Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  The article had led to an immediate uproar that dwarfed the furor over Church’s comments about a possible Neanderthal revival. Ethicists warned about the dangers of playing God, of designer babies birthed in test tubes, of gene drives and the terrifying ramifications that could arise from genetic tinkering in the wrong hands. No matter that Church and others had already created life in a Petri dish—in 2010, Craig Venter had synthesized a tiny mycoplasma bacteria with a million base pairs of DNA, and then from 2013 to 2016 Church himself had designed and revised his version of the E. coli bacteria, complete with its genetic biocontainment strategy.

  If creating life were the barometer, Luhan supposed, Church and others had already been playing God for some time. But even she agreed that human cells were different. A pig with a human-compatible liver raised eyebrows, but a human liver from scratch would be a game changer.

  While other outlets took the Times’s reporting on a “private” meeting to mean it was in some sense a secret conclave, the Harvard Medical School meeting hadn’t been any more secret than most meetings. More than 350 invitations were sent out, with no request for confidentiality, and the whole meeting was videotaped and put online for open access. Church and his colleagues had been on the verge of submitting a paper summarizing their research. Before the publication of any noteworthy scientific study, authors request that the press delay reporting until the paper is publicly available. But the science for creating a synthetic human was worthy of headlines, even though they were discussing cells from many species, not human babies.

  Church felt that the press and public misunderstood the purpose of the project: It wasn’t actually to build a human, just human cells. The availability of these cells to scientists would make research into human diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, as well as conditions such as aging, cheaper and more practical.

  The estimated price tag for funding Church’s new project was $100 million. To Luhan, it seemed a paltry amount, considering that the original Human Genome Project had cost almost $3 billion to complete. More than anything, the controversy around Church’s private meeting stemmed from the fear that maybe science was now moving too fast, accelerating beyond people’s ability to control it.

  But closing your eyes won’t stop the inevitable use of technology that is already here. Today—not tomorrow—a living cell could be made, synthetically, in a lab. And that was the real holy grail of biology—not the HGP, the reading of the genetic sequence, but the writing of the genetic sequence.

  Church finished looking over the assembled Petri dishes with the hemoglobin, then turned back to Luhan and Bobby. Unlike his synthetic human cell project, this was not creating life from scratch, but to Luhan it was just as important. The sample in front of them was no longer the blood of an elephant. It was the blood of a ten-thousand-year-old Woolly Mammoth, revived.

  Then Church glanced back at the row of Petri dishes.

  “There’s something missing, isn’t there?”

  Luhan’s eyes met Bobby’s.

  “We were wondering when you’d notice.”

  * * *

  “It ended up being much more complicated than we’d initially thought,” Bobby said, as they walked Church deeper into the lab, passing dormant workstations and humming ventilation hoods. “But we didn’t really need to reinvent the wheel. We started with a pipeline based on research done at the University of California.”

  “They had it a little easier,” Luhan continued, as they passed a pair of postdocs bent over an electrophoresis machine, working on separating DNA from cells. “They were able to take stem cells that they’d edited for the proper lineage. But from there, the process was the same.”

  “We seeded our iPSCs with the inserted gene into a gel matrix,” Bobby said, clearly excited. His glasses kept slipping down his nose as he tried to stay a step ahead of Church. “We had to make the matrix ourselves. It was tough getting the nutritional level just right. Once it had been seeded in, and started to thrive, we peeled the sample out and were ready for the graft procedure.”

  They had grafted the cells into mice. Luhan didn’t like trials involving live animals—whether nude mice or transgenic pigs—but sometimes, it was necessary. Sooner or later, experiments needed to leave the Petri dish.

  The three of them headed toward a plastic and glass animal cage sitting on a counter beneath one of the work hoods. Luhan had done the procedure herself on a little nude mouse, a mutant breed, born without an immune system. The little mouse had been lying unconscious on its side, its tiny, hairless chest rising and falling as the anesthetic moved through its bloodstream. She had used a scalpel to make a small incision on the rodent’s back, then employed a tiny syringe to implant the slice of gel into the open wound. It had been delicate work, suturing the area closed. The mouse was much smaller and more fragile than the pigs she worked with.

  “How long?” Church asked, as they approached the cage. As they moved closer, Luhan could just make out, through the transparent cage walls, the little figure of the mouse, now healed and wide awake, running inside a metal wheel. The mouse’s body was mostly a blur as it worked the wheel, which gave off a rhythmic creak, metal against metal, the metronome of a happy rodent in motion.

  “Almost two months,” Luhan said. “We started to see results at five weeks, but waited for it to become more pronounced.”

  Church looked at her, then hurried his step, making short work of the distance between the three of them and the mouse on the wheel.

  Up close, Luhan noted with satisfaction that the mouse was indeed healthy, tiny paws turning the wheel with a minimum of effort. Her surgical technique had been adequate, and the scar on the mouse had entirely healed.

  “It’s . . . stunning,” Church said, his voice more breath than words.

  Luhan wondered if anyone had called a nude mouse stunning before. But the truth was, this nude mouse was no longer completely worthy of its name. Though most of its body—its stomach, head, hindquarters, and tail—was still hairless, one area was decidedly . . . not.

  The area where Luhan had performed her delicate surgery—the area where she had inserted the engineered cells they had grown in their nutritional matrix—wasn’t naked at all.

  It was covered in bright red hair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Three years from today

  TWENTY KILOMETERS SOUTH OF WRANGEL ISLAND.

  At ten minutes past three in the afternoon, Nikita Zimov braced himself against the heavy waves as he stared at the canopy of dark clouds, hovering so low they seemed to blend right into the heavy fog. The fog was laced with a cold drizzle, the kind of weather that stung right through clothes and skin, each drop seeming to dig right into bone.

  The ocean was rough, spraying against the sides of Nikita’s boat. All around, the ocean was pocked with oddly shaped ice floes, some only a few feet in length, others even bigger than Nikita’s vessel. But when Nikita leaned forward to look over the railing, the surface of the water was clear, a gorgeous shade of blue, the kind of water he’d expected to see in the Caribbean, around an island brimming with rich businessmen and beautiful women in bikinis.

  He laughed at the thought. The kind of people who visited Caribbean islands wouldn’t get anywhere near a place like this.

  He stepped back from the railing, looking toward the stairs that led down to the small cabin of the thirty-foot cruiser. If it wasn’t for the fog, he could have stood on his toes and maybe caught sight of the twenty-foot-long, high-speed Yamaha tethered behind the cruiser—a makeshift tender/lifeboat, because you never really knew what you were going to run into this far north. Scratch that: You had the lifeboat because you knew exactly what you’d run into this far north. Misery, hardship, danger.

  Both boats were packed to the gills with supplies. Although the shortest route from Chersky to Wrangel Island was about nine hundred kilometers, most of that had been spent traversing the Kolyma River; once you exited the mouth of the Kolyma, it was another
two hundred kilometers through the open Arctic Ocean. A trip for a madman, Anastasiya had called it, something Nikita had repeated numerous times with no small amount of pride. True, it wasn’t a trip for the lighthearted, but nobody in Nikita’s family had ever been accused of suffering from that particular affliction.

  In fact, Nikita had made this trip once before, back in August 2010. On that journey, he had been accompanied by his father, Sergey, who had been fifty-five at the time, his uncle Victor, fifty-eight, and a twenty-year-old family friend named Alexei who had worked for them at Pleistocene Park. Of the four of them, it had been the twenty-year-old who had suffered the most.

  On that trip, as well as the current journey, they had gone to retrieve cargo for the park. In 2010, they had made the crossing for musk oxen: Thirty-five years earlier, a small herd of the mixed species—basically, a cross between an ox, a giant sheep, and a goat—had been brought to Wrangel where villagers had raised them for food, milk, and labor. Sergey Zimov had realized that the musk ox—sturdy, horned, covered in dark fur—was perfectly suited for their growing habitat, and had made a deal to retrieve six to ten of the beasts to help populate Pleistocene Park.

  Nikita’s memories of that earlier trip to Wrangel were mostly fond, though it had been an intense learning experience. It had taken an extra few days at sea to find entrance to the ice-locked island, and by the time they’d worked their way past the ice floes, through bouts of engine trouble and storm damage, they had been thoroughly exhausted. The way back had been even harder, dealing with the elements while tending to a family of musk oxen who didn’t particularly like living in the hull of a boat. It hadn’t been as bad as carting a group of angry elk across the Russian continent, but surviving the journey had involved copious amounts of vodka that Nikita had kept hidden in a diaper box his wife had left on board from a previous trip downriver with one of their children.

  This current trip, too, there had been plenty of need for vodka. Things had started off fine: The first ninety kilometers down the Kolyma had been calm and quiet. Barely any waves, the two boats cutting through the glassy water like a sharp razor through his father’s long beard.

  When they’d passed the final seaport at the end of the river they had celebrated—again, vodka, but this time shared between Nikita and his partner on the journey, a young Siberian native who worked with Nikita and his father at the Science Center—and by the third day, they’d gone half the distance to the island. They’d even spent time admiring an ice floe, supporting in the center a single happy and fat seal, sunning himself without a care in the world.

  It wasn’t until they’d reached thirty kilometers outside Wrangel that they’d hit their first major snag; as with Nikita’s last trip, they’d found the island surrounded by thick, impassable ice.

  That first night, they’d had to anchor the pair of boats and wait for a break in the ice. By the next morning, they’d been able to make a little forward progress, but again had been slowed by ice and forced to tie up for a second night.

  The next morning, they’d awakened to a spectacle. Right next to where they’d anchored, a colony of walruses had gathered. The giant animals seemed quite magnificent, though he doubted there was enough vodka in the world for him to mistake them for sirens or mermaids, as ancient sailors supposedly had.

  Along with the walruses, the ice kept them trapped again for the next day, which Nikita spent curled up in the main cabin on one of the four small beds. On the previous trip, two of the beds had been covered by baled hay, ready for the musk oxen. On that trip, Nikita and his father had slept in sleeping bags, surrounded by the animals’ dinner.

  This time, Sergey had remained back in Chersky, in preparation for the return of the cargo. Sergey was half expecting Nikita to return empty-handed. Sergey had seen the same emails as Nikita, but still he didn’t quite believe there was going to be anything waiting for them when they reached the frozen island.

  Sergey Zimov was a complex man. He was a staunch believer in science, but he lived in the now. He and Nikita had kept current with all the developments they could, from their isolated Arctic laboratory. They knew all about the South Koreans and their Russian partners, working on Mammoth clones. Nikita had seen many frozen carcasses in his journeys around the steppes. The Mammoth graveyard had been a huge economic boon to the area. In fact, at this point, in this part of the world, there were only two types of work for most of the tribes: fishing and recovering Mammoth ivory. Beginning in the early 2000s, ivory hunting had eclipsed fishing, and much of the local population had gone even farther north, hoping to become rich.

  Zimov believed that part of the impetus for the shift was cultural: Siberians didn’t like to work every day. They preferred to work for a week and then do nothing for the rest of the year. Mammoth ivory provided this option. It had inspired a modern-day gold rush.

  Nikita looked at the South Korean effort in similar terms—as taking advantage of a gold rush. Exploiting the Mammoths coming up from the ice, trying to find some way to turn that ancient, dead tissue into gold.

  The science that George Church and his lab were conducting was different—genetic engineering, not alchemy. Nikita supported their efforts, hoping for the best.

  But the Zimovs weren’t in the business of making Mammoths. They weren’t trying to revive one species, they were trying to revive an entire ecosystem. The Woolly Mammoth was just one brick in their wall.

  After another day of waiting, the walruses left, and, finally, the ice shifted just enough to let them move forward again. After ten kilometers, they’d passed a single ice floe, twice as large as their boat. From the center of the floe, a lone polar bear warily watched them pass. Nikita, once again at the bow of the boat, had instinctively put his hand to his hip, where he kept a large hunting knife. Then he’d grinned at himself: Crazy Russian. What would he do with a knife against a polar bear?

  Wrangel was teeming with polar bears. On his last trip, his father had nearly shot one of the animals that seemed too close, but Nikita had stopped him. It didn’t seem right to kill a bear when their goal was to repopulate the tundra.

  “Better the bear should kill us?” his father had asked with a laugh.

  A few hours after they passed the ice floe they found a clear path, ever north.

  He started to make out the island, rising up from a new gray fog. On the nearest edge of the shore, a craggy, rocky slope, he could see a heap of rusty barrels. They looked like others he’d noticed on the last trip, which he guessed contained some sort of industrial waste, a reminder of the defunct Soviet Union that had once built bases on remote islands like this. Past the barrels, he saw a pair of tree stumps, traces of storms that had come through, again and again, driving Arctic winds that could reach a hundred miles per hour.

  After the stumps, signs of a tiny village of about fourteen houses. One of them contained the barn where, in 2010, he and his father had retrieved the musk oxen. It had been exhausting work to rope the young animals, contain them, and get them aboard the boat.

  Today, they hadn’t come to Wrangel to rope musk oxen.

  “Nikita. Do you see that?”

  His Siberian crewmate had come up from the cabin and was pointing past Nikita’s shoulder. Nikita followed his finger—beyond the last house of the small village, toward a low slope that ran down to the shoreline. The fog was too thick to see much beyond shapes. Nikita made out what he thought were more tree stumps, and then another handful of barrels. Beyond those, a small wooden construct that might have been a makeshift dock. And then, higher up on the slope, something big and rounded, vaguely reminiscent . . .

  Nikita paused, staring.

  The shape was moving.

  “Nikita . . .”

  “I see it,” Nikita said, half to himself.

  A part of him didn’t really want to believe. More accurately, didn’t know if he should believe.

  There was still too much fog to know for sure. Maybe it was something else. A very large musk ox. A wa
lrus or bear.

  For the past year, there had been almost no real developments that he and his father had read about, no news sent to their isolated outpost. Most of the news blackout had been their own fault. They did not travel west or east very often, and they didn’t communicate with the outside world more than was absolutely necessary. Their English wasn’t great, their Korean even worse.

  Nikita knew everything he could know about the different approaches, the different teams struggling toward the same future: It was part of being a scientist, the constant battle to be first. First meant accolades, prizes, glory, history, yes, but, more important, first might mean an easier competition for funding for more research. Thus, first could change the world.

  In the past, Wrangel had never been a place of firsts. Wrangel was a place of lasts.

  And Nikita, like his father, like the island, had never really cared who got there first.

  Just that they got there at all.

  He held his breath, as the boat moved closer, as the fog began to clear, as the shape grew solid and real . . .

  EPILOGUE

  BY DR. GEORGE CHURCH

  January 24, 2017

  ELEVEN KILOMETERS ABOVE EARTH AT –56 DEGREES CELSIUS AND 830 KM/HR.

  Head in the clouds, a bit higher than the 8.8 km summit of Mount Everest, flies a “synthetic biologist” augmented by a 737 skin. Inside this biologist resides a 1.4 kg narcoleptic brain dreaming of flying Mammoths (hairy Dumbos)—reflecting on people who ask about flying pigs and the ever-oxymoronic pygmy Mammoths, as if making a routine inquiry about an online consumer product. So what actually stops us from creating these and other fantastical animals? We can start with (but are not limited by) precedents and records so far. The highest-altitude flight for a bird is similar to the 737 heights, with Rüppell’s griffon vulture (an endangered species) soaring up to 11.3 km. The fastest animal so far is the peregrine falcon at 320 km/hour, quite fast, but slower than a 737 flight, not to mention that diving is not really flying.