Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  Minh’s find in the ice cave at Muus Khaya had been stunning in its completeness, and although he hadn’t yet finished extracting cells from the specimen, he had hope that he would find some informative, if not usable, cell tissue. But red muscle tissue? Blood?

  Actual liquid blood?

  It didn’t seem possible. Minh knew, better than most, that scientists under pressure to make discoveries could exaggerate findings. They could also be so excited by a discovery that they misinterpreted what they saw. Hell, the entire building around him—the kennels down below filled with cloned puppies being weaned by surrogate mothers, the operating tables he’d just walked past, the labs filled with frozen specimens from the Arctic—all of it had been built after a scientific exaggeration.

  But if the Russians had found a Mammoth with actual blood—and intact DNA—it could be the breakthrough Minh and his colleagues had been waiting for.

  Minh put the manila folder back onto his desk and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He had been back in Seoul for only a few months, but he had no choice—he needed to book a flight to Russia at once. He needed to see this new discovery for himself.

  Many geneticists thought that the goal of cloning a Woolly Mammoth, which Hwang and his research center had set for themselves, was impossible. Many questioned their motives, believing that Hwang would overreach or exaggerate the significance of his work again in order to revive his destroyed reputation. Other labs competing to resurrect the Mammoth had chosen the synthetic route over cloning because they believed that DNA could not be revived after millennia in the ice.

  The blood flowed out from there. It was very dark.

  According to the papers on his desk, the Russians had hidden their sample in some sort of secret vault, because the lead scientists believed that it was so valuable someone might actually try to steal it. To Minh, that seemed overly dramatic—and a little suspicious. Then again, even in America, scientists could be secretive, even paranoid. People stole ideas from each other all the time.

  Certainly, Minh’s superiors at Sooam understood the importance of secrecy. Only recently, the foundation’s parent “chaebol,” or mega-company, had completed the purchase of twenty thousand acres of farmland in Alberta, Canada, that seemed a perfect sister site to the Siberian tundra regions, a secluded and vast tract of geography well suited for a revived Woolly Mammoth herd. When local residents reacted with suspicion and fear that the Korean company was actually planning some sort of mining expedition in the region, the company had released a beautifully obtuse statement claiming the land would be used for “experimental agricultural techniques.” Even so, the company’s attempts to avoid any details about the purchase had led some locals to wonder if Sooam was building a “Jurassic Park” in northern Canada.

  Minh wouldn’t know for sure what the Russians had actually found until he saw the specimen for himself. But for the moment, he dared to be optimistic. There was a small chance that a fifteen-thousand-year-old Mammoth had just made the impossible possible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  August 15, 2014

  The symposium in the Harvard auditorium appeared to be in full swing as Church reluctantly followed Ting along the edge of the full auditorium, searching for a pair of empty seats. He was surprised to see so many people in the room; there had to be at least fifteen rows of seats set up in front of the podium, and maybe 150 people. The room was dark, most of the light coming from the projection screen that had been pulled down for the presentation, but Church was pretty sure he recognized many of the faces. Geneticists, biologists, some fairly big names. Which really didn’t make much sense, considering the topic.

  “This many people came to a conference about cat DNA?” he whispered, but Ting waved at him to be quiet. She was determined to find them reasonable seats, and was moving along the side of the room at twice her normal speed. Church, with his long legs, was struggling to keep up.

  “But cat genomics?” he whispered again. “Really?”

  Sure, once upon a time, the sequencing of a common house cat would have been big enough news to fill a Harvard auditorium. Back in 2007, when the folks at Cold Spring Harbor had sequenced a four-year-old feline named Cinnamon, the effort was another example of the sequencing process that had already yielded workable genomes for humans, chimps, mice, and dogs, among a handful of other animals whose cells had found their way into the hands—and hypodermics—of scientists at gene labs all over the world. But seven years later, Church wasn’t aware of anything groundbreaking going on in the cat world that would draw such a crowd for a single speech, let alone a three-day conference. When George had first seen the bulletin advertising the GCAT60, it had hardly registered.

  “We’ve gone from karyotyping and pictures of the chromosome,” the speaker was droning on as Ting finally found a pair of chairs in the back row, “to a sequence, to a full phylogeny, to a radiation hybrid map, to a genetic linkage map, to sixty sequenced cat genomes. We now have the cat genome as a template to sequence other species . . .”

  Church shifted against the hard plastic of his chair. He could already tell that this session was going to tax his narcolepsy. But people tended to watch him for his reaction, and he didn’t want to appear as uninterested as he was. Also, the speaker, Fritz Roth, wasn’t some hack biologist. Roth was a professor at the University of Toronto and had earned his Ph.D. in biophysics at Harvard in Church’s own lab.

  In fact, as Church glanced at the people in the row around him, he recognized other faces—more former Ph.D. students of his, most of whom had gone on to great careers in genetics at other universities.

  Maybe there had been some new development with the cat genome that had squeaked past him. Recently, he had been consumed by other research. If the symposium had been about elephants, he would have arrived twenty minutes early to sit in the front row. Since his visit to the Ringling Brothers Conservation Center, he’d put the Revival project front and center.

  “We’ll go over the selection pressure in the cat genome,” Roth said, although his voice was mostly background noise to Church. “And then we can think about the ancient history of domesticated cats . . .”

  Church’s mind was in the lab with Luhan and Bobby. Quinn had taken a temporary leave from the team—his mother was extremely ill, and was participating in a clinical trial—and Margo had recently left for work in scientific patent legislation. But Luhan and Bobby had been preparing numerous cultures of elephant cells for the implantations, creating immortal cell lines with the necessary properties to become iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells). Soon they would be showing Church elephant cells with partial Woolly Mammoth genomes.

  Which meant it was time to start thinking farther ahead and to consider more of the ethical dilemmas they were soon going to face. Church had set up a special team to work on the cure for elephant herpes and the team was synthesizing a version of the virus, and was working on a way to deliver its cure into the affected cells. Church had come to the conclusion that building a Woolly Mammoth, in some ways, was secondary to helping the endangered elephants—it wouldn’t do any good to create a Mammoth if it harmed the elephant population in any way, essentially trading an endangered animal for an extinct one. The work had to benefit both species.

  Which brought him to the biggest ethical dilemma they were going to face: once they’d managed to create a faux stem cell containing Woolly Mammoth traits, they would need to implant it into a fertilized embryo, and somehow get it to term. But using a pregnant female Asian elephant was ethically troubling. No doubt, there would be numerous starts and stops. When cloning an animal, miscarriages and mutant births occurred more often than normal. Even Sooam’s dog factory, as Church thought of it, claimed successes only one-third of the time. The Revivalists couldn’t continue their project with a rate anywhere near that troubling. It would be much too hard on the elephant mothers.

  So Church had begun to think of a solution, one that both thrilled and terrified him.

&n
bsp; “Now let’s get into some defining traits,” Roth was saying, as the screen behind him showed two house cats in different poses, one on its back with a blissful look on its face and closed eyes, and another whose back was arched, tail up, and fur erect, snarling. “Gentle behavior versus aggressive behavior.”

  Church momentarily lost his train of thought. A new pair of slides appeared, one of a hugely overweight cat and one of a cat so small it fit into the palm of a hand.

  “Giant body mass versus a smaller cat.”

  Church glanced at Ting. This was getting appalling. The silly pictures on the screen had obviously been pulled from the Internet, stills from funny cat videos. Had Roth lost his mind? Then Church noticed that Ting was smiling, and that all the other people sitting around him were looking at him.

  “We realized there is a human analogy,” Roth continued.

  A picture of a cat with a white beard appeared on the screen, and the audience started to laugh.

  “We begin to let the cat out of the bag,” Roth said.

  The cat morphed into a picture of George Church. The letters below the cat—the title of the symposium, GCAT60, began to move, until Church suddenly realized what they really stood for.

  GC-AT-60. George Church At 60.

  He’d been so caught up in his work, in elephants and futuristic ideas, he had forgotten that it was only a short time before his sixtieth birthday.

  No wonder he had recognized many of the faces in the room. As the lights went up, he realized that everyone there was either a former member of his lab or a former mentor. He even saw Sung Hou Kim from Duke near the front of the room, preparing to give his own lecture on the cat genome.

  The conference was a joke on him. As applause rang out, champagne bottles were uncorked. Church rose to his feet as his current lab members filed in from an adjacent room where they’d been watching on closed-circuit TV. Church shook his head, amazed that such a large group of people had managed to pull this off without his getting wind of it. He was truly touched.

  “Well, I am surprised,” he said, as the applause died down. “Used to be a big deal, the sequence of the cat genome.”

  Then everyone was congratulating him, shaking his hand, reintroducing themselves. It was incredible to see the many tendrils his lab had sent out to so many different universities in so many countries. Much of the future of genetics was embodied by the scientists in this room. Church felt no small sense of pride that his lab had seeded the original work and ventures the assembled scientists represented.

  It was close to an hour before he’d worked his way through most of his former charges and found himself in a corner of the room with Luhan, Bobby, and Quinn and Margo, who had joined for the surprise party. Church felt it was time to talk a little shop and tell them all that he had decided, even if Luhan and Bobby would be doing the heavy lifting going forward.

  Church got to the point, as direct as always.

  “I’ve gone over it, and there’s just no ethically responsible way we can experiment on fertilized embryos inserted in female Asian elephants.”

  The postdocs seemed surprised. As lab scientists, Luhan and Bobby might have weighed the importance of their work more heavily than their responsibility to the comfort of the individual elephants. As animal lovers, Margo and Quinn understood.

  “Where does that leave us?” Luhan asked.

  “What’s the workaround?” Bobby added.

  There was always a workaround.

  Church smiled at a passing former Ph.D., who lifted his glass of champagne in congratulations. The man now lived in London, where he was working on a universal flu vaccine that would eventually save millions of lives. Church focused back on his team.

  “We’re going to make a synthetic uterus,” Church said.

  Bobby gave a low whistle and said, “An artificial womb.”

  Bobby and Luhan had been working on a fertility project on the side. Because of Bobby’s own interest in having a child, he was well versed in the current state of IVF and reproductive science. Although it was technically possible to grow embryos outside a womb for a significant length of time, no scientist had yet tried to grow one past fourteen days. The simple reason was that it was against the rules. A self-imposed ban on growing human embryos past two weeks had been agreed upon by scientists all over the world, and many countries had passed laws to ensure the guidelines were followed.

  The moratorium on research past fourteen days, which originally had been agreed upon back in 1995, though ethical, made studying implantation and gestation exceedingly difficult.

  “Is the science there yet?” Luhan asked.

  Growing a baby outside a natural womb was possible; preterm babies were being kept alive at twenty-three weeks. But those first twenty-three weeks were the challenge.

  “I’ve looked into the literature,” Bobby said. “I haven’t found anything online or in any journals.”

  “That’s because it’s never been done,” Church said.

  “But we’re going to do it,” Luhan finished for him.

  They would file a grant to make a synthetic uterus. Church knew the grant committees would balk at the idea—some would say that it hadn’t been done because it couldn’t be done.

  Maybe they’d be right—but that had never stopped Church before.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  June 20, 2016

  NANTUCKET SOUND.

  Three p.m., halfway across from the island to Hyannis, the double-decker Hy Line fast ferry cut at thirty knots through a low chop, white-capped jags spitting spray against the sleek, angled hull.

  A seagull was suspended a few yards from the railing of the sun-splashed outer deck, frozen against a backdrop of celestial blue, like a prehistoric creature trapped in glacial ice. Wings spread against the surface drafts, feather skirts tilted into perfect airfoils that maximized lift, eliminated drag, the seagull was held in a complex, motionless balance, exactly matching the Hy Line’s speed and direction.

  If Ting had climbed up the shoulder-height railing and held out her arm, she could have plucked the bird from the air. Instead, she was content to watch it, until finally a gust of wind from an errant wave rustled through the bird’s feathers, shattering the imagined glacial ice, and the seagull dived straight down the side of the ferry, plunging toward the water below.

  “We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time leaning over railings,” Church said, next to her, as they both watched the bird touch the chop, then rocket right back upward, something green and stringy hanging from its beak.

  Ting laughed. The truth was, these moments had become rare. Both she and Church were in peak periods of their careers, which meant many long hours in their respective labs, as well as many days on the road, pushing their work at symposia and to colleagues all over the world. The trip to Nantucket had been a chance to combine their areas of expertise, a coming together of two very different perspectives on a shared biological future.

  As on their very first date, Ting knew that she and Church could be looking at the same thing over that railing, seeing something completely different, and yet be completely aligned. He might be thinking about the mechanics of flight, while she was thinking of the genetics. Or she might be thinking about the avian visual system, while he was thinking about the chemistry.

  This time, Church wasn’t seeing the seagull as a whole, but each cell that made up that bird. His vision pierced deep down into the nuclei, to the twisting strips of DNA that coded for every trait that kept the bird aloft. Microscopic sequences of genes generated the shape and texture of the feathers, coded for the strength and depth of the muscles and tendons in the wings, the sharp angles of its beak, and the shape and color of its eyes. Each of those particular cells, derived from the immortal stem lines, was itself the product of at least 50 million years of inheritance. A genome of a billion base pairs passed down from gull to gull, containing thousands of tiny sequences that made the bird everything that it was.

  Chang
e even one of those sequences—cut the tiniest segment of that DNA away using CRISPR and replace it with a synthetic gene of your choosing—and you changed the seagull. Change enough of those genes, and it wasn’t even a seagull anymore. Make those changes in its stem cell line, and the manipulation entered the species’ line, carried forward generation after generation, for another 50 million years.

  “It sounds like the presentation went very well,” Church said, resuming the conversation they had started while waiting in line to board the fast ferry, the beginning of their short trip back to Boston. He was referring to a town hall meeting that had taken place on the island two weeks earlier. “According to everyone I spoke to who attended, the audience seemed to understand.”

  Although they hadn’t attended the presentation itself, and were getting a feel for the way it had been received secondhand, they hadn’t expected to hear that things had gone half as well as they apparently had. They had just strolled through Nantucket’s narrow streets and wharves, passing the quaint, cedar-shingled cottages and shops jumbled densely together in concentric waves spreading out from the wooden latticework of docks, feeling transported back in time 250 years. Despite the crowds of summer tourists clutching ice cream cones from one of the half dozen parlors lining the waterfront, and the parents with strollers valiantly fighting the cobblestones as they shuttled children between the various beaches and high-end resorts that spotted the idyllic, upscale island, Ting could easily picture the place as it once was, an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century whaling village originally settled by the English, dominating the whale-oil industry that partially powered the American experiment. Derived from blubber, whale oil was the premier energy source of the time, and was once considered irreplaceable.

  “They didn’t run Esvelt off the island with pitchforks,” Ting said. “Which I think qualifies as a good start.”

  The historic town had been an odd setting for Kevin Esvelt’s presentation. The town hall–style meeting took place at the end of a cobblestone path that whaling captains might have strolled down on their way to the docks. Kevin Esvelt, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, who was previously a postdoc in Church’s lab, and the organizer behind the event, had addressed the crowd of about twenty townspeople, civic leaders, and members of the Nantucket board of health on the topic of an innovative new solution to the spread of Lyme disease.