was just their time, I believe that is just subconscious fear. Hundreds of thousands of have thrived on this planet for millions of years, and it is only in our own age we have the least amount of species.

And those who may feel it is wrong for religious beliefs, must not believe our intelligence has not been also a gift from god. A gift to get us to instances as this to bring life and guard that life to all species created by god.

We would learn much from resurrecting the mammoth. Techniques that will help us evolve our procedures into other areas. And as we make our journey off into space and populating the many worlds in our galaxy what we learn here and now will help us and other species to survive in a new dawn of mankind.

First of all, people with a strong opinion like the person above me need to make sure that they have complete sentences because they completely discredit themselves by making sloppy comments. That being said, we can learn a lot from recreating the woolly mammoth. However, we do NOT know how the mammoth DNA will mix with the elephant DNA; we have no idea of knowing which genes are dominant and which ones are recessive. Even the variation among mammoth DNA cannot be determined, so we really have no idea what this clone will turn out to be phenotypically and we also don't know how the meiotic cells are divided so we can't know the exact genes that will be present either. My only concern with this is where does it end? If we could clone dinosaurs is that something we, as the human race, really need to do? That would be incredibly stupid on our part considering we would no longer be the top of the food chain. When species become extinct, nature finds a NEW balance of things, not always for the better of our species, but whatever species remain evolve and adapt to the new changes. It just so happens that right now the human race is the most evolved and adapted to the environment than we have ever been. Yes the extinction of the woolly mammoth was sad, but our environment has adapted. Sometimes introducing a new species into a habitat is just as bad as removing one. It upsets the natural order of things. So, to everyone who is so quick to jump the gun on this, maybe some more thought should be put into this I'm not saying for sure it would be good or bad. I am simply saying we shouldn't jump the gun on this one.

Here are my thoughts on the issue:

I think we can all agree that when we get drawn to articles like "Russian and Korean Researchers will [Resurrect Mammoth]" it's because we're interested in the idea of resurrecting not just a completely new animal, but a completely new species. If the mammoth weren't different and unique, we wouldn't care about its resurrection.

For me, though, the value of using genetic tools on a problem like this is about more than just doing amazing things with science; it's about developing the technology needed to fix and reverse the extinction of countless recently deceased species.

It is no coincidence that the first signs of human presence in archaeological strata also mark the end of megafauna, in almost every case. Giraffes and Elephants in Africa and Asia are the exceptions; Moas in New Zealand, Mammoths and Wooly Rhinos in Siberia and North America, and Giant Sloths in South America are not.

From a moralistic standpoint, I think it would be wise for us to endeavor to bring back these species; and from a selfish biological standpoint, increased biological diversity is almost certain to be a good thing in the long run.

This is especially true of the more-recent species. Passenger pigeons, which once flew by the billions across North America; the Dodo of Mauritius; the Thylacine or Tasmanian Wolf (which is still within the cultural memory of the Europeans who settled Tasmania): all these are unequivocally worth bringing back, and they could reasonably be expected to integrate seamlessly back into the existing ecosystems.

As far as the ecological issue of a population of mammoths is concerned, a good parallel can be drawn between reintroduction of the mammoth to the Russian tundra and removal of the buffalo from the Great Plains. Great herds of buffalo once roamed from Texas up through Saskatchewan and Manitoba, right up until very recently in our history. We didn't exactly get an enormous chance to study the buffalo, but we know a few things; after the buffalo were removed, and after we installed poor farming practices, we experienced a Dust Bowl across the entire region, causing millions of tons of topsoil to blow away in the summer wind, and cause dust storms even as far away as Washington D.C.

Yet where did all that topsoil come from? Partially it built up over the years by the decomposition of grasses; but all that was helped along by herds of buffalo who roamed the plains, digging massive ruts with their hooves and pooping nutrient-rich manure all over the place.

If we were to reintroduce mammoths as a species in Siberia and Northern Canada, we would most likely see an adaptation toward the herd ecosystem seen in those areas during the Ice Age, seen still on the plains of Africa, and seen until recently on the Plains of North America. As long as we kept the population in check, I see no reason to believe that a bunch of walking manure machines would fail to end up ultimately aiding, or at least being a neutral burden, upon the topsoil-poor tundra.

But putting abstract possibility aside, I worry whether the species would be too expensive to make viable; it is all well and good to create one baby mammoth just to say we did, but how are we to say that the baby would be healthy? What is the point of creating a new species if it would just require another active-breeding program like the Giant Panda or the Hawaiian Nene?

What we really need to do, if we want to make the regeneration of species viable, is to find a way to artificially increase the genetic diversity of the group as a whole, perhaps by artificially mutating a single genetic code and testing the variations for viability. The alternative would be highly restrictive and inbred population lines that ultimately would be over-costly, over-sensitive and worst of all, unreliable for breeding self-propagation purposes.

As to the idea of resurrecting old diseases; I find it unlikely, since the things have been melting out of the permafrost for years and years. But there is always that unhappy chance.

V. Gouralnik Import-Export is a family-owned German company that has been involved in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) trade between Russia and the European Union since 1992. The company has been trading raw mammoth ivory material worldwide since 1999.

With offices near Frankfurt and in Moscow, we are committed to delivering superior mammoth ivory material to our customers. Our company has been directly working for over ten years with specialist expedition teams in order to source the finest quality raw mammoth ivory material on the market.

The expedition teams survey remote areas of Yakutia, Taymyria and Chukotka in high latitudes of northern Russia, each year taking advantage of the small window of opportunity in summertime when the permafrost thaws slightly. This allows the extraction of limited quantities of precious mammoth ivory which is then transported to Moscow, subjected to quality assurance and exported to Germany.

Email: vladimir.gouralnik@googlemail.com