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 
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>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

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