Akira Iritani

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“A Healthy Mammoth Could Be Born In Four Or Five Years”

June 8, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Ed Young at the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog, the opening of a post asking if we can clone a mammoth–and if we should:

“Tens of thousands of years ago, woolly mammoths roamed the northern hemisphere. These giant beasts may now be extinct, but some of their bodies still remain in the frozen Arctic wilderness. Several dozen such carcasses have now been found, and some are in extremely good condition. Scientists have used these remains to discover much about how the mammoth lived and died, and even to sequence most of its genome. But can they also bring the animal back from the dead? Will the woolly mammoth walk again?

Akira Iritani certainly seems to think so. The 84-year-old reproductive biologist has been trying to clone a mammoth for at least a decade, with a team of Japanese and Russian scientists. They have tried to use tissues from several frozen Siberian specimens including, most recently, a well-preserved thighbone. Last year, Iritani told reporters, ‘I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years'” (Thanks Browser.)

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“A Healthy Mammoth Could Be Born In Four Or Five Years.”

January 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"All we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth." (Image by Mauricio Antón.)

After 5,000 years of extinction, the Woolly Mammoth may be getting a new lease on life, as Japanese scientists believe they’ll be able to clone the humongous beasts within a few years. It sounds like such a terrible idea. (Thanks Newser.) An excerpt from a Telegraph article about the experiment:

“Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.

‘Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,’ he told The Daily Telegraph.

He intends to use Dr Wakayama’s technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.

‘The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently but now stands at about 30 per cent,’ he said. ‘I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years.'”

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