Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  The tusk was a thing of beauty. Though browned by age and ice, it held glimpses of white beneath. It was pure ivory—but not from an elephant. It was part of a Woolly Mammoth tusk, unearthed near where Timur was standing, dug from the ancient permafrost by his cousin.

  It was an incredible treasure, but, in the scheme of things, not at all rare. Timur’s tribe of Yakuts had built their entire livelihood around finds like that. Though Timur’s cousin’s specimen was incomplete, a single Mammoth tusk could measure as much as ten feet long, and at market could bring in more than two hundred thousand dollars.

  In pieces, Mammoth ivory now went for more than five hundred dollars a pound. And the better preserved the material, the more it could be worth.

  More than sixty tons of Mammoth ivory were sold every year. Most of the demand came from Asia, and as much as 90 percent of Mammoth tusks ended up in China, where it was turned into jewelry and ground into various medicines. Unlike the trade in elephant ivory, the Mammoth ivory business was completely legal. More than that, the sale of Mammoth ivory was encouraged as a hedge against the murder and harvesting of endangered African and Asian elephants. Mammoths weren’t an endangered species; they were long extinct. Which meant that every ounce of Mammoth ivory sold to a collector or jewelry designer or doctor in Beijing, Hong Kong, or Shanghai meant another elephant hadn’t been killed for profit.

  Conservationists around the world had applauded the growth in the Mammoth ivory market. But the conservationists, who faced considerable danger fighting the elephant trade, did not have to risk their lives in search of those valuable Mammoth tusks. The Yakuts had a near monopoly on the Mammoth-hunting business, due to their proficiency as nomadic hunters and their proximity to the Arctic ice floes where the Mammoths had once lived, and died, in massive numbers. Scientists estimated that more than 100 million Mammoths were buried under that ice, many of them over fifteen feet tall, with tusks that almost reached the ground.

  Every day, more fossilized Mammoths were being discovered. And where one Mammoth lay, a dozen more were sure to be nearby. It was just a matter of following his cousin’s map, avoiding the polar bears, and scouring the ice with his tools. If he were lucky, he would find a piece of tusk nearly as big as his cousin’s prize.

  Along with a tusk, Timur would also take a sample of the Mammoth’s carcass, which he would carefully seal in one of the plastic specimen containers he carried with him. The containers had been given to him by a courier who worked for a laboratory in the United States. More and more often, Timur and his Yakut brethren were carrying back samples of Mammoths, along with their ivory, to be sold to the laboratories in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.

  Timur didn’t know why the scientists were so eager for the Mammoth meat. After ten thousand years in the ice, it certainly wasn’t edible or usable for leather. But Timur didn’t really care why the scientists wanted it; he cared only that they were willing to pay for it.

  Besides, the requests for samples from the American scientists were less strange than the offers now circulating through the Yakut villages from representatives of a group of South Korean scientists who were also interested in the Woolly Mammoth. Unlike the American scientists, the South Koreans weren’t looking for Mammoth pieces sealed in specimen containers; they were hiring Yakuts themselves, transporting them to a massive excavation project, employing them for their expertise in the region and for their knowledge of the ancient beasts. The excavation project was located deep inland, up the side of Muus Khaya, the highest peak in the Suntar-Khayata range. Timur didn’t know why the South Koreans wanted to dig inland, and into a mountain; Mammoths were much easier to find in the north, buried in the permafrost. But again, it wasn’t a question he needed to ponder.

  As he started forward through the snow, he brought his mind back to polar bears and his charcoal map. With danger around him, and ivory ahead of him, he had more important things to worry about than the whims of American and South Korean scientists.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Spring 2009

  THIRTY MINUTES NORTH OF SAN FRANCISCO.

  A stretch of salt marsh runs along a serpent’s curve of the Petaluma River, a secluded, fifty-acre sanctuary embraced on all sides by a living carpet of knee-high pickleweed.

  George Church strolled along a dirt path that led up from where the car had first deposited his family after the short trip from the runways of San Francisco International Airport, SFO. He was momentarily by himself; Ting and Marie had fanned out in opposite directions as soon as they’d arrived, wanting to check out the natural streams and nearby little bodies of water that spotted the gentle slope leading up toward the two-story guest house. But Church was more interested in the pair of figures sitting in deck chairs on the unique building’s front porch.

  One of them, Stewart Brand, rose from his chair with a warm smile on his triangular face. Animated and angular, like an amiable praying mantis, long and trim, even at seventy-three, he had an overflowing level of kinetic energy. He was wearing a gray safari shirt covered in pockets and had a hunting knife strapped to his waist. Ryan Phelan, Brand’s wife, still seated, her blond hair pulled up in a ponytail, exuded the intelligence and confidence of a serial entrepreneur; she’d sold at least two successful biotech start-ups in the past decade, and had her fingers in a couple more.

  Church did his best not to trip on the high steps leading up to the porch. Over the course of his career, he’d been blessed to meet many brilliant people, but true innovators like Brand and Phelan were few and far between. Their meeting had come about by way of a butterfly effect starting with that phone call from the journalist at the New York Times, asking questions about Woolly Mammoths.

  “It’s different, isn’t it?” Brand said, as he shook Church’s hand and then gestured at the house behind him. “Took quite an effort to get it set up. There’s about two thousand books in the library downstairs, and we added a whole second story for a guest bedroom. But you’re not going to find better bird-watching, I can promise you that.”

  The compact little house, set about twenty yards away from the main farmhouse where Brand and Phelan spent their summers, was odd and beautiful. A former schoolhouse, seven hundred square feet and more than a hundred years old, it had been moved to its perch on a hill high that provided staggering views of the surrounding marsh, then outfitted with glistening, eight-foot-tall picture windows.

  “Specially designed glass,” Brand said. “Layered in an experimental UV coating visible only to birds.”

  “If you were a bird,” Phelan added, “you would see the windows are painted in quite an exquisite pattern. It’s called Ornilux, and it’s modeled after the natural architecture of a spider’s web. Spiders design their webs to keep birds from crashing into them. Turns out, the concept works for windows, too. The birds can see the patterns on the glass, and it saves their lives.”

  “Science modeled after nature,” Brand said, gesturing around him. “Spiders teaching people how to protect birds. Pretty heady stuff.”

  Church took a seat next to the pair on the porch, beneath one of the bird-friendly picture windows. Brand and Phelan’s primary home was a century-old converted tugboat named Mirene, docked in Richardson Bay, Sausalito. With its black hull and red windows, it seemed the perfect base of operations for a pair of revolutionaries.

  Church could think of no better description of Brand and Phelan. In the late sixties, as the creator and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand had become a guide for those looking to live in harmony with the environment. He had blazed a countercultural trail that had inspired Church’s entire generation. One of Ken Kesey’s original Merry Pranksters, who were written about by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Brand had been a proponent of the use of LSD—the “turn on, tune in, drop out” movement.

  In fact, the Whole Earth Catalogue had actually grown out of an acid trip. After a particularly lucid experience in 1968, Brand had decided to sell buttons
inquiring, “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole Earth yet?” At the time, Russia and the United States had gone into orbit multiple times and NASA very shortly would send a man to the moon. But nobody outside NASA had seen a photo of the entire Earth, and Brand believed that just seeing the planet, from beyond, could have a powerful, unifying effect on the way people chose to live.

  Unlike his fellow pranksters, Brand realized that technology wasn’t the enemy; in fact, science could be a transformative force.

  His simple query had led to a public campaign to force NASA to release what soon became the most famous photo of the Earth from space. Putting the photo on the cover of the first issue of his Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand had inspired millions with what was essentially a do-it-yourself guide, with essays on topics from physical fitness and farming to building rudimentary computers.

  Over the years, Brand had only grown more convinced that technology—computers, biotech, even nuclear power—would aid his environmental revolution. In many ways, he was the ideological father to Silicon Valley, seeing technology as the proper lever to disrupt the status quo. In fact, in 1984, right about the same time Church was helping launch the Human Genome Project, Brand had launched the annual Hackers Conference in Marin County, California, where he had declared, “Information wants to be free.” Years later, Church could have used the same phrase to describe his Personal Genome Project.

  “The intersection of nature and science. That’s where we learn to properly coexist. If we’re going to last, this is how it begins. A spider’s web.”

  The Whole Earth Catalogue had been the launch of a revolution, and no less a tech luminary than Steve Jobs had once likened it to “Google in print.” Brand’s current project, the Long Now Foundation, was no less ambitious. A philanthropic think tank, which Brand had created with computer scientist Danny Hillis, Long Now’s goal was to look forward over the next ten thousand years. Instead of focusing on problems in the present, the idea was to see the world on a much longer time frame. One of the Long Now’s initiatives was to create a permanent database of the world’s seven thousand known languages. Another was “The Clock of The Long Now”—a three-hundred-foot-tall timepiece built in a mountain on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Texas property, to keep exact track of the next ten thousand years. Conservationism taken to an extreme: spiders and birds and people, living together in the shadow of a clock that would tick on for millennia. Brand was currently focusing most of his time on Revive & Restore, a Long Now project with a mission to use genetic engineering to protect endangered species and to bring back extinct species.

  “There are still some kinks to figure out,” Phelan said. “The windows aren’t one hundred percent bird-strike-proof, since at night owls cannot see the intricate spiderweb pattern, but thankfully they’ve learned to stay away from them.”

  Church had actually met Brand through Phelan, with whom he had a more basic shared area of interest. Ten years after her 1995 start-up Direct Medical Knowledge had become the backbone of what was now known as WebMD, Phelan had founded a company called DNA Direct, offering genetic testing to customers via the Internet. By screening for preconditions for more than a half dozen diseases, DNA Direct had been aimed at the same sort of personalized medicine that Church foresaw for his Personal Genome Project. Phelan had sought Church out for the advisory board of her company. He had happily accepted and asked her to be on the board of his Personal Genome Project.

  But they didn’t reconnect for another few years, a short time before the trip to Petaluma, because of an odd little email Brand had sent Church, which had landed in his inbox just a few days after his phone call with Nicholas Wade.

  Church hadn’t been the only recipient of the email. Brand had also copied E. O. Wilson, the esteemed Harvard biologist and naturalist, who coined the term biophilia to describe the innate love for nature and other life that all living creatures share. Church had quickly written Brand back.

  “Just a little over a hundred years ago,” Brand now said, “in most places in the country, out East where you’re from, you wouldn’t have needed a sanctuary or a guest house on a hill. You wouldn’t have needed picture windows, binoculars, or a telescope. You would just look up and see the ribbons of tens of thousands of birds, twisting above the trees. Can you imagine it? So many, they would block out the sun.”

  It hadn’t been a Woolly Mammoth that had first inspired Brand to seek out Church and E. O. Wilson at Harvard to talk genetics. It was a bird. The passenger pigeon. As a conservationist and avid outdoorsman, Brand had always been fascinated by birds. But as a long-term, big-picture thinker, this one red-breasted bird had dominated his thoughts for the past decade.

  “They say when they hit a forest,” Church commented, “it was like watching a raging fire. And there were five billion in North America. One of the most successful, populous species in history.”

  Until they weren’t.

  Church, Stewart, and Ryan had gone through the apocalyptic story of the passenger pigeon numerous times since that email exchange. For a hundred thousand years, at least, the passenger pigeon had been the most abundant bird on the planet, reaching a population in the billions by the early nineteenth century.

  “Then they met us,” Phelan said.

  No amount of spiderweb-patterned glass could have saved the passenger pigeon: A mass migration of Europeans into the North American wilderness, combined with the rise of the commercialized use of pigeon meat, led to organized shoots. By 1900, the very last wild passenger pigeon was killed. A few years later, the species was officially declared extinct.

  The doomed bird was the prime model of what happened when humanity refused to coexist with its environment. Although extinction can be a natural process—and scientists estimate that more than five billion species have gone extinct in Earth’s history—humans have rapidly accelerated the process. Earth has lost half its wildlife in just the past forty years, and some scientists estimate that more than a thousand species disappear every year as a direct result of human activity. In just the past few decades, the world has lost multiple species of dolphin, the western black rhinoceros, the Caribbean monk seal, and almost two hundred species of birds, and 432 species are now at the highest risk of extinction if significant action isn’t taken. For conservationists and long-term thinkers such as Brand and Phelan, extinctions represent a devastating threat to the planet. As a technologist, Brand had begun to wonder, was there a way to use the passenger pigeon as a model for reversing the dangerous trend?

  Church, already on overdrive contemplating the de-extinction of the Mammoth, had responded to the email with optimism and with detailed thoughts about how they might bring back the extinct bird. It was more than Brand and Phelan had expected.

  Cloning a passenger pigeon wasn’t likely to be easy, because birds grow in eggs, a process that was difficult to re-create in a lab. And nobody had a frozen passenger pigeon lying around with intact genetic material. But Church believed there was enough fragmented DNA available to sequence the passenger pigeon’s genome. You could then implant that genome into a modern relative, perhaps the band-tailed pigeon, a forest-dwelling relative of the ubiquitous rock pigeon that lives in cites around the world, and that pigeon would give birth to its extinct cousin.

  Brand hadn’t been aware that Church’s lab already had the ability to change multiple genetic traits at once. Nor had he realized how quickly genetic engineering was progressing. Most of all, he was taken by Church’s forward-thinking approach to science. Church believed that since genetics was moving forward at such an accelerated rate, you could start planning for innovations even before you had the capability to perform them.

  Inspired, Brand and Phelan had traveled to Boston, arranging a face-to-face meeting with Church at a café near his lab. As Brand remembers it, Church walked into the café and introduced himself with a simple statement: “I’m George. I read and write DNA.”

  There he was, this incredibly tall man with an immense bear
d and wild hair, describing himself in five words. In that moment, Phelan and Brand became instant fans. Clearly, science was rapidly moving from passive observation to active creation, and this was the man who was helping make that happen.

  Church had been similarly impressed. Brand had just published the latest extension of his philosophies, Whole Earth Discipline, and he had laid out a controversial form of conservationism that spoke directly to Church: Cities were good. Nuclear energy was good. Geo-engineering was good. It was exactly the sort of environmentalism in which de-extinction made philosophical sense.

  Before long, Church shifted their conversation away from the passenger pigeon to the Woolly Mammoth. Both were keystone species that had once been plentiful, and both had been hunted to extinction. But the Woolly Mammoth, to George, was more compelling. Maybe it was the state fairs and circuses he had attended in Tampa as a kid, where he’d marveled at the enormous elephants, so gentle and intelligent. Or maybe it was just a form of speciesism. It was hard not to see the contrast—a giant, prehistoric beast, moving powerfully across the tundra, versus a swarm of red-breasted pigeons descending on crops or forests.

  Ethically, both species deserved a second chance. But to Church, there needed to be more than an ethical reason to embark on such a complex project. He knew that for Brand and Phelan, it was much simpler—they were sitting on that porch looking out above the salt marsh, imagining that avian ribbon of birds threading in and out of the clouds. Church looked out and saw the living, breathing mud, the metronomic churn of the Petaluma River, the methodical progress of his daughter and wife as they picked their way through the marsh.

  Church wasn’t a conservationist or a philosopher. He was a chemist/geneticist, and if he was going to take a shot at a miracle, he needed a real motivation, something that would inspire a team of postdocs to take time away from whatever had brought them to his lab in Boston in the first place.