Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  At first glance, the batons hadn’t struck Church as particularly cruel; similar devices were used on farms all over the world. So he’d asked if he could try one out himself. The handlers had assumed he’d meant on an elephant, but Brand had understood his intention right away, and had happily volunteered to apply the charge.

  Church also had the chance to check out the circus trains in which the elephants had traveled, when they were still performing. Though small, the cars seemed comfortable, if not luxurious. Every effort had been made to make the elephants as happy as possible.

  The Conservation Center included a full-fledged habitat outdoors, with sloping hills and wide-open ranges, a well-designed obstacle course, even a massage and stretching center for the herbivores’ physical and mental well-being.

  The handlers had told Church that the center spent more than seventy thousand dollars a year taking care of each elephant. Brand wasn’t surprised at the attention to detail. Everyone he’d ever met who’d worked with elephants had developed an enduring love of the species, especially the Asian breed, who were smart, agreeable, even friendly. The way one vet at the center had described it, when you surprised an African elephant, it either charged or fled. When you surprised an Asian elephant, it responded with curiosity.

  Of course, even the gentlest of beasts was still formidable. After the experiment with the electric prod, Church and Brand followed one of the handlers into a gated area just past one of the feeding zones. A large male elephant was off to the left, kept behind a row of massive columns in the ground that created a five-foot-tall barrier. The columns had been designed to separate male elephants from the rest of the herd when they were in musth, or heat—rutting season. When a male Asian elephant is crazed with lust, it can break through all but the strongest enclosures to get to a female, and it will trample anything and anyone in its way.

  On the other hand, when a male elephant is in heat, it is a great time to get samples of semen for the Conservation Center’s genetic database, which it had been adding to for more than a decade. While Church stood by the columns that were holding back the bull elephant, Brand wandered over to an odd-looking device that reached almost to his shoulders. As he was running his hands over its curved plastic, he realized it was designed to look like a female elephant’s rear end.

  “Uh, Stewart,” Brand heard Church mumble, but he was too busy trying to figure out the device.

  “Hold on a second. This is quite remarkable.”

  “Stewart.”

  “Ah,” Brand continued. “I think this is an insemination machine. The male elephant goes in here . . .”

  “Stewart!”

  Brand turned around and saw that the bull elephant had gone completely ballistic—his eyes rolled back, his feet pounding at the metal pins. He wanted to stomp Brand into dust.

  “I think you’re messing with his girlfriend,” Church said.

  Brand jumped back from the device, his face turning red.

  “I guess jealousy is universal. When the time comes, remind me never to get between a Woolly Mammoth and his mate.”

  Church laughed, as the elephant eyed them angrily. He apologized for his friend, and then both he and Brand followed the handler out of the insemination pen.

  * * *

  A few hours later, Church, Brand, and Phelan were sitting in a conference room located in one of the low-slung buildings at the edge of the compound, kitty-corner to a pair of genetic labs that would not have been out of place at Harvard Med School. Church had been impressed by the circus’s research facilities, which weren’t just some sort of glorified zoo, but part of a scientific endeavor to help the endangered Asian elephant, both in the wild and in captivity.

  The genetic database the center had created was proving helpful in understanding and increasing fertility in the dwindling species, as well as learning the specific health risks facing the giant beasts. Even though the elephants were retired, they now had much more to offer humankind than entertainment. Their cells would aid in the search for cures for cancer and for extending life.

  Although elephants rarely got cancer, more than half of humans developed the disease at some point in their lives. As a scientist working on reversing aging, Church thought, What good would it do to extend life spans, if eventually everyone got cancer?

  Church was convinced that elephants’ immunity to cancer was genetic. Something was hidden in their DNA that gave them resistance, that allowed their cells to divide without the sort of mutations that gave rise to tumors in humans.

  Given enough time, and enough access to elephant cells, Church was certain that biologists would eventually discover that secret.

  Talking about meeting one of the young elephants, a calf named Mike, though, Brand was emotional.

  “He’s pretty hairy, so much more hair than I’d expected. And so beautiful, already big and muscular, but so gentle. Just like the grown elephants, the first thing he did was sniff my shoes with his trunk, to learn where I’d been.”

  As a conservationist, Brand found walking among the endangered elephants to be a peak experience. Approaching Mike, he’d first been looking at the animal from a purely scientific perspective; sizing him up physically and figuring out where he stood in the hierarchy of the park’s herd. But then he’d come face-to-face with the calf, who had playfully reached out to him with his trunk, making an instant emotional connection.

  Brand knew that his experience wasn’t unique at all—it was well documented that elephants lived extraordinarily complex and emotional lives, both as individuals and as part of herds with an established social order. He had recently read the story of a mother elephant who, during her herd’s annual migration year after year, had returned to the exact spot where her baby had died; there was no question that the mother was mourning her loss. Videographers had captured many similar incidents of elephants mourning and even burying the remains of herd members, and elephants protecting and assisting injured or sick relatives. Elephants also developed real, emotional bonds with humans, sometimes lasting decades.

  It wasn’t just their emotional capacity that struck Brand as special: Elephants were extremely intelligent. They could use rudimentary tools—sticks, branches, rocks—and could even learn vocally, imitating sounds such as whistles and horns. And elephants were playful, and curious; Brand had spent nearly ten minutes joyfully watching Mike figure out, and then drink from, a garden hose. He’d also seen pictures of other elephants encountering snow for the first time, using their trunks to roll huge snowballs to throw at each other. Brand was not anthropomorphizing—he could see the intelligence and emotion in Mike’s eyes.

  Then one of the center’s senior researchers brought him back down to earth.

  “Unfortunately, a year from now Mike will most likely be dead.”

  The researcher went on to explain that the Asian elephant was facing a species-wide catastrophe; a vicious herpes virus had spread throughout the entire population, and unlike the human version of the disease, elephant herpes was often fatal. In fact, more than a quarter of all young Asian elephants would die from herpes, more than were killed by ivory hunters and loss of environment combined.

  Hearing the news, Church had immediately caught Brand’s eye.

  What good would it be to engineer a baby Woolly Mammoth if it immediately died of herpes?

  “We need to do something about this,” Phelan started.

  Before she could continue, Church cleared his throat.

  “We can solve this.”

  His mind was already on overdrive. Nobody had ever been able to culture the virus that caused herpes in a lab, which was the reason nobody had yet come up with a vaccine. But every scientific problem had a solution, a workaround. His Revival team was working around a lack of stem cells by immortalizing regular cells and turning them into synthetic stem cells. He could work around the inability to culture the herpes virus—by writing it himself.

  “We’ll study fragments of the virus, then we’l
l reconstruct its genome. Write it in the lab, then grow ourselves a vaccine.”

  The researcher stared at him. It was classic George Church.

  “If we’re going to ask an Asian elephant to help us bring back the Woolly Mammoth,” Church said with a shrug, “it would be nice if we could do something for them, too.”

  Quid pro quo.

  Just like that, Church had laid out a pathway to the cure for elephant herpes—and the Revivalists had their elephants.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Winter 2014

  SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, SOOAM BIOTECH RESEARCH FOUNDATION.

  A marble and glass complex at the edge of a perfectly manicured lawn, protected by a gate and a pair of uniformed guards. Jy Minh shivered as he moved through the surgical theater, his blue scrubs swishing against the elastic ties of his sterile rubber slippers. His mask and surgical cap felt tight—perhaps he had been spending too much time in the field, garbed in yak fur and down coats the size of sleeping bags, to remember what it was like to work in a biology lab. Then again, the central cloning floor of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation was not a common biology lab.

  He shivered again as he squeezed between the operating tables. The air was almost as cold inside as the winter weather outside; the windowless interior of the sterile room had to be kept at an optimum low temperature for the specimens—not necessarily for the surgeons. But his body wasn’t reacting to the breeze that the high-tech ventilation system was blowing. No matter how many times he’d been through that operating room, no matter how deep his training, no matter how many animals he’d cut into over the years, dead and alive, he’d never gotten used to the setting.

  Three tables were set up at four-foot intervals across the large rectangular theater. Technicians dressed the same as Minh—blue scrubs, rubber boots, masks, and caps—were gathered around each table, checking and rechecking intubation tubes, blood lines, anesthesia gauges. The surgeons moved between them, shifting from table to table, making sure the subjects were properly prepped for their procedures.

  As Minh passed the closest table, he could see the brown fur and limp tail of the first animal’s hindquarters. Most of the body was covered by a tarp, with surgical windows placed at exactly the precise points where the surgeon would cut; the animal’s head hung over the other side of the table, the jaws pried slightly open to allow the insertion of the intubation tube.

  Minh had been in many hospitals before, had witnessed surgical procedures many times. He’d even watched his own wife’s Caesarian, years earlier; he’d sat by her head on a little stool, holding her hand, while an obstetrician cut through her abdomen to the womb to rescue their second child from a troubled labor.

  But somehow, this procedure was different. This seemed—unnatural.

  He passed the second table, where the surgeon had already begun making a tiny incision through the window in the tarp. For the surgeon, this was an easy, routine procedure that he had performed hundreds of times before. In a human, it would have been a similar operation with similar equipment, a tube and an ultrasound probe, a suctioning needle and a steady hand.

  The third operating table was slightly different. There, the incision had already been made, the catheter inserted, and the solution was ready to be pumped directly into the uterus. Here was the end result of the work begun on the first two tables. Compared to the harvesting, the insertion was much more delicate, and took the trained and steady hand of an experienced professional. Even so, the procedure was successful only one out of every three times. There was a better than even chance that the insertion wouldn’t take or that the developing embryo would die before it reached term. Even if the embryo came to term, many of the animals would not grow to a healthy adulthood. In a room downstairs, veterinarians tried their best to nurse the less perfect specimens back to health.

  Although the process was not perfect, and Minh couldn’t shake the feeling of discomfort that hit him as he moved through the lab, he knew he was watching a medical miracle. The work that took place in between the first two tables and the last was, in his opinion, Nobel Prize–worthy—although, because of the scandal and the claims of fraud surrounding him, his boss, Hwang Woo Suk, the man who had pioneered the practice, would never be eligible for that award.

  But in the midst of his questioned work, he’d also achieved something spectacular. In August of the same year as his trial—2005—he’d published a paper in Nature on the successful cloning of an Afghan hound: a dog named Snuppy, a breakthrough so amazing that Time magazine named the dog the year’s “Most Amazing Invention.”

  Although his human cloning claims were false, his cloned dog was real. Hwang, an obscure veterinarian who had previously spent his time working with cattle, had done what nobody else had been able to accomplish: He’d cloned a dog.

  Since then, his revived foundation had replicated the feat more than six hundred times. Minh had watched the intricate process many times. The harvested eggs from the dogs in the operating room were placed in a Petri dish. A pipette was used to remove the eggs’ DNA, and then the DNA from another dog—usually, from a living skin cell—was inserted, through a process called “somatic cell nuclear transfer.” The egg was then stimulated with an electrical charge, forcing it to divide, essentially kick-starting its growth into a functioning embryo. Then the sample was brought back into the operating theater and carefully placed into another dog’s healthy uterus.

  Life from life, Minh thought, as he moved past the implantation table and headed toward a pair of double doors in the back of the operating theater. Still, he couldn’t shake the chills he felt as he thought of those three dogs, lying supine, tongues hanging to the side around the breathing tubes, as the surgeons did their work. He chided himself for his own backward thinking; of course, futuristic science always seemed unnatural—until it became routine. Hwang wasn’t simply providing a service to grieving, wealthy dog owners; he was also pushing forward the science of cloning, giving the world a glimpse of what this powerful new technology could provide.

  His cloned dogs could help in the fight against diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes by providing identical physiologies—perfect control specimens—for drug studies and the like. Hwang had also gifted to South Korean police departments “sniffer” dogs that had been cloned from the skin cells of talented working animals that had been trained to sniff out cadavers, bombs, and drugs. All dogs have a keen sense of smell, but certain breeds of dog are more responsive to training and fieldwork. So by harvesting genetic material from dogs with these superior natural abilities, Hwang could provide the police departments with animals that had literally been born for their jobs.

  Hwang was planning to send the specially bred dogs to the foundation’s partners working on a project in Russia, as well—a sort of altruistic precursor to the more complicated cloning subjects they hoped to deliver in the future, although many would argue that nothing Hwang or Sooam did was truly altruistic. The human cloning scandals would not be overcome by the foundation’s work with cloned dogs.

  Minh pushed through the double doors, then headed down a long hallway leading deeper into the research complex. Opening a locked, vaultlike door, he entered an austere office lined with bookshelves, microscope cabinets, and computers.

  For the past year, this had been Minh’s center of operations when he was not out in the field. Although he was not secretive by nature, Minh and other researchers had learned from Hwang’s past of the danger of presenting findings to the world that hadn’t been confirmed.

  Minh reached his desk in the center of the room and dropped heavily into a leather-backed seat. Immediately, he turned his attention to a manila folder containing a stack of pages next to his computer.

  Months ago, when he had returned from his most recent trip to Siberia, the baby Woolly Mammoth specimen he had found was taken to a specially designed tank in the research facility. He had overseen the transfer and storage process himself, making sure the air temperature,
humidity, and sterilization were all precisely maintained. He had believed, when he’d first seen the carcass pulled up from the ice, that the specimen was very close to what they had been looking for—perhaps as good as they would ever find.

  But if the papers now in his hands were correct, he had been dead wrong.

  According to the documents, in May 2013, a Russian expedition led by the foundation’s partners at Northeastern Federal University in Yakutsk had pulled another Woolly Mammoth out of the ice on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. Although that specimen had been spectacular enough—a female, sixty years old at the time of her death more than fifteen thousand years ago—when they hoisted the Mammoth out of the ice, they’d made an even more significant find.

  When the animal had died, her lower part had settled into water, which had quickly frozen. Although the upper part of the beast had been exposed to the elements, and a large portion of its meat had been eaten away by predators, the lower segment of her body had been preserved in a manner the Russian scientists had never seen before.

  Minh read, and reread, the words of the lead Russian, Semyon Grigoryev:

  “When we broke through the ice beneath her stomach,” Grigoryev had exclaimed, “the blood flowed out from there. It was very dark.”

  To Minh, the comment was shocking. A carcass so well preserved, after fifteen thousand years in the ice, that it still contained liquid blood? Reading deeper, the Russians described finding intact muscle tissue that was “red, the color of fresh meat.”