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Species go extinct. In the roughly 4 billion years that life has existed on Earth, over 99% of species have gone the way of the Dodo. Some go by fire, others by ice, but however they go, they don't come back... at least until the Japanese bring them back.
Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the
long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient
pachyderm back to life in around five years time.
The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this
summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research
laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
"Preparations to realize this goal have been made," Akira Iritani,
leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told
the mass-circulation daily.
Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an
elephant's egg cell from which the nuclei have been removed, to create
an embryo containing mammoth genes, the report said.
The embryo will then be inserted into an elephant's uterus in the hope
that the animal will eventually give birth to a baby mammoth.
The Article Continues Here
It's worth noting that the Neaderthal's Genome has been roughly sequenced. This means it's only a matter of time before scientists are confronted with the morality of cloning and bringing to term a Neaderthal. As shocking as the idea of a walking, talking cloned Neanderthal may seem to us, it may be a bit anticlimatic. Recent research has found that the Neanderthals were not that different than modern humans. An interesting excerpt from the article reads:
Any human whose ancestral group developed outside
Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of
their genome, Pääbo's team estimates. In other words, humans and
Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. A small amount of that
genetic mingling survives in "non-Africans" today: Neanderthals didn't
live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no
trace of Neanderthal DNA.
It's impossible to know how often
humans invited Neanderthals back to their cave (and vice versa), but the
genome data offers some intriguing details.
"It must have been at least 45,000 years ago," says David Reich,
a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was involved in the project.
That's because all non-Africans – be they from France, China or Papua
New Guinea – share the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that
interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes
the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and
resident Neanderthals did the deed.
Article Continues Here
It may well be within our lifetimes that Neanderthal DNA is used to bring a Hominid species back from extinction. Should we be worried about mad scientists cloning dinosaurs, strapping lasers on their heads, and using their cloned dino-armies to conquer the world? First of all get a hold of yourself, that's ridiculous. Secondly no, Jurassic Park may exist in the far future, but for right now there is no method for obtaining dinosaur DNA.
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