Today the thorniest questions about cloning extinct species may be less technical than ethical. “Mammoths, like elephants, were intelligent, highly social animals,” says Adrian Lister, paleontologist and mammoth expert at the Natural History Museum in London. “Cloning would give you a single animal, which would live all alone in a park, a zoo, or a lab—not in its native habitat, which no longer exists. You’re basically creating a curio.” Tom Gilbert, an expert in ancient DNA at Copenhagen University who with Schuster and Webb pioneered the harvesting of mammoth DNA from hair, admits that as a student of mammoths, he’d be the first to go see one trundle across a paddock. But he questions both the utility and the wisdom of cloning extinct species. “If you can do a mammoth, you can do anything else that’s dead, including your grandmother. But in a world in global warming and with limited resources for research, do you really want to bring back your dead grandmother?”
Thursday 7 May 2009
Cloned Species ☀
Notes
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Today the thorniest questions about cloning extinct species may be less technical than ethical. “Mammoths, like...
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