Question: In the future , if we were to be able to get a gene from animals that are extinct (e.g a woolly mamouth) do you think it is possible to join and animal we have in the present day,( such as an elaphant) and join the gene of a extinct animal such as the woolly mamouth to make an animal come back and not be extinct any more.

Heather Eyre answered on 19 Jun 2013:

You mean like Jurassic Park?

If we could get a complete DNA set out of cells from an extinct species you might be able to put it into a fertilised zygote (the very first cell that becomes the embryo). But there are loads if problems, embryo cells are really special, they can divide easily, and the cells that are made are able to become every different type of cell in the body! These are called stem cells.

A normal cell has a specific role, like adults have jobs. Stem cells are like babies, they can grow up to be anything.

To over come this problem, you’d need to be able to turn a normal cell back into a stem cell! That’s like turning an adult back into a baby, without time machine.

Taking a single gene from an extinct animal and putting into a current one may be possible, but it would be difficult to know what the gene would actually do as there is now way to study it in an a population.