Scientists Close to Cloning Mammoth. Neanderthals could be next.

Woolly mammoth to be brought back to life from cloned bone marrow ‘within five years’. Neanderthals will take a while longer.

Source: Dateline Zero

Scientists believe it may be possible to clone a woolly mammoth within five years after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia, according to an article that appeared at The Daily Mail this past weekend.

Teams from Russia’s Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal. Much of this was originally reported by Japan’s Kyodo News, and reported second-hand by other news agencies, including The Daily Mail. Scientists have been involved in the research since the late 1990s, according to the article.

But this isn’t the only project aimed at quite literally resurrecting the past. At a conference in Dubai on science, religion and modernity, this question reportedly came up: “Should we clone Neanderthals?” It’s not just an interesting question, but a relevant one as well.

Last year, Discover’s Andrew Moseman took a look at the hurdles facing scientists who are truly undertaking the project of cloning our our hominid siblings. The following comes from an article that ran in Volume 63 Number (the March/April 2010 issue) of Archaeology:

In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia’s Vindija cave 30,000 years ago. As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. … The ability to use the genes of extinct hominins is going to force the field of paleoanthropology into some unfamiliar ethical territory. There are still technical obstacles, but soon it could be possible to use that long-extinct genome to safely create a healthy, living Neanderthal clone. Should it be done?

Glad someone is remembering to ask “should it be done?”, because this opens up a whole Pandora’s Box of ethical problems. Sadly, I’m sure there are going to be people doing it anyway, just because we can. The following related articles suggest “resurrection” experiments have already been quietly conducted. 

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Full post at Dateline Zero