Editorial: Mammoth ethical dilemma

Monday, Oct. 8, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

Anyone who thinks that bringing extinct animals back to life is an idea found only in fiction - a la Jurassic Park - must not be keeping up with the scientific journals.

More is being learned all the time about how a woolly mammoth or other ancient animal could be brought back to existence through cloning.

A recent article in the journal Science reported that researchers have now discovered how to extract viable genetic material from ancient hair.

Important about this discovery is that hair from mammoths and other animals that went extinct thousands of years ago is in plentiful supply in museums, private collections and even caves in the southwestern United States.

It was previously believed that ancient bones, in short supply and hard to find under layers of soil and ice in random locations, were the only sources of DNA needed for cloning.

With new techniques for sequencing DNA being developed, and with sources for the genetic material - at least for Ice Age animals such as mammoths - now known to be plentiful, scientists are moving toward the day when fiction becomes reality.

In a story about the Science article, the Los Angeles Times quoted an evolutionary geneticist who said deciphering the complete mammoth genome is "doable, and it's on the horizon" in the next 50 to 100 years.

We're relieved that the breakthrough will take some time. All of us, not just scientists, need to think about whether recreating an ancient life form is ethical - or smart.

If it is OK to clone a mammoth and put it on display, would it be OK then to bring back near-human Neanderthal individuals and confine them to labs and zoos?

Rather than pour billions into efforts to bring back animals or subhumans whose time has long passed, we should instead invest in the habitats of living animals, including us humans. Better not to go extinct in the first place than to be brought back not as a free-ranging life form, but as a curiosity.