Geneticist George Church’s lab at Harvard has taken a small step toward, possibly, someday bringing the wooly mammoth back from extinction. The researchers report that they have successfully copied genes from a wooly mammoth into the genome of an Asian Elephant.

That step, however, is still a long way from bringing the animal back from extinction even according to the researchers themselves.

“Just making a DNA change isn’t that meaningful. We want to read out the phenotypes,” Church told Popular Science.

The team used a tool called “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” CRISPR. The technique is, itself, something of a breakthrough and one that some scientists are concerned will cause researchers to go too far too fast, without fully understanding the implications.

That does not appear to be the case with Church’s work. The small step taken to date has not yet been peer reviewed or published in a scientific journal because, according to the team, there is still a considerable amount of work to do.

The next step, according to the researchers, is to try to coax the new cells into becoming tissues such as blood cells to see if they behave properly. So, they may be on the verge of re-creating a mammoth blood cell or liver organoid but not a mammoth.

In order to get from functional cells to animals, the researchers would have create an artificial womb. Many researchers, as well as animal rights activists, have issues with the possibility of artificially incriminating an animal with a clone of a different animal.

“It’s going to be more humane and easier if we can set up hundreds of [embryos] in an incubator and run tests,” says Church.

Artificial wombs are, at this point, only theoretical so it is another thing that would need to be invented and proven before an actual mammoth could be considered.

According to the researchers, long before any attempt to create a mammoth, they would consider engineering elephants to survive at colder temperatures. An cold weather elephant could help prevent poaching and allow the animals to survive into the next century.

However theoretical and far-off the return of the mammoth might be, the project is part of a larger emerging field called de-extinction.

Many people believe that we are currently in the midst of a 6th great extinction, also known as the Holocene extinction. This time instead of volcanoes or comets it is human activity which is causing animals to become extinct.

In principle, de-extinction has the potential to bring back recently extinct animals or bolster the populations of animals on the brink of extinction.

Over a decade ago, French and Spanish researchers attempted to bring a wild goat, the Pyrenean ibex, back from the brink. While that effort ultimately didn’t work out, genetics research has come a long way in the last 12 years.

One of the animals that researchers have come the closest to reviving is the passenger pigeon. The birds, which are now extinct, once numbered in the million in the northeastern United States.

According to Longnow.org “a first draft of the band-tailed pigeon genome has been assembled from sequencing the DNA of “Sally,” the band-tailed pigeon (seen on KQED Quest Documentary “Reawakening Extinct Species“). Sequencing was completed at the UCSC paleognomics laboratory. Genes are being analyzed between the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon with this first draft, and refined drafts will complete the picture as work moves forward.”

While the revival of the woolly mammoth may or may not be desirable, or even possible, with so many of the worlds best known animals in danger, there is considerable interest in the overall technology of bringing animals back from extinction.

Even in principle, however, de-extinction also has its critics.

We face the potential extinction of African and Asian elephants. Why bring back another elephantid from extinction when we cannot even keep the ones that are not extinct around? What is the message? We can be as irresponsible with the environment as we want. Then we’ll just clone things back,” professor Alex Greenwood, an ancient DNA expert from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in the US, told The Telegraph.