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Summary
Summary
Science fiction becomes reality in this Jurassic Park -like story of the genetic resurrection of an extinct species--the woolly mammoth--by the bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and The 37th Parallel .
"With his knack for turning narrative nonfiction into stories worthy of the best thriller fiction" ( Omnivoracious ), Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic circle, and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant. Will they be able to turn the hybrid cells into a functional embryo and bring the extinct creatures to life in our modern world?
Along with Church and his team of Harvard scientists, a world-famous conservationist and a genius Russian scientist plan to turn a tract of the Siberian tundra into Pleistocene Park, populating the permafrost with ancient herbivores as a hedge against an environmental ticking time bomb. More than a story of genetics, this is a thriller illuminating the race against global warming, the incredible power of modern technology, the brave fossil hunters who battle polar bears and extreme weather conditions, and the ethical quandary of cloning extinct animals. Can we right the wrongs of our ancestors who hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction--and at what cost?
Author Notes
Ben Mezrich graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. He has published seventeen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Accidental Billionaires , which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network , and Bringing Down the House , which was the basis for the hit movie 21. He lives in Boston.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this dramatized narrative of advances in biotechnology, Mezrich (The 37th Parallel) plunges readers into the Siberian wilderness and the "beautiful chaos" of the Harvard laboratory of George Church, one of the world's leading geneticists. Mezrich attempts to lend a thriller's pace to a five-million-year-old story about the extinction and attempted reintroduction of the woolly mammoth. However, early on he gets stuck on a track devoted to Church, an originator of the Human Genome Project. After lumbering over Church's biography, Mezrich flings readers back to Siberia and into the company of six captured elk that are en route to an arctic refuge where a father-and-son team of scientists, with the aid of pile drivers and a WWII tank, are returning a swath of tundra to its Pleistocene state. Mezrich's portrayal of these men and their work is disappointingly thin. Instead of fleshing out the work of the Siberian team, the story shifts back to Boston with vignettes about Church's growing woolly-mammoth-revival team, new competition from South Korea, and petri dishes containing 14 woolly organoids-the building blocks of the future mammoth. Mezrich handles the ethics of de-extinction with the same lightness he uses to describe the science; the result is an unsatisfying book. Agency: WME. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Earlier works, including How to Clone a Mammoth (2015), by Beth Shapiro, show that, fantastical as it seems, there are actual projects to bring extinct species back into existence. Mezrich (Once upon a Time in Russia, 2015) depicts one such effort at the Harvard Medical School, led by geneticist George Church. Using a breezy narrative technique Mezrich calls re-created dialogue, he relates Church's childhood interest in biology and his achievement of a high-profile career. One day, Nicholas Wade, science reporter for the New York Times, called Church to ask if re-creating the woolly mammoth was possible. Thus prompted to explore the idea and with financial backing from the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, Church selected a team from his lab's staff to chase this chimera. Explaining how they might revive the woolly, Mezrich describes their techniques to decode DNA from the carcasses of mammoths from Siberia, genetically synthesizing their DNA, and implanting it in a modern elephant. Making complex genetic engineering intelligible, Mezrich successfully channels the enthusiasms of the scientists he so vividly portrays.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
in 1801, Charles Willson Peale, the curator of one of America's first museums of natural history, put a skeleton on display in Philadelphia's Philosophical Hall, setting off a popular craze - "mammoth fever," historians have called it. Trained as a painter, Peale was more showman than scientist, a precursor to RT. Barnum as well as Neil deGrasse Tyson. (In fact, Barnum would later acquire much of Peale's collection.) Peale's beast was something of a chimera, a hybrid of anatomy and makebelieve. In place of missing bones, he fashioned approximations out of wood and papier-mache. In assembling it, he managed to aggrandize it. He stuck the tusks on upside down so that his beast resembled a walrus. In promotional material, he described it as "exclusively carnivorous." His bones, moreover, hadn't belonged to a mammoth at all but to its evolutionarily distant cousin, a species of prehistoric North American proboscidean that in 1806, five years after Peale put his specimen on display, the pioneering French naturalist Georges Cuvier would christen "le grande Mastodonte" - but never mind. Peale's skeleton was a hit, and it was mammoth, and not mastodon, fever that people caught. There are signs we may be living through a second outbreak of mammoth fever. The remains of mammoths and their cousins keep emerging out of beanfields and permafrost, making headlines. They've also been making prominent cameos in books. A mammoth is the first of the 17 animals Elena Passarello thinks eloquently about in her bestiary of essays, "Animals Strike Curious Poses," published earlier this year. Elizabeth Kolbert opens "The Sixth Extinction," winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize, with a chapter on the paleontological case history of the mastodon. One of Cuvier's contemporaries proposed calling the mastodon "the American incognitum." It's a shame the name didn't stick. Reading John J. McKay's "Discovering the Mammoth," an unabridged version of the history Kolbert artfully condenses, one learns that for almost as long as they've been extinct, mammoths and their cousins have been to us figures of mystery, totems of the unknown and invitations to fantasize about the past. In China, people mistook dead mammoths for dead dragons. Ancient Greeks imagined they'd found the remains of Titans slain by the mutinous gods. Multiple villages in Sicily claimed to possess the remains of Polyphemus, the Cyclops blinded by Odysseus. (We now know that elephants once grazed on Sicilian hills. Look at a pachyderm skull, and you'll see that its nasal cavity bears some resemblance to the socket of an enormous eye.) One gets the impression that McKay, possessed by a kind of scholarly monomania, has hunted down every written reference to mammoths and mammoth bones ever made, and it is impressive how many authors ancient and modern expressed an opinion on the subject. As he stalks his quarry through the wilds of medieval treatises on, for instance, the disputed existence of giants, even readers who share his fascinations - with mammoths or with medieval treatises - may weary of the chase. Once McKay reaches the 17th century, when anatomists finally noticed the resemblance to elephants, the mystery of mammoths becomes one of the great detective stories in the history of science. Cuvier's comparative anatomical studies of these ancient pachyderms led him to his heretical discovery, announced in 1796, of the phenomenon of extinction. As evolution would a few decades later, extinction upset the old cosmologies. Since Cuvier's time, paleontologists and geologists have identified with confidence five major mass extinctions - the Big Five, they call them. In "The Ends of the World," accompanying scientists and amateur fossil hunters into the field, seeking lost worlds at the edges of highways and parking lots, Peter Brannen takes readers on a time-traveling tour through all five, in chronological order. Throughout he is a companionable guide, as good at breathing life into the fossilized prose of scientific papers as he is at conjuring the Ordovician reign of the nautiloids. Although a worlddestroying asteroid can make for a spectacular apocalypse, many of the most lethal events in Earth's history, Brannen learns, have been homegrown. Investigations into the Devonian Extinction, which around four hundred million years ago terminated the Age of Fishes, have recently pointed not to an asteroid, or a super volcano, or any of the usual cataclysmic suspects, but to an unexpected one: trees. As they successfully colonized the continents, trees sent roots into the rock, building soil that washed into the ocean, fertilizing algal blooms of the sort that account for the Gulf of Mexico's anoxic dead zones. Their leaves, meanwhile, drew down carbon dioxide from the Devonian atmosphere - enough, evidence suggests, to induce an ice age. In debates about climate change, sophists like to observe that the Earth's climate has changed wildly in the past, the implication being that climate change is perfectly natural. That this is irrefutably so should comfort no one. We're also perfectly natural, after all. But if human activity does bring about yet another mass extinction, we can at least console ourselves with the notion that trees did it first. Devonian trees, however, didn't know what they were doing when they did it. And of course, we're not depleting carbon dioxide. We're increasing it at "perhaps the fastest rate of any period in the last 300 million years of earth history." The planet has run greenhouse experiments before, and if we wish to know their results, we can follow the geologic record back 250 million years to the hell of the End-Permian, when temperatures in acidic oceans reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit and "hypercanes" blasted around the hemispheres. Hurricane Irma, we were told in September, was as big as Ohio. End-Permian hypercanes attained the magnitude of continents. There followed what paleontologists call the Great Dying, the worst extinction in the planet's history, which extinguished 90 percent of life on Earth. Amid all the eschatological gloom, Brannen does offer some hopeful news: However alarming, the extinction rate we've seen in the last four centuries does not come close to rivaling the Big Five, not yet. Woolly mammoths turn up toward the end of Brannen's guided tour. As he reminds us, the animals vanished so recently it's still possible to eat mammoth meat pulled from the Arctic refrigerator. Paleontologists have by now mostly solved the mystery of the mammoth's disappearance - mostly, but not quite. The retreat of the ice sheets a dozen-odd millenniums ago likely played a role, but mammoths had survived interglacial warm periods before, by shifting latitudes. Why did they disappear this time? Along with beavers the size of bears? And sloths the size of elephants? Brannen favors the overkill hypothesis - that spear-chucking humans drove the mammoth if not to extinction then to extinction's brink. The case, among scientists, remains open, and hotly debated. Rivals to the overkill hypothesis include, among others, the landscaping hypothesis, according to which we eradicated mammoths by burning down their habitats. Amazingly, scientists not long ago discovered that a remnant mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic held on until just a few thousand years ago, but their gene pool was too small, and they succumbed to inbreeding, also known as genetic decay - which is how isolated populations today often meet their end. If Ben Mezrich's "Woolly" is to be believed, mammoths may be returning someday soon to a tundra near you, resurrected by the necromancers of synthetic biology. Even if you don't live to see a mammoth in the flesh, the odds are excellent you will have the opportunity to see its computer-generated likeness. Mezrich wrote the book that became "The Social Network/' and the cover of "Woolly" announces that a movie adaptation is already on the way. The advertisement is almost unnecessary. The book reads like an extended movie treatment, or mammalian fan fiction inspired by "Jurassic Park." The real star of Mezrich's story isn't his eponymous mammoth but the Harvard geneticist George Church. Along with journalistic access Church has furnished Mezrich with nine epigraphs and an epilogue. A leader of the Human Genome Project and a pioneer of synthetic biology, Church is well suited to the familiar role Mezrich casts him in, that of the wizardly genius. Church even possesses what Mezrich describes as a "billowing white beard." In photographs, the beard looks more woolly than billowing; like it would take a hypercane to billow it. Not so Mezrich's prose. In hagiographic reconstructed childhood scenes Mezrich has a prepubescent Church already speaking like someone trying out lines for a TED Talk. Although the subtitle promises a "true story," "Woolly" is, like Peale's beast, something of a chimera, a hybrid of journalism and science fiction. (One chapter narrates, from the point of view of a doomed baby mammoth, a scene set 3,000 years ago on Wrangel Island. Another narrates, from the point of view of a scientist, a scene set "four years from today.") If a mammoth ever emerges from Church's lab, it will likewise be chimerical, in the genetic sense of that word - not the clone of an individual mammoth but an approximation of one conjured out of synthetic DNA spliced, crisply, into the genome of an Asian elephant, the mammoth's closest living relative. It would be, in effect, an Asian elephant compelled to express several of the mammoth's distinctive genetic traits: frost-resistant hemoglobin, diminutive ears, woolly hair. Mezrich makes believe that this brave new Snuffleupagus will be stomping around by the next presidential election cycle. Even optimistic proponents of the science behind his fiction predict a birthday that middle-aged hominids like me probably won't be around to celebrate. Why make a pseudomammoth? Ostensibly, for ecological reasons. The most fascinating chapter in Mezrich's book might well be one he didn't write. It excerpts "The Wild Field Manifesto," by Sergey Zimov. A Russian geophysicist, Zimov has spent much of his career working to resurrect an ecosystem, the pasturelands of the Siberian tundra as they existed 14,000 years ago, before bipedal apes with a taste for megafauna came along. His motives aren't nostalgic. He isn't trying to turn back time or build a new Eden so much as he's trying to landscape the future. The "frozen soils of the mammoth steppe" are "the biggest natural source of greenhouse gases on the planet," and the permafrost has already begun to thaw. Snow insulates soil, and by trampling it in search of forage, big herbivores expose the permafrost to the air, lowering ground temperatures by as much as 40 degrees centigrade. "It is very hard to agree to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions," Zimov writes. "Reducing permafrost emissions is much easier." Zimov doesn't really need a living mammoth to restore the mammoth steppe, however. In a demonstration project he calls Pleistocene Park, he's already introduced other big herbivores adapted to cold climates: moose, Yakutian horses, Finnish reindeer, North American bison, elk, musk oxen, yaks. The greatest benefit that a mammoth might bring is publicity. Already, it is becoming to "de-extinction" what the humpback whale was to marine conservation four decades ago - a charismatic mascot. Save the Whale, Make a Mammoth. It would be fitting and a touch ironic if we brought the mammoth back purely so that we could see a living breathing one with our own eyes at long last. As Peter Brannen notes, the secret to the predatory success of our clawless, fangless species on the ice age hunting grounds may well have been our culture - language, tools, all of those technologies that allowed us to acquire knowledge and transmit it across time. As John McKay informs us, paleontologists finally learned what mammoths looked like - the upward curling tusks, the humped shoulder, the downward sloping spine - not by studying bones but by looking closely at ice age art made by those who'd observed the animals attentively, perhaps even lovingly, or wondrously, or worshipfully. Of the 255 engravings and paintings left by Paleolithic artists on the walls of the Rouffignac Cave in southern France, 16 depict the horse, 29 the bison. There are ? rhinos, 6 snakes, 4 human figures, a single bear. The woolly mammoth outnumbers them all, recurring over and over, 158 times, like a dream. ? Donovan hohn is the author of "Moby-Duck."
Kirkus Review
A tale of the resurrection of the woolly mammoth and how "biology and genetics [have] gone from passive observation to active creation."Bestselling author Mezrich (Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs, 2016, etc.) is a fine storyteller who likes offbeat topics. Film producers snap up his books (The Social Network, 21), including this one. The author describes this one as a "dramatic narrative account," and he opens with something out of a Michael Crichton novel: 3,000 years ago, a 200-pound mammoth calf is born, and he's "the last of his kind." Fast-forward to today, where we meet Dr. George Church"fast becoming the face of the genetic revolution"in his lab at Harvard Medical School. This is his story as well as the story of the many graduate students working with him on genetic engineering. Their goal is to genetically engineer synthetically sequenced woolly mammoth genes in Asian elephant cells. Meanwhile, Sergey Zimov, a Russian scientist, has been working at his own science center in Siberia studying the permafrost, a "land mass covering as much as 20 percent of the Earth's surface." Zimov's research revealed that it "held a devastating secret"it was a "ticking time bomb." As the Arctic warms, the permafrost begins to melt, releasing carbon dioxide and methane gas into the air. Eventually, it would "release more carbon than would be created by burning all the forests on Earth three times over," an event that "could suffocate the world." If, Church speculated, a new generation of mammoths could be created and returned to their Siberian grazing grounds, then maybe the ecology of the late Pleistocene could be re-created and defuse the bomb. Mezrich recounts Church's career and accomplishments in genetics as he works toward achieving this lofty goal. Along the way, he also highlights important issues in wildlife conservation. There's a lot of science here, but on the whole, Mezrich does a good job of making it accessible. An enthralling story only occasionally inhibited by languorous prose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
What's the point of bringing an extinct animal back to life? Mezrich (The 37th Parallel) tells the story of geneticist George Church and others working to create, not clone, wiped-out species, including mammoths. Such endeavors are not for our amusement-the author readily acknowledges and dismisses the parallels to Jurassic Park. Rather, they are intended to help in today's world. Mammoths, for instance, could balance the ecosystem by trampling the permafrost in places such as Siberia's Pleistocene Park, thus lowering the permafrost's deadly carbon emissions. The ethically minded Church is well known for his open and collaborative spirit in mainstream media, and the idea of "science fiction becoming science" is intriguing. However, despite the intellectual matter at hand, the narrative is simplistic and often gets bogged down in details that make the story seem unfocused. VERDICT Readers unfamiliar with Church's work and looking for a lighter touch of science might be able to power through the superfluous bits. Still, its commercial appeal, furthered by a movie already in the works, will attract popular science readers. [See Prepub Alert, 2/6/17.]-Elissa Cooper, Helen Plum Memorial Lib., Lombard, IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Woolly CHAPTER ONE Three thousand years ago WRANGEL ISLAND. An eighty-mile-wide swath of volcanic rock, gravel, and permafrost jutting out from the Arctic Ocean, ninety miles off the coast of Siberia, windswept and forbidding. Gray on gray on gray, a forgotten stretch of beach covered in a thick mist, the air heavy with the spray from waves crashing through the loose ice beyond the breakers. A little after 5:00 a.m., the calf opens his eyes. Even though his mother is only a few yards away, splayed out against a makeshift nest of dry reeds that she has gathered from the underbrush deeper toward the center of the island, the calf feels strangely alone. The rest of his herd--twenty-five strong, arranged along a matriarchal line that stretches back through three generations--has already begun a short pilgrimage down the coast. Being separated from the bulk of the herd feels unnatural. A mild illness has briefly kept his mother from engaging in the routines of survival on the island, so she's stayed behind as the herd has set out to search for more sources of drinkable water and grazing. At less than a year old, the calf has remained with his mother, his familial bonds and youthful needs overcoming his developing social instincts. But neither nature nor nurture makes sitting around waiting for her to get back to her full energy any easier. The calf pushes himself to his feet, the thick muscles in his enormous legs trembling with the effort. His size already makes rising from the ground a bit of an ordeal. He weighed over two hundred pounds at birth and even then stood over three feet tall. Now, though he is far from fully grown, he weighs well over a thousand pounds. He shakes his head back and forth, shedding reeds and bits of snow and ice that gathered over him as he slept. His mother is still lying on her left side against the ground in front of him, her huge body rising and falling as each breath sends clouds of condensation through the frozen air. As big as the calf is, his mother is a veritable mountain, five, maybe six tons, and more than twice his height. It is no wonder that his kind often naps standing up. When they do sleep flat against the ground, it is usually for periods of no more than four to five hours. The calf watches his mother for a few minutes, then kicks the last bits of ice off his legs and starts forward down a gentle, gravelly slope that leads toward the beach. Each heavy step sends tremors up and down his body, as his huge feet compress and churn the frozen ground. The wind howls around him, pushing his tiny, round ears flat against the sides of his head, but he continues forward, his eyes searching the turned permafrost beneath him for bits of grass, moss, roots. As he nears the bottom of the slope, he starts to feel the spray from the waves that crash against the large volcanic rocks making up much of the coast; the water feels good against his body, the glistening, bluish drops beading against the long strands of thick red hair that cover most of his hide. Despite the wind, the icy water, the cold, the calf is not uncomfortable. Though it is a harsh environment, he and his herd are uniquely suited for it; in fact, for thousands of years, Wrangel Island has enabled the huge animals to survive and thrive. Even now, his is one of perhaps two dozen herds on the island. At one time, the super-herd numbered close to a thousand individuals, though in recent years it has dwindled to half that. Though the interrelated herds have always lived in proximity to various predators, it wasn't claws and teeth that cut down the calf's cousins, aunts, and uncles in recent years. The thinning of his kind was part of a natural process of adaptation. The world around him has changed, and his species has adjusted; smaller in number, leaner, but functioning. In this forgotten corner of the world, they have learned, survived. In fact, though the calf couldn't possibly know, the isolated, icy nature of his island home is the only reason the herd still exists at all. A twist of fate, an accident of geography, a turn of weather: Six thousand years earlier, as the world had first begun to warm, the water surrounding Wrangel had risen--fifty feet or more--and cut off the island from the mainland. The calf's ancestors, who had crossed over one herd at a time along an ice bridge during the colder months of the year, had found themselves trapped. Lost in time. Saved. While the calf's super-herd adapted to its isolation on Wrangel, the rest of their species had died off around the world, over four thousand years ago. The five hundred or so individuals left on the island are all that remain. Split into familial units, close-knit, living in a symbiotic relationship with the island itself, they have lived four thousand years beyond their kind's extinction. The calf finally reaches the bottom of the slope and is now less than a dozen yards from the water itself. The spray is even more palpable now, the frozen droplets pelting his face and hide like hail. It is time to head back up the slope toward his mother. Perhaps she is awake now and well enough to finally rejoin the herd, farther down the coast. He starts to shift his heavy body in the opposite direction, when something out on the water catches his attention. Cutting through the waves, slicing past the jagged chunks of ice and over the breaking foam--something the cub has never seen before. He stands frozen in place, staring at the long, cylindrical object, which his mind had no capacity to understand. Like a hollowed-out tree trunk, the object lies horizontal, moving forward on the ocean's surface toward the beach--right in his direction. The calf takes a step back, then freezes again. Above the edges of the long object, he can now make out creatures, five or six of them, huddled together against the water's spray. They are small and pale, covered in odd hides that aren't hairy. And they are pointing at him. He watches as one of the creatures rises and lifts a thin wooden shaft tipped in razor-sharp bone high into the air. It is twice as long as the creature itself. The calf stares, too stunned to move. He does not know what these strange creatures are, or why they are heading to his beach. He cannot know that they have come to finish what the millennia of a warming world have not. The calf cannot know that he, his mother, his herd, are the last of his kind. After him, there will be no more. Excerpted from Woolly: The True Story of the de-Extinction of One of History's Most Iconic Creatures by Ben Mezrich All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.