Board Thread:Fossil Fuels/@comment-3213993-20150324212822

George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University often noted for his advocacy of human genetic engineering, has transplanted 14 mammoth genes into elephant cells (the article confuses 14 genes with 14 cells, I think). He plans to recreate mammoth-like elephants in 3-20 years, which is more plausible than cloning a mammoth using frozen cells (which will almost certainly never happen).

However, the project has some critics. Jackson Landers, a a journalist at the Washington Post, has questioned the accuracy of Church's "extraordinary" claims, pointing out that he has not published this experiment in a journal yet (then again, Horner announced the Chickenosaurus project before he published the first journal article in 2014).

Another hurdle to the project is that elephants do not do well in captivity. Only 40 elephants of breeding age are present in the US anymore, and most of these are being used in conservation efforts for living elephants, which are endangered. Artificial insemination in elephants usually fails, to say nothing of cloning, which has never been done or attempted before.

After investigating both sides, I think we need to improve the conservation status, as well as captive husbandry, of elephants before we can attempt to make a mammoth. However, I am looking forward to seeing Church's paper about the mammoth/elephant hybrid cells. 