X-Message-Number: 9985 From: (Randy Smith) Newsgroups: sci.cryonics Subject: Re: Scientists hope to revive mammoths Date: Sun, 05 Jul 1998 21:13:36 GMT Message-ID: <> References: <> On Sun, 05 Jul 1998 20:56:42 GMT, (Randy Smith) wrote: From the London Sunday Times: >by Lois Rogers > > > > > > >SCIENTISTS aim to create a new generation of woolly mammoths using deep-frozen sperm from animals that died 40,000 years ago. > >Next month an expedition to Siberia will excavate mammoth carcasses buried complete with flesh, bones and hair in the Arctic permafrost. The intention is to extract sperm from them and use it to fertilise elephants' eggs. > >Cross-breeding with successive generations would allow the hybrids gradually to become pure genetic copies of their mammoth ancestors. > >Scientists involved in the ambitious project run jointly by the British, Japanese and Russians have already proved that long-dead sperm can be used to create viable embryos in cattle by injecting their genetic material directly into eggs from living heifers. > >Last year David Smale, a British geophysicist and one of the world's experts in the use of underground radar, and Kazufumi Goto, professor of veterinary science at Kagoshima University, conducted an initial three-week summer visit to the wastes of northeastern Siberia to evaluate the project. > >They are being joined in their search for likely mammoth sites by Pyotr Lazarev, a specialist from the Museum of the Mammoth in Yakutsk. > >Smale specialises in the use of ground-penetrating radar, which can provide accurate images up to 70ft below the surface. The technique has been used successfully by British police forces searching for murder victims. The radar waves bounce off buried objects and detectors on the surface translate them into pictures showing their exact location. > >Smale, who works for Allied Associates Geophysical, a British scientific consultancy, said expedition members would travel by boat down the Kolyma River near Cerskijo in the republic of Sakha into one of the world's most remote regions. The river is flanked by high permafrost cliffs in which the ice has remained intact for tens of thousands of years. It is here that the expedition hopes to find carcasses to study. > >"Apart from the breeding programme, it would be very exciting to find a whole mammoth preserved in the ice," said Smale. "Last year we found a lot of mammoth bones and quite a large section of a horse, complete with flesh and hair, which had been buried for about 30,000 years, so I am reasonably confident this is a worthwhile exercise. > >"The museum specialists know exactly where to look and they have already found pieces of mammoth carcass with the flesh intact." > >Interest in the project increased this week after the announcement that normal offspring can be created from freeze-dried sperm stored for prolonged periods in a vacuum-sealed jar, like instant coffee. A team from Hawaii and Tokyo universities proved that the freeze-dried sperm could even be flown around the world and remain fertile. > >The researchers added water to the dried sperm, removed the heads and injected them directly into unfertilised fresh eggs. Most of the eggs became fertilised and about a quarter led to births and the development of healthy adult mice. > >In a report on their findings, Ryuzo Yanagimachi and Teruhiko Wakayama, the researchers, emphasised the implications for the use of genetic material from sperm that would not normally be viable: "Although the sperm are dead in the conventional sense, they can support normal development when injected directly into an egg." > >The mammoths, which populated every continent between 2.5m and 30,000 years ago, were on average 14ft high. They fed on the sparse vegetation of the Arctic tundra and were kept warm by a woolly, yellowish-brown undercoat about 1in thick, beneath a coarser, dark brown hair coating up to 20in long. > >The most recent intact carcass was a six-month-old calf, found in 1977 by gold miners in the former Soviet Union. Others have been exhumed by sled dogs and eate Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9985