Mouse cloned from a Dead Cell - . . going towards immortality? (Nov/04/2008 )
Researchers produce cloned mouse from frozen dead cells
A Japanese research team has succeeded in cloning a mouse from the frozen body of a dead mouse, raising hopes that the same process could be carried out on extinct species such as the mammoth.
The experiment was carried out by a team of researchers led by Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology. It is the first time that cells that have died completely after prolonged freezing have been brought back to life.
Team researchers were also successful in a similar experiment using cells that had been freeze-dried, raising hopes that extinct species could be revived through the same process in the future.
The first reported clone using animal cells was of a frog in 1962. In 1996, the cloned sheep Dolly was born in Britain. Since then, other animals such as cows and pigs have been cloned, but all of these clones have used cells from living animals or samples in which only the cells are frozen.
In its experiment, the research team used a mouse that had been frozen for 16 years at minus 20 degrees Celsius, and extracted its brain cells. When cells are frozen without a special preservative, they are damaged by ice crystals and die. However, the team managed to extract some DNA from the dead cells, and used this to produce a clone embryo. The embryo was in turn used to create an embryonic stem cell, and through a subsequent process with a surrogate mother mouse, four mice with the same DNA as the frozen mouse were produced.
Mammoths remains are also kept in a freeze-dried state, and with scientists now able to create embryonic stem cells from freeze-dried mouse cells, the research opens up some exciting possibilities.
"There are many barriers ahead of us, but the latest clone technology heightens the possibility of reviving extinct species," Wakayama said. "That will contribute greatly to evolutionary studies and biology."
Source
This is sick 
This means we can re-start our life after we died!
we can clone our dead pet... or dead grandfather or Albert Einstein.
...again this strange topic. I really like the horror movie where they cloned the Hitler-brain and inserted it in a shark's body. A B-picture (or was it D?) 
They speak of cloning already extinct animals like mammoth but won't that be ridiculous? Suppose they do that - they clone a male and a female mammoth and they can even breed them . . then? How do they behave? Everything is not in genes. What they eat, how they behave, etc etc . . they will just be luxury pets I guess.
..or killed very fast by infections as their immune system is completely outdated.
Still, the scientific outcome of such clonage is totally amazing, don't you guys think??!
Yes, we should agree.. but may be the media is exaggerating the real use of it.. . instead of reviving Mammoths they can instead focus on recently extinct animals or something like that.
Can we here discuss the potential good use of this ?
come on guys, this is not immortality....it is not the dead cells they are talking about.....it is the DNA that they have extracted and used to clone new mice.....this is the same old story of Jurassic park............ similar to extracting DNA from animals in amber fossils.
Perhaps everyone who's interested should put some cells of himself in the freezer or better liquid nitrogen and write on the label "Please revive me (in the case of early death)"...
