4.000 year-old mammoth to be cloned

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March 15, 2012
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Russian scientists with their counterparts from South Korea, attempt to clone a woolly mammoth, extinct about 4,000 years ago.

According to the project team, ‘they will try somatic cloning, the same method used in 1996 to bring to life the famous sheep Dolly, the first mammal cloned.”

A spokesman for the Institute for Applied Ecology North (Russia) explained that “the procedure is to introduce the egg of a modern elephant, genetic material of a mammoth that lived thousands of years in Yakutia (Siberia). The egg will implant in the uterus of a female elephant to gestate a fetus for 22 months and may give birth to a mammoth baby alive.”

And that “mammoth genetic samples will be selected in Yakutia before year end and then delivered to the South Korean team members who have experience in the cloning of large mammals. Thus, one of them, Hwang Woo-Suk of Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, is one of the pioneers in the field and the architect of cloning the first dog in 2005.”

If they manage this project will be “the first cloned mammoth and his birth would be within 10 years.”