Mammoth plan to revive extinct beast

LONDON: Scientists might soon be able to create a hybrid embryo of an elephant and a woolly mammoth, they have said. The work would be an important step towards the controversial mission to resurrect the long-extinct animal.

That in turn could give rise to the rebirth of a range of creatures that have died out, with only their DNA needed to bring them back to life.

First, scientists hope to be able to create an embryo with features of a mammoth, such as long, shaggy hair, thick layers of fat and cold-adapted blood. Those would be combined with the DNA of an elephant. With years more work, that embryo could potentially be grown into a living creature, bringing the animal back to life.

Eventually, scientists hope they could nurture the embryo within an artificial womb. They have previously sug- gested implanting an embryo into an elephant – a move that has been criticised as cruel, since the animal would probably suffer and could die.

Since the project was started in 2015, researchers have been able to gradually add more edits into an elephant genome. That means they can add more and more features from mammoth DNA, eventually moving towards a hybrid of the two.

Professor George Church, head of the Harvard University team, said: “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant/ mammoth embryo. Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.”

The woolly mammoth roamed Europe, Asia, Africa and North America during the last ice age and died out 4 500 years ago. – The Independent