Japanese Scientist Says We’ll Have Mammoths by 2015

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Construction workers transport the cranial bone model of the biggest carnivore 'Giganotosaurus' of the world in southern Germany (REUTERS / Michaela Rehle)

A Japanese professor in Kyoto, Japan seems to have take a cue from Hollywood: he says that he’ll be able to create a woolly mammoth by 2015, a mere four years now, in a Frankenstein-like twist.

(Read about how European scientists attempted to bring back ancient cattle.)

Even the professor, Dr. Akira Iritani, admits it sounds strange on paper. By using a new technique that was used to clone a mouse that was frozen for 16 years, he plans to bring a species that died out over 5,000 years back to life.

(Read about how South Korea is cloning pet dogs.)

He plans on attempting to bringing back the extinct creature by inserting frozen nuclei of mammoth cells into the eggs of an African elephant. It will take about 600 days for the fetus to gestate. Of course, that’s only if he can find enough undamaged genetic material to achieve his task, which is why attempts have failed in the past.

(Read the financial argument against and for human cloning.)

What are the chances that he’ll succeed? We don’t know. But if Iritani prevails, the last thing we need is people trying to clone dinosaurs. We’ve already seen that story… by Steven Spielberg. (via PC Mag)