Briar+Oral

__Cloning extinct animals is dangerous__ What would be going through your head if you left to go to school or work, you stepped out into your garden and there was a woolly mammoth sitting on your front lawn?

Did you know that right now in America, scientists are working on a project that could see this become a reality and change the world’s views of cloning forever, for better or for worse?

Personally I think that this shouldn’t continue.

A scientific team at Pennsylvania State University has extracted DNA from the hair of a mummified woolly mammoth that was found in Siberia. They plan to clone the currently extinct woolly mammoth using this DNA.

They’ve found three ways to clone a mammoth and all of them are difficult, dangerous for the mammoth’s welfare and expensive to research. A new DNA decoding machine made cloning possible, because it can work with genetic material from hair and DNA that is broken up and can only be isolated as fragments.

The first possible way to clone the woolly mammoth using DNA decoding is to change the DNA of the mammoth’s closest relative. This relative is the African elephant. But the DNA of these two species is still different at about 400,000 places in the genes. Changing the genes of an African elephant would mean having to change each of these genetic differences. So the decoding of the DNA will still be a long process and it isn’t even guaranteed to work. If it doesn’t work it will take even more time and funding to research mammoths more before they get it right.

Another way to clone mammoths is creating mammoth eggs using the damaged DNA from female mammoth mummies and implanting the eggs into an African Elephant. But this has failed in lots of attempts.

The last way, is to create an egg out of the DNA of mammoths frozen in Permafrost and, again, place it inside an African Elephant.

Is there a good reason to do this anyway? Shouldn’t we be thinking more about the welfare of the mammoths? Is it actually worth it to pour so much money into creating animals that will just become lab test subjects?

Previous cloning attempts have produced short-lived animals that quickly succumb to tumors, diseases and many other deadly or painful illnesses. Why will this be any different?

The mammoths will suffer horribly if scientists succeed, they will be put through all sorts of tests to see if any parts of their bodies contain anything that can be used for a medicinal pupose. And if they do succeed in cloning mammoths, how are they going to keep them alive? No one knows what mammoths eat!

This can still be stopped though.

Decoding the entire mammoth gene is only a question of money; the cost is estimated to be about $2 million US dollars and if they change the African Elephants genes, it would cost an estimate of $10 million US dollars on top of that. I don’t think that just our opinions alone could make a difference, but if you spread the word to your friends and relatives across the globe that this cloning should be stopped, that it is dangerous for the mammoths and costly for many people. Then maybe these mammoths can be saved from a horrible fate.

Briar Irving

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