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Asked by popcorn32 to Clare, Divya, Ian, Jess, Lewis on 13 Mar 2014.
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Ian Hands-Portman answered on 13 Mar 2014:
I think one day we’ll be able to recreate the Mammoth and there’s already a project to recreate an extinct frog called the Gastric Brooding frog.
The question is, should we? With the frog, we wiped it out recently and there’s still a habitat for it but where would you put a mammoth? Should we make one just to keep it in a zoo. Also we’d have to make more than one – enough to make a breeding population.
As for dinosaurs, no-one’s found DNA that old preserved anywhere yet but you never know, it might crop up trapped in amber – or even as the ice cap thaws in Antarctica where the ice has been there for tens of millions of years some might show up. I’d love to see it happen but only for selfish reasons.
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Lewis Dean answered on 13 Mar 2014:
I agree with Ian. I think that sometime soon we will have an extinct animal brought back to life – there has been debate about bringing back wooly mammoths (using elephants to raise them). What we need to be careful of is creating an animal solely for us to stare at!
And bringing back dinosaurs might be dangerous – just look at what happened in Jurassic Park!
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Clare Nevin answered on 13 Mar 2014:
We can already clone animals – you might have heard of Dolly the sheep. She was cloned by taking the nucleus containing the DNA from the cell of an adult sheep and placed into an egg which was then fertilised and implanted into a surrogate mother sheep which eventually gave birth to Dolly. However, cloned animals have a huge predisposition to diseases and she developed severe arthritis and didn’t live for very long. I am sure if we began to clone extinct species there would be similar problems and like Ian said, there are many ethical issues to consider, especially if the animal’s health will be poor and its life limited.
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Divya Venkatesh answered on 14 Mar 2014:
Yeah I agree, it would be super interesting but probably not a good idea.
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