Fond of watching dinosaurs in Jurassic Park?
Recently, geneticists from Harvard University have inserted DNA from woolly mammoth into the genetic code of an elephant. The said samples preserved in Arctic permafrost.
In case you didn’t know, mammoths were dissolve in the last Ice Age, and it is closely related to Asian elephants. Some of the last mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean.
According to George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard says that they’ve looked over the genes associated with resistance to the cold. These will include the genes for hairiness, ear size, and subcutaneous fat. After they locate the genes, they replicated them and spliced them into the code of a modern elephant.
He added, “We now have functioning elephant cells with mammoth DNA in them,” “We have not published it in a scientific journal because there is more work to do, but we plan to do so.”
There are some scientists against the procedure. Professor Alex Greenwood, a well known expert on ancient DNA said, “We face the potential extinction of African and Asian elephants. Why bring back another elephantid from extinction when we cannot even keep the ones that are not extinct around?” He added, “What is the message? We can be as irresponsible with the environment as we want. Then we’ll just clone things back?”
“Money would be better spent focusing on conserving what we do have than spending it on an animal that has been extinct for thousands of years,” Greenwood concluded.