They already created a mouse from frozen cells

Nov 4, 2008 14:00 GMT  ·  By
Japanese scientists managed to clone a 15-year old mouse, which has been dead for most of this time
   Japanese scientists managed to clone a 15-year old mouse, which has been dead for most of this time

Japanese cloning experts announced on Tuesday that they were successful in cloning a mouse that has been dead for 15 years, and that the new animal turned out fine. It was even able to reproduce with another female rat, which gave researchers a field day, seeing how this step in science could bring forth a cloning "revolution." The cell that the team used was stored for all these years in an environment with a constant temperature of about -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit).  

Because this temperature is almost identical to the one frozen ground has, cloning experts are confident that they can find a mammoth cell that was preserved since the last Ice Age. Such a huge breakthrough in the field of genetics has the international scientific community buzzing with excitement, as the new experiment proved that not only living animals can be cloned, but dead ones as well.  

Current estimates place the potential number of dead mammoths under Siberian soil at about 10,000, so the odds of scientists finding a good cell are pretty good. The main problem for cloning the large beast is not a good cell though, but rather a host to plant the cell in. The mouse was "resurrected" when his cell was inserted into a female mouse and developed there.  

Finding a host to grow a mammoth is another story completely. The only land animal large enough to house a baby mammoth is an elephant. So researchers will have to get the cell, take out its nucleus, get a female elephant, and place the mammoth cell inside her uterus. It's easy to see why this could be a little complicated, but undoubtedly it will happen sometime over the next few years.  

There are also critics to the idea, who say that cloning should be banned altogether, because of the risk it poses to human security. They argue that unauthorized researchers could concentrate on cloning people that lived throughout our history, which could span a major political turmoil. Also, cloning animals for food is also dangerous, as evidenced by the warnings the European Union and a few Asian countries put out on the matter.