They will try to revive the long extinct species by obtaining tissue over summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory. The nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an elephant's egg cell where the nuclei have been removed, creating an embryo containing mammoth genes. The embryo will later be inserted into an elephant's uterus with the hope that the animal will eventually give birth to a baby mammoth, just the way God intended it to be.
At the heart of the project is a new technique to extract DNA from frozen cells. Previously, this was an obstacle to cloning attempts because of the damage cells sustained in the freezing process, but in 2008, Japanese scientists cloned a mouse from the cells of another that had been kept in temperatures similar to frozen ground for 16 years. The extracted cell nucleus from the dead mouse (not to be confused with deadmau5) was implanted into the egg of a live mouse.
Some mammoth remains still retain usable tissue samples, making the species a better candidate for cloning, unlike dinosaurs, which disappeared 65 million years ago and whose remains exist only as fossils. Why a majority of the huge creatures that once strode in large herds across Eurasia and North America died out towards the end of the last Ice Age is still debated. Some hold that mammoths were hunted to extinction by humans, while others argue that climate change was more to blame. If the Japanese are successful, they may not only help to answer those questions, but also find horrible ways to exploit the revived species. Sailor Moon branded mammoth sandwich vending machines, anyone?
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