Like "Jurassic Park," what if you could use the science of DNA to resurrect long-extinct creatures that once roamed the earth?
Efforts to do that are actually underway.
Led by Dr. George Church – "the Einstein of our times," according to author Ben Mezrich – a lab at Harvard Medical School is working on bringing back the woolly mammoth through genetic engineering.
The process is detailed in Mezrich's new book, "Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of the History's Most Iconic Extinct Creatures," published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster which is a division of CBS. It's also being made into a movie.
"The woolly mammoths are coming up out of the ice. So the permafrost that is slowly getting warmer, these bodies are coming out and they're taking the genetic material and then they are synthesizing it and they're placing [it] into the cells of an Asian elephant so that an Asian elephant gives birth to a woolly mammoth," Mezrich said on "CBS This Morning: Saturday." "So essentially, you're recreating the mammoth using its relative that still exists today."
Mezrich likened the permafrost to "the ring of the world." Read more...
Efforts to do that are actually underway.
Led by Dr. George Church – "the Einstein of our times," according to author Ben Mezrich – a lab at Harvard Medical School is working on bringing back the woolly mammoth through genetic engineering.
The process is detailed in Mezrich's new book, "Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of the History's Most Iconic Extinct Creatures," published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster which is a division of CBS. It's also being made into a movie.
"The woolly mammoths are coming up out of the ice. So the permafrost that is slowly getting warmer, these bodies are coming out and they're taking the genetic material and then they are synthesizing it and they're placing [it] into the cells of an Asian elephant so that an Asian elephant gives birth to a woolly mammoth," Mezrich said on "CBS This Morning: Saturday." "So essentially, you're recreating the mammoth using its relative that still exists today."
Mezrich likened the permafrost to "the ring of the world." Read more...