perfidy

Scientists are once again contemplating the de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. We last saw our friends the mammoths at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, when we exterminated them with fire and spear. Over the last 10,000 years, our technology has advanced somewhat, and our researchers have determined that the sperm in mammoths buried beneath the ice can, possibly, be used to bring the dead mammoth back to life. Using all the trickery and cunning evolved on the plains of ancient Africa, and refined through thousands of years of cutthroat competition, and further refined by half a millenium of science, we can now suck the mammoth junk from the frozen nads of dead mammoths, and inject them into the eggs of Asian Elephants. After enough tries, it is hoped that this will result in a fertilized mammoth/elephant chimera.

Sperm expert Narumi Ogonuki of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research Bioresource Centre in Tsukuba, central Japan, has demonstrated that sperm better survives freezing if contained in its natural packaging, than all by itself. Sperm taken from whole mouse bodies that had been frozen 15 years earlier was still capable of fertilising mouse eggs and producing pups. This demonstrates, at least in principle, that mammalian sperm can survive in a body that has been frozen for several years. And that led the eggheads to the belief that sperm could survive for much longer periods, for example in millions of years dead mammoths frozen in the arctic permafrost.

When the egg is implanted into a willing and motherly female elephant (the asian elephant is believed to be a close genetic cousin to the deceased mammoths) we wait a year and a half and BANG! we've got a cute baby mammoth. Well, a bastard red-haired half mammoth. By repeating this process, and with some careful animal husbandry, we could over time breed the half mammoths into something resembling pure bred mammoths. The Ministry fully supports the efforts to bring the dead to life. Not, you know, in a creepy undead zombie way. But through clean, wholesome science. We owe it to the animals that we killed to ensure that at least some of their genes survive into the future not just as frozen sperm in a ice-buried testicle, but as living, breathing, tasty mammals.

Further, we feel certain that when the robots come, the desperate remnant of humanity left after the initial onslaught of cybernetic death will be driven to the remote places of the earth. These places are often very, very cold. Reborn woolly mammoths will make excellent cavalry in the cold wastes of the north, and, in a pinch, very large meals.