Once Implicated in Cloning Fraud, This Scientist Now Wants to Bring Back to an Extinct Ice-Age Horse

It's an idea with Jurassic Park-level ambitions: cloning a mummified 40,000-year-old horse to bring the extinct species back to life. Many experts are highly skeptical, to put it lightly. And at the center of the controversy is Woo-suk Hwang, a researcher who was part of a major scientific scandal scandal about cloning a decade ago.

The story begins in the Ice Age, when a baby horse died at the age of two years in which a suspect was an accident, likely a drowning. About 40,000 years late, in August 2018, Yakutian scientists at North-Eastern Federal University studying the horse's mummified life in the region's permafrost had kept the foal in amazing condition. "Even its hair preserved, which is incredibly rare for such ancient finds," said Yakutia Mammoth curator Semyon Grigoryev, speaking to The Siberian Times.

The horse is known as Equus lenensis, or "Lena Horse." It shares with the United Kingdom and the United States of America that it is more likely that it will be used as a bitterly cold region, which is known as Yakutian horses and domesticated since the 13th century.

Now things have gotten truly odd. A group of Russian and South Korean scientists think that can clone it.

"If we find only one live cell, we can clone this ancient horse," says Woo-suk Hwang, one of the South Korean scholars involved, to The Siberian Times. "We can multiply it and get as many embryos as we need."

If Hwang's name sounds familiar, it's because it has a curious history with cloning claims. A veterinarian by trade who first gained acclaim for cloning pets in the 90s, Hwang rose to scientific stardom in 2004 when he and his colleagues claimed to have created the world's first cloned human embryos, and furthermore, that they had extracted stem cells from them.

Hwang continued to apply to his embryos until 2006, when his collaborators and online researchers both presented uncontrovertible evidence that he was committed to ethical compliance. The president of Seoul National University, where Hwang had been doing his work, called the episode "an unwashable blemish on the scientific community as well as our country."

Hwang has been trying for a comeback ever since. He has never been responsible for any of these embryos that have been shown to be fraudulent, but remains an expert on the animal cloning process. For years he has run the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which has successfully cloned dogs, cows, pigs and coyotes. But some experts wonder if Hwang's claims about the ancient wild horse were simply a new attention grab.

Cloning a modern day creature-say, a coyote-is possible because the coyote's DNA is fully intact. That's simply not the case with Ice Age DNA. It has been degraded "into tens of millions of pieces," Love Dalen, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told LiveScience. Similar challenges would exist with trying to clone a woolly mammoth or other extinct species. Hwang says he is undeterred. Speaking to The Siberian Times, he says, "if we manage to clone the horse, it will be the first step to cloning the mammoth."

The odds are long, but not impossible. Scientists concede that if Hwang and his team are able to find workable DNA, then it is a chance at being scientifically feasible. Considering Hwang's history with bold claims, though, they're not holding their breath.

Source: LiveScience