Market for mammoths

On a non-election day the news that scientists had managed to create viable mouse clones from frozen cells would no doubt have created a frenzy of media teeth-gnashing and dire warnings from the "Thought for the Day" slot. As it was, it still got a good deal of coverage - my favourite being the Daily Mail headline: "Cloning from the grave".

The story was a classic in how the media manages to mis-cover technology issues through a combination of glossing over the detail and headline-generating hyperbole. A mouse has been cloned from 16 year old DNA - next step the mammoth!

First of all, we need to start from the premise that the story is hard fact. Here a degree of caution should be exercised - it's not so long since a certain Dr Hwang's career went south (South Career!) due to false claims of human cloning. The present work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a second tier journal (usually where Science/Nature/Cell rejects end up) and one that relies on an old boys' network where papers submitted for publication are "sponsored" by members. Reproducibility is key: the work needs to be reproduced in other laboratories to verify it.

It would be a giant leap, in all senses of the term, to go from mouse to mammoth. For a start, any mammoth DNA will have spent the first few thousand years of its preservation in uncontrolled conditions. Even if the DNA is viable what current species would be the surrogate? It could hardly be shoved in a mouse - yes, we've seen human ears growing on mice but a mouse pregnant with a mammoth? I guess the nearest equivalent would be the elephant but they hardly lend themselves to the industrial reproducibility that would be required to achieve this. Finally, on the subject of our tusked, furry friends; what is the market for mammoths anyway? They would hardly make convenient pets unless you live on an iceberg. Given the latter are fast disappearing would probably require a large walk-in freezer to maintain them at a temperature at which they might be comfortable. Or perhaps Kubla Khan's vision: "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" anticipated this?

The media today also encouraged us to contemplate cloning ourselves from frozen bits. Apart from that rather exclusive segment occupied by the James Bond-style villain (Ernst Stavro Clonfeld perhaps?), again, what is the market for this? Anyone with an ambition to spread their DNA around the gene pool can do this by standard reproduction. Okay, you get diluted by 50% but at least the process is enjoyable.