Can the long-extinct mammoth be resurrected through the alchemy of modern biology?
Such hopes were raised yet again last week by the recent discovery, in the permafrost of Siberia's Yamal peninsula, of a 6-month-old female that died perhaps 10,000 years ago.
"It's a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition," Alexei Tikhonov, the deputy director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Reuters last week.
The best hope would be if some of her eggs had been preserved in arrested state, much the way human eggs are stored in the freezers of fertility clinics. Sperm from an elephant could possibly tickle the egg awake from its long hibernation.
But mammoths rarely die in the controlled-temperature conditions necessary to preserve eggs without harm. Intact organs are seldom found. To retrieve viable sperm or eggs "seems an even more remote chance," said Alex Greenwood, a biologist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., who has worked on mammoth DNA.
The alternative, far more laborious, would be to analyze the sequence of DNA units in the mammoth's...
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