Six days into the new millennium, Celia’s collar transmitted the “mortality” beep. A natural death—crushed by a falling tree limb, her neck broken and one horn snapped like a twig. In a photo taken by the humans that fetched her, she seems to have been nestled on her haunches, asleep. They sent Celia to a local taxidermist and then turned to the cells they’d biopsied. After a year spent swimming in liquid nitrogen at 321 degrees below zero, the cells were primed to divide. The Los Angeles Times ran a long article about what might happen next, quoting an environmentalist who warned, “We don’t have the necessary humility in science.”
At the lab, technicians matched a skin cell from Celia with a domestic goat’s egg cell. The goat-egg’s nucleus was removed, and Celia’s nucleus put in its place. Nearly all the DNA of any cell lives inside its nucleus, so this transfer was like putting a perfect Celia curio into the frame of a barnyard goat.
After a mammal’s egg cell is enucleated, it is common for nothing to happen. But sometimes, the reconstructed cell re-programs itself. Thanks to a magic humans don’t totally grasp, the nucleus decides it is now an egg nucleus and then replicates not as skin, but as pluripotent, able to split into skin cells, blood cells, bone cells, muscle cells, nerve cells, cells of the lung.
While this DNA technology evolved, the Celia team cultivated an odd harem of hybrid surrogates—domestic goats mated with the last female bucardos. They had hybrid wombs that the scientists prayed would accept the reconstructed and dividing eggs. In 2003, they placed 154 cloned embryos—Celia in a goat eggshell—into 44 hybrids. Seven of the hybrids were successfully impregnated, and of those seven, just one animal carried a zygote to term. The kid was born July 30, 2003, to a trio of mothers: hybrid womb, goat egg, and magical bucardo nucleus. Genetically speaking, however, the creature was entirely Capra pyrenaica. And so, thirteen hundred days after the tree fell on Celia, her taxon was no longer extinct—for about seven minutes.
The necropsy photos of the bucardo kid are strangely similar to those of Yuka, the juvenile mammoth found frozen in permafrost with wool still clinging to her body. Wet, strangely cute, and lying stretched out on her side, the newborn looks somehow timeless. Her legs seem strong and kinetic, as if she were ready to jump up and run. All of her systems were apparently functional, save her tiny lungs.
In her hybrid mother’s womb, the clone’s lung cells mistakenly built an awful extra lobe, which lodged in her brand-new throat. The kid was born struggling for air and soon died of self-strangulation. Lungs seem the trickiest parts to clone from a mammal; they’re what killed Dolly the sheep as well. How fitting that the most difficult nature to re-create in a lab is the breath of life.
The term we now use for the procedure of un-ending an endling has been around for decades, though it was rarely used. “De-extinction” first appeared in a 1979 fantasy novel, after a future-world magician conjures domestic cats back from obscurity. But when the Celia team reported their findings to the journal Theriogenology, they didn’t use the word. A few scientific papers in fields ranging from cosmology to paleobiology check the name, but it was left almost entirely to science fiction until a dozen years postbucardo. A MacArthur Fellow chided the term’s clunkiness, calling it “painful to write down, much less to say out loud.” But eventually, the buzzword stuck.
“De-extinction” made its popular debut in 2013, in a National Geographic article. To celebrate the coming-out of the term—and the new ways it would allow humans to mark animal lives—the magazine held a conference at their headquarters with lectures organized into four categories: Who, How, Why/Why Not, and Wild Again. Among the How speakers was Ordesa National Wildlife Park’s wildlife director, who recounted the Celia saga. The four-syllable term tangled with the director’s Castilian accent, but people still applauded when he called Celia’s kid “the first ez-tinc-de-tion.” As the audience clapped, the director bowed his head, obviously nervous. Behind him was a projected image of the cloned baby, fresh from her hybrid mother and gagging in the director’s latexed hands. The clone’s tongue lolled out the side of her mouth.
Earlier that morning, an Australian paleontologist confessed his lifelong obsession with thylacines, despite being born nine years after the Tasmanian tiger’s demise. “We killed these things,” he said to the audience. “We shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them. I think we have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it.” He then explained how he’d detected DNA fragments in the teeth of museum specimens. He vowed to first find the technology to extract the genetic code from the thylacine tooth-scraps, then to rebuild the fragments to make an intact nucleus, and finally to find a viable host womb where a Tasmanian tiger’s egg could incubate—in a Tasmanian devil, perhaps.
The man’s research group, called the Lazarus Project, had just announced their successful cloning of gastric brooding frog cells. The fact that the cells only divided for a few days and then died would not deter his enthusiasm. “Watch this space,” he said. “I think we’re gonna have this frog hopping glad to be alive in the world again.”
Later in the conference, a young researcher from Santa Cruz outlined a plan that allowed humans to “get to witness the passenger pigeon rediscover itself.” But after de-extinction, he said, the birds would still need flying lessons. So why not train homing pigeons to fly passenger routes? To convince the passenger babies they were following their own kind, the young scientist suggested coating the homers with blue and scarlet cosmetic dyes.
That afternoon, the chair of the Megafauna Foundation mentioned how medieval tales and even the thirty-thousand-year-old paintings in Chauvet Cave would help prepare Europe for the herds of aurochs he hoped to resurrect. The head of the conference’s steering committee sounded almost wistful when he concluded at the end of his speech, “Some species that we killed off totally, we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them.” And a Harvard geneticist hinted that mouse DNA could be jiggered to keep the incisors growing from the jawline until they protruded, tusklike, from the mouth. This DNA patchworking could help fill a gap in our spotty rebuild of the mammoth genome, he said.
Shortly after that talk, a rare naysayer—a conservation biologist from Rutgers—addressed the group: “At this very moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of existing African elephants from heavily armed poachers, and here we are in this safe auditorium, talking about bringing back the woolly mammoth; think about it.”
But what exactly is there to think about? What can thinking do for us, really, at a moment like this one? We’re knee-deep in the Holocene die-off, slogging through neologisms that remind us what is left. These speeches—of extravagant plans, of Herculean pipe dreams, and of missing—are more than thought; they admit to a spot on our own genome. Perhaps we’ve always held, with submicroscopic scruples, the fact of this as our next. The first time a forged tool sliced a beast up the back was the core of this lonely cell, and then that cell set to split, and now each scientist—onstage and dreaming—is a solitary cry of this atomic, thoughtless fate.
To dispatch animals, then to miss them. To forget their power and use our own cockeyed brawn to rebuild something unreal from the scraps. Each speech, at this very moment, is a little aria of human understanding, but it’s the kind of knowledge that rests on its haunches in places far beyond thought.
And at that very moment, the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog was dodging his keepers at a biosecure lab in Atlanta. Nicknamed Toughie, the endling hadn’t made a noise in over seven years.
And at that very moment, old Nola and Angalifu, two of the six remaining northern white rhinos, stood in the dirt of the Safari Park at the San Diego Zoo with less than twenty-four months to live. Their keepers had already taken Angalifu’s sperm and would do the same for Nola’s eggs, housing the samples in a lab that had already cataloged cells from ten thousand species. It was a growing trend—this new kind of ark, menagerie, or book of beasts—and it carried a new term for its
elf: the “frozen zoo.”
The planet’s other northern whites, horns shaved down for their own protection, roamed Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy under constant armed watch. And Celia’s famous cells were buzzing in their cryogenic state, far from Monte Perdido, still waiting for whatever might come next.
And at that very moment, way up in northwest Siberia, a forward-thinking Russian was clearing a space to save the world. As the permafrost melted, he said, it would eventually release catastrophic amounts of surface carbon into the atmosphere. To keep the harmful gases in the rock-hard earth, the Russian and his team wanted to turn the tundra back into the mammoth steppe: restoring grassland and reintroducing ancient megafauna that would stomp the dirt, tend the grass, and let the winter snows seep lower to cool the deep land. The reintroduced beasts, he swore, would send the tundra back in time.
He proposed that for every square kilometer of land there be “five bison, eight horses, and fifteen reindeer,” all of which had already been transported to his “Pleistocene Park.” Here was a space where earlier versions of all these beasts had lived in the tens of thousands of years prior. Eventually, once the science caught up, he would bring one elephant-mammoth hybrid per square kilometer, too.
And so here is a picture of next: some model of gargantuan truck following the Kolyma River—rolling over the open land where mammoths once ran for hundreds of miles. Like a growing many of us, the Russian sees the moment in which that truck’s cargo door opens and a creature—not quite Yuka but certainly not elephant—lumbers out into the grass. Her first steps would be less than five hundred miles as the crow flies, out and out over the Arctic, from the island where the last living mammoth fell into the earth 3,600 years ago.
The Russian’s process—making new beasts to tread on the bones of what are not quite their ancestors—has a fresh label for itself, as everything about this world is new. The sound of this just-coined word, when thrown by a human voice into a safe auditorium, carries with it the hope of a do-over, and the thrust of natural danger.
That new word is re-wilding.
ASSOCIATED PRESS: YOU’VE expressed some regret over the way this transpired. Is your regret about taking this lion or being kind of caught up in this whole swirl?
Dr. Walter Palmer: I made an initial statement on that and I’m going to stay true to that, OK? Obviously, if I’d have known this lion had a name and was that important to the country, or a study, obviously, I wouldn’t have taken it.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: Do you know, I’ll take a stab at this …
Dr. Walter Palmer: Nobody in our party knew, before or after, the name of this lion.
COLLECT THEM ALL!
Notes
“Jeoffry” began when I learned that the most famous cat poem in English is actually a fragment. Apparently, Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno—written from a madhouse in the mid-eighteenth century—has several lost sections, and it is believed that the “My Cat Jeoffry” section is missing its left-hand side. I did my best to mimic intact portions of the Jubilate when I “finished” the poem (aka the “Let” lines). All the “For” lines on the right are Smart’s.
The text of “Koko” comes entirely from the thousand-plus-word vocabulary of a famous sign language-using gorilla. I’ve not strayed from that documented lexicon, and I’ve tried to evoke the syntactical pairs that myriad sources report the gorilla employing, but the actual telling of the joke is my invention (though Koko is known for her sense of humor).
Acknowledgments
Once again, I owe so very much to Sarah Gorham and her team and I am beyond proud to run with the Sarabande pack.
I am extremely grateful to the Whiting Foundation, to the Oregon Literary Fellowships, and to the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities for their generous support of my writing. Thank you for making this project possible.
Much appreciation to the journals and anthologies in which earlier versions of some essays appeared: Passages North (“Harriet”), Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong (“Jeoffry”), Oxford American (“Arabella”) and Virginia Quarterly Review (“Vogel Staar”).
Thank you to Oregon State University’s School of Writing, Literature, and Film, especially my fellow Creative Writing faculty. Extra howls of thanks to my spirit animal, the ferocious Professor Marjorie Sandor.
I made it through this project by asking a lot of stupid questions, which were patiently entertained by my friends and colleagues: Tara Williams, Rebecca Olson, Evan Gottlieb, Clement Hawes, Joy Futrell, John D’Agata, Tracy Daugherty, Monica McFawn, Justin St. Germain, and many others I hope to remember later and thank in person. Special thanks to Randa Jarrar for her work translating the videos used in the Bab Amr Bird section of “War Pigs” and to Mark Burford for helping me with the music theory passages in “Vogel Staar.”
Many thanks to my students in the MFA programs at OSU and Murray State University, who keep me thinking.
Thanks to Jon Lewis and Irene Taylor Brodsky for saving my laptop and all my notebooks when I accidentally left them seventy miles from home on a freezing porch by the railroad tracks. Whoops.
Thanks to my family: the Passarellos, the Turkels, and Karen Horton; and thanks to Caroline Casey, Patrick Jordan, Riley Hanick, Matthew Gavin Frank, David Conrad, and Alexi Morrissey, who feel more like family every year.
Hooray for the three greatest creatures in history: Charlene, Columbo, and Sharky.
And I am so grateful every damn day for David Turkel, who doesn’t (seem to) mind talking to me about animals for the majority of his waking hours, and who guards my heart and my brain like some kind of crazed wolverine.
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YUKA
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THE WOLF OF GUBBIO
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