Concerns as Russian lab attempts to re-awaken 'Zombie virus' found in frozen woolly mammoth

MIRROR

Scientists have caused alarm by unearthing the bodies of long-dead mammals in an effort to ‘re-awaken’ Stone Age viruses.

The pathogens are believed to have been preserved for millennia in the frozen remains of woolly mammoths and other extinct species in northeast Siberia.

Such prehistoric ‘paleoviruses’ are unfamiliar to anything inhabiting the Earth today.

The project is being carried out by Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector.

It aims to extract cellular material containing the diseases for lab experiments.

One of the research centre’s branches is a former biological weapons facility which, in April 1979 inadvertently released spores of anthrax.