Scientist plans to clone a mammoth in the next five years.

Using a technique that produced a mouse from tissue frozen for 16 years, a scientist at Kyoto University plans to clone a mammoth within the next four to five years.

Dr. Akira Iritani has announced that he is going to produce a living woolly mammoth baby by 2016. Although past efforts to clone mammoth tissue have failed due to the degradation of what small amount of tissue we have. Most of it has been frozen and partially decayed, leaving nothing suitable for cloning. Dr. Iritani is hopeful, though, due to a relatively new technique he hopes to use. It is based on a technique that successfully cloned a mouse from tissue that had been frozen for sixteen years. That pales in comparison to the thousands of years that mammoth DNA has been frozen, but it does give a glimmer of hope.

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