Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million

[Brownian Motion]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?hp

November 20, 2008

Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million

By NICHOLAS WADE

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this long time staple of science fiction were a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.

The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years. Though the stuffed animals in natural history museums are not likely to burst into life again, these old collections are full of items that may contain ancient DNA which can be decoded by the new generation of DNA sequencing machines.

If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are now discussions of how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that generation by generation it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes. The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but ethically more challenging.

[RDK]

I'm curious what the religious fundamentalists will think about this. On the one hand, it's Man playing God. On the other, it's reuniting humans and dinosaurs... just like God intended 5000 years ago.