The March Towards Mammoth-Cloning Continues

The first man to successfully clone a dog was also one of the biggest perpetrators of academic fraud this decade. Now, it seems he's aiming to redeem his work, in part by moving forward with a plan to bring one of the world's most famous extinct mammals back from the grave.

Woo Suk Hwang is the disgraced stem cell research pioneer—his team was found to have fabricated the results of a huge study that purported to show the successful cloning of human cells. Hwang was expelled from Seoul National University, and still faces criminal charges. He's now running what is probably the world's foremost cloning operation, the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. According to a new report in the esteemed science journal Nature, Sooam has now successfully cloned hundreds of animals.

Many of these include the clones of beloved dogs from wealthy American canine lovers, who pony up $100,000 for a carbon copy of their recently deceased pets. Wanting to ensure that Sooam doesn't become a "dog-cloning factory," Hwang is quickly moving his foundation towards other aims: Alzheimer's research, a renewed effort to clone human cells, and, yes, bringing a long-extinct woolly mammoth back to life.

In 2012, Sooam partnered with the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North, based in Yakutsk, Russia. The explicit goal was to begin exploring the prospect of cloning a woolly mammoth. In 2013, they hit potential paydirt: an intact mammal carcass, complete with blood samples. It was what Semyon Grigoriev, the head of the Institute, called "the best preserved mammoth in the history of paleontology."

"We intend to carry out somatic cloning by implanting the genetic material of a mammoth that lived several thousand years ago into the egg of a modern female elephant," a spokesman told the Russian news outlet Ria Novosti at the time. "The egg will then be placed into the womb of the elephant, who will bear the foetus for 22 months before hopefully giving birth to a live baby mammoth."

This specimen led many to speculate that the era of extinct mammal cloning may be at hand, and an intense debate on the ethics of proceeding ensued. Conservationists argued against it, claiming that it propagates the notion that we can just reanimate fallen species and the will to protect them would fall. Most recently, esteemed environmentalist Steward Brand offered full-throated support for cloning.

Now, Sooam has confirmed that the project is still underway, but may be a bit of a longshot. Insung Hwang, another scientest at Sooam (no relation to Woo Suk), told Nature that the operation is proceeding, but: “The chances are very small,” he says.

Some of Hwang's Korean scientists feel that it's another overblown publicity stunt, and strikes them as too similar to the previous headline-grabbing foray.

“I am afraid that it seems to be just show,” Jeong-Sun Seo, director of the Genomic Medicine Institute at SNU, said. Nature claimed he "feels a sense of déjà vu." Still, the journal explains that progress is being made:

Under Woo Suk Hwang’s guidance, the institute has published more than 40 papers documenting cloning successes and technical improvements to the cloning process. “His group is making important yet incremental progress towards long-term goals,” says Cindy Tian, a cloning and reproductive biology researcher at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

It's a fascinating, complicated story, and it certainly seems it could break either way—Hwang could be overzealous in his efforts to redeem himself, or he could have a greater motivation to be scrupulous than ever. I guess we'll know for sure as soon as there's a roaring mammoth in a Siberian zoo somewhere.