joe randel's art dump

Recently scientists in Japan have successfully cloned a mouse from a lab mouse carcass that was frozen in permafrost (-40 C) for 16 years.  The new technique was demonstrated to show that cloning is now possible on severely damaged cells due to deep freezes from dead animal specimens.  Several mice where cloned in this fashion and they even mated and had healthy babies.

So what animal is at the top of the list for scientists to clone using this new method?  Yup, the great dead woolly mammoth.  Woolly mammoths have already been found in well preserved in the ice and experts believe that there are as many as 10,000 more trapped in the frozen wastes.  Why, there is even plans to make a “Pleistocene Park” in northern Siberia.  It would be twice the size of Japan and be the new home of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, Siberian tigers, steppe lions, giant deer, ancient foxes, and ancestors of the Siberian horse.

Crazy eh?

So what’s your take on all this?  We have the opportunity to bring back long lost animals and really see and study what they where like.  To be able to touch a real woolly mammoth would be awesome.  But is it something we should be fooling with?  Is it our place to do such a thing?  I’m not sure where I stand.  On one side I think it’s amazing and on the other I think it’s down right scary.  I don’t think it’s right but I’d love to see a real woolly mammoth…  I just don’t know…

Discuss!