Irina Gusakova

The resurrection of extinct species is central to the films in the Jurassic Park saga. Now the Hollywood fairy tale can turn into reality.
American scientists thought to bring back woolly mammoths thousands of years after the giants disappeared from the Arctic. With $ 15 million in funding for the project, Harvard professor of genetics, George Church, known for his pioneering work in genome sequencing and gene splicing, hopes that the era is not far off when mammoths will "walk the Arctic tundra again."

Researchers hope mammoths can help fight climate change. "We are working to bring back the species that left a gap in the ecosystem when they became extinct," said Colossal, a company that is active in the conservation of endangered species.
In fact, the scientists are going to create a new species - it will be a hybrid created using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool. Fragments of frozen mammoth DNA and DNA from an Asian elephant, the mammoth's closest relative, will be used.

Once upon a time, mammoths scraped off significant layers of snow when walking, as a result, cold air penetrating into the soil could maintain permafrost. After they disappeared, the accumulated snow acting as natural isolation caused the permafrost to melt, releasing greenhouse gases, Church said. Presumably, the return of mammoths could reverse this trend.
But even if researchers at Colossal can bring the mammoths back, the obvious question is: should they do it? After all, nobody cancelled ethical moments.

Joseph Frederickson , paleontologist and director of the Weiss Museum of Earth Science in Menashe, was inspired as a child by the original film Jurassic Park. But even he believes that it is more important to prevent the extinction of modern species, and not to resurrect the dinosaurs.
"If you can create a mammoth or elephant that looks like a good replica of a mammoth, then you could do a lot for a white rhino or a giant panda," he notes. Back in 2015, Beth Shapiro, a paleogeneticist at the University of California and author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of Extinction, stated, "I don't want mammoths to return."

Opponents of resurrection give another argument: the ecosystem has adapted to their absence, and it is not a fact that mammoths will be able to adapt to new conditions.
Frederickson believes that the theme of the resurrection of mammoths is fuelled by pop culture and real achievements of science. “I think we humans feel guilty knowing that we almost certainly contributed to the extinction of many species. Resurrection may be a way to take that burden off ourselves,” he says.

-- Pravda.Ru