Objective: ‘resurrect’ the mammoth in the next 50 years – The World

Siberia with love … Lyuba, raising preserved in the ice of the tundra mammoth for 42,000 years, has traveled to London in a very special case. Since it was discovered in 2007 by a caregiver reindeer is displayed as an oddity from another time at the Museum Shemanovsky and never before had traveled to the West.

The Natural History Museum of London has now become the undisputed attraction Lyuba Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age , which opens today at the venerable temple of science. The baby mammoth, 85 inches high and 130 inches long, has helped unravel some of the best kept secrets of the furry relatives of elephants, which became extinct about 4,000 years makes (one blink of an eye in geological terms).

Lyuba, the best preserved specimen of all the remains of mammoths that have emerged from the Siberian permafrost, has shot pass one of those races, a delight to the human species. When will the first cloned mammoth

Geneticist Ian Wilmut , father of la sheep Dolly , believes that science can be 50 years of the possibility of cloning extinct species like the mammoth. The method used would be the same as that used for live animals: retrieve the cell nucleus Mammoth frozen tissue, implant it into the egg of a female elephant (which previously would have extracted the core) and create an embryo with mammoth genes that would be implanted in the uterus of the pachyderm. The incubation period would be about 22 months.

However, Adrian Lister, a specialist in mammals proboscídeos Museum of Natural History, believes that is too early to speak of the resurrection of the mammoth : “The DNA found in Lyuba is highly fragmented and is not organized into cells. Thanks to him we were able to reach new and fascinating discoveries about Mammoths and how they adapt to their habitat, but I’m not one to rub their hands thinking that cloning is just around the corner. “

mammoth skeleton exhibited in the London exhibition. NHM

“Neither the technology we have today and the quality of remains give hope to clone a mammoth in a reasonable time, “warns Lister. “I do not deny that in a few decades as possible, and all extinct species such as the woolly mammoth Lyuba will surely be the first candidate. But even scientifically possible, ethical issues arise . “

” What would resurrect a mammoth couple of copies if their habitat is gone, and if we know that they were social animals lived in herds? “investigator Natural History Museum asks. “To what extent could scientifically justify cloning? I personally think we should concentrate all these efforts to avoid at all costs the extinction of elephants . “

The London show comes to rag on the controversy and responds well to such that the million dollar question: “Scientists can not clone a mammoth. Although they have been able to decode up to 70% of its genome, still lack crucial information. One way to find this information is to modify the genome of the elephant up to the mammoth, but that would require modifications to 400,000 . And even if scientists were able to produce a baby mammoth of an elephant surrogate mother is harder than it looks. “

Dr Akira Iritani , Kyoto University, has announced plans to clone a mammoth are already advanced in their laboratory in Japan and it is possible that in 2016 the first born baby mammoth of an African elephant. The South Korean Hwang Woo-Suk , who was disgraced for committing fraud in their experiments to clone human embryos, has also announced that it has reached an agreement with the University of the Republic of Sakha for avanzar to cloning a mammoth .

No wait for the resurrection of his kind, Lyuba, who died Siberian possibly drowned in the mud when he was little more than a month-old continues stunning tracks to the researchers, who found in your intestines and traces of milk residues grass , possibly chewed by his mother to the little shaggy breeding could digest.

” As the human species, mammoths originated in Africa and then spread to Europe, Eurasia and the New World “, says Adrian Lister. “One of the biggest mistakes is to believe that mammoths were the ancestors of elephants, when in fact it’s close cousins, who came to live at the same time and were adapted to other cold habitats.” “Climate change was undoubtedly the main reason for their extinction,” adds the researcher of the Museum of Natural History. “Rising temperatures 120,000 years ago almost ended their habitats: prairie that thrived were giving way to forests and tundra. They managed to recover in the Ice Age, but populations drastically decrease again until the final blow, some 6,000 years ago. ” “The definitive role of humans in their extinction remains to be seen, but the fact is that its disappearance coincides with the contact with human populations and the practice of hunting. It is quite possible that mammoths disappeared from the face of the Earth by the combined action of climate and man in a similar situation that the elephant lives today. “