Get your Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King jokes ready. A professor at Japan’s Kyoto University is claiming that he’ll be able to resurrect a woolly mammoth within roughly four years’ time, bringing new life to a species that died out more than 5,000 years prior.
Even though Dr. Akira Iritani isn’t going to attempt to duplicate DNA strains from animals trapped in amber, the technique he’s propositioning—which was already used by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology to clone a mouse previously frozen for sixteen years—does sound fairly close to that on paper.
Iritani intends to travel up to a Russian mammoth research laboratory this summer in order to acquire the correct tissue from a frozen mammoth. If he can uncover a working sample of at least three square centimeters, he’ll claims that he’ll be able to insert the nuclei of the frozen mammoth cells into the egg cells of an African elephant. Following a 600-day gestation period, out pops a new woolly mammoth—in theory.
"Now that the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," said Iritani in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
Read the rest of the story: Scientist Plans to Clone Woolly Mammoth (Just Not For Theme Park).