Scientists believe mankind will see live mammoth

PanARMENIAN.Net - Despite the lack of strong indication of the success of the venture, South Korean scientist Hwang In Sung remains hopeful of the possibility of cloning the extinct woolly mammoth, todayonline.com reports.

“I think there’s not a good judgment on how soon the technology (to recreate a mammoth) will develop, but I hope one day in future mankind will be able to see a live mammoth,” he said.

Hwang In Sung, a researcher at South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, was part of the team of scientists that trekked through northern Siberia on an expedition to search for viable mammoth samples, as part of the National Geographic Channel’s documentary, Mammoth: Back From The Dead. The team also comprised Dr Love Dalen, a researcher from the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University, and Jim Coates, President of Kryotek Arctic Innovation.

“We initiated this project because with global warming accelerating the melting of the Siberian permafrost, more mammoth samples are getting exposed (to the atmosphere) but they are not (being handled or processed properly),” said Hwang.

Together with Russian colleagues at the North-Eastern Federal University, the team is working on a joint project to restore the mammoth, so they were after fresh mammoth samples for scientific analysis.

The expedition took place at two sites, Batagaika and Muus-khaya, in the northern part of Siberia, from early August to early September last year. The team succeeded in finding cell nuclei that were still there after 30,000 years, and their next step is to attempt to inject those nuclei into egg cells to revive them.

“The purpose was to find a nucleus that has been well preserved, and then we can inject it into an egg from an elephant to see whether it can survive. The nuclear DNA may have been a bit damaged over time, but implanting the nucleus into the egg may revive the nucleus if the damage is not serious,” explained Hwang. The nuclei were extracted from mammoth skin samples, which are easier to isolate than, for example, those in bone marrow.

Extracting nuclei from the mammoth samples was difficult. “We find a lot of good nuclei samples, but we lose a lot of them when we’re isolating them, because the isolation process is optimized for working on fresh tissue, and not 30,000-year-old tissue,” said Hwang.

Instead of cloning, other methods could be used to revive mammoths, such as gene synthesis to construct the genome of mammoths from scratch in order to create the animal. “If the technology develops, the chances (of having a live mammoth) will get better. Science and cloning technology progress very quickly, so it’s still possible in the near future,” Hwang said.

Hendrik Poinar, professor of evolutionary genetics at Canada’s McMaster University, is also working on a process called "de-extinction."

“We're interested in the evolutionary history of these beasts. These lumbering animals lived about 10,000 years ago and went extinct. We've been recreating their genome in order to understand their origins and migrations and their extinction. That led to the inevitable discussion about if we could revive an extinct species and is it a good thing,” he says.

He believes mammoths can be revived in a period of 30-50 years.