South Korean Scientists Prepare To Clone Wooly Mammoth

An anonymous reader writes "Last year Russian researchers discovered a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone and announced plans to clone a mammoth from the bone marrow within — and they just signed a deal with South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation to bring the project to fruition. The Sooam scientists plan to implant the nucleus of a woolly mammoth cell into an elephant egg in order to to create a mammoth embryo, which would then be placed in an elephant womb. 'This will be a really tough job,' Soaam reasearcher Hwang In-Sung said, 'but we believe it is possible because our institute is good at cloning animals.'" Not to be confused with a similar mammoth effort at mammoth-cloning at Kyoto University.

Mother of different species?

[hawguy]

How well can an elephant's womb support an animal of a different species? Even human babies born to human mothers are in danger if something as simple as the mother's Rh factor is different than the baby's. Surely implanting an animal of one species into a completely different species will run into problems with rejection?

Viruses

[Sqreater]

Are they taking any precautions against the probability that the genome contains viral components just as ours does? If they cannot prove beforehand that no virus will start replicating from the Wolly Mammoth genome once they activate it, they should not be allowed to proceed.