The beast and the burden

Don’t buy your tickets yet, but keep an eye out for the wait list: Harvard researchers say they are just two years away from creating an embryo that’s as close as modern science can come to reanimating the wooly mammoth, the enormous creature that went extinct 43,000 years ago.

It’s a long step from a single in-the-lab zygote to a living, breathing beast — or a parade of them — capable of pounding dirt and being banned from participation in the circus, but the advances in DNA-editing technology are breathtaking.

A planet that, 20 years after the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, has grown accustomed to lower-level genetic engineering must not waltz into this brave new world.

The new creature would have no natural habitat. No natural allies or prey.

It would lack the natural genetic diversity that keeps most species alive and healthy.

And unlike, say, gene tweaking that might render malaria-carrying mosquitoes incapable of breeding, there’s no benefit here to humankind.

Meantime, the resources poured into bringing back marquee organisms that vanished before modern history began could well divert us from the far more urgent struggles to balance ecosystems teetering on the brink before our very eyes.

Some 24,000 species are now threatened, a number that’s apparently accelerating as the climate changes. It would be a cruel irony if millions of dollars helped bring back an ancient relative of the elephant only to see the humbler pachyderm go extinct in our time, murdered by poachers.

Scientists who are perfecting gene editing technology deserve support and cheers. And the rest of us owe our children an honest reckoning with the future they may be about to create.