Scientists Hope to Recreate Mammoths
Thu Aug 22, 4:44 AM ET
By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press Writer
A group of privately funded Japanese scientists has a mammoth project for Siberia — a safari park they hope might eventually feature a genetic hybrid of the extinct woolly mammals and modern-day elephants.
For several years, the researchers have conducted excavations in Siberia in hopes of finding a frozen specimen well enough preserved in the Siberian tundra for its DNA to be used to impregnate an elephant.
"If we can find a somatic (body) cell, or preferably a sperm cell, that is intact, we can recreate a mammoth," said Shoji Okutsu, a veterinary expert at Kagoshima University. "If everything goes successfully and we have baby mammoths, we don't want to keep them at a zoo. We want them to live in an environment as close as possible to where their ancestors once lived."
That is a big if — so far, no mammoth sperm or other cells bearing cloning-quality DNA has been found and there are no guarantees any ever will be.
Even so, the Mammoth Creation Project in 1996 won permission from Russia's Sakha region to use a 52-square-mile preserve near Duvannyi Yar in Siberia should they ever succeed.
The sanctuary won't likely be a big tourist attraction — the Siberian preserve is currently accessible only by helicopter, and is not open to the public.
But tigers, giant deer, moose and other Siberian animals believed to have coexisted with woolly mammoths are already there, said Mammoth Creation Society Chairman Kazutoshi Kobayashi.
Kobayashi is president of Field, a technology patenting business that has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars for the project over the past six years.
So far, veterinary experts from Kagoshima University in southern Japan, joined by genetic scientists at Kinki University in western Japan, have searched mainly along the Kolimaya River in western Siberia.
They have found mammoth fossils, including legs, buried under permafrost. But the DNA inside turned out to be damaged by time and climate changes, and was unusable.
The society sent a team of researchers to the area last year, and plans to do so again next summer, Kobayashi said. He said they did not go this month — August is the best time because of the weather — as they are still studying the data collected from their last trip.
Tetsuya Taga, the director of Institute of Molecular Embryology and Genetics at Kumamoto University who is not associated with the project, said sperm could theoretically be preserved well enough if they are frozen, but that finding such high-quality specimens would be difficult.
"If the sperm is in the ice, it was under stress and may have been damaged," he said. "But you cannot say it's impossible."
Even if mammoths can be reproduced, however, some experts doubt the plan's viability.
Mitsuko Masui, director of Yokohama Zoo, near Tokyo, said simply keeping a mammoth alive is a new challenge since little is known about the animals.
"You can't recreate the environment that the mammoths lived in. Can a mammoth really survive in today's environment?" Masui said. "I don't think they've deliberated that enough."
Establishing a breeding population could be even tougher, Masui said, citing problems zookeepers already have with such non-extinct species as pandas.
The researchers admit they have a long way to go — with the lack of usable DNA being the major obstacle for now.
But they say their idea is fairly straightforward — by using retrieved DNA from to impregnate an elephant, they could produce a half-elephant, half-mammoth offspring. Over several generations, a creature genetically close to the prehistoric one could be created.
"Some people may question the ethics of what we are trying to do, but all we want to do is to make our dream come true," Kobayashi said.
Large swags of funding actually. 
