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Mammoth Cloning Still Not Possible

We have heard so much about how scientists are going to clone a mammoth. For many this idea remains "pie in the sky" - a lot of talk and no action. There is plenty of mammoth raw material around to do tests on. The problem is getting good DNA that can be cloned.

Scientists are jumping up and down again with the recent find of a frozen mammoth in Siberia. They say this time their will be "living cells". This is very optimistic. The new mammoth will probably be like all the others. Only partial DNA will be found. Even though bone marrow has been identified this time, cloning is a long shot. No living cells have so far been found in any extinct animal, as far back as 10,000 years when mammoths roamed the Earth.

There are problems in analyzing human DNA even though the human genome is known. The complete DNA of mammoths has not yet been determined. A prize is offered by the X Prize Foundation for the first cloned extinct animal. Scientists can hope I suppose.
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