Should cloned mammoths roam the Earth?
Cloning an extinct species might be possible, but should we go down that route? Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at the University of Oxford, and Russell Powell, assistant professor of philosophy at Boston University, discuss the potential ethical issues of bringing back an extinct animal.The display of a frozen mammoth in Japan has again raised questions as to the possibility of creating a live born clone of extinct animals.Theoretically, mammoths could be cloned by recovering, reconstructing or synthesizing viable mammoth DNA and injecting it into the egg cell of a modern elephant whose nuclear DNA has been removed; alternatively, mammoth genetic material could be introduced into an elephant genome in order to create a mammoth-elephant hybrid or chimera.This raises an ethical question as to whether we should start the journey down one of these paths.