"I don't want to live my life again" was a line from legendary rock group The Ramones' theme song from the Pet Sematary films. The point being: Once dead, whom in their right mind really wants to come back to life, lest you wish to end up like Clancy Brown's crazy "Gus the Sheriff" character or one of the many demented resurrected pets from those films.That's the first thing that occurred to me when I read the crazy story this week of a Japanese "researcher" who wants to bring an extinct woolly mammoth back to life (so to speak) through the cloning process over the next five years (link to full story at bottom).
His name is Akira Iritani of Kyoto University, and he claims he can resurrect a woolly mammoth through cloning if he can just get his little hands on some frozen tissue from the remains of one of the extinct pachyderms in Siberia. He says he would use a modern elephant from Africa to act as a "surrogate" mama. How convenient.
Iritani says that if he gets ahold of the proper tissue, his chances for bringing back a living woolly mammoth would be 30 percent. Translation: He would have little or no chance of actually pulling it off.
But regardless, why even try? What truly bona fide purpose is there? He'd be creating a solitary lonely animal, not bringing back the entire species. And for what? So that human beings could gawk at it in some display somewhere? So that stuffy academics somewhere can purport to "study" it and stick their "findings" in some science journal read by no one?
I for one say let the woolly mammoth rest in peace. Dead things from the past best live on in history books only.
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201103/6703/World-to-welcome-back-woolly-mammoth-by-2016
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