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Comment by endtwist | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting part of that article is the non-chalant last line: "Once the [wooly mammoth's] tissues have been treated to a nuclear transfer process, the eggs will be implanted into the womb of a live elephant for a 22-month pregnancy."

Cloning wooly mammoths! Now that is cool.

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The line before that is even more interesting:

Stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk's private bioengineering laboratory confirmed he is poised to make a bid to return the extinct Siberian mammoth to the planet.

Hwang Woo-suk is an extremely famous scientific fraud.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/asia/0,16641,20060109,00.htm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/asia/27clone.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2006/11/28-01.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk

SEOUL, South Korea — Hwang Woo-suk, a disgraced cloning expert from South Korea who had claimed major breakthroughs in stem-cell research, was convicted Monday of falsifying his papers and embezzling government research funds. A judge sentenced him to a suspended two-year prison term, saying Dr. Hwang had shown remorse and had not taken research money for personal use.

Dr. Hwang was once hailed as a national hero in the South. His school, Seoul National University, disowned him in 2005, saying that he had fabricated the papers he had published to global acclaim.

One wonders though, his research was shown to be fraudulent but is his skill fraudulent? I mean guy the might be an excellent cell biologist that tried to short cut his way to fame and got caught, or he might be a complete fraud and not even be a passable biologist. Trying to find stuff about the man is difficult through all the articles about his downfall.

or he might be a complete fraud and not even be a passable biologist

He's genuinely one of the top researchers in the field (see: cloned dog).

The first cloned dog, in fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuppy

An extinct ibex was successfully cloned in 2009 using the same technology. It died shortly after birth due to breathing problems. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_ibex#Cloning_project

The problem here is, we don't have land for mammoths.

Mammoths need tundra steppes to live on subarctic grains, and they all converted to unproductive swampy tundra :(

There is a project to recreate tundra steppes tho: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park

That's only a problem for getting them back into the wild.

I'd suspect cloned mammoths would be a zoo feature first.

I remember reading about that plan when I was a kid. Twenty years later, I'm still all for it, but when articles like this appear I don't hold my breath either.

Hold onto your butts...

I say this line nearly every chance I get. I find it's useful in almost every situation where the return button need be pressed.

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