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January 16, 2011
Coming Soon to a Zoo Near You - The Extinct Wooly Mammoth
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8257223/Mammoth-could-be-reborn-in-four-years.html
Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.
But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.
Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.
"Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily Telegraph.
He intends to use Dr Wakayama's technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.
As a general rule, I'm constantly amazed by our lack of progress on the biology front. The most important breakthroughs in biology, in my opinion, were made before the advent of computers. They invented Aspirin in 1889 and Penicillin in 1928. They were doing blood transfusions in 1625. Yet, the "War on Cancer" seems to have been a glorious failure.
This, to me, seems to be what we ought to be doing. One of the rare cases where we seem to be making progress on the biology front.
Posted by Rob Kiser on January 16, 2011 at 12:38 PM
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