Cloning wooly mammoths! Now that is cool.

Stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk's private bioengineering laboratory confirmed he is poised to make a bid to return the extinct Siberian mammoth to the planet.

Hwang Woo-suk is an extremely famous scientific fraud.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/asia/0,16641,20060109,00.htm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/asia/27clone.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2006/11/28-01.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk

SEOUL, South Korea — Hwang Woo-suk, a disgraced cloning expert from South Korea who had claimed major breakthroughs in stem-cell research, was convicted Monday of falsifying his papers and embezzling government research funds. A judge sentenced him to a suspended two-year prison term, saying Dr. Hwang had shown remorse and had not taken research money for personal use.

Dr. Hwang was once hailed as a national hero in the South. His school, Seoul National University, disowned him in 2005, saying that he had fabricated the papers he had published to global acclaim.

He's genuinely one of the top researchers in the field (see: cloned dog).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuppy

Mammoths need tundra steppes to live on subarctic grains, and they all converted to unproductive swampy tundra :(

There is a project to recreate tundra steppes tho: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park

I'd suspect cloned mammoths would be a zoo feature first.

Presumably, given how radical this discovery is, the opportunity to clone an extinct species would be given to the most capable scientific institution on the planet, not for the highest bidder... Maybe the South Koreans qualify as the most capable, I don't really know. Or perhaps my vision of the international science community is just naive.

After reading this [0], found from an above comment, it's clear that cloning endeavors are generally private initiatives. In my mind, this discovery was similar to unearthing ruins or something, but nothing's sacred [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_ibex#Cloning_project [1] http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-3743-peru-heavy-machinery-d...

Also inbreeding might work itself to produce a viable herd.

There are two versions of each gene (because there are two of each chromosome), what often happens is that even if one version of the gene is defective, the other version is enough to compensate.

Now, say you have two individuals, each one has one working and one defective version of a gene. If you cross those individuals 25% of the offspring will have two copies of the "good" version, 50% will have one good and one defective copy, and 25% will be unlucky and have two versions of the defective version. This is just regular Mendelian genetics so you might have heard all this before. However, it sets up why crossing two clones can be risky.

So, in the above example 75% of offspring will be fine. Sounds pretty good, right? But that's only when considering one gene. A mammoth likely has tens of thousands of genes. This particular one can be carrying any number of defective versions of each of those genes. Crossing it with an exact genetic copy would mean that the risk of having an offspring with a genetic defect is that much higher.

However, it might not be all that bad. Entire viable populations have likely descended from something like a pregnant female floating on a raft to a new island. If they can extract blood from even one other mammoth, that might be just enough to create healthy enough offspring. The main barrier is the gestation time and generation time. Two fertile rats stranded on an island with plenty of food can reproduce fast enough to quickly create a good population that might be able to overcome low genetic diversity through sheer numbers. Trying to raise enough mammoths will be much more expensive and much more time-consuming.

I didn't get the impression that they had DNA from more than a single animal (a female in this case), making breeding unlikely.

Hail to the king, baby.

edit: Make that two questions: one for 'full nuclear genome replication' and one for 'full nuclear genome sequencing'.

Have we developed the tech to go from mammal -> digital genome sequence -> physical replicated chromosome -> egg implanted with chromosome -> developmentally normal mammal -> fertile offspring, yet, or is that somewhere in the future?

It makes sense to take a sample immediately and preserve it ASAP.

But i'll keep my fingers crossed

http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/may/21/reviving-extinct-sp...