Should We Clone A Woolly Mammoth?

[RATTER15]

It appears that we will soon be in the position to clone a woolly mammoth, should we do it and will we do it? Who will do it?

[B00]

No, horrible thought.

Stick it in a zoo to serve its life behind bars? Why would we subject another living thing to that?

[sandyRoe]

The people in Edinburgh who helped produce Dolly the Sheep have experience with woolly animals. They could do it.

[mccfluff]

no, it's had time, poor thing would be lonely

[wolf63]

No - anytime we tinker with mother nature we make a mess of it.

[Sqad]

\\\\Stick it in a zoo to serve its life behind bars? Why would we subject another living thing to that?\\\

I am a little lost here.......we haven't got a Woolly Mammoth to clone.....They are extinct.

Have i missed the point?

[grasscarp]

What for? To prove it is possible? And what would you do with one woolly mammoth? It would need a lot of food.

[sandyRoe]

Can they clone one from the DNA taken from one found in the Siberian permafrost?

[Sqad]

sandy...yes......that is all i can think of.

[sandyRoe]

And it needn't necessarily lead a lonely life. If it was brought up with elephants it would just look like a hirsute member of the herd.

[Retrochic]

They found blood samples with long string DNA in the Woolly mammouth found in Siberia.

[Baldric]

http://io9.com/russian-scientists-we-have-a-high-chance-of-cloning-1543713621

[jim360]

Depends on what you do with it once you have one cloned, I suppose. Hard to see how it could survive in any modern zoo or in the modern world, since that is, after all, part of the reason it died out (mind, the other part is that we hunted the things rather a lot, possibly even to a premature extinction).

[237SJ]

I thought it wasn`t possible to do it because the DNA was too damaged? Have they made advances with that? I think they should leave well alone.

[Mamyalynne]

Seems a ludicrous idea to me, also it would have to be brought into life using a surrogate elephant mother as 'host' from the bits I have read and understand.

[stuey]

When I was a kid, my parents were too poor to buy us Christmas presents so my mother used to knit us stuff. My sweaters were always way too big...I called them wooly mammoths. OK, I leaving:)

[DTCwordfan]

It's when they clone Sqad that we should be worried! A woolly mammoth is nothing.

[Prudie]

Clearly they have not watched Jurassic park (1,2 and 3)

[B00]

No one should watch all 3 Jurassic Parks!

The first, yes, maybe- but 2 and 3? Errrr!

[Prudie]

be fair B00, it's Boxing day, you're prostrate on the sofa, can't find the remote and can't be bothered to look for it either....

[Peter Pedant]

Sqad: // Have i missed the point? //

They have a woolly mammoth with a sufficient degree of preservation that the idea would be sudduv, irradiate a fertilised elephants egg and put a wooly mammoths nucleus inside and see what happens.

Science Fact
First done in 1959 - frog's spawn and a nucleus from a frogs liver cell. And the end result was a ... whole frog. Everyone thought it would be a collection of frog liver cells. I thought Jerome Lejeune did this but wiki says he did something else