In 1984 Technology Review published an article titled "Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth" that described an effort by Soviet scientists to bring the woolly mammoth species back from extinction. The technique being used was the insertion of DNA from woolly mammoths found frozen in Siberian ice into elephant cells. The cells were then brought to term inside surrogate elephant mothers. The head of the project was said to be Dr. Sverbighooze Yasmilov. The story was widely reported as a factual event.
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Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.

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Do y'all know that according to TLC and the Discovery Channel, that this is close to becoming a distinct possibility?
Posted by El Gecko  in  Oklahoma, USA  on  Wed Mar 24, 2004  at  06:29 PM

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This sounds pretty plausible with today's technology. I mean this is the technique that current cloning uses.
Posted by Sir Edmund Fangal the Third  in  Floating in the Ether  on  Fri Apr 30, 2004  at  12:00 PM

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Why do we need to bring the mammoth back anyway? The ice caps are melting, so it's not as if we've got anywhere to put it...
Posted by Phyrbyrd  in  England  on  Mon Jun 21, 2004  at  05:35 PM

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Even I was fooled by this one. But i was 7
Posted by Alex  in  here  on  Thu Jun 24, 2004  at  02:52 PM

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YEAH! this isnt a hoax! i think it was just predicted at the time.

but now we have the technology to try this out

it would take a few generations to breed out those mammoth trait we all know and love

i'll have to read up some more. i know this one is plausible
Posted by Chris  on  Tue Nov 02, 2004  at  08:52 PM

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Oh man... I was totally taken in by this one. A case of being too close to plausible after reading and thinking Jurrasic Park sounded too close to plausible.
Posted by Vern  in  Earth - somewhere in Canada  on  Sat Apr 02, 2005  at  01:01 PM

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Doesn't this sound like a popular movie of the same time?
Posted by Stephen  in  Arica, Chile  on  Sat Apr 02, 2005  at  04:56 PM

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They are actually trying this in Scotland and at Texas A & M....just a thought!
Posted by Daughterofthegods  in  somewhere in time  on  Fri Apr 08, 2005  at  03:43 AM

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According to my sources at Texas A & M and in Scotland (remember Dolly? the cloned sheep?) they are working together to make this happen. Although they are having difficulties with the gestation time as well as the ovulation schedule so that they can make things happen...but science IS catching up with fiction.
Posted by Daughterofthegods  in  somewhere in time  on  Fri Apr 08, 2005  at  03:51 AM

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Yeah, I think the discovery channel said it would take about 50yrs for them to breed a 99.9% pure Mammoth. If they can do that with Mammoths maybe Jurrasic Park isn't such a long shot.
Posted by Justin  on  Mon Oct 10, 2005  at  04:34 AM

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Yeah, i'm pretty sure this is actually truth, or at least a plan similar to it. about 6 years ago, i'm pretty sure i saw some sort of documentary about how they found something like 3 mammoth cells frozen in the ice, (not sure what kind of cells. then they would crossbreed these with elephants 3 times to create a specimen similar to a woolly mammoth. I don't think this documentary was created as a joke.
Posted by Jason  in  Boston  on  Tue Mar 07, 2006  at  09:54 PM

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And to the people saying wel we could do this with dinosaurs, well, its a lot different. If i recall correctly, these were cells with complete DNA in them because they were frozen. You will not find the cells of dinosaurs. The DNA must be perfect for it to work.
Just as side note about the actual movie Jurassic Park, the way they said they did it was some DNA found in insect blood caught in amber. The DNA was damaged, but they spliced it together with some frog DNA. This is absoulutely impossible. DNA between different species is very different, and the technology of splicing such things together is ludicris. Even the partial DNA being taken from the insects blood is rediculous.
Posted by Jason  in  Boston  on  Tue Mar 07, 2006  at  10:00 PM

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Actually, they splice DNA together all the time, and the differences between species are really far less than you'd think.

So yeah, they could do this. And it would be very, very cool.
Posted by raincoaster  in  Vancouver  on  Sun Apr 02, 2006  at  12:39 PM

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It's interesting but I see no point to bringing it back - except for fun.
Posted by Andy  in  England  on  Fri Apr 14, 2006  at  10:40 AM

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It would be kinda cool to bring back the mammoth, but why? I mean, bwhat good would it bring us? It died out millions of years ago because the Earth was warming up. I don't think it wants to come back
Posted by Dominique  in  Somewhere over the Rainbow  on  Wed Apr 19, 2006  at  05:03 PM

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While it may be "cool" to do something like this, it also has the potential to be frightening. Consider the premise of the "The Boys from Brazil", which was a book (fiction of course) that was then made into a movie of the same name. The premise of the book is that some of Hitler's DNA was preserved after the war and that this DNA was used to create clones of Hitler - not just one this time but fifty Hitlers, just in case some did not live to maturity. Just to be extra sure, the people behind this plot also tried to give the 50 new Hitlers similar childhoods in case their environment and upbringing had more influence on their characters than their genes.

While this is only a novel so far, who's to say that something like this couldn't happen some day?
Posted by Buzz  on  Sun Jun 18, 2006  at  01:39 PM

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Well, it was not such a clever hoax, because four years earlier the Russian scientist Nikolai Vereshchagin had already announced that he was going to attempt to clone a mammoth.

In response to teh perosn who wrote "it's not as if we've got anywhere to put it..." - Russian ecologist Sergei Zimov operatesd a project that is recreating a "mammoth steppe" in north-east Siberia.
Posted by David Broadfoot  in  Sydney, Australia  on  Fri Jul 07, 2006  at  05:42 AM

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This is particular amusing when viewed in recent scientific news, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2312860,00.html

Seems wooly mammoth sperm might be viable and there may be attempts to create a half-mammoth/half-elephant that could be successful.
Posted by Jody  on  Fri Aug 18, 2006  at  06:01 PM

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I believe that this will only be a matter of time before someone tries this and is successful. You would need male mammoth DNA I suspect in order to get both X and Y chromosomes, and multiple mammoth DNA sources to develop a viable breeding population. I would imagine that other possibilities will be the moa of New Zealand, and perhaps the long-horned giant bison, corpes of which are periodically discovered frozen in Alaska.
Posted by Dale Ridder  in  USE  on  Fri Jan 26, 2007  at  07:00 AM

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Jason
Experiments have already been done with gene splicing. Jellyfish DNA has been messed about with
and I seem to recall Tomatoes too in an effort to prevent them spoiling.
Posted by sueper  in  UK  on  Thu Feb 01, 2007  at  03:37 PM

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