Mommy, can I have a mammoth?
For only $10 million, two American scientists will make a mammoth out of the genetic information that has been unearthed in the Siberian perma frost and the reproductive infrastructure of a living elephant. The basic idea is to take an elephant egg, fix up the chromosomes based on the mammoth blue print from the frosty north, then bring the contraption to term in the belly of an elephant mommy, and presto!
(When I asked our VP of technology if they were going to buy one for the company, he sadly became patriotic and proposed we clone a moa instead, bringing it to term in a kiwi's egg.)
Among the ethical concerns that I had heard was the interesting one that a social animal like a mammoth should not be force to be the only one of its species; but kblake convinced me that, given that species is defined as a breedable population, it wasn't really all that sensible to talk of the species of something that is sui generis.
Which suggests that someone should pony up the missing $190 million, so that we can get a herd of them, and not have to worry about these issues.
(When I asked our VP of technology if they were going to buy one for the company, he sadly became patriotic and proposed we clone a moa instead, bringing it to term in a kiwi's egg.)
Among the ethical concerns that I had heard was the interesting one that a social animal like a mammoth should not be force to be the only one of its species; but kblake convinced me that, given that species is defined as a breedable population, it wasn't really all that sensible to talk of the species of something that is sui generis.
Which suggests that someone should pony up the missing $190 million, so that we can get a herd of them, and not have to worry about these issues.