In How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction, Beth Shapiro explains the idea of “de-extinction”, which more plainly is the idea of bringing an animal back from extinction, particularly the mammoth. Shapiro uses her expert knowledge in the background of ancient DNA, which is the DNA from prehistoric specimens such as fossils, to propose this idea. Throughout this book Shapiro explains step-by step exactly how an organism that is extinct could be brought back to life with the knowledge that we have today. While she believes that in this day and age it would be unrealistic to clone a mammoth, she offers up two alternative forms of reviving the mammoth for the sake of restoring a large grassland that once existed called the “mammoth…show more content… I thought that this would be an interesting topic to learn more about especially since the topic was lightly touched during a particular lab. What I found was that there have been multiple cloning experiments done on dogs and other animals, as well as many advancements that were developed over the years.
Cloning, in the sense of animal biology, refers to genetic copies of individual animals being produced using nuclear transfer. In order to have a successful production of cloned animals require advanced methods of reproduction that involves embryo culture and the transfer of those embryo into a surrogate mother. Typically, the nucleus from a donor’s cell is placed into an oocyte, or egg, whose nuclear DNA has been removed, which is called enucleation. This newly reconstructed egg is then stimulated in order to continue the development of the embryo, which results in the production of a living organism that is genetically identical to the donor. This process is known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) and it has led scientists to discover many scientific
