Woolly mammoth, a visitor from the Ice Age

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Sun, October 1, 2023 | 21:09

Woolly mammoth, a visitor from the Ice Age

Posted : 2011-01-20 16:38

Updated : 2011-01-20 16:38

By Dale McFeatters

Curiosity is an overpowering motivation. Perhaps that best explains a plan by Japanese, Russian and U.S. scientists to clone a woolly mammoth, a large Ice Age mammal that was largely extinct 10,000 years ago.

News accounts of the venture suggest that the scientists are doing this basically to see if they can and they'll worry about what to do with a mammoth once they have one.

A team led by Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan, plans to extract DNA from the soft tissue of a mammoth carcass now preserved in a Russian laboratory. The nuclei of the mammoth cells will be inserted into the egg cells of an African elephant and the eggs implanted in the elephant's womb. If it works as planned, in 600 days a very surprised African elephant will give birth to a baby mammoth.

The problem has always been that prolonged freezing damaged the soft tissue. But another Japanese scientist seems to have surmounted that when he cloned a mouse from cells that had been frozen for 16 years.

Iritani says now there's "a reasonable chance" he could produce a healthy young mammoth within four or five years.

The problem then would seem to be: Now what? It seems selfish to bring a creature back from extinction merely to put it on display, although mammoths do appear to have been spectacular animals with hair three feet long and massive great curved tusks. Like elephants, they were sociable animals that moved in herds, so if you cloned one it would seem you're obligated to clone more.

Mammoths went extinct because the global warming that ended the Ice Age changed their habitat in northern North America and northern Eurasia, and Stone Age hunters took care of the rest.

From the mammoths' standpoint, the climate is even worse today and mankind hasn't proven notably successful at protecting the African elephants from poachers. It would be carelessly cruel to let a species go extinct twice.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).

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