Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Pleistocene Park?

It's been talked about before, but apparently a team of researchers led by a Japanese scientist have a plan to create a baby woolly mammoth using cloned-cell technology, and DNA from a frozen Siberian mammoth carcass

A mammoth in 4 years?

They plan on taking nuclei from the mammoth cells and inserting them into an elephant's egg cells from which the nuclei have been removed. This will create an embryo that contains the mammoth's genes. The embryo will then be inserted into the elephant's womb, and the animal will, hopefully, give birth to a mammoth. According to The Daily Tech, [Dr. Akira] Iritani said:

"The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently, but now stands at about 30 percent. I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years."


After they study it, then they'll probably eat it. This is Japan, after all. Eating species on the verge of extinction is their specialty, so why not dine on a species that actually IS extinct?



"I thought we were done with this nonsense 10,000 years ago!"

No comments: