The eventual plan is to plant an implanted egg into a live elephant for a 22-month pregnancy.
Earlier this year a group of scientists from around the world met for TEDx conference in Washington, sponsored by National Geographic.
The group were discussing the possibility of bringing 24 animals back from extinction, also known as 'de-extinction'.
De-extinction....hmmm. Not to sure what to think. Be neat to see a woolly mammoth and yet...is it possible we'd unleash Pandora's box messing with natural selection? Hoping we don't find an ancient virus transferable from mammoth to man.
I thought about your post overnight. I too am leery that science will overreach its ability to control unintended consequences. (We have plenty of examples from history.)
But natural selection isn't a force per se, it's just Darwin's way of describing the cause-and-effect relationship of environment and heredity.
In
theory, a cloned mammoth would be more at risk than humans would be. In
theory, we may well still have whatever genetic immunities our ancestors developed when they were hunting and eating such creatures. (Or at least a percentage of us would have.)
The mammoth, on the other hand, would have no acquired immunity to any virus that has emerged since the mammoth died. (The exception to this is whatever immunity the fetus might acquire from the elephant in which it is implanted. IIRC, there is considerable evidence that mammals acquire some immunities while in utero and by nursing after birth.)
I'm not a scientist, but I suspect it's more likely they'll have trouble keeping the clone alive than that the clone will trigger a pandemic. OTOH, I just rewatched
Jurassic Park on cable the other night...
