Pleistocene Park

Not Jurassic Park, Pleistocene. For some time now, there has been considerable attention placed on the possibility of resurrecting Ice Age animals, particularly the woolly mammoth via the Mammoth Creation Project. Comprised of a group of Japanese researchers, the project would like to fulfill the dream of a Siberian reserve for cloned extinct Ice Age species. The group has made considerable headway from its initial goal of impregnating an elephant with the frozen sperm of a mammoth (nh). There are believed to be anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of mammoths encased and preserved in ice across the globe.

While stumbling upon frozen mammoth sperm seems like a shot in the dark let alone a rather unorthodox way of going about cloning, some recent developments may present new avenues. Stem cell research has faced limitations in the delicacies of the DNA, always requiring the material from live animals. Dead tissue, and particularly frozen tissue, irreparably damaged the genetic material. Or so we thought. In Kobe, Japan at Riken Center for Developmental Biology, successful experiments have cloned mice dead and frozen for 16 years. Researchers were able to create stem cell lines from the cloned embryos made with nucleic transfer, that is, healthy egg cells were injected with nuclei extracted from ruptured brain cells of the dead mice. Further, the cloned mice were successful progenitors.

Of course, while the breakthrough presents better chances of ushering ideas such as the Mammoth Creation Project to fruition, ethical questions will loom over these practices. Is it irresponsible to introduce extinct species to an environment inexorably unnatural to them?