Japanese Researchers Announce Plan to Resurrect Woolly Mammoth Within Five Years
The Mammoth Paul KIt's just like Jurassic Park, except for real, and also with several key practical differences! Japanese researchers, led by Akira Iritani, professor emeritus of Kyoto University, have begun plans to resurrect the long-extinct (except in our hearts and minds and museums) woolly mammoth through new cloning techniques. The researchers hope to induce the birth of a new woolly mammoth--the first since the last Ice Age--within five or six years. Thanks to the relatively recent death of mammoths (compared to, say, dinosaurs) and the frigid conditions in which they lived and died, there have always been lots of well-preserved mammoth bodies in the Arctic north. In the past few years, that has led to an interest in cloning the creatures, but there was always some kind of stumbling block. Infuriatingly, the very thing that makes the mammoth so well-preserved--the ice and freezing temperatures--left much of the animal's DNA too...