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 COLUMBUS, Ohio — For years, scientists have been looking for ways to bring the long-extinct woolly mammoth back to life — and although the exercise sounds like a science-fiction movie plot of "Jurassic Park" proportions, there's progress to report. 
 
 The result almost certainly won't be a resurrection of the tusked behemoth exactly as it was thousands of years ago. It's more likely to be a genetically modified elephant that's adapted to the mammoth's traditionally chilly Pleistocene habitat. 
 
 "If we can make one, the second one will be easier," Harvard geneticist George Church, who's spearheading a project to engineer a cold-resistant elephant, told NBC News. Church discussed the de-extinction effort this week during the ScienceWriters2014 conference in Columbus. 
 
 Building a more mammoth-like elephant involves blending ancient mammoth DNA and modern-day elephant cells, but there are at least two approaches to the task: One research team has been trying to recover intact DNA from a 28,000-year-old mammoth carcass recovered from Siberian permafrost. 
 
 The remains appear to have been preserved well enough to retain liquid blood, but so far, the blood samples have been too degraded to provide useful genetic material, Russian scientists say. The team still hopes to find suitable samples. 
 
 Starting with the elephant 
 
 In contrast, Church and his colleagues are starting with the elephant rather than the mammoth: They're editing the elephant genome to insert the codes for traits associated with woolly mammoths, using a gene-splicing method known as CRISPR. Fifteen changes have been made so far, focusing on factors ranging from freeze-resistant hemoglobin to subcutaneous fat to sweat glands, Church said. 
 
 The researchers are being guided by the genetic sequence that was extracted in 2008 from woolly mammoth hairballs that were found frozen in Siberia. "We are not limited by it, but we are certainly inspired by it," Church said of the mammoth genome. 
 
 To test out those changes, the edited genetic code would be inserted into elephant stem cells, which would then be coaxed to grow into organoids, cellular structures that perform organ functions in the lab. Church said that placental cells and umbilical-cord cells harvested during the recent birth of a baby elephant in Tucson, Arizona, should serve his purpose nicely. 
 
 Church said it would take "a couple of years" to put the organoids through their test runs. Once the fully edited genome is ready to go, the mammoth-like traits would be inserted into an elephant egg cell for activation and implantation. Church suspects that an Asian elephant would be better-suited for the project, on the grounds that its genome is a closer match for mammoths. 
 
 Why do it? 
 
 To some, tweaking the elephant genome to produce creatures that are more like mammoths may sound like an adaptation of mad-scientist tales ranging from "Frankenstein" to "Jurassic Park." But Church and others argue that humans would have at least as much justification for restoring extinct species as they did for rendering them extinct in the first place. "De-extinction" is seen as a way to make up for what our ancestors did to such species as passenger pigeons, dodos and thylacines. 
 
 Another objection has to do with the idea of reviving a cold-tolerant species in a warming world. Is it really such a good idea to make elephants more like mammoths if the ancient permafrost is fading? Church maintains that mammoths might be just what the Siberian ecosystem needs. "Returning this keystone species to the tundras could stave off some effects of warming," he argued last year in a Scientific American essay. ||||| Scientists at Harvard University are one step closer to bringing Woolly mammoths back to life, after successfully inserting some sequences of mammoth DNA into an elephant genome. The study is yet to be published, though, as there is still work to do. 
 
 No recreation of the Ice Age would be complete without large, shaggy woolly mammoths stomping across the frozen tundra. That is what George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard University and his team ultimately hope to achieve once more. 
 
 Taking a preserved Arctic permafrost specimen of a Woolly mammoth, scientists analyzed mammoth DNA before reproducing exact copies of fourteen mammoth genes. 
 
 “We prioritized genes associated with cold resistance including hairiness, ear size, subcutaneous fat and, especially, hemoglobin,” Church told The Sunday Times. 
 
 The woolly mammoth was one of the last in the line of the species that emerged in the early Pliocene age some 2.5 million years ago but almost completely died 10,000 years ago. Some mammoths, however, continued to survive on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, between the Chukchi Sea and East Siberian Sea, until around 3,300 years ago. These were the specimens which researchers used for the DNA analysis. 
 
 The scientists inserted mammoth genes into the cells of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant. 
 
 The introduction of the genes was done through a new developed technique CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat), that allows for precise editing of DNA taking out parts of modern elephant DNA and replacing them the prehistoric genes. 
 
 “We now have functioning elephant cells with mammoth DNA in them,” Church announced. 
 
 “We have not published it in a scientific journal because there is more work to do, but we plan to do so,” he added. 
 
 Beth Shapiro, University of California professor, in her new book, ‘How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction’ explores the possibility of mammoth resurrection, as a number of well-preserved species have been found in the past. 
 
 “If we really want to bring mammoths back to life, then we’re in luck, as far as DNA preservation goes. It’s in pretty shoddy condition, so hard to piece together, but if we sort through these tiny pieces, finding where they fit along the elephant genome, then we can slowly build a lot of the mammoth genome.” 
 
 Professor Church believes that bringing the ancient mammoth back eventually could have a positive impact on the ecosystems in Russia. “The Siberian permafrost is melting with climate change, but research suggests large mammals could stabilize it,” he said.
– For the first time since the woolly mammoth went extinct, its genes are working again, Popular Science reports. Sure, it's only in a lab; woolly mammoths haven't wandered the planet for about 4,000 years. But the effort at Harvard has brought the return of the animal a tiny bit closer, the magazine notes. Researchers were able to splice mammoth genes—specifically, those coding for aspects of their hair, ears, and fat—into the DNA of Asian elephants. The genes came from a mammoth preserved in Arctic permafrost, RT reports. "We now have functioning elephant cells with mammoth DNA in them," geneticist George Church told the Sunday Times, per RT. But it's a baby step, because "just making a DNA change isn’t that meaningful," Church says. The next step is getting the cells to become specific tissues; after that, the goal would be combined mammoth-elephant embryos to be placed in artificial wombs—though developing the wombs themselves is still pie in the sky. Why do all this? One idea is to engineer hybrid elephants that can survive in colder climates, thus helping them avoid the dangers of humans and other threats. Church's work offers hope for the idea of "de-extinction" by genetic splicing, but that's just one method under investigation: As NBC News reported last year, other teams have been working on simply getting usable woolly mammoth DNA from existing remains. We may owe it to the animals to bring them back, as the possible cause of their extinction. (There's also a chance dogs could be responsible.)