2MSN.net

Recently posted on MSN.com was a story from MSNBC about the possibility of cloning a woolly mammoth. A team of scientists from Russia, America, and Japan have began banding together to start trying to revive and reintroduce a viable woolly mammoth baby back into the world. They plan to take 40,000 year old Woolly Mammoth ova (eggs from the mammoth’s uterus) recovered from the frozen remains of Mammoth corpse and injecting it into an African Elephant ova. This would mean that a modern day elephant would be giving birth to the creature.

The main Japanese scientist heading the project has already been able to clone domesticated animals from corpses already 16 years old. Though in this case, he’ll be dealing with DNA over 40,000 years old. Unlike we might imagine, the frozen corpses of these Mammoths didn’t just freeze until scientists found them eons later. They have been through freezes and thaws over and over, leaving the DNA badly damaged fragments. Cloning offspring from these samples is more than likely impossible though there is a slim chance it could work.

But more importantly than “if” is “should.” Should we be trying to revive dead animals in the first place? One major problem to all this would be the thousands of nonviable offspring that might be brought to term before getting the process right and finally producing a healthy living specimen. There are definitely several animal rights issues surrounding this issue as well considering all the Elephant mothers who would have to bear the stillborns and dead fetuses before everything pays off.

Beyond that, there are several issues here worth exploring. Is our technology sophisticated enough to pull off such a feat? Would the clone survive? Would it be ethical and moral to bring an extinct animal into a world where it was the only one of its kind? And finally, will this one day be applied to humans? These are serious matters that will probably be discussed for decades.