Mammoth could be brought back to life in 4 years

The Huffington Post:

Researchers will attempt resurrecting the mammoth, a species believed extinct for over 5,000 years, after finally obtaining tissue last summer from a carcass preserved in a Russian mammoth research laboratory.

The team will be led by Professor Akira Iritani, professor emeritus at Kyoto University, notes Physorg.com.

Though the study began in 1997, the researchers were unable to determine how to safely extract DNA until a 2008 experiment by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, during which he cloned a mouse that had been in deep freeze for 16 years.

They plan on taking nuclei from the mammoth cells and inserting them into an elephant's egg cells from which the nuclei have been removed. This will create an embryo that contains the mammoth's genes. The embryo will then be inserted into the elephant's womb, and the animal will, hopefully, give birth to a mammoth.

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