A team of researchers at the Harvard University has apparently planned to modify elephant cells with frozen mammoth DNA, which will later help to clone the giant beasts that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago.
Just like the plot we have seen in the Hollywood movie 'Jurassic Park', researchers are planning to create a 20,000-hectare Ice Age safari park in a remote part of Siberia where these woolly giants will roam around.
The project is expected to be materialized within two years, and if all goes as planned, the final creature would be a hybrid animal of the Asian elephant and woolly mammoth.
"We are focusing on reviving mammoth genes and making a mammoth/elephant hybrid and help them spread to a vast wild, arctic climates. We have already revived dozens of genes and are testing them in elephant cells," told Professor George Church, the lead researcher on the project to the Sun.
Researchers are planning to use the remains of mammoths collected from Siberia to clone the new animal. Using a technique called CRISPR/Cas9, researchers believe that all the unique characteristics of mammoths including woolly long hairs, thick layers of fat, and long tusks could be retained in the newly cloned animal.
As the news of mammoth cloning surfaced online, skeptics have lashed against this move stating that it is against the law of nature. According to these skeptics, the recreation of extinct species could have multiple side effects, and the major one being the change in the ecosystem. They claim that mammoths have roamed on earth during the ice age, but now, the climate has changed a lot, and the earth is getting warmer day by day.
These skeptics also reveal that this plan is Anthropocentric. According to these critics, the mammoths created using cloning would ultimately serve no other purpose, but to be an exhibit for human beings.
