Thursday, November 06, 2008

The Resurrection Project

A scientific development I can get behind.

Japanese scientists said Tuesday they had created a mouse from a dead cell frozen for 16 years, taking a step in the long impossible dream of bringing back extinct animals such as mammoths.

But the researchers said tough challenges remain ahead in terms of how to restore extinct animals, which would require breeding with animals that are still alive.

To revive a mammoth, researchers would need to find a way to implant a cell nucleus of a mammoth into the egg of an elephant and then implant the embryo into an elephant's uterus, it said.

The elephant is the closest modern relative of the mammoth, a huge woolly mammal believed to have died out with the Ice Age.

But Akira Iritani, a mammoth expert at Kinki University in Osaka, said it was only a matter of time before researchers could find a mammoth for a resurrection project.

Any other megafauna they can bring back I wonder?

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