It’s entirely possible that the ability to clone a woolly mammoth will become a reality in the not-so-distant future. Scientists have already sequenced 70% of the woolly mammoth genome (find the Nature article here) and the remaining 30% will surely be sequenced soon owing to the discovery of new, well-preserved mammoth specimens. After patching up the missing DNA chunks with DNA from African elephants, we’ll be able to use African elephants as surrogate mothers to bring woolly mammoths back a planet that hasn’t known them for ten thousand years.
There is a lot of debate over whether or not we should bring woolly mammoths back. In my opinion, bringing these and other extinct animals back to life could do a lot of good.
Cloning a woolly mammoth will require an extensive amount of funding. I don’t suspect that the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Institute of Health (NIH) will be chomping at the bit to fund this sort of research, so private investors will have to step up to the plate.
Such a high profile project is sure to attract the attention of private investors, who will undoubtedly identify the one could monetize the hell out of a cloned woolly mammoth. Imagine how much people would pay to see such a thing! Surely investors will see dollar signs and fund the cloning research.
Investors would mainly be interested in the production of clones, but their money would have to be spent on basic research as well. Previous cloning attempts have produced short-lived animals that quickly succumb to tumors, diseases, etc. In order to solve this major problem, part of the money that investor’s provide would necessarily fund basic research in fields as diverse as development biology, genetics, epigenetics, immunology, and microbiology. The results of these studies would be applicable to numerous species, not just woolly mammoths.
The percentage of submitted projects that are funded by NSF and NIH is pretty darn low. A sexy and exciting project like cloning woolly mammoths would undoubtedly tap into previously unexploited private funding resources, bringing millions of dollars into biology labs across the country.