South Korean Researchers Plan To Bring to Life a Woolly Mammoth

Woolly mammoths ruled our planet about 10,000 years ago but a group of scientists in South Korea decided to do something to bring back these animals.

Several academics from Russia decided to collaborate with Hwang Woo-Suk from Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea with the goal of trying to clone the extinct mammoth.

To carry out the cloning operating, Korean scientist will use bone marrow collected from well-preserved mammoth bones that researchers discovered in summer of 2011 in the thawed.

Researchers from Sooam look forward to implanting the nucleus of a woolly mammoth cell into an elephant egg. Thus they plan to create a mammoth embryo. The next step will involve placing the embryo in an elephant womb.

Despite the fact that Hwang Woo-Suk was disgraced in 2006 after it was revealed that a number of his experiments on developing human stem cells proved to be faked, he still managed to carry out several successful cloning operations. He was the first to clone a dog called Snuppy. Hwang Woo-Suk also cloned cows and coyotes.

According to Sooam scientists the research will start later this year. This is of course if Russians ship the mammoth remains and do this on time.

[via Physorg]