If only.

The Discovery Channel‘s Web site carries this hed: “Wooly mammoth to be cloned.” The writer, Jennifer Viegas, ledes this way: “Within five years a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned…” She does attribute that optimistic promise thusly:”according to scientists.”

MSNBC‘s Alan Boyle has the same story. Here’re his lede: “Reports from Japan suggest that long-extinct woolly mammoths could be cloned back into existence within five years, but don’t hold your breath.”

Today’s Tracker wrote his first story promising the cloning of a mammal–a human, no less–in the 1960s. At that time a frog had been cloned, and scientists were saying that the procedure looked so simple that it should be possible to do the same for people within five years. In fact, it took about 30 years to produce Dolly, the cloned sheep that caused an international sensation.

Now, to the procedures for cloning when you have intact, living nuclei, add the problem that ancient DNA, even if frozen in Siberian ice for thousands of years, is always fragmented. Boyle quotes one expert saying, “DNA from a woolly mammoth is a mess. … The code gets damaged a lot.”

Why aren’t the readers of Discovery News entitled to that same information? Why are they told that the finding of mammoth nuclei in marrow bones is the fulfillment of a “Holy Grail-type search”?

It would be incredibly amazing and entertaining to see a living woolly mammoth. I’d pay a lot to do that. I wish I could buy Viegas’s enthusiasm, but I know the truth lies with Boyle’s level headedness.

-Boyce Rensberger

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