Could we Really Clone a Woolly Mammoth?

We all remember Dolly the cloned sheep, who, by the way, recently passed away. It was a shock to learn that what had seemed to be the stuff of science fiction had come to be reality. Since Dolly, other animals have been cloned and several businesses even cropped up offering, when the technology became a bit more perfected, to clone your beloved pet. During all of it, a controversy raged on about whether we should clone animals. Was there a practical application? Now, some scientists think so, and they are talking about cloning animals that we once thought were extinct, in this case, Woolly Mammoths.

Of all the animals that are extinct, none have been found in the numbers and good condition that woolly mammoths have been found in. Many are found frozen in ice, with hair and internal organs intact. Russian scientists have discovered living cells in a frozen ice age mammoth that could provide the DNA needed to resurrect the long extinct tusked giant.

This particular woolly mammoth was found last summer in Russia's far northern Yakutia region. The live cells were obtained from the well preserved legs of the mammoth. To be precise, the cells are "conditionally alive" says Vladmir Repin of the Vektor Research Center for Virusology and Biotechnology. This means that although the cells are not multiplying, they are not decaying, the inner structure of the cells is undamaged and this suggests that the rest of the frozen tissues contain similar cell layers which could be unfrozen. The cells have been fixed in formalin, an aqueous solution of formaldehyde immediately after they were found.

Repin went on to explain that although it is not positive that the cells are good enough for cloning purposes, it sure looks that way. "The cell material is unique because it contains not just intact mammoth DNA but whole cells which have been perfectly preserved for 10,000 years,"

The latest finding comes as a boon to a group of Russian and Japanese scientists who have been planning to revive the mammoth once they can find usable DNA material. The team, led by Japan's Kazufumi Goto, a former professor of reproductive physiology at Kagoshima University, said last August that it would be "technically possible" to produce mammoth calves using the DNA and artificially inseminating an elephant cow.

The bulk of the woolly mammoth remains, still covered in reddish fur, where it died and was frozen in the soil next to a riverbank near Yakutsk. The research team washed the remains using a water jet before placing them in a freezer and transporting them to Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum.

Goto hopes that by using good DNA from an ice-age mammoth he will be able to produce a hybrid of a mammoth and an elephant. A female elephant can be impregnated that the hybrid calf itself can later be impregnated with mammoth DNA, thus working back to full mammoth. It's a sort of reverse evolution.

The Japanese researcher is hoping that the resurrected mammoths can live in a sanctuary in an uninhabited area north of the remote, frozen Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East, where present conditions resemble their original habitat.

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