Some mammoth experts object to attempts to bring them back to life. They balk at creating an animal that could only live in a zoo, or creating a single, lonely specimen of a defunct species. Do you think that these ethical concerns will prevent the resurrection of the mammoth?

I think the scientific imperative will carry the day. That's how it was back when the DNA revolution started. There was a lot of opposition to creating transgenic plants and animals, when they take DNA from a species and put it into the genome of a different species.

Are there any efforts to resurrect early humans using the same techniques?

The early humans that you'd probably be interested in, the Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthal, we just haven't found frozen. But there is this Ice Man that was found in the Italian Alps. He's 5,000 years old -- conceivably you could clone him, if they had kept his tissue frozen the whole time that he was extracted from the ice.

But say you found some decent enough DNA, the Ice Man could be brought back -- a 5,000-year-old person! The question is, would it make a difference? Would the intelligence capacity of a human 5,000 years ago be any different from that today? Because you wouldn't just clone this person as he was. He'd be a baby, and he'd grow up and he'd learn. Presumably, you wouldn't put him in a cave and see how he developed. You'd have to give the cloned baby the opportunities that any other child would have.

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You'd end up having a normal person just like us. Five thousand years is not a long time in human evolution.

How seriously do wildlife biologists and environmentalists take cloning as a way to prevent the extinction of endangered species?

They don't think that it's really viable for protecting populations right now. So little is known about the reproductive biology of many endangered species, cloning is really a long shot for it to work.

But there's a list of species, like the Sumatran rhino, that they have that they would love to try to clone to see if they can supplement dwindling populations. The Chinese government has a panda cloning project, since there are only about 1,000 pandas left in the wild.

Say scientists succeed in bringing a mammoth back, where would it live?

You need a place to put them that would be similar to the habitat that existed 10,000 years ago. There are certain areas that seem to be close to what it was like 10,000 years ago in Northern Siberia. And there's even an attempt to try to re-create a Pleistocene ecosystem in Northern Siberia, called Pleistocene Park.

It's very wet and boggy in Northern Siberia today. It can't sustain huge populations of grazing animals. It could not sustain mammoths today. Mammoths, presumably, if they were like elephants, need to eat 300 pounds of forage a day. So, you couldn't just stick a mammoth in Northern Siberia and expect it to survive. In the last Ice Age, you had dry grasslands, very rich land that could support lots of grazing animals, lots of mammoths, lots of woolly rhinos, lots of steppe bison.

One theory is that these large animals helped to maintain that ecosystem. Russian ecologist Sergei Zimov is working to bring bison to Siberia to a fenced-off section of land called Pleistocene Park. By disturbing the land he thinks they are going to bring back these Ice Age grasses, which are present in Siberia in very sparse populations. The grasses could then reestablish. If you can transform a section of the permafrost, of the tundra, in this way, to grasslands, then you'd have a place for the mammoths if you could bring them back.

Do you think that some governments, like the United States, will try to stop the resurrection of extinct species, as they have with human cloning?

I don't think any of the governments are going to step in and say: "How dare you! Don't clone the woolly mammoth!"

Animal cloning has taken place, and the only regulatory issues that it's triggered have been animal care, in ensuring that the clones are treated with the same standards as any other research animals. I think that would extend to mammoths as well.

One theory about the mammoths' demise is that a mystery "hyperdisease" killed off the last of the species, a kind of super virulent pathogen. Some scientists express concern that bringing the mammoth back would unleash this mammoth-killing Ebola virus. Is a plague of mammothitis being unleashed upon us really something to worry about?

I think it's credible, but judging by past experience, it's a long shot.

In Siberia, there are people who died of smallpox, buried in the permafrost, and these viruses are alive in there, and you don't get researchers or residents dropping from smallpox that thawed from the ice. More realistically, resurrecting a mammoth may create a reservoir for viruses or bacteria that haven't had one since this species died out. The mammoth might have been a host to a very specific disease. It may not affect humans at all, but it might be a disease that could come back in through the mammoths, and perhaps jump again to elephants, which are already endangered themselves.

Besides the remote possibility of some mystery hyperdisease, are there any dangers to cloning mammoths?

Some cloned animals have had problems. They tend to be really big. Some have bad circulation related to the cloning; others have birth defects. There are a lot of unknowns about the medical risks of cloning. And you don't know whether you're going to have a problem until you see the birth, so that's a huge ethical issue with human cloning. That's what has researchers outraged by some of these efforts by scientists to try to clone humans, forging ahead without knowing what the medical risks might be.

But that won't stop mammoth cloning efforts?

No. But the risk of medical problems could be severe in resurrecting an extinct species, because even in a clone you're not going to be using the mitochondrial DNA from the mammoths. That's going to come from the mother's egg from a closely related species.

There's something called genetic imprinting where the mitochondrial DNA and all the other elements in the egg have a major effect on what genes get turned on in the fetus, and you don't know how that process is going to work with mammoths.

You might create these really pathetic, miserable creatures. Talk about a denouement. All the excitement would really be gone. And all this dream of having mammoths roaming the earth would not happen.

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