Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  In that, she’d found a veritable paradise in the Church Lab. Everyone at the lab was smart, or at least had a baseline of knowledge that Luhan could work with. And she was at the top of the food chain, a favorite of Dr. Church. When a group of bored postdocs had hacked into Church’s daily schedule and had written a computer program to crunch the time sheets to see with whom Dr. Church spent his time, Luhan had dominated the rankings. Week after week, the only people Church spent more time with were his own family members.

  To be fair, part of that time Church had spent teaching Luhan English. When she’d first arrived from China, her knowledge of the language had come entirely from watching dubbed television shows that classmates had smuggled into the dorms at Beijing University, which meant she could handily describe the bathing suits on Baywatch, but very little else. She could barely communicate outside of her lab work, which hadn’t been helpful when she’d first interviewed for Harvard’s Ph.D. committee. And later, her graduate school qualifying exam committee had nearly turned her down, despite the fact that she had been the number-one-ranked student in high school, and one of four kids chosen to represent the entire country of China at the monthlong international Biology Olympics in Australia. There was an actual statue of her standing in a park in her home town, where intellectual prowess was considered as celebrity-worthy as traits like athletic ability or physical beauty.

  But Church, perhaps seeing a parallel with his own rejection at the start of his Ph.D. studies, had stepped in with an offer to teach her as she worked. His lessons had revolved around the scientific project she’d joined his lab to pursue, but he’d pushed her, and she had learned. For Luhan, it was the perfect situation; she could learn the language without wasting valuable lab time taking a language course, and she would get one-on-one time with the most brilliant mind in genetics.

  The modern American hallway she was now churning through was a stark contrast to the rural mountain town deep in mainland China where she had grown up. Luckily, her father had worked for the government, which had ensured their family a certain level of prosperity. When China had shifted from a purely communist state to a country that embraced private enterprise, her father had gone from being a public servant to the director of a factory. To make sure his transition went smoothly, the first person he had fired from the factory was Luhan’s mother. At the time, Luhan hadn’t understood that her father had simply chosen the expedient political route. But her mother had thrived outside work, teaching tai chi and helping to make Luhan’s childhood as worry free as possible.

  Luhan hadn’t seen herself as special and was as surprised as anyone when she’d graduated number one in her middle school class. At her parents’ prodding, she then applied to the best high school in China—a boarding school in the capital of Szechuan Province. Out of eight thousand applicants, fifty from outside the capital were accepted, and Luhan made the cut.

  Life in boarding school hadn’t been easy. As a country girl, Luhan had been an outsider, an easy target for her more cosmopolitan classmates. She was teased for her rural accent, and she learned to tamp down her sensitivities, to cover her emotions as much as she could.

  In her second year of high school, when she went to Australia for the Science Olympics, she saw it as an opportunity to move beyond the walls of boarding school—to interact with foreigners, professors, people who didn’t care where she came from, only how she thought, what she could do.

  After two more years of high school, she was on to Beijing University, where she finished as the top student in the department of life sciences. She’d never thought she would stay in China after university, but around that time, her mother became extremely sick, so Luhan returned home. Her mother faced a difficult decision—should she have surgery to remove part of a lung or undergo treatment with a medicine that would leave her sick and helpless for a long time? Knowing that the second option would force Luhan to stay in China to help take care of her, Luhan’s mother chose surgery, telling her daughter to go out into the world and be useful. That, to Luhan’s mother, was the more important thing.

  Harvard, and the Church Lab, seemed the perfect destination. For her predoc work, in 2009, she’d pitched Church on a project involving chimeric dreaminase proteins to be used for flexible, safe DNA engineering. A chimera was an ancient, mythic beast that had the body of a lion, the head of a goat, and a tail that ended in a serpent’s head. Today, with bioengineering, scientists can create proteins and even DNA that contain parts of separate and distinct species. Whereas the current process of using bacterial DNA to cut all the way through genes could be toxic to the cells, a dreaminase protein could change itself to match up with the damaged genetic material, which would allow safer, more precise binding.

  Normally, a first-year graduate student at a gene lab wouldn’t have been allowed to launch a project like that on her own, but Church had been immediately impressed by Luhan’s ideas. Now, two years later, moving down the third-floor hallway toward the seminar, her phone still raised in front of her, she felt that familiar presence hovering over her left shoulder well before his long shadow winked across the ultrasound on the screen.

  “He looks happy,” Church commented, matching her speed. At his height, he was taking one step for every two of hers, but now that it was the two of them, people were getting out of the way much faster, which made their progress much easier.

  Luhan allowed herself to smile. When she’d first started at the Church Lab, she’d been a jumble of nerves whenever they spoke. But as her English improved, and she’d learned that Church was warm and nonjudgmental, in contrast to many of the professors she’d known in Beijing, she’d grown comfortable with him.

  “He is very healthy,” she said. “Although we won’t really know very much until he grows up, and we biopsy his liver.”

  Church wasn’t only supervising Luhan’s project, he was helping her to get a patent for this very special pig, and also to form a company around the process that created the piglet.

  Church seemed to slow a step, and Luhan had to choose between cutting her own gait in half and sprinting ahead.

  “Do you have a moment?” Church asked.

  “The seminar . . .” she said.

  “I think it can wait.”

  Luhan had been interested in learning about the lab’s progress on the mosquito project, for which they were nearing the testing phase. The Gates Foundation, run by Bill and Melissa Gates, had already been investing in huge domes over a trio of villages in sub-Saharan Africa, where the very special mosquitoes that had been created in Church’s lab would be released, to be tested in a safe environment, one from which they couldn’t escape.

  But Church was already leading her toward a door set a few feet away in the third-floor hallway. Luhan found herself in an empty classroom, following Church through a maze of chairs that formed a half circle facing a desk at the center. Church pulled an iPad out from under his arm and placed it on the desk so that she could see what was on the screen.

  In the center was a painting of three Woolly Mammoths, walking through a pasture of grass and snow. They looked much as she remembered them from the pictures in biology classes in high school. Thick red hair, huge tusks, small, rounded ears, long, curled trunks. Then she noticed that above the Mammoths was a line of bold text, a title or headline, of sorts:

  WOOLLY MAMMOTH REVIVAL.

  “This is something I’ve been working on,” Church said, “with Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan. A new project that we hope to take live as soon as we figure out a team and the proper funding.”

  Luhan looked up at him.

  “A website?”

  Church paused.

  “No, the Woolly Mammoth. We’re going to try and de-extinct a Woolly Mammoth.”

  Luhan slowly slid her cell phone into her pocket, as Church directed her to a page of text below the picture of the Mammoths. It began with a mission statement that would have fit nicely in the prologue of a science fiction novel:

  Th
e ultimate goal of woolly mammoth revival is to produce new mammoths that are capable of repopulating the vast tracts of tundra and boreal forest in Eurasia and North America.

  Luhan skimmed the rest of the text: The story of Sergey Zimov’s research showing how the tundra, with its ticking time bomb of carbon and methane, could be brought back to a state of Pleistocene pastures by the introduction of large, prehistoric herbivores. How a herd of Woolly Mammoths, engineered in a Harvard lab in Boston, might save the world from the melting permafrost.

  Luhan allowed herself to digest what she was reading. The lab was filled with crazy projects that were somehow very real. It was the type of place where you had to set your own limits, stay focused. By staying focused, she had completed her own initial project on dreaminase proteins in twenty months. She had gone from that work into the pig organ transplantation project. Luhan loved that work, because it was exactly what her mother had wanted—for her to be useful. Thousands of people died every year waiting for livers and kidneys; in China, the situation was even worse, because according to their local Buddhist beliefs, people needed to die intact, and the concept of organ donation was troublesome.

  The ultrasound on the phone in her pocket was the definition of useful science. If she and Church succeeded with the project, they could save thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people. Yet bringing back the Woolly Mammoth would solve an ecological problem that affected billions. It would also be a vivid demonstration of what genetic science could do for the world—the way her pigs, once impossible, were now possible.

  And on a much bigger scale.

  “I want you to head the Woolly Mammoth team. Be our first Revivalist.”

  Luhan understood what Church was asking. Church, as the head of his lab, supervised, inspired, pushed, prodded, and shepherded the postdocs who did the experiments. But the postdocs ran the projects themselves. A good professor chose the smartest people he could find, set them in a direction to accomplish a task, then got out of the way, stepping in only when they ran into a roadblock they couldn’t clear alone.

  “The Revivalists,” Luhan repeated. “Like the Avengers. Superheroes.”

  Maybe it was her English, but it sounded funny to her, even though she knew that Church was dead serious. This was something he was going to attempt, with or without her. And as crazy as it seemed, she knew she was already in.

  She also knew that the first call she’d make when she got home was to her parents. Her mother wouldn’t see this as science fiction at all. Once, after Luhan had first arrived at the Church Lab, she had told her mother that she was going to make a dragon by taking a snake and inserting genes for legs, wings, and feathers. Her mother had believed her, for which Luhan forgave her. After all, there was a statue of Luhan in her home town. Her parents believed she could do anything she set her scientific mind toward.

  “We can do this?” Luhan said, her voice somewhere between a question and a statement.

  “I think we can,” Church said.

  “Should we do this?”

  People in Church’s lab asked that question frequently. Luhan thought about the seminar she was missing about the mosquitoes that had been invented in their lab—mosquitoes that had been engineered to be impervious to carrying malaria, and engineered to spread throughout the African ecosystem. The mosquito team would move forward as carefully as possible, from their domed test villages into the world at large. Eventually, they would save millions of lives.

  Luhan looked back at the family of Woolly Mammoths, already thinking about who she was going to ask first to join her team. Who was going to be the next Revivalist.

  Then she turned back to Church.

  “I think we’re going to need a very big dome.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Winter 2012

  MACDONALD-CARTIER FREEWAY, HIGHWAY 401 EAST, U.S.-CANADIAN BORDER CROSSING INTO MICHIGAN.

  A little after noon, Bobby Dhadwar stared out through the windshield of his Honda Civic hatchback and counted the cars ahead of him. Four, five, maybe seven, and then the rest of the queue disappeared into the swirls of snow blowing back and forth across the highway. Beyond the line of cars, he could just make out the border patrol booths running perpendicular to the stretch of pavement, divided by bright red electronic gates that separated his old home from his new. Each time one of those gates rose, each time one of the cars in the slow-moving convoy ahead of him disappeared into swirling snow, it meant he was that much closer to the next phase of his life.

  “Try not to be nervous when you’re talking to them. Just smile and answer the questions,” said his wife, Gurjeet.

  Bobby glanced at Gurjeet, sitting in the passenger seat next to him. Her dark hair ran down almost to her shoulders, and she had a small duffel bag on her lap. An even larger duffel was beneath her legs, pushing her knees almost to the dashboard. It hadn’t been easy to fit their entire lives into a hatchback. Amazing, how much junk they had accumulated in five years of marriage, considering they were still in their late twenties, and he was employed in one of the worst-paying professions on Earth. Actually, employed was probably too strong a word. As a matriculating postdoc, he was basically still a student. Instead of having a boss, he was technically going to work for a professor. Although this prof was so smart, it kind of scared the daylights out of him. As if packing up your life and moving to a new country wasn’t terrifying enough.

  “Don’t be nervous? Why are you telling me not to be nervous? Why would I be nervous? We’ve made the border crossing a dozen times before.”

  Together, and separately, they had traveled from Toronto to Boston a half dozen times, beginning with Bobby’s first interview at the Church Lab more than six months earlier. Then they’d made trips to find an apartment, deal with their work visas, and meet the other postdocs with whom he’d be working. He’d spent almost as much time talking to Customs agents as he had to Harvard geneticists.

  “I know,” Gurjeet said, trying to calm him with a smile. “I’m just saying, we both understand how it is when you get nervous—and there’s no reason to be nervous.”

  “Of course there’s no reason to be nervous.”

  “That’s all I’m saying.”

  There were only two cars ahead of them now, and he could clearly make out the uniformed Customs agents standing outside the booths on either side of the highway. As the car in front reached the booths, one of the agents tapped on the driver’s window, then leaned in for a brief conversation.

  “Okay, but now I am getting nervous.”

  Then they were both laughing, because it really felt absurd. Crossing from Canada to the United States shouldn’t have been a big deal. But to Bobby, Canada, especially Toronto, where he had lived his entire life, had a small-town feel. Even though Boston was technically around the same size, it felt foreign and big. Bobby’s parents had left India with very little, emigrating to the UK and then finally landing in Canada. They had driven Bobby and his brother and sister to excel in school and had worked hard to assimilate into Canadian culture. Toronto was multicultural, and Bobby had never really felt like an outsider; but in America, he was going to be a foreigner. Fortunately, one visit to any lab at any university in the country, and it was easy to see that many postdocs faced the same situation.

  Finally, the car ahead of them reached the border gate. After a brief talk with the Customs agent, it was waved through, and it was Bobby’s turn.

  He pulled the Honda to a stop in front of the gate. As the agent approached, he forced the friendliest smile he could muster, and quickly rolled down his window.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said, holding out his and his wife’s passports for the tall agent to take.

  The agent wore badges on his chest, dark sunglasses, and a gun strapped to his waist. His wide, muscular shoulders stretched the material of his uniform.

  As he glanced through the first passport, a bored expression on his face, he asked, “Where are you headed?”

  He couldn’t h
ave sounded less interested, and he didn’t even look up from their documents, but Bobby kept the stupid grin on his face.

  “Boston, sir.”

  The agent nodded and flicked through pages of the second passport.

  “And what are you planning to do in Boston?”

  “I’m going to be implanting genetically altered DNA from naked mole rats into laboratory mice, to try to reverse the aging process.”

  The agent stopped flicking, paused, and looked up from the passports. Bobby felt his wife jamming her fingers into his leg, and his smile started to waver. The agent stared at Bobby, glanced from Bobby to Gurjeet, then took a slight step back from the car door.

  “Sir, would you please step out of the car.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Bobby found himself seated next to his wife on a plastic-covered two-seater couch in a starkly appointed holding cell at the Canadian/U.S. border, desperately trying to explain basic genetic engineering to a room full of Customs agents. He didn’t need to look at his wife’s face to know that it was going to be a long drive to Boston if he ever did manage to convince the agents they weren’t on their way to America to unleash some sort of genetically mutated mice on the innocent population. He had the bad habit of telling the truth—the whole truth—when he got nervous. He was a true laboratory scientist and had never been good at reading social situations, or knowing when it would be better to keep his mouth shut.

  The more the Customs agents stared blankly at him, the more Bobby tried to fill the silence with explanations of the genetic anomalies that might allow naked mole rats to live thirty-year life spans, rather than the two years that regular mice lived. He just couldn’t stop, even though, as he spoke, he could tell that he was just digging himself a deeper and deeper hole. They had asked him a question, so he was going to give them an answer. That’s just how he was wired.