Harvard geneticist hoping herd mentality hits Woolly research

Revolutionary Harvard geneticist George Church and his research team are spearheading an effort to tackle climate change by resurrecting the woolly mammoth — and the scientist says he’s “delighted” to learn the White House may be looking for ways to promote the project.

“That’s pretty cool,” Church told the Herald yesterday when he found out White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci told “Woolly” author Ben Mezrich he was interested in looking for ways to trumpet the groundbreaking research.

“I’m shocked and delighted to hear they’re interested,” Church said, adding that the effort to use the CRISPR DNA editing technique to copy woolly mammoth genes into the genome of an Asian elephant “at a minimum raises consciousness about the possibility of getting win-win solutions.”

“That’s what we’re looking for,” he said. “Things that don’t necessarily require us giving up our SUVs or that negatively impact the economy that can still get us to the same point. The point is this gets people thinking out of the box.”

Although the end result of the research may be the return of the woolly mammoth, Church says his team is taking it one step at a time. If they’re able to splice enough genetic segments from frozen mammoth specimens into the genome of an Asian elephant, they’d be able to equip the species with traits necessary to survive in a northern climate.

If they’re able to get to that point, Church says scientists can test a theory that, according to simulations, shows that herds of the creatures would lower the temperature of the soil in Siberia by about 16 degrees by reverting it to the grassland that existed during the Ice Age.

So far, Church says his research team have successfully spliced mammoth DNA into the elephant genome at 60 sites.

And though they’re still working toward engineering elephant cells to produce an embryo and then developing the embryo in an artificial womb, Church said recent advancements in genetic technology are promising.

“So far, we’re making a lot of progress on changing the genome and we can keep improving that process until its automated and easy to do,” Church said. “That’s inevitably what will happen.”