captioning funded by cbs and ford-- built for the road ahead. >> kroft: i mean, you've been called a lot of names. you've been characterized as a hero and as a villain, a martyr, terrorist. >> i'm not yet a martyr. >> kroft: right. >> let's keep it that way. >> kroft: julian assange, the nomadic founder of the web site wikileaks, is under legal and personal attack from the u.s. government for publishing military and diplomatic secrets. he is under house arrest in the english countryside, where we conducted the most extensive

television interview he's ever given, about his life, his beliefs, and his concerns about being charged and extradited to the united states. >> it's completely outrageous. it is the worst form of censorship we have seen by the united states since the 1950s, since the mccarthy era. >> kroft: are you surprised? >> i am surprised, actually. >> kroft: but you are screwing with the forces of nature. >> stahl: the woolly mammoth is the first extinct animal to have its genome decoded. and some scientists believe that, one day, they may be able to clone one. that may seem like science fiction, but new breakthroughs in d.n.a. research may also help keep today's animals from going extinct. >> i feel like we're in the emergency room of the wildlife business, really. i don't want to see elephants in textbooks or, you know, the way we see dinosaurs. >> stahl: so dr. dresser is storing skin samples of lions, gorillas and hundreds of other species in something she calls a "frozen zoo."

so if any one of these animals were to go extinct, you could bring them back. >> in theory, i believe we can. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm morley safer. >> i'm byron pitts. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories and andy rooney tonight on "60 minutes." i can't enjoy my own barbecue with these nasal allergies. i know what works differently than many other allergy medications. omnaris. omnaris, to the nose! did you know nasal symptoms like congestion can be caused by allergic inflammation? omnaris relieves your symptoms by fighting inflammation. side effects may include headache, nosebleed, and sore throat. i tossed those allergy symptoms out of my party. [ man ] omnaris. ask your doctor. battling nasal allergy symptoms? omnaris combats the cause. get omnaris for only $11 at omnaris.com. battling nasal allergy symptoms? omnaris combats the cause. we should reach our normal high by this afternoon.

hey, ellen! what are you doing? not much -- just brewing up some dunkin' donuts coffee. want some? [ whoosh! ] i'd love some. one taste, and you'll understand. delicious dunkin' donuts coffee. mm! good! pick some up where you buy groceries. hey, did you ever think about getting curtains? america runs on dunkin'. i don't know if i could say the same for my parents.

it's the worst thing that's ever happened to them. i'm just pretty much killing it out here. they say they're happy. i mean, what do you think they do every day without me there? ♪ are they eating? they must really miss me. i'm their only child, except for my sister. [ male announcer ] venza from toyota. >> kroft: wikileaks, the web site which solicits and publishes secret and suppressed material from whistleblowers all around the world, was back in

the news this week, along with its mysterious and eccentric founder, julian assange. someone-- it's not clear who-- dumped 250,000 unredacted and classified state department and pentagon documents which had been in wikileaks possession onto the internet. when we first interviewed assange last january, he was already under investigation by the justice department for publishing classified material and possible violations of the espionage act. he was also under house arrest in britain, fighting extradition to sweden in connection with two sexual assault cases, which he has called part of a smear campaign against him. none of that has changed, and the battle between the freedom to publish and government's need to keep secrets continues. in what is still his most extensive television interview, assange talked to us about the idea behind wikileaks and the prospect of facing criminal charges in the united states.

i mean, you've been called a lot of names. you've been characterized as a hero and as a villain, a martyr, terrorist. >> assange: i'm not yet a martyr. >> kroft: right. >> assange: let's keep it that way. >> kroft: for now, julian assange is holed up on this bucolic 600-acre english estate with an ankle bracelet, a 10:00 curfew, and a slow internet connection. he declined to talk to us about the allegations in sweden, on the advice of his attorney. he has not been charged and proclaims his innocence. well, i suppose if you have to be under house arrest, there could be worse places. >> assange: well, it's a gilded cage. it's still a cage. but when you are forced to stay somewhere against your will, it does become something that you... you want to leave. >> kroft: it's a radical departure from the lifestyle that the peripatetic internet muckraker is used to-- bounding from city to city, country to country, and regularly changing

his cell phones, hair styles and general appearance, he says, to elude surveillance and avoid being killed, kidnapped or arrested. and there are reasons for his paranoia. in the last fours years, wikileaks has published information that played some role in deciding the 2007 elections in kenya, and fueling the anger that recently brought down the government of tunisia. it's divulged membership rolls of a neo-nazi organization in britain, and secret documents from the church of scientology. and that was before assange began publishing u.s. secrets, provoking what he calls "threatening statements" from whople close to power. >> assange: the statements by the vice-president, biden, saying, for instance, that i was a high-tech terrorist. sarah palin calling to our organization to be dealt with like the taliban and be hunted down. there's calls either for my assassination or the assassination of my staff, or for us to be kidnapped and renditioned back to the united

states to be executed. >> kroft: well, as you know, we have a first amendment, and people can say whatever they want, including politicians. i don't think that many people in the united states took seriously the idea that you were a terrorist. >> assange: i would like to believe that. on the other hand, the incitements to murder are a serious issue. and unfortunately, there is a portion of the population that will believe in them and may carry them out. >> kroft: if nothing else, wikileaks is the latest demonstration that a small group of people with a powerful idea can harness technology and affect large institutions. in wikileaks' case, it was the idea to aggregate state and corporate secrets by setting up an online electronic drop box, where whistleblowers around the world could anonymously upload sensitive and suppressed information. the secrets are stored on servers around the world, beyond the reach of governments or law enforcement, then released

worldwide on the internet. >> assange: the u.s. does not have the technology to take the site down. >> kroft: because? >> assange: just the way the... way our technology is constructed, the way the internet is constructed. it's... it's quite hard to stop things reappearing. so, it... we've had attacks on particular domain names, little pieces of infrastructure knocked out. but we now have some 2,000 fully independent in every way web sites, where we're publishing around the world. >> kroft: wikileaks first caught the attention of most americans a year ago april when it released this video. it shows a u.s. apache helicopter crew in iraq opening fire on a group of suspected insurgents who were standing on a street corner in baghdad. some of the men were armed, but two of them were journalists from reuters. >> come on, fire. >> roger. >> keep shooting.

>> kroft: at least a dozen people were killed in the attack, some of them innocent civilians. then last july, wikileaks released 76,000 classified field reports of u.s. operations in afghanistan that provided a chaotic and bleak ground level view of the war. in october, there were another 400,000 classified documents released from iraq, showing that civilian casualties there were much higher than the pentagon had claimed. and finally in november, thousands of state department cables that lifted the veil on highly sensitive backroom diplomacy. the documents revealed that arab leaders were lobbying the u.s. to attack iran, and that the state department had been secretly collecting intelligence on leaders at the united nations. it triggered outcries that assange was a political actor trying to damage the u.s. government. are you a subversive? >> assange: i'm sure there are

certain views amongst hillary clinton and her lot that we are subverting their authority. but you're ri... you're right, we are subverting illegitimate authority. the question is whether the authority is legitimate or whether it is illegitimate. >> kroft: do you consider the u.s. state department a legitimate authority? >> assange: it's legitimate insofar as its actions are legitimate. it has actions that are not legitimate. >> kroft: and you've gone after the ones that you think are illegitimate? >> assange: we don't "go after." that's a bit of a misconception. we don't go after a particular country. we don't go after a particular organizational group. we just stick to our promise of publishing the material that is likely to have a significant impact. >> kroft: to increase the impact of the u.s. documents, assange decided to share them with some of the leading news organizations in the world, including the "new york times,"

a relationship that grew testy when assange published the first set of war logs without removing the names of afghans who were cooperating with u.s. forces. the most persistent criticism from within the press has been that you have behaved recklessly, from time to time. and the example that they cite is that you've decided to release afghan documents without redacting the names of people who had provided intelligence to the u.s. government. >> assange: there's no evidence or any credible allegation or even any allegation from an official body that we have caused any individual at any time to come to harm in the past four years. >> kroft: the pentagon said that they've gone through all of these documents and they found the names of 300 people. >> assange: well, that's new... new public information to us. it's possible that there are 300 names in the publicly released afghan material. we don't pretend that that process is absolutely perfect.

we did hold back one in five documents for extra harm minimization review, and we also improved our process. so, when iraq came around, there was not even a single name in it. >> kroft: i mean, there have been reports of people quoting taliban leaders, saying that they had the names of these people and that they were going to take retribution. >> assange: the taliban is not a coherent outfit, but we don't say that it is absolutely impossible that anything we ever publish will... will ever result in harm. we cannot say that. >> kroft: there's a perception on the part of some people who believe that your agenda right now is anti-american. >> assange: not at all. in fact, our founding values are those of the u.s. revolution. they are those of the people like jefferson and madison. and we have a number of americans in our organization. if you're a whistleblower and you have material that is important, we will accept it, we will defend you, and we will

publish it. you can't turn away material simply because it comes from the united states. >> kroft: after the release of the state department cables, attorney general eric holder condemned wikileaks for putting national security at risk. >> eric holder: there's a real basis. there is a predicate for us to believe that crimes have been committed here. >> kroft: holder announced that the justice department and the pentagon were conducting a criminal investigation. they are reportedly looking at the espionage act of 1917 and other statutes to find a way to prosecute assange and extradite him to the u.s. >> assange: it's completely outrageous. >> kroft: are you surprised? >> assange: i am surprised, actually. >> kroft: but you are screwing with the forces of nature. you have made some of the most powerful people in the world your enemies. you had to expect that they might retaliate. >> assange: oh, no, i fully expected they'll retaliate. >> kroft: you took... you gathered, you... you stored all sorts of classified cables and

documents, and then released them to the world on the internet. and they want to... >> assange: they see it as highly embarrassing. is keeping the illusion of control. i'm not surprised about that. i am surprised at how the... the sort of flagrant disregard for u.s. traditions. that is what i'm surprised about. >> kroft: you're shocked? someone in the australian government said that, "look, if you... if you play outside the rules, you can't expect to be protected by the rules." and you played outside the rules. you've played outside the united states' rules. >> assange: no. we've actually played inside the rules. we didn't go out to get... get the material. we operated just like any u.s. publisher operates. we didn't play outside the rules, we played inside the rules. >> kroft: there's a special set of rules in the united states for disclosing classified information.

there is-- longstanding... >> assange: there's... there's a special set of rules for soldiers, for members of the state department who are disclosing classified information. there's not a special set of rules for publishers to disclose classified information. there is the first amendment. it covers the case. and there's been no precedent that i'm aware of in the past 50 years of prosecuting a publisher for espionage. it is... it is just not done. those are the rules. you do not do it. >> kroft: no one has accused assange of stealing secrets. the apache video and the classified documents were allegedly provided to wikileaks by private first class bradley manning, a low-level intelligence analyst in iraq who is accused of copying them from a classified government network that a half a million people have access to. manning is now in a military prison in fort leavenworth, kansas, facing charges that

could put him away for life. you've called him as a prisoner of conscience, correct? >> assange: i've said that, if the allegations against him are true, then he is the foremost prisoner of conscience in the united states. there's no allegation it was done for money. there's no allegation it's done for any other reasons than a political reason. now, i'm sorry if people in the united states don't want to believe that they are keeping a political prisoner. but in bradley manning's case, the allegations are that he engaged in an illegal activity for political motivations. >> kroft: people in the united states think he's a traitor. >> assange: that's clearly not true. >> kroft: regardless of what happens to private manning, any prosecution of assange will be fraught with problems, because wikileaks wasn't alone in the publishing the classified material. the "new york times" also published some of it. if the government were to try and prosecute wikileaks and not the "times," it would likely

need to prove that assange was actively involved in a conspiracy to illegally obtain the documents. did you encourage anyone to leak this material to you? or have you done anything in connection with the u.s. cases in terms of encouraging an individual to provide you with material? >> assange: no, never. >> kroft: there are people that believe that it has everything to do with the next threat. that if they don't come after you now, that what they have done is essentially endorsed a small, powerful organization with access to very powerful information releasing it outside their control. and if they let you get away with it, then they are encouraging... >> assange: then what? they will have to have freedom of the press? >> kroft: then, they will encour.... that... that it's encouragement to you... >> assange: and? and? >> kroft: ...or to some other organization. >> assange: and to every other publisher. absolutely correct. it will be encouragement to every other publisher to publish fearlessly. that's what it will encourage. >> kroft: to publish information much more... much more dangerous

than this information. >> assange: if we're talking about creating threats to small publishers to stop them publishing, the u.s. has lost its way. it has abrogated its founding traditions. it has thrown the first amendment in the bin. because publishers must be free to publish. >> kroft: when we come back, julian assange talks about his background and his political beliefs. >> cbs money watch update sponsored by: >> mitchell: good evening. labor degas prices are almost $1 higher than last year, averaging $3.66 a gallon nationwide. congress's deficit cutting super committee holdsers first meeting this thursday, and "the help" was number one at the box office for the third straight weekend. i'm russ mitchell, cbs news.

>> kroft: julian assange is not a traditional journalist or publisher, and many have argued that he is not really a journalist at all. he is an antiestablishment ideologue with conspiratorial views. he believes large government institutions use secrecy to suppress the truth, and he distrusts the mainstream media for playing along. some people have called him an anarchist, which he denies. assange prefers to be called a libertarian, and believes the only people who can adequately police the system are those on the inside who are in a position to notice the abuse and blow the whistle. while most reporters pride themselves in gathering information and interpreting it for a larger audience, wikileaks wants to make the raw data available and let others decide the meaning.

regardless of whether you agree with this idea or not, it beats close to the heart of the internet and a younger generation, and it runs through the life of julian assange. you obviously have a mistrust of authority. where does that come from? >> assange: i think it comes from experience with various types of authorities. >> kroft: assange gave us an example from his childhood, a story about him and his mother, christine, who was present at one of his recent court hearings. she was a political activist who helped scientists gather information about nuclear tests conducted by the british in the australian outback. he remembers them being stopped late one night and questioned by authorities, one of whom said: >> assange: "look, lady, you're out at 2:00 in the morning with this child-- it could be suggested that you're an unfit mother. i suggest you stay out of politics." and which she did for the next ten years, in order to make sure nothing happened to me. so that's a very early abuse of power and the secrecy that i saw

in my life. >> kroft: his was an unconventional and sometimes tumultuous childhood. he was frequently uprooted and moved around the countryside. he attended 37 different schools. so you've always been a little bit of an outsider? >> assange: i've certainly... when i was a child, going from one school to another, you are the outsider to begin with and you have to find your way in. but in most of the places where i... where i stayed long enough, i did find my way in. >> kroft: one of the first places assange found his way into was populated by teenagers and computers. and he knew how to program them before most people had them. you got involved with computers pretty early, with hacking? >> assange: well, i first became involved with computers when i was 13 or so, and i was unusually adept. i saw a sort of intellectual opportunity-- understanding how

to program, understanding how these complex machines work. and that was part of a social culture in cracking codes to prove that you could do it. it is very, actually, normal and... and healthy amongst young men. you see it in skateboarders, competing to show that they are capable in learning the best tricks. >> kroft: and your tricks were like breaking into computers at the department of defense and los alamos national laboratory, nasa and nortel, some canadian banks. >> assange: yeah, all that... all that happened. >> kroft: at age 20, assange was arrested by the australian federal police and eventually pled guilty to multiple counts of computer hacking. he managed to get off with no jail time, because the judge concluded that he hadn't stolen any information or done any damage. is that still one of your primary skills? >> assange: not really. unfortunately, i've been sort of, you know, promoted up into management, so i don't get to do... don't get to do that so

much. but i know the terrain, which means i know what is possible. for example, bill gates could program-- but he certainly doesn't program anymore-- but he knows what is possible for other people to do. >> kroft: except that assange is not bill gates and wikileaks is not microsoft. the shoestring operation that created all the havoc has no permanent offices and is headquartered wherever assange happens to be. wikileaks is a small non-profit organization with a handful of employees, a secret cadre of international programmers, and a legion of worldwide volunteers. its finances are administered by the wau holland foundation based in berlin and named after a famous hacker. according to its ledgers, wikileaks took in $1.3 million last year in donations, with expenses of about $500,000. for somebody who abhors secrets, you run a pretty secret organization. >> assange: that's not true.

what we want is transparent government, not transparent people. we are an organization who, one of our primary goals is to keep certain things secret-- to keep the identity of our sources secret. so secrecy is an inherent part of our operation. >> kroft: the state department would make the same argument. they have... doing very sensitive work that they're trying to make peace and negotiate situations around the world very delicately. it's very important that they do this in secrecy. what's the difference? >> assange: we don't say that the state department should have no secrets. that's not what we're saying. rather we say that if there are people in the state department who say that there is some abuse going on, and there's not a proper mechanism for internal accountability and external accountability, they must have a conduit to get that out to the public. and we are the conduit. >> kroft: given all the

attention that assange has received, we were curious about how he thought he was being perceived in the united states. he told us he hasn't had the time to give it much thought. do you want me to give you my characterization of what i think people think? >> assange: sure. >> kroft: mysterious. little... little weird. a cult-like figure. little paranoid. >> assange: well, you're... you're repeating all the... the ad hominem attacks by our critics. my role, when i do something like speak about... that we have discovered the deaths of 109,000 individual people in iraq, 15,000 civilian casualties never before reported anywhere-- that's a very serious role. that is not ro engage in humor, so i'm not used to... performing under the spotlight, and i am learning this as... as time's going by.

>> kroft: you have shown a fair amount of contempt for the mainstream press over the years. why did you decide to-- as you used the word-- "partner" with them in some of these most recent releases? >> assange: we're a small organization. we're in a position, say, with cable-gate, where we have 3,000 volumes of material that are very important to get out to the public in a responsible manner, that have the potential for great change-- for example, this recent revolution in tunisia. it is logistically impossible, so instead, our organization delegates its excess source material to other journalists who will have more impact, who will do a better job. >> kroft: there is an element of the press-- most of the mainstream press-- nobody wants to see you prosecuted, because it could affect the way that they do their business. but there's also a feeling

within the community that you're not one of them, that you play a different game. >> assange: we do play a different game. and i hope we're a new way. >> kroft: the point that they're making, i think, is that you're not... you're a publisher, but you're also an activist. >> assange: wait, whoa. we're a particular type of activist. in the u.s. context, there seems to be "communist activists" or something, so it's a... >> kroft: right, "agitator." >> assange: it's a... it's a dirty word in the u.s. >> kroft: it's a dirty word. and people think that what you're trying to do is to sabotage the workings of government. >> assange: no. we're not that type of activists. we are free press activists. it's not about saving the whales. it's about giving people the information they need to support whaling or not support whaling. why? that is the raw ingredients that

is needed to make a just and civil society. and without that, you're just sailing in the dark. >> kroft: there have been clear signs that assange, under the threat of possible indictment by the justice department, has moderated some of his views. before releasing the last two batches of classified documents, assange and his lawyers contacted both the pentagon and the state department, offering to explore ways to minimize potential harm. in both cases, their offer was rebuffed. assange acknowledged that his fundraising has been hurt by the decision of paypal, mastercard, visa, and bank of america to cease handling donations. but he dismissed reports that wikileaks is wracked by internal dissention and mass defections. >> assange: we're talking about daniel domscheit-berg, who was a german spokesman, had a limited role in the organization. we had to suspend him some five months ago. >> kroft: describes you as being authoritarian, secretive, punitive.

>> assange: i'm the boss that suspended him, that's correct. >> kroft: you don't care to elaborate? >> assange: i think i just did. >> kroft: you said you have this package of very damaging documents, sort of a poison pill, that's going to be released if anything bad happens to you. >> assange: no, that's not... that's not at all true. that's... that's some kind of media hype. what we do have is a system whereby we distribute encrypted backups of things we have yet to publish. there are backups distributed amongst many, many people-- 100,000 people-- and that all we need to do is give them an encrypted key and they will be able to continue on. >> kroft: this wasn't intended to be a blackmail threat. >> assange: not at all. >> kroft: what would trigger that encryption code being released? >> assange: anything that prevented us from our ability to publish-- so, not just for a second, but preventing us significantly from being able to publish.

>> kroft: your imprisonment, for example. >> assange: if a number of people were imprisoned or assassinated, then we would feel that we could not go on, and other people would have to take over our work, and we would release those keys. >> kroft: i mean, you see yourself as a check on the power of the united states and other big countries in the world. and in the process of doing that, you have now become powerful yourself. who is the check on you? >> assange: it is our sources who choose to provide us with information or not, depending on how they see our actions. it is our donors who choose to give us money or not. this organization cannot survive for more than a few months without the ongoing support of the public. >> kroft: since our interview

first aired in january, wikileaks has continued to release documents on its web site, but its donations have fallen off considerably. also, a number of web sites have tried to copy the wikileaks model of soliciting secrets, including several in the mainstream media. >> go to 60minutesovertime.com to hear how the julian assange/wikileaks story almost never happened. sponsored by pfizer. i'm phil mickelson, pro golfer. if you have painful, swollen joints, i've been in your shoes. one day i'm on p of the world... the next i'm saying... i have this thing called psoriatic arthritis. i had some intense pain. it progressively got worse. my rheumatologist told me about enbrel. i'm surprised how quickly my symptoms have been managed. [ male announcer ] because enbrel suppresses your immune system, it may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers, and nervous system and blood disorders have occurred.

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>> stahl: it's difficult to imagine that, 10,000 years ago, right here in north america, there lived giant animals that are now the stuff of legends--

mammoths and mastodons, ground sloths and saber-tooth cats. they and thousands of other species have vanished from the earth. and today, partly due to the expansion of one species-- ours-- animals are going extinct faster than ever before. the very definition of "extinct" means "gone forever," but what if that didn't have to be? as we first reported in early 2010, scientists are making remarkable advances that are bringing us closer than ever before to the possibility of a true animal resurrection. >> oh, my goodness, that's the biggest one! >> stahl: who wouldn't be dazzled by an animal like this-- the woolly mammoth... or the saber-tooth tiger... the irish elk... the giant sloth. today, they exist just as bones in museums, alive only in our imaginations, and the recreations of artists and filmmakers.

but what if that could change? in the age of d.n.a., we now know that these vanished creatures, like all life on earth, are ultimately nothing more than this, sequences of the four letters-- a, c, t, and g-- that make up the genetic blueprint or code of life. the codes for extinct animals were thought to have died along with them, until recently, when machines like this one at the smithsonian's d.n.a. lab started working magic. >> sean carroll: just the study of ancient d.n.a. only broke onto the scene 20 years ago or so-- the idea that we could harvest d.n.a. from extinct creatures, from fossil bones, learn something about the past. >> stahl: sean carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the university of wisconsin, says that, like so many things in the field of d.n.a., the progress has been staggering. one surprising discovery has been the value of ancient hair. scientists recently discovered

that the hair shaft seals d.n.a. inside it like a biological plastic, protecting it, and making hair a rich and plentiful source of genetic information. does that mean that you can take extinct animals... i mean, there's hair in museums? >> carroll: right, yeah. >> stahl: and get the genetic sequencing? >> carroll: possibly. and especially if those animals were preserved in any way, there's a good prospect of that. it's sort of like "c.s.i.," you know? how good is this forensic material? can you get good d.n.a. information from older and older and older material? that's pretty promising. >> stahl: so dusty old specimens that have been tucked away in the drawers of natural history museums like the smithsonian are suddenly potential treasure troves of genetic information. just a couple of years ago, using only a few clumps of woolly mammoth hair, scientists at penn state were able to extract enough d.n.a. fragments to figure out most of its genetic sequence, making the woolly mammoth the first extinct animal to have its genome

decoded-- which raises the question of whether resurrecting one of these creatures is really possible. scientists say one option would be genetic engineering-- take a living animal that's related to the mammoth, like the elephant, figure out all the places where its d.n.a. differs from the mammoth's, and then alter the elephant's d.n.a. to make it match. that's not possible just yet. but there may be another way: cloning. is it possible that we're going to get the full d.n.a. of the woolly mammoth and be able to clone it? >> carroll: yes, i think we'll be able to get much, if not all, of the woolly mammoth d.n.a. and the great advantage there is that a lot of the specimens are in permafrost. so they've sort of been conveniently frozen for us, which preserves d.n.a., preserves tissue better. >> stahl: but for cloning, just knowing the d.n.a. sequence from hair isn't enough. you'd need an intact mammoth cell, which carroll says will be

difficult to find, but not impossible. >> carroll: it could be a skin cell. it could be any particular cell that, hopefully, has been preserved well enough, stayed frozen for thousands of years. and to transfer the nucleus of that cell into, for example, an egg of an elephant. >> stahl: and they're close... >> carroll: close enough that... >> stahl: close enough. >> carroll: ...close enough that maybe the elephant could serve as a surrogate mother. it's called inter-species cloning, implanting d.n.a. from one species into the eggs of another. and anyone who wants to try it, with a mammoth or anything else, would be well-served to pay a visit to dr. betsy dresser in new orleans. tu a parserengeti, part high-tech medical facility, she ahd her staff at the audubon nature institute have been working quietly for years on the science and the art of inter- species cloning. and she'll be the first to tell you that, even with living animals, it isn't easy.

>> betsy dresser: you don't just clone some cells, and then all of a sudden, you have a baby. i mean, there's so many scientific steps along the way-- knowing everything from hormones to the proper surrogate to, you know, length of pregnancy. >> stahl: length of pregnancy? >> dresser: yeah. because, see, we don't know how long a woolly mammoth... the gestation period. we can guess, but we don't know, really. >> stahl: but betsy dresser's work on inter-species cloning is focused on the future, not the past. rather than trying to resurrect extinct creatures, her goal is to keep the animals we have today from going extinct tomorrow. >> dresser: i feel like we're in the emergency room of the wildlife business, really. i don't want to see elephants in textbooks or, you know, the way we see dinosaurs. we're going to lose a lot of species if we don't do something about it. >> stahl: dresser and her team are trying to increase the populations of endangered animals by putting their d.n.a. into the eggs of their non- endangered relatives.

>> dresser: this cat's going to act as a surrogate mother, and so here's the surgery... >> stahl: on the day we visited, they were laparoscopically removing eggs from an ordinary housecat, then sending the eggs down the hall to have the housecat d.n.a. literally sucked out of them. ooh, tell me what's happening. >> dresser: what she's doing is she's removing the d.n.a. from this domestic cat egg. and she can see it by what we call fluorescing it. it becomes just very blue, and so now she knows where it is. and now, you'll see her go in there and be able to remove it. >> stahl: she's taking out all the genes? >> dresser: right. >> stahl: once the housecat d.n.a. is out-- that's it being deposited outside of the egg-- they will replace it with the d.n.a. of an endangered arabian sandcat, a completely different species, gathered from a tiny piece of skin. >> dresser: and there you see it being inserted into the domestic cat egg. >> stahl: and you made that from just skin? >> dresser: just from skin cells, right.

>> stahl: an electrical pulse starts the egg dividing, and, if all goes as planned, the now sandcat embryo will be put back into the domestic cat to grow to term. it's worked before, with african wildcats. these two are both interspecies clones-- so normal, they even mated the old-fashioned way and produced kittens. >> dresser: eight kittens, altogether. we had a couple litters. >> stahl: and they're totally healthy and they're african wildcats. >> dresser: totally african wildcats, totally healthy. and it said to us, "hey, this works." and now that we know we can do it, we can say to the world, "these animals do develop. they do reproduce naturally. and we can use this as a tool for endangered species." >> stahl: is she hissing at us? >> dresser: yeah, she's hissing at us. >> stahl: and dresser is working her way up. her next inter-species cloning project will use this non- endangered caracal cat as a surrogate mother for an endangered lynx; and after that,

the eland antelope as a surrogate for its endangered cousin, the bongo. you know, there are still people who get nervous at the idea of cloning. they think there's something wrong about it. >> dresser: i'll tell you what-- if i have to choose cloning or extinction, i'm going to choose cloning. but i want to be darn sure that i know how to do it. and if we don't do it while we have the animals, now, to be able to learn how to do it, then we're not going to have a choice. it's not going to be an option. >> stahl: so to keep her options open while she's mastering inter-species cloning, she's also putting as many animals as she can on ice, literally. dresser is the keeper of a new kind of zoo-- a frozen zoo-- where she's collecting tiny skin samples from thousands of different animals, representing hundreds of species, and is storing them at 343 degrees below zero in tiny canisters inside these tanks filled with liquid nitrogen. >> dresser: we've got lions and

tigers, we've got gorillas and rhinos. we've got little frogs. all of the animals... >> stahl: so, everything... >> dresser: ...that people know in zoos. >> stahl: ...from this size to this size. >> dresser: to this size, exactly. >> stahl: so, how long can a piece of skin be viable? >> dresser: we think these cells can sit here for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. >> stahl: so if any one of these animals were to go extinct, you could bring them back? >> dresser: in theory, i believe we can. >> stahl: in other words, it's kind of a noah's ark. >> dresser: yeah. >> stahl: it's not a zoo, it's an ark. >> dresser: it's an ark. ( chuckles ) truly. >> stahl: do you think we're at the stage where we should be taking every single wild animal, even if they're not endangered, and putting them in a frozen zoo? >> dresser: yes. i absolutely do. >> stahl: every single one? >> dresser: what have we got to lose? i think we should put every species in that we can, while we have the opportunity. >> stahl: which raises the question, with so many living animals today threatened, why think about resurrecting extinct ones, like the mammoth? to bring the woolly mammoth

back-- we don't have enough space for the big animals we already have. >> carroll: these projects, like the woolly mammoth, they inspire people to think about the meaning of what we're doing here. and why would you invest years and years of your life in trying to bring back a woolly mammoth, or taking care of them if you did? >> stahl: that's an excellent question. >> carroll: i think it would fire up people's imaginations. and i think, somewhere, there's a nine-year-old girl watching this program and listening to this saying, "that's what i want to do. i want to bring back these creatures that are extinct. or i want to protect creatures that are now threatened from going extinct." so, in many ways, i think the woolly mammoth can sort of be, you know, a poster animal for a general effort of being more conscious of our activities on the planet. >> stahl: no one has yet found the intact cell it would take to resurrect that poster animal, but in siberia four years ago, a reindeer herder discovered a remarkably well-preserved one- month-old baby mammoth that had lain frozen in permafrost for 40,000 years.

its d.n.a. was in better shape than any previously found, raising hopes that between new finds and new technology, it may just be a matter of time. betsy dresser stepped down as director of the audubon research center recently to work on a book about endangered species and new technology. she continues to consult on the center's work, which is ongoing. >> welcome to the cbs sports update presented by viagra. i'm ian eagle. at the u.s. open today, defending champion rafael nadal advanced into the fourth round with a straight-sets win over david nalbandian. elsewhere, giles simon advanced and americans andy roddick advanced to the round of 16.

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