Harvard employee, biologist George Church, who studies extinct animal species, has been working on the Woolly Mammoth Revival project since 2015, within the framework of which he is going to resurrect a mammoth. The scientist emphasizes that it would be more correct to call such an animal an elephant with the features of a mammoth. Now scientists are confident that they can get an elephant with ears and hair similar to a mammoth, but they expect to get an embryo using the new CRISPR / Cas9 technology.
A team of specialists led by Church found and introduced into the chromosomes of elephants 45 mammoth genes isolated from DNA that was preserved in the permafrost - Naked Science writes about this with reference to the scientist's report.
The first "baby mammoth" will develop in an "artificial womb" - this decision was made by the scientists in order to avoid risk to the life of animals. Nevertheless, some of Church's colleagues have expressed doubts that such a method will be effective.
Church himself believes that there is an opportunity to resurrect woolly mammoths, because scientists quite often find remains containing DNA in the permafrost, which means that there will be no shortage of materials with which to work comfortably.
Russian experts agree with their Harvard colleague, who announced a couple of years ago that mammoths can be cloned, but also made a reservation that this would require the use of elephant cells, and a living elephant would have to bear the mammoth
VYACHESLAV LARIONOV