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In 2004, Woo-suk Hwang cheated the scientific community. Now he wanted to bring a species back to life.
It's an idea with Jurassic ParkAmbitions: Clone a 40,000-year-old mummified horse to revive extinct species. Many experts are very skeptical, lightly. Woo-suk Hwang, a research that was part of a scientific scandal of cloning fraud ten years ago, was at the center of the controversy.
The story begins in the ice age, when a baby horse died at the age of about two months, depending on what the scientists suspected was an accident, probably a drowning. About 40,000 years later, in August 2018, scientists from the Northeastern Federal University of Yakutia, studying the mummified remains of the horse, found that the permafrost of the region had kept the foal in astonishing conditions. "Even her hair preserved, which is incredibly rare for such ancient finds," said museum curator Yakutia Mammoth, Semyon Grigoryev, speaking to The Siberian.
The horse belonged to a species called Equus lenensisor "Lena Horse". It shares more with the ancient wild horses of the Yukon North America than with the current horses that occupy this extremely cold region, known as yakutian horses and domesticated since the thirteenth century.
Now, things are really weird. A group of Russian and South Korean scientists think it can clone him.
"If we find only one living cell, we can clone that old horse," says Woo-suk Hwang, one of the South Korean scientists involved in The Siberian Times. "We can multiply it and get as many embryos as needed."
If Hwang's name sounds familiar, it's because he has a curious story with cloning claims. A veteran by profession who was the first to be recognized for cloning pets in the 1990s, Hwang achieved scientific fame in 2004 when he and his colleagues claimed to have created the first cloned human embryos in the world. stem cells d & # 39; them.
Hwang continued to criticize his embryos until in 2006, when his collaborators and online researchers both proved irrefutably that he had committed extreme ethical failings in obtaining cells and that He had falsified data. The president of the Seoul National University, where Hwang was doing his work, described the episode as "an impenetrable spot on the whole scientific community as well as on our country".
Hwang has always tried to return. He has never claimed responsibility for nine of the eleven scientific articles related to human embryos that have proven to be fraudulent, but remains an expert on the animal cloning process. For years, he led the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which successfully cloned dogs, cows, pigs and coyotes. But some experts wonder if Hwang's claims about the old wild horse are just another awareness.
The cloning of a modern creature, for example a coyote, is possible because the coyote's DNA is totally intact. This is simply not the case with the DNA of the ice age. Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told LiveScience that it was generally "degraded into tens of millions of pieces." Similar challenges would exist when trying to clone a woolly mammoth or other extinct species. Hwang says that he is not discouraged. Talk to The Siberian, he says, "if we succeed in cloning the horse, it will be the first step to clone the mammoth."
Chances are long, but not impossible. Scientists recognize that if Hwang and his team were able to find enough usable DNA from the former foal, cloning is a chance to be scientifically achievable. Given Hwang's story with bold claims, however, they do not hold their breath.
Source: LiveScience
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