Bringing Back The Woolly Mammoth

A team of scientists working on “de-extinction” says that they hope to engineer a woolly mammoth embryo within two years. Actually, it will be a mammoth/elephant hybrid. The plan is to insert the genes for mammoth characteristics into an elephant’s DNA. It will be several years after the embryos are generated before giving birth to a live animal.

The article linked after the jump cites some problems that have to be overcome, as well as some ethical issues that have been raised.

Do you see a moral problem with such “de-extinction” genetic engineering? Might at least some “life issue” concerns apply not just to humans but also to animals?

From Hannah Devlin, Woolly mammoth on the verge of resurrection, scientists say | Science | The Guardian:

The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering.

Speaking ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the “de-extinction” effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant.

“Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” said Prof George Church. “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.”

The creature, sometimes referred to as a “mammophant”, would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr.

Until now, the team have stopped at the cell stage, but are now moving towards creating embryos – although, they said that it would be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature.