Will Scientists Cloning A Wooly Mammoth Be Trampled To Death Or Gored To Death?
Scientists in Japan are planning to resurrect the long-extinct wooly mammoth by cloning a cell taken from a carcass preserved in ice for 4,500 years in Siberia, and implanting it in the uterus of a female elephant. Should take about five years, they say.
Of course, there are serious questions. As one of the scientists, Akira Iritani of Kyoto University says, “If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed (the mammoth) and whether to display it to the public.”
These are the wrong questions, I think. (Answers: As fast and prolifically as possible. And, Only once the special “Ice Age” theme park is built and also stocked with giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers.) Rather, I think the scientists should be concerned with the matter of exactly how will nature point out the folly of their extreme hubris this time.
Will they be flattened by a stampede of mammoths, once some long-dormant genetic memory is triggered in the reawakened beasts’ collective consciousness, and they realize that our ancestors hunted them to death and drew unflattering pictures of them on cave walls?
Or will it be goring?
Or will some invisible vapors escape the mammoth cells during the cloning process that, once breathed in, cause the scientists’ facial features to flatten and broaden into the famously hideous (and, apparently, genetically advantageless) visage of the neanderthal?
Or maybe even something worse?