Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  Thiel had first made his billions in PayPal and Facebook, then branched out, following his passions deep into scientific corners most investors didn’t even know about. He’d invested heavily in nuclear research—specifically, experimental fusion—and other forms of “clean” power; he’d also put money into funding efforts to develop artificial intelligence in a controlled, responsible way; and he supported research exploring the bridge between the technological and the biological, commonly known as “the singularity”—the moment when computer technology advanced to the point where it would be possible to “download” humans onto a hard drive, achieving a sort of immortality. He’d put money into politics and social projects—funding sometimes controversial efforts, political candidates, and movements that aligned with his conservative libertarian views. He’d put up a scholarship that encouraged brilliant entrepreneurs under twenty to drop out of school and pursue their dreams, believing that school wasn’t the answer for everyone.

  But perhaps his most pressing passion, and the one that had put him into Luhan’s sphere of expertise, was life extension. Reverse aging, immortality, whatever label the science came under, Thiel was interested, and willing to put some of his billions behind it.

  Luhan had never met a billionaire before, and from what she had read about Thiel, she had expected him to be arrogant and intimidating. But she quickly found him quite humble, even charming, and well versed in genetics and the health sciences. His passionate belief that the marriage of science and investment could create astonishing advances—such as true clean energy and massively extended life spans—was infectious. Before she realized what she was doing, Luhan had launched into a monologue about her own philosophies of scientific engineering, colored by the work she and the Revivalists were doing.

  “I think we are often stupid in the face of nature,” she said, knowing that her English competency was still trailing behind her ideas. “For instance, we didn’t invent CRISPR, nature invented CRISPR—it was a bacteria’s natural way to defend against viruses. That’s all CRISPR is, a natural mechanism of defense that we’ve borrowed and turned into a tool for genetic engineering. Before CRISPR, our own efforts to edit DNA were so cumbersome, so time-consuming. Then nature gave us an elegant solution.”

  A line of people had formed behind Thiel, trying to edge into the man’s orbit, but he didn’t cut her off, so she continued.

  “You want to know how we can use science to live forever? The key is, we don’t need to start from scratch. We start with nature.”

  In her mind, she was back in the Church Lab, staring at a Petri dish containing cells from an elephant’s placenta.

  “Elephants don’t get cancer. Why? Well, we don’t really know, but it probably has to do with something deep within an elephant’s genetic code. There’s something in its DNA that keeps the cells, even in such large numbers, such a large biomass, from generating mistakes. Right now, in the project we are working on, we are running into a wall because of it—that same mechanism probably makes it hard for us to generate elephant stem cells, which we need. But one day we might find whatever it is that keeps those mistakes at bay. We might find the natural secret that keeps an elephant from getting cancer, and then we will take that secret and apply it to our own cells.”

  Suddenly self-conscious, she felt her cheeks grow warm, and it wasn’t only because Thiel was listening to her so intently or because the rest of the guests at their table had gone quiet as she continued to speak.

  “The same theory will apply to reverse aging. We won’t invent the secret—we’ll borrow it from nature.”

  As Thiel pressed her for more information about the project that had led her to her knowledge of elephants, she realized that she was on the verge of something. An answer to their stem cell problem was sorting itself out in her thoughts. What she had told Thiel didn’t just apply to his own passions, his goal of infinite life extension. It applied to the Revivalists as well.

  The answer they were looking for was already there, in nature, in the elephant cells themselves.

  After she had filled in Thiel on more of the science of the Woolly Mammoth project, he congratulated her and turned his attention to another guest. In May 2015, he had already given one hundred thousand dollars to help fund the Mammoth Revival project. Up to the point at which Thiel had stepped in, Church had been funding much of the project from his discretionary monies, along with funding from Revive & Restore. Thiel’s deep pockets, and their aligned interests, could help them get to the next stage.

  Luhan felt an excitement growing inside her that had nothing to do with money. Without money, much of science was impossible. But money alone wouldn’t allow men like Peter Thiel to live forever. Nor would money alone bring the Woolly Mammoth back to life.

  Speaking to Thiel, Luhan had realized that she had solved her own problem. And the answer wasn’t money. It was nature.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Late Spring 2013

  77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR.

  At ten minutes past three in the morning, Bobby was still shaking sleep out of his eyes when Luhan burst into the lab, as usual moving like some sort of possessed sprite. No hello, no small talk about the trip to British Columbia on the private jet or the long flight home, no acknowledgment that three in the morning was a hell of a time to call him, to drag him out of bed, to demand that he meet her in the lab. No acknowledgment that Bobby was even in the room. Instead, she headed straight for the back of the lab, to the steel shelves that were jammed between hooded work cabinets, and began leafing furiously through a stack of old science journals and publications, her fingers plucking through the covers as if she were fretting a guitar.

  “So how was the in-flight movie?” Bobby tried, but Luhan wasn’t in the mood for small talk.

  “Where’s Justin? Margo?”

  Bobby shrugged and said, “They’re probably smart enough to keep their phones on silent after midnight. I’m unlucky enough to have a wife who works a night shift in the ER once a week. Which means nothing in my life is ever on silent mode.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Luhan said, “we’ll get them up to speed in the morning.”

  “Technically, it is morning.”

  “Bobby, what is aging? Why do we age?”

  She was still bent over the journals, searching. Bobby stared at her, wondering where that non sequitur had come from. Then again, with Luhan, nothing was ever really a non sequitur. She could continue a line of thought, or a conversation, picking up after long breaks—hours, days, weeks—no matter how many distractions occurred in between.

  “Well, it’s a big question. But in part, we age because cell replication causes the breakdown of certain physical properties that cells need to survive.”

  Bobby was simplifying things to an extreme, but he was guessing that Luhan was thinking of the big picture. There were actually many definitions of aging, and many reasons that people and animals got old. Bobby had spent a lot of time thinking about the processes that caused the mutations and cell death that, eventually, led to a creature’s death.

  “But is it natural? Is aging a natural process?”

  Bobby shrugged.

  “I look at it like cancer, or any other disease. It happens in nature, but it’s really a breakdown in the natural process of cell division. I believe aging is something we can cure, like any other disease. So in that sense, no, it’s not natural.”

  Luhan nodded. She had expected his response, since she and Bobby had talked about this before. Then her back straightened suddenly and she pulled a journal out of the stack.

  “Our elephant cells—we can’t use them because they die, just like aging cells. That’s why we need stem cells. We need cells that can divide, indefinitely. Like nature intended,” she said.

  Bobby added, “We also need stem cells because they can turn into all the other cells in the body—”

  Luhan cut him off.

  “Yes. One problem at a time,” she said. “The first thing we
need to do is stop our cells from dying. We need to cure them, the same way we’re going to eventually cure the disease of aging.”

  “You want to immortalize our elephant cells,” he said.

  Making cells “immortal” was a process widely used in biochemistry, in order to better study cell lines. Basically, cells could be immortalized by adding viruses that contained DNA that countered some of the deteriorating processes involved in cell death. The bigger problem—the breakdown of telomeres that protected the chromosomes—could be addressed by adding a stretch of DNA encoding a protein that could help elongate the telomeres, making them last longer.

  “It’s possible,” Bobby continued. “We’d have to remove the additional gene right before we finished with our implantations, or the cell wouldn’t express correctly or could develop tumors. But it still doesn’t solve our second problem. Maybe we can show our work—get our genes to express themselves as traits, like red hair and working hemoglobin—but without stem cells, we still can’t do anything with them.”

  Adding telomeres—immortalizing cells—would not create a fountain of youth. It would not provide a system-wide immortality. The cells might divide and replicate forever, but they would be in a single cell line. A skin cell that kept going. A hair follicle that never stopped growing. Also, the act of immortalizing the cell affected its biology, introduced opportunities for mutations and contamination.

  “That’s why we have to take it one step further,” Luhan said, holding the journal she had just retrieved in front of her to show Bobby the cover.

  Bobby recognized it: Cell, from November 2007. He immediately knew which article Luhan had remembered that caused her to drag him out of bed:

  “Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors.”

  Bobby had no problem remembering the title, no matter how complex it sounded. The work had won biologist Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University the Nobel Prize in 2012, just six months ago.

  “Beginning back in 2005,” Luhan said, “Yamanaka and his team began experimenting with skin cells, infecting them with RNA viruses that carried very specific strands of DNA.”

  “Genetic engineering, pre-CRISPR,” Bobby said, as Luhan flipped open to the relevant pages.

  “Correct. And slowly, he made an incredible discovery. With the right combination of genes, it was possible to turn a skin cell into an iPSC.”

  “An induced pluripotent stem cell.”

  Bobby felt a jolt as the full import of the article hit him and drove the last remnants of sleep from his body.

  “He made stem cells,” he said.

  “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Luhan said. “Yamanaka narrowed it down to just four genes that needed to be added to the skin cells to make stem cells. Through trial and error, he proved that just the right combination of DNA implanted into these cells could change their nature, permanently.”

  “The four genes—the Yamanaka factors. Oct4, Sox2, cMyc, and Klf4.”

  “The process is really quite simple,” Luhan continued, looking through the pages. “We isolate our elephant cells. We immortalize them. We insert the four factors using CRISPR. We culture the cells. And then we draw out the ones that become stem cells, and start to generate colonies.”

  Bobby whistled. It didn’t sound simple, but it was a process all the Revivalists had grown adept at performing.

  “Then we add our synthetic Woolly genes, and we’re good to go,” he said.

  Good to go. It was a funny way to look at it, because all they’d have at that point was a stem cell with Woolly Mammoth properties. They wouldn’t have a Woolly Mammoth.

  Bobby was reminded of a conversation he’d had recently; he’d been telling someone about the Mammoth project, and she’d asked, “Well, where is your Woolly Mammoth going to live?”

  “A Petri dish,” he’d answered.

  Luhan dug through the journal, looking deeper into Yamanaka’s work.

  Of course, if this was going to work, they were going to need more.

  “We’ll need plenty of cells,” Bobby said. “And eventually, if this actually succeeds, we’re going to need a place to put them, beyond a Petri dish.”

  Luhan finally looked up.

  “We’re going to need more elephants,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Summer 2013

  POLK CITY, CENTRAL FLORIDA, FORTY MILES WEST OF ORLANDO.

  At three in the afternoon, the sun was high above a two-hundred-acre complex of single-story, barracklike buildings, large feeding troughs, mud-floored exercise pavilions, outdoor obstacle courses, and shaded pagodas.

  “Okay,” Church said to Stewart Brand, through gritted teeth. “I think I’m ready.”

  Brand was standing behind him, a frightening grin on his angular face. As when they’d met at Brand’s bird sanctuary in Petaluma, the Whole Earth icon was wearing his signature safari clothes: tan shirt covered in pockets, scuffed pants, a wide-brimmed hat, and a pair of hunting knives resting in scabbards attached to his belt. But the device in his outstretched hands was not a knife. It was a cattle prod, a couple of feet long, mostly plastic, with two terrifying metal prongs sticking out one end. At the moment, the prongs were only a few inches from Church’s upper left thigh.

  “You sure about this?” Brand asked.

  Church’s hands were balled into fists, his eyes tightly shut, as he hunched forward, offering up as good a target as he could muster. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but he didn’t think the clothes would make much of a difference

  “Anything for science, right?” Church said.

  “Better you than me,” Brand said, winking.

  He touched the baton to Church’s jeans. The pain was instantaneous, shooting down Church’s leg and up his back, electric tendrils reaching all the way to his beard. He gasped, but didn’t cry out. Then, just as suddenly, the pain disappeared.

  He straightened, then ran a hand through his frizzed-up hair.

  “Not as bad as I thought,” he said. “You want a turn?”

  Brand glanced at Phelan, who was talking to a man with a clipboard over by a high metal gate. She rolled her eyes at them, and Brand turned back to Church.

  “I think I’ll take your word for it.”

  Church laughed, rubbing his thigh. Getting zapped by a cattle prod wasn’t nearly the wildest thing he’d ever done just to prove a point. Long ago, he’d spent days walking through his lab wearing blinders, to show his lab mates what it meant to have tunnel vision. When he was becoming vegan in 1973, he’d subsisted for quite a while on an entirely synthetic diet that he’d whipped up in his lab, just to see if he could.

  Now that he was going to be working with elephants, it made perfect sense for him to try out one of the controversial electric prods that many elephant handlers used to train and control the majestic beasts. And although the shock had been painful, Church didn’t think it constituted animal cruelty. He knew that some elephant trainers could—and did—turn up the voltage well beyond what he’d just gone through, but then again, he wasn’t an elephant. But he did feel that, at the moment, he was standing in pachyderm heaven.

  When Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus had first contacted Church a few weeks earlier to visit their Center for Elephant Conservation just outside Orlando, Church had been both surprised and thrilled. Apparently, the people behind the “Greatest Show on Earth” had read one of the many interviews he had done on the Revival project, and had been immediately intrigued.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. Luhan, Bobby, and the rest of the team had immortalized cells and synthesized stem cells, which meant they were getting closer to the time when they’d need a real partner with access to many Asian elephants. Meanwhile, the circus had recently entered a new phase in its relationship with its central attraction. Responding to a growing popular movement toward eliminating the use of elephants for commercial and entertainment purposes, they had recently decided
to retire all of their performing elephants.

  Church had mixed feelings about the circus’s decision; as a kid, he’d grown up among snakes and starfish and he’d seen larger animals only from visits to the traveling circus. He’d always believed that people became interested in conservation and preservation because they, too, had seen these great beasts in their own home towns. But public opinion about the circus had changed, and there was a widespread belief that using large wild animals in circus acts was cruel, even if the professionals who worked with them were, on the whole, kind and devoted to their welfare. But Ringling Brothers’ retirement of the elephants, the circus’s loss, could be the Revival team’s gain.

  Brand and Phelan had asked to join Church on the trip to Florida. As Brand described it, he wanted to touch the elephants, see what it was like to be with them, and think about them one day becoming Woolly Mammoths. So the three of them had traveled to the two-hundred-acre compound, home to nearly forty retired Asian elephants, the largest herd on the entire continent.

  The Conservation Center was actually small in acreage, compared with other refuges. Church knew of at least two that were spread over thousands of acres. But Asian elephants didn’t need the same amount of space as their African brethren. They were indigenous to the Asian jungles, not the African plains, and used to smaller quarters.

  Church, Brand, and Phelan felt the poignancy of seeing such majestic beasts in captivity. It wasn’t like viewing horses in a pasture; these were large, wild animals that had to be kept safe, and their care involved a lot of hardware. The handlers employed by the circus had been working with the elephants for decades, and had loving relationships with them. Each elephant was individual, unique. But controlling a large population—really, a super-herd—took engineering and science.

  Church, Brand, and Phelan spent hours strolling through the various barriers that had been erected to control the animals’ movements, from the many fences and enclosures to specially designed blockades with openings big enough so that people could run through them if they were threatened, but too small to allow a charging elephant to follow. They took stock of the cameras, locked doors, and feeding zones, and last, the metal hooks and prods the handlers resorted to when the elephants were unwilling to correct or redirect natural behavior that could be extremely dangerous in an enclosed environment.