If you ask a member of the general public to name an animal from the North Pole, they will probably give you one of two answers - reindeer, or polar bear (or, possibly, a third and incorrect answer of "penguin"). Those are probably the two answers that you'll get. The high north isn't generally known as a hotspot of animal diversity. These days, at least...
Thousands of years ago, the tundra that ring the Arctic Circle were home to a wide variety of megafauna, some of which still exist, much of which has faded into extinction. Among these animals, the biggest and perhaps most famous was the woolly mammoth. Unlike those other famous extinct giants, the dinosaurs, woolly mammoths went extinct quite recently (geologically speaking), with the last known population dying out about 4,000 years ago. That means that unlike dinosaurs, mammoths coexisted with humans - in fact, they were still plodding around on Wrangel Island while the pyramids were being built in Egypt. Their relatively recent existence and the nature of their frozen ecosystem means we also have some frozen specimens - and DNA.
Anyone who has read or seen Jurassic Park knows where this is going...
Ben Mezrich explores the possibilities in Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History's Most Iconic Creatures. This quest is largely driven by two very different scientists from opposite ends of the world. The book's main protagonist is George Church, a Harvard geneticist and molecular engineer who has been one of the leading pioneers in human genetics and director of one of the most high tech labs in the world. The other is Sergey Zimov, a Russian biologist who is based out of the Russian Far East, his isolated research base standing amidst some of the last lands the mammoths once walked.
Most of the book focuses on Church and his students (which makes sense considering how much more accessible the are, both in terms of geography and language). Not surprisingly, most of the book also focuses on their aspect of the project - the "how?" The reader will learn a lot about the development of genetic research and the challenges and processes of extracting genetic material and splicing and manipulating genes to create something which may or may not be a mammoth. Church and his team identify a series of traits - such as hemoglobin that will survive the bitter cold, small ears, and, of course, the mammoth's namesake coat - that will need to be selected for in order to recreate the animal. It's all very interesting, but for those of us who are more interested in the whole animals, not just the sums of their parts, we may wish that more attention was paid to Zimoy, because that's where the "why" comes in.
When people discuss the resurrection of extinct species, the expectation is often that the recreated animals will be little more than very expensive show pieces of little environmental significance. Wouldn't it be better to channel all of these funds into conserving the elephants that we do still have rather than creating yet another? If you believe Zimoy's theories, however, there is a lot more at stake in the mammoth resurrection that just making some hairy elephants (though that would be cool, too). Zimoy believes that restocking the Arctic with mammoths - as well as musk ox, bison, caribou, and Yakutian horses, among other species - will save the world.
In Zimoy's view, the tundra that we see today is an unnatural, unstable ecosystem, one that resulted from the loss of the large animals that once lived there and maintained it as a steppe. Without the steppe ecosystem, the permafrost beneath is now more accessible, allowing stored carbon to leak into the atmosphere and creating a global warming feedback loop. In his mind, restoring the steppes will shield the permafrost and reduce global climate change, creating a more stable, productive environment not just in the Arctic, but worldwide. To that end, he and his son are experimenting on a small scale by restocking the land near their research station with small herds of ungulates - with the end goal being to bring back the keystone mammoths themselves (in the meantime, the Zimoys are doing the best they can to replicate the effect themselves by driving a tank back and forth across the tundra).
Zoos make brief cameos throughout the book, largely in Church's quest for elephant DNA to use in the experiments. Many do not seem especially receptive to participating in what seemed like a mad scheme, and it takes a while before the lab gets access to the genes - first in a failed attempt to snag a sample from a very irate elephant who makes its displeasure very clear, and second from trying to scoop up a placenta from a very newborn baby in a different zoo. Along the way, Church learns about the deadly elephant herpes virus and offers his services in helping to combat it - in part as a "Thank you" to elephants for helping him with his research, in part to help protect any potential future mammoth babies from succumbing to the disease.
Mezrich's book is a work in progress, and in a few parts (starting in the very beginning) he slips into the future, offering a glimpse of what a world might look like with mammoths still astride the top of the globe. It makes for a somewhat frustrating read at times, as you feel like things just stop at the end without real resolution. At times I felt like Mezrich was stretching out Church's biography (and shorter biographies of his students) to fill the book, because there wasn't as much mammoth info to write about yet. There's the feeling that the story is left half-told and unfinished... because it is. While the project conclude and mammoths be reborn? Did things just... end or go in a completely different direction five days after he published the book? Only time will tell.
One thing is certain though. To paraphrase one of Church's disciples, "It's all science fiction... until you remove the fiction part."
Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History's Most Iconic Creatures on Amazon.com
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