How to Clone a Mammoth: But should we?

[C C]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22...ld-we.html

With the science nearly upon us, a new book highlights the ethical and logistical issues of bringing back proxies of extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth.

EXCERPT: When Beth Shapiro started writing How to Clone a Mammoth a few years ago, she could have had little idea how timely her "how-to" manual would be. Now, with a flurry of headlines in recent months about the "imminent" resurrection of the woolly mammoth, her timing looks impeccable. Already, news of mammoth genes cloned in living elephant cells has emerged from two research groups this year. "De-extinction", the preserve of proleptic fiction like Jurassic Park, and coined from that genre, is becoming real. Shapiro, a biologist who researches the mammoth and the passenger pigeon, gives us a clear and fascinating update.....

[Yazata]

I just checked out this book from my local library and haven't read it yet. (I'll post a book report when I do.)

But just from glancing through it, I get the impression that Beth Shapiro (an evolutionary biology professor at U. California - Santa Cruz) thinks that cloning a mammoth will be harder than people think. Even well-preserved samples of frozen mammoth tissue apparently have very fragmented DNA. The entire mammoth genome might not be recoverable. So the idea seems to be to splice it together with DNA from existing elephants, using the elephant DNA to plug the holes, so to speak.

She also discusses the idea of using shorter selected segments of mammoth DNA to give existing tropical elephants cold-resistant genetic features, like shaggy fur, so that they can be reintroduced into sub-arctic environments like northeastern Siberia. Those animals wouldn't be mammoths at all, but rather some kind of currently unknown genetically-engineered mammoth-elephant hybrid.