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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Can genetic science bring extinct species back to life? And if it can, should we let it?
Jan 3, 2002 | The woolly mammoth had a 3-foot-long penis and 16-foot tusks.
Its skull, which had a gaping cavity for those tusks, may have inspired the myth of the Cyclops, the one-eyed monster. Mammoth bones have been mistaken for unicorn remains.
And just daring to disturb a mammoth's frozen carcass is still thought by Siberian natives to unlock a fatal curse, like messing with an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb.
Even in extinction, the woolly mammoth has more going for it than most living creatures, and some genetics-happy scientists hope that it can be brought back from the dead to dazzle again with its mangy charms.
In his new book "Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant," Richard Stone, 35, a London-based editor for Science Magazine, goes mammoth hunting in Siberia with the researchers and dreamers who want not only to raise but to revive the Ice Age beast. Stone will go as far as the frozen tundra to get his story, but he turns down an offer of a celebratory bite of freezer-burned mammoth flesh when the woolly corpse has been successfully chiseled from the frigid ground.
Turning a mammoth corpse into a mammoth clone hasn't happened yet, and some scientists doubt that it ever will. But Stone argues the mammoth is just the most high-profile of the extinct and endangered creatures that may make a comeback thanks to cloning. One group of scientists is already attempting to re-create a woolly mammoth habitat circa 10,000 years ago, Jurassic Park-style, in hopes of accommodating the coming herds of clones.
It may be too soon to look forward to the day when animal-rights protesters will rally to rout the Homo sapiens out of their homes in the Berkeley hills so that the saber-tooth cat can once again roam free. But with the Chinese government already working to clone the disappearing panda, can the ethical debate about the resurrection of early human ancestors be far behind?
Stone told Salon how reproductive biology may soon bring back long-lost species.
Do you really think that the woolly mammoth will be brought back from the dead?
I do. We could see a cloned mammoth within a generation, within 20 years. But there'll be human clones before there are mammoth clones, probably in the next five years.
Why is there so much interest in bringing back a mammoth?
It hasn't walked on the earth for 3,700 years. It's not like one of these more recent extinctions where people are familiar with the animal and they may have saved some of the DNA, even fresh tissue frozen in the hopes of cloning it.
Advanced Cell Technology, the company which is famous for having attempted to clone a human embryo, recently announced that they are trying to resurrect the bucardo, a type of goat that recently became extinct in Spain. But it's a goat.
When you talk about the more charismatic extinct species that have been gone longer, like the woolly rhino, the saber-tooth cat, the mammoth is the most likely candidate because it was one of the more common species from that time, so there are just more remains.
