from mice to mammoths – post 257

Recently scientists in Japan have successfully cloned a mouse from a lab mouse carcass that was frozen in permafrost (-40 C) for 16 years.  The new technique was demonstrated to show that cloning is now possible on severely damaged cells due to deep freezes from dead animal specimens.  Several mice where cloned in this fashion and they even mated and had healthy babies.

So what animal is at the top of the list for scientists to clone using this new method?  Yup, the great dead woolly mammoth.  Woolly mammoths have already been found in well preserved in the ice and experts believe that there are as many as 10,000 more trapped in the frozen wastes.  Why, there is even plans to make a “Pleistocene Park” in northern Siberia.  It would be twice the size of Japan and be the new home of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, Siberian tigers, steppe lions, giant deer, ancient foxes, and ancestors of the Siberian horse.

Crazy eh?

So what’s your take on all this?  We have the opportunity to bring back long lost animals and really see and study what they where like.  To be able to touch a real woolly mammoth would be awesome.  But is it something we should be fooling with?  Is it our place to do such a thing?  I’m not sure where I stand.  On one side I think it’s amazing and on the other I think it’s down right scary.  I don’t think it’s right but I’d love to see a real woolly mammoth…  I just don’t know…

Discuss!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 11:20 pmand is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “from mice to mammoths – post 257”

  • John M. Hanna Says:
    November 14th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    I think scientists everywhere are in too big a hurry to consider the consequences of their experiments. While they’ve given us wonderful things that make life easier, they’ve also given us things that make the world a more terrifying place. Cloning extinct animals sounds exciting, and not as dangerous as say nanotechnology (see the “Gray Goo Theory”) or the Large Hadron Collider (which could create a black hole), but once a species is extinct, it should remain so. To paraphrase a quote from Ed Wood’s “Bride Of The Monster”, We’ve tampered enough in God’s domain.

    Reply
  • Cinos Nroca Says:
    November 14th, 2008 at 11:26 pm

    I dunno, I think being able to see how these creatures of the past lived, what they eat…etc in real life would be so much cooler than the computer images they create. Cloning these creatures to life has many possibilities for learning about these majestestic prehistoric animals.

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