Bringing mammoths back from the dead
I met a woolly mammoth once. Dead, of course, but an impressive beast nonetheless. It was in the city museum in the frigid Siberian city of Yakutsk, and the curator let me climb over the ropes and touch it. Many specimens of this extinct animal have been found, preserved in the Russian permafrost and this was one of the more complete specimens. The most memorable thing was the red ‘wool’, a thick matting of long hairs which displayed the thickness and pliability of raw spaghetti. These large pachyderms died out for the most part 10,000 years ago, although some hung on into historic times; a small population on Wrangel Island only died out about 3,700 years ago, meaning there were woolly mammoths alive when the Great Pyramid at Cheops was already 800 years old.
For about 20 years, stories have emerged that a team of scientists somewhere or other is trying to bring the woolly mammoth back to life, using DNA extracted from permafrost-preserved flesh to generate a cloned individual, which would then be brought to term in the womb of an Indian elephant. This week it was reported that academics from Russia and Korea have extracted ‘living cells’ from a specimen dug up this summer. So are we about to witness the first example in Earth’s history of a species being brought back from the dead?
I doubt it. For a start, cloning animals even now is a far-from-easy procedure, and that is when you are taking living cells from a living animal and placing the embryo in the womb of a creature of the same species. I am not clear what the team means by ‘living cells’; this cannot literally be true as any tissue will have been devoid of nutrients for tens of thousands of years and will have been frozen solid as well. If there are cells that are undamaged, whose nucleii have escaped the ravages of freeze-thaw and ice-crystal growth then it is – just – possible that useful genetic material could be extracted. And then, again, it is just possible that with a heroic effort and a great deal of luck an embryo could be created using a donor elephant egg and mammoth chromosomes. Again, this all seems like science fiction but let’s assume it can be done. What then?
The result would, surely, be a sorry beast. Alone, the last of its kind in a world into which it no longer fits. The woolly mammoths went extinct for a number of reasons, including climate change and overhunting by humans. A single woolly mammoth would be a freakshow, interesting for sure but telling us little about how these wonderful animals behaved or about the ecosystem, now vanished, in which they lived. Of course in theory you could create a breeding population of mammoths but what then? Where would they live? Another of Asia's magnificent mammals, the Siberian Tiger, survives to this day but it is hardly thriving – just a few hundred of these cats survive, having been hunted to near-extinction. I’d like to see a living woolly mammoth, but perhaps it would be better if we concentrated our efforts on preserving the species that we do have rather than bringing creature back from the dead.