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Woolly mammoth cloning attempt revives ethical debate (cbc.ca)
16 points by tvanzyl on Jan 16, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



Good grief, I think some people are just addicted to debating or creating "moral dilemma."

On one side, you have scientists that want to bring back the wolly mammoth. They have some pretty convincing arguments in terms of bringing back a extinct species that may have a beneficial niche to fill and pioneering techniques to revive extinct species to boot.

On the other side, you have a guy who thinks the fact that the scientists requiring the use of a elephant surrogate mother is animal abuse, and the whole thing should be called off, at least until we can create an artificial womb(which isn't even on any scientific radar that I have been privy to). Elephants in captivity are already bred for a variety of reasons, and breeding is a pretty nature animal endeavour.

I say, bring them back. Or at least try to.


Of course we should. Tundra steppes are the way to go.

You can't seriously damage frozen swampy tundra forests because noone wants them already. Our ecosystem is already badly damaged wrt large polar animals.

We should also have every threatened animal cell structure so we may revive them when we figure out ecology.

I really hope that we do have something like that. Any 12 yo will think out of it.


Raindeers will love it :-)


> Any 12 yo will think out of it.

Is the opinion that one day humans will "figure out" ecology and reintroduce a bunch of extinct animals out of a need to "repair" what we have done, the opinion of a 12 year old? Because it sounds like it.


I would love to try a mammoth burger.


The Explorers Club served mammoth meat during their annual dinner in 1951 using a 250,000 year old carcass: http://mentalfloss.com/article/57100/time-250000-year-old-ma...


I, too, dream of the day when we can revive long-extinct species for the purpose of eating them.


Somewhat ironically, that would be much easier to achieve than the full cloning of a mammoth.




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