A mammoth mistake to recreate the past
A woolly mammot is installed as part of the American Museum of Natural History's "The Secret World of Elephants" exhibition in Manhattan, in 2023. Credit: AFP via Getty Images/Timothy A. Clary
I remember the picture books, the broad pages and sweeping landscapes, the colorful depictions of Earth thousands of years ago, the rocks and ice and creatures that inhabited the land, and most of all, in the center of it all, the woolly mammoth.
The mammoth on these pages was majestic, massive in bulk and hair, soldiering on in a forbidding environment, clumps of snow clinging to its thick fur. I suppose I was a woolly mammoth fanboy. I remember the yearning, the wondering what it would be like to see one.
But when news came this week that a Dallas biotech company had taken another step toward being able to genetically resurrect the mammoth, what I felt was more akin to fear than joy, more dread than celebration.
Nostalgia has many facets. Not all of them are warm and fuzzy.
The attraction to the past we humans share is a curious thing. It might not be love, but it is romantic. It clearly is girded by our general desire for knowledge, and our more specific thirst to know from whence we came. But we creep into a danger zone when we don't see the past for what it was, when we seek comfort by evoking earlier times we like to think were simpler and easier. Reality has sharp edges.
Put aside for a moment the incredible and aggravating hubris of this quest — the belief that we can re-create that which is gone, in this case, for 4,000 years.
Focus instead on the mammoth.
One doesn't have to have been a fanboy to understand that the beast is iconic. It stood 10 to 12 feet tall and weighed 6 to 8 tons, about the size of an African elephant. And it had those magnificent tusks.
While humans back then did hunt the mammoth, it largely was a victim of a changing climate; melting glaciers pretty much wiped out the vegetation mammoths needed to survive. Some carcasses were preserved well enough in the icy tundra that paleontologists were able to collect fragments of DNA, and by 2015, scientists had sequenced enough of the mammoth's genetic blueprint to spark thoughts of rebirthing it.
Now, the appropriately named Colossal Biosciences says it has moved closer to a “de-extinction” moment by producing Asian elephant stem cells it can transform into the cells needed to reconstruct the woolly mammoth. After it edits a stem cell to duplicate mammoth genes, the company plans to fuse the cell into an elephant egg and if all goes well, implant the resulting embryo into an elephant surrogate for gestation and birth.
That's a huge “if.”
Much needs to be done — and so much could go wrong — before we can envision herds of mammoths rumbling again through the Arctic.
What if the company gets the genes wrong? What influence will the elephant have on the embryo's development? How can we be sure that what is born — if something is born — is actually a woolly mammoth?
And again, think of the mammoth. When born, it will be singular, the only one of its kind. How will it learn to forage, to communicate, to defend itself? How will it learn to be a mammoth? How will it survive in a world vastly different in all the wrong ways from the world it was unable to survive 4,000 years ago? How many elephant surrogates will suffer how much stress in the obsession to resurrect a species?
Bringing back the mammoth might tickle our curiosity. It might assuage our collective guilt over the ongoing crisis of worldwide extinction. But it's dangerous to think we can bring back one part of the way things were — or the way we imagine them to be.
Remembering the past is one thing. Reliving it is another.
Some things are best left to our imaginations.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
