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Subscribe to RSSHendrik Poinar, a scientist who believes he is close to cracking the woolly mammoth's genetic code, says that cloning extinct species is now possible. NBC's Jim Maceda reports.
Russian and South Korean scientists, including the cloning expert who was the focus of a stem-cell scandal six years ago, have signed a deal to try re-creating a woolly mammoth using cells recovered from 10,000-year-old frozen remains.
The papers for the joint research project were signed on Tuesday by Hwang Woo-Suk, chief technology officer for South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation; and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of Russia's North-Eastern Federal University, during a ceremony at Hwang's office in Seoul.
Hwang is infamous for his role in human embryonic stem-cell research: In 2004 and 2005, he and his colleagues claimed to have extracted stem cells from what they characterized as the world's first cloned human embryos. But in late 2005, his work was found to have been based on fabricated data, and he was barred from continuing research with human cells.
Despite the disgrace, Hwang continued working with animal cloning techniques. Before the scandal broke, his team announced that they produced the world's first cloned dog, nicknamed Snuppy, and that claim has stood up to scrutiny. Last October, Hwang's team at Sooam unveiled eight cloned coyotes that had been produced by injecting nuclei from coyote skin cells into dog eggs. At the time, he said he was interested in cloning an endangered African dog species known as the lycaon ... and was interested in cloning a mammoth, too.
In December, Japanese news media said that scientists recovered a seemingly viable sample of bone marrow from a frozen mammoth thigh bone in Russia's Sakha Republic, and that a mammoth could be cloned back from extinction within five years. This week, Agence France-Presse reported that North-Eastern Federal University is working with the Japanese scientists and with the Koreans. The Beijing Genomics Institute is said to be taking part in the Korean-Russian project as well.
Reports from Seoul suggest that the mammoth-cloning effort could be launched this year if the Russians can ship the remains to Sooam's laboratory. "The first and hardest mission is to restore mammoth cells," a colleague of Hwang's at Sooam, Hwang In-Sung, told AFP.
Jung Yeon-Je / AFP - Getty Images
South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, (far left) and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of North-Eastern Federal University of Russia's Sakha Republic (far right), exchange agreements during a signing ceremony on joint research at Hwang's office in Seoul on Tuesday.
Sooam Biotech Research / AFP - Getty Images
This diagram released by the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation shows the process of replacing the nuclei of elephant egg cells with those taken from the mammoth's somatic cells to bring a mammoth back to life.
The plan calls for extracting nuclei from the thawed-out mammoth cells, putting them into elephant egg cells and stimulating the cells to start dividing. Embryos would be implanted into elephant wombs for gestation — and if the effort is successful, a mother elephant would give birth to a baby mammoth around 22 months later.
That's a big "if," as I wrote in December when I discussed the Japanese-Russian project. In addition to the usual problems surrounding interspecies cloning, it's highly doubtful that genetic material recovered from tissue that's been frozen for millennia would be sufficiently intact for extraction and implantation. What do you think of Hwang's chances? Feel free to register your vote at right, and voice your opinion in the comment section below.
More about mammoths:
- Clone a mammoth? Not so fast
- Mammoths mated with a different elephant species
- Mammoth resurrection on the way?
- Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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Rick Santorum would be irate if he could understand any of this....so lets keep it on the DL.
Rick is still 100 times smarter than suddenly silent Biden
Little Warm Period Europes population was doubling every 20 years, not bad when life length was 35.
People then maily used Coal and Peat to heat homes, cook food, make metals, bricks, etc. 100 x the pollution of today's fuels. Massive CO2 and
Particulates.
Very few paved roads. LOTS of dust when using roads.
Tribal people used man made forest fires
to hunt.
In N America at that time, sometimes these fires would burn from Texas to nearly the Northwest Territories of Canada, while becoming hundreds of miles wide. Imagine the CO2 and particulates.
Yet after all this beginning in 1300ad, the world temperature became increasingly colder and not beginning to recover until the mid 1930's, just 80 years ago.
400 million people worldwide burning coal, peat, dung, and wood at 100x pollution per person. 1000ad = 4 Billion today. Today population over 6.8 Billion so we are putting out more overall today.
Then instead of getting warmer with all that new pollution, we fell into a new mini ice age
But in the past 1000 years, 50% of the time was WARMER than today.
Where do you get your facts from? A lot of that sounds hokey.
You put your peat fires in, you take your peat fires out, you do the hokey-pokey and you shake it all about...
Looks like we got a real egghead heyday going on here.
Some how I think this disgraced scientist is going to trot out an elephant with a beard pasted on him.
disgraced liar gets to make a few more bucks by telling more lies to wealthy investors... if the investors have money to throw away, thy can go for it...btw, I have this great invention to turn water into gas, I just need a few hundred thousand to make some of the pills...
What a total waste of effort and money! Maybe Korea hopes to breed these animals as a FOOD SOURCE for the north.
If they manage it, it will be easy to say that this will be the most protected animal on the planet.
They need to clone humans...only using material from earlier humans. You know, before they became so self centered and addicted to world destroying technology.
Odd you would like to go back to a time before flush toilets and starvation and dieing of old age at 30 years. Not to mention dirt floors and rats infested smoke filled tree limb shelter. The last species needed to be cloned in the human one. Technology is not the villian, it is the that there are 6 billion to many using it.
What makes you think the humanity of yesteryear were less self-centered and exploitative than today? It's only because the population of this planet has risen to levels where we can't just strip the local resources and move on to new areas that the issue of sustainability is in the local mindset as much as it is.
Even at the time Eurpoeans were first migrating over to North America across the Atlantic, Britain was already experiencing shortages of wood and clean water, and coastal fisheries were experiencing reduced yields from the burgeoning population.
In short, people haven't changed. We're the same as we ever were.
There's a hair in my Mammoth steak!
Just more weird food for the Koreans and japs to consume.....but they are all super excited!
Well I guess he deserves a second chance but we should probably be on the look out for a couple ton order of hair weave products or gallons of Rogaine in their lab.
I sure hope it works. We sure could use a few herds of Woolly Mammoths roaming the country as they once did.
After that maybe resurrect all the dinosaurs. That would be great for population control of the most destructive species of them all.....humans.
Mmmm.... Mammoth burgers :)
Stop him.
I'd like to see them clone Megan Fox, but with a bigger brain.
it's all very interesting, and very possible. It may be useful for our own survival, I'm not being negative, just a realists point of view. I believe the World is in the shape it's in, good or bad, to teach future generations what not to do. My short life on the Planet is a blink in time as is anyone else, as much as the problem as the solution. I think we passed the point of no return back in the 1400's, as far as being good stewards of what we had. Technology has come at a great cost, hopefully the gene for stupidity will be found and taken of of the chain.
The religious must be going nuts about this, just imagine that after we clone dinosaurs, even they won't be stupid enough to believe in god
Clone a Wooly Mammoth and? They died out for a reason!
Same goes with polar bears;-)
Read "Oryx & Crake".
Santorum ancestor? Wooly Republican? Oh the man cave thing.