Stem-Cell Milestone Reached For Wooly Mammoth Restoration

[TTL News 313]

Quote

 

A biotech company that hopes to resurrect extinct species said Wednesday that it has reached an important milestone: the creation of a long-sought kind of stem cell for the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth.

"This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project," said George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded Colossal Biosciencesin Dallas.

The woolly mammoth was a big, shaggy species of elephant that roamed the tundra before going extinct thousands of years ago. Colossal has been working to bring the mammoth, the dodo bird and other extinct species back to life using the latest cloning and genetic engineering techniques.

And now the company says scientists have for the first time created induced pluripotent stem cells for the mammoth's closest living relative: Asian elephants. The company plans to describe the work in a scientific paper that will be posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. It hasn't been peer-reviewed, but the company says that's in progress.

 

Read the rest here. 

What do you think? Should scince be trying to resurect some extinct species?

[Adam 375]

i think for those species that man directly caused extinction, this could be useful, however messing with Nature's plan seems a good way to get bit right in the arse