As a scientist and someone who has always been fascinated with prehistoric mammals and dinosaurs I (Rob) had to read the new hardcover book called "Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures" by Ben Mezrich. The book just came out on July 4, 2017, and I pre-ordered it. This true quest to revive the Woolly Mammoth is for a very, very good reason and it involves climate change. Scientists have learned that under the melting permafrost of the Arctic lies such a massive quantity of methane and carbon dioxide (two greenhouse gases) that if released could exacerbate the rate of global warming at a more alarming rate than even present day pollution. The Woolly Mammoth would actually help alleviate that melting, but you have to read the book. Dr. George Church is the man behind the genetics research and his spinoff studies have done so much already for humanity that you likely don't know. I'll leave it there... It's a fascinating read and you can find out just how close we are to making this quest a reality. - Rob
Science fiction becomes reality in this Jurassic Park-like story of the genetic resurrection of an extinct species—the woolly mammoth—by the bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and The 37th Parallel.
“With his knack for turning narrative nonfiction into stories worthy of the best thriller fiction” (Omnivoracious), Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic circle, and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant. Will they be able to turn the hybrid cells into a functional embryo and bring the extinct creatures to life in our modern world?
Along with Church and his team of Harvard scientists, a world-famous conservationist and a genius Russian scientist plan to turn a tract of the Siberian tundra into Pleistocene Park, populating the permafrost with ancient herbivores as a hedge against an environmental ticking time bomb. More than a story of genetics, this is a thriller illuminating the race against global warming, the incredible power of modern technology, the brave fossil hunters who battle polar bears and extreme weather conditions, and the ethical quandary of cloning extinct animals. Can we right the wrongs of our ancestors who hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction—and at what cost?
As a kid, I've (Rob) always found dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals fascinating. In fact, I used to have quite a collection of
little plastic figures and knew many of their names and the periods in which they lived. So, this latest science news was really exciting to me!
We May Resurrect The Mammoth Sooner Than You Think
Wooly Mammoths Credit: Longnow.com
Source: Huffington Post 12/18/15
"Dr. George Church, a molecular biologist at Harvard University who is
working on such projects, estimates that a variation of the first new
woolly mammoth (which disappeared some 4,000 years ago) may be born as
soon as seven years from now."
Of all the varied and incredible possibilities presented by the
controversial new gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9, perhaps
the most intriguing are efforts to bring animals back from extinction.
Candidates for de-extinction, as the process is known, include species
like the passenger pigeon (the last one died in captivity in 1914), the
dodo (last seen in 1662) and the sea cow (1768, a mere 27 years after it
had been discovered by Europeans.)
These projects are not pipe dreams.
Dr. George Church, a molecular biologist at Harvard University who is
working on such projects, estimates that a variation of the first new
woolly mammoth (which disappeared some 4,000 years ago) may be born as
soon as seven years from now. Like other proponents of de-extinction, he
hopes the animals will play a key role in slowing or reversing climate
change.
If you've seen "Jurassic Park" (and is there anyone who hasn't?),
you’re already familiar with the basic idea behind how it would work.
First, scientists would retrieve DNA from the frozen remains of a woolly
mammoth that was preserved for centuries in the frozen tundra. Then
they would splice that DNA into an Asian elephant genome -- a step that
Church’s lab completed earlier this year. The two species are so closely
related, Church said, that if mammoths were alive today, they could
successfully breed with elephants. If Asian elephants' DNA were tweaked
to more closely resemble that of their ancient relatives, they might be
able to give birth to a furrier, fattier hybrid.
A month after Church’s lab announced its gene-splicing success, an
international group of scientists published a paper showing they had sequenced the woolly mammoth’s entire genome,
drawing a "road map" for changing an Asian elephant's chromosome to
make it more mammoth-like. With CRISPR, making those changes is faster,
cheaper and easier than ever before. The method allows researchers to
change, delete or replace genes in any plant or animal (picture the
precision and ease of the find-and-replace function in a word document).
Church and other scientists in the field say this work is decidedly
not about creating Mammoth Park. The hope is that these "cold-adapted
Asian elephants" will be capable of repopulating the vast tracts of
tundra and boreal forest in Eurasia and North America, a goal they feel
will help protect endangered Asian elephants and at the same time revive
an ancient grassland in the tundra, which could prevent the melting of
Siberia's permafrost.
Of course, the project is not without its critics. Duke University
conservation ecology professor Stuart Pimm called the idea “molecular
gimmickry” in an opinion piece for National Geographic.
“At worst," he wrote,
"it seduces granting agencies and university deans into thinking they
are saving the world. It gives unscrupulous developers a veil to hide
their rapaciousness, with promises to fix things later. It distracts us
from guaranteeing our planet’s biodiversity for future generations.”
The Huffington Post caught up with Church to talk about the potential
for de-extinction efforts to help delay climate change, the ethical
quandaries inherent in the work and his response to the critics. This
interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What’s the latest in the world of de-extinction?
The way we’re framing it these days is we’re bringing DNA back from
the past to improve modern survival and diversity. So rather than
bringing a whole species back, you can augment current-day species.
Because in practical terms, you have to have a modern-day host anyway,
so you might as well help that host while you’re at it.
My favorite example is the Asian elephant. It has two big threats to
its existence -- it's going extinct, just like the mammoth did, and it’s
mainly because humans are exacerbating all of its other problems.
The whole point of the project is merging modern molecular techniques
with environmental conservation projects. So, for example, bringing
back alleles from the mammoth, just bits of DNA, that can make the
modern species compatible to cold.
Courtesy of longnow.org
Building a mammoth out of an Asian elephant begins with three major adaptations.
So how does it work?
If you do bring the woolly mammoth genes into the elephant, would it
just naturally migrate to northern territories?
The precedent is the bison. The bison was essentially extinct
worldwide, with just a couple hundred left, so you needed a plan that
included land all over Russia, Europe and North America. And now there’s
500,000 of them, so ranchers and conservational land and so forth can
accommodate the bison. It will probably be even easier for the mammoth,
because it’ll be even further north, where there are even fewer people
and fewer demands on the property. It’s not like we’re going to build a
city or a factory in Siberia.
And it would help the environment — it would help restore the rich
ecosystems that are based on woolly mammoths and grass, rather than what
many ecologists consider a much poorer ecosystem that we currently
have, based on trees and moss. Do you think these projects could be one of the keys to reversing climate change?
That’s going to be a multi-pronged effort. But this could be one of
the major prongs, because the Arctic tundra has about two and a half
times more carbon trapped in it than all the forests of the world put
together. So if it melts, that carbon gets released. And if that gets
released, it would be the equivalent of burning down all the forests of
the world two times over.
So anything you could do to stabilize that would be good. In the case
of the elephants, they’ve done experiments where they’ve set aside
plots of land and do a treatment similar to what mammoths could do [to
the habitat], using tanks or tractors to knock down trees and punch
holes in the snow. This has resulted in a 15 to 20-degree lower soil
temperature -- and that would stabilize the carbon and buy us a few more
decades of time to figure out other solutions. What’s the history of the idea of reviving extinct species?
First there was "Jurassic Park." Then there were breakthroughs in DNA
sequencing that allowed us to inexpensively decode ancient DNA as far
back at 7,000 years. And now we have the exact DNA for these ancient
species and, in some cases, we have appropriate hosts that are pretty
close.
There were three steps. One was the basic idea, then the second step
was new sequencing methods -- some of these are things my lab helped
develop -- and the third step is new synthesis methods like CRISPR that
allow us to test ideas that come out of the sequencing. What was your reaction when you saw "Jurassic Park" back in the '90s? Did you think it all looked possible?
I read Crichton's book in 1990 and saw the movie in 1993. I was
pleasantly surprised that the "dinosaur DNA" in the book was actually
from a bit of bacterial DNA (not dinosaur DNA) that I worked on in 1978
as part of my Ph.D. thesis. By 1990, my lab was 3 years old and the idea
of sequencing ancient DNA was 6 years old. The idea of genome
engineering by homologous recombination in animal germ line was 1 year
old.
It looked possible to me, especially since my lab was focusing on new technology for genome sequencing and genome engineering. How did CRISPR change the game?
CRISPR is about
1,000 times cheaper than previous methods, and that can change
everything. It sounds like its just a quantitative difference, but it
can result in whole new capabilities. We’ve made 15 different genetic
changes already in the elephant genome using CRISPR. This would have
been very hard to do prior to this.
And CRISPR is not the bottleneck anymore -- it’s growing up the
embryos and making sure that they’re developing normally. That’s the
bottleneck. Sergey Brimov, the Russian ecologist and a major proponent of
de-extinction of woolly mammoths once wrote “All [that] is needed is to
cross mental barriers.”
That’s almost always what’s needed. Do you think we have a mental barrier when it comes to reviving extinct species?
I think there are some people whose job it is to cross barriers. I’m
one of those people. We have to think out of the box in order to make
new sequencing and synthesis methods, if nothing else.And
in fact I’m a little less extreme in feeling that everyone has to think
differently. Usually it's sufficient that a few people think
differently and then they work out the details so it’s a very compelling
case.
I think the reason it’s hard to change people’s hearts and minds is
that, until you have a few de-extinct mammoth DNA put into Asian
elephants, and you can see that they are now woolier and better adapted
to the cold and so forth, then you can say, "okay, now let's scale it
up." And that’s the point you have to start convincing more people.
It doesn’t hurt to start talking about it now because it could be
here much faster than it seems. Some of these technologies happen ahead
of schedule rather than behind schedule. What’s your estimate for when we’ll actually see the first woolly elephant?
CRISPR turned out to be easier than expected. The growing of embryos
is harder to predict. I would say it will probably take us five years to
work out the embryo development part, and then it takes at least two
years to go through full gestation. So we might be seeing the first new
baby elephants in seven years. Maybe a decade. That’s pretty soon. What will we call them?
I call them cold-resistant Asian elephants. What are unambiguously
woolly mammoths are the DNA we’re drawing inspiration from and literally
moving from the computer back into Asian elephants. What the hybrid
will be called will be up to popular decision making that’s outside of
my realm. I’m not going to call them mammoths unless somebody insists.
They’re elephants with mammoth DNA. What do you think the biggest ethical issues are?
For me, it almost always it boils down to safety and efficacy,
whether it’s a human medicine or some ecosystem intervention. For people
first, and then other species a close second.
In this case some of the things that come up are, "Won’t they be
lonely?" Well, the answer is, you make a whole herd of them, the way
that was done with the bison -- there are 500,000 bison. We could easily
make tens of thousands of these elephants. Another question would be,
hasn’t their environment disappeared? Isn’t the reason they died off
still here? And I think the answer is, probably the northern part of
Siberia is adequately cold. The fact is, it’s not too warm for the Asian
elephants [in their current climate], it's too cold for them. Are you
harming the current endangered species? And I think our intention is to
only help them. What is your response to those who call this work “molecular
gimmickry”? Or those who say this is a distraction from the work that
needs to be done to protect the biodiversity that exists today?
Well, that’s a very vague critique. Here’s a very specific way of
protecting the biodiversity in Asian elephants. If they have a better
way of protecting Asian elephants, I’m all for it. We’re trying to
reduce the loss of the babies to the herpes virus and we’re trying to
give them cold resistance to expand their range. I don’t think that’s a
distraction or a gimmick; that's a goal.
The variation on that that I’ve heard is that this takes funding
away, or it makes people think that they don’t have to protect current
species because we can always bring them back. But the fact is we’re not
bringing back species -- [we're] strengthening existing species. That
may turn into full de-extinction in the future but only because it’s
inexpensive and it has value.
We’re not just saving the Asian elephants here. If the ecological
experiments are correct, these are keystone species that are missing
that would stabilize a whole variety of species, plants, microbes and
animals, that are all dependent on the keystone species, which is, in
this case, the mammoth. You can call them gimmicks if you want, but
they’re goal-oriented environmental conservation strategies.
I'm a simple guy who enjoys the simple things in life, especially our dogs. I volunteer for dog rescues, enjoy exercising, blogging, politics, helping friends and neighbors, participating in ghost investigations, coffee, weather, superheroes, comic books, mystery novels, traveling, 70s and 80s music, classic country music,writing books on ghosts and spirits, cooking simply and keeping in shape. You'll find tidbits of all of these things on this blog and more. EMAIL me at Rgutro@gmail.com - Rob
