It Lives!
09/12/11 17:07 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Fri, 12/09/2011 - 15:07.
I concur with Dr. Miller. The difficulty in cloning normal healthy woolly mammoths from the DNA samples available to us today may not only be too technological challenging, but also too expensive to be economically justifiable. Moreover, even if a few mammoths could be successfully cloned, due to their shortened teleomers, their life spans would likely be relatively short.
It seems likely that human hunting in combination with the last global ice age led to the demise of the mammoth species. So in a sense, perhaps there might be a moral responsibility to help restore these magnificent creatures. However, such resurrected animals would likely be confined to imprisonment in zoos or game farms for our personal gratification. It seems more sensible to focus our efforts on preserving contemporary species that are presently on the verge of disappearing or have recently become extinct because of human activities.
Habitat loss and global warming from human pressures are only two of many problems that confront wildlife on our planet. Ironically, the global warming is resulting in the rapid melting of glaciers and the thawing of frozen mammoths and other organisms in relatively short order. Consequently, time may be running out to retrieve high quality specimens from enough diverse mammoths to enable their successful cloning even in the far future.
Link to the original blog post.
I concur with Dr. Miller. The difficulty in cloning normal healthy woolly mammoths from the DNA samples available to us today may not only be too technological challenging, but also too expensive to be economically justifiable. Moreover, even if a few mammoths could be successfully cloned, due to their shortened teleomers, their life spans would likely be relatively short.
It seems likely that human hunting in combination with the last global ice age led to the demise of the mammoth species. So in a sense, perhaps there might be a moral responsibility to help restore these magnificent creatures. However, such resurrected animals would likely be confined to imprisonment in zoos or game farms for our personal gratification. It seems more sensible to focus our efforts on preserving contemporary species that are presently on the verge of disappearing or have recently become extinct because of human activities.
Habitat loss and global warming from human pressures are only two of many problems that confront wildlife on our planet. Ironically, the global warming is resulting in the rapid melting of glaciers and the thawing of frozen mammoths and other organisms in relatively short order. Consequently, time may be running out to retrieve high quality specimens from enough diverse mammoths to enable their successful cloning even in the far future.
Link to the original blog post.