A question of mammoth proportions
If we want evidence of our intelligence and ingenuity, we see it almost every day.
One of the latest entries may be the most astonishing, a scenario straight out of Hollywood.
Scientists are exploring the possibility of reanimating a species extinct for thousands of years — the woolly mammoth.
Spielberg meets Einstein.
In “Jurassic Park,” the 1993 blockbuster movie, scientists reintroduced dinosaurs to the ecosystem, and the results were disastrous, the creatures chewing both the scenery and the characters who inhabited it.
Now, the line between reality and fiction has become so blurred that movies no longer manufacture; they document. Fueled by a curiosity as boundless as the universe itself, we have turned the world into our laboratory.
Are we going too far?
George Church does not think so; he is a Harvard genetics professor, acclaimed for his pioneering work in genome sequencing and gene splicing, and he hopes to see a time when mammoths “walk the Arctic tundra again.”
In what he termed a significant breakthrough, he said scientists have created a long-sought stem cell for the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth — the Asian elephant.
“This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project,” Church, who co-founded Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, told NPR.
The creature may not develop a perfect reproduction of the woolly mammoth, but the stem cells will allow scientists to employ cloning techniques that create elephants with mammothlike traits, including the ability to survive in colder climates, Church said.
Through his bioscience and genetics company, scientists are focusing on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by reprogramming the skin cells of Asian elephants into stem cells that contain DNA recovered from the mammoths found in the Arctic.
The genetically engineered embryos could be carried in a surrogate womb, although the details are still sketchy.
“These cells definitely are a great benefit to our de-extinction work,” Eriona Hysolli, the head of biological sciences at Colossal Biosciences, told Live Science.
The problem with such ambitious projects is that technology has outpaced our ability to grasp the moral implications of scientific achievement. Is there any ethicist, no matter how wise or profound, who can argue for or against such projects? Has human achievement exceeded our ability to understand it, to see how it has placed the universe in a different context, both scientifically and morally?
Perhaps the answers lie in the questions. If we have to pose the queries in the first place, the ramifications may be too disturbing, too horrendous, to consider. Knowledge should be tempered by wisdom, and we must know when to rein in our wondrous imaginations — a difficult task, perhaps, for scientists with colossal intellects.
And yet in “Frankenstein,” published more than 200 years ago, Mary Shelley warned of the perils inherent in manufacturing lives, no matter how noble the motives. It’s a force we still do not fully understand, despite the wondrous achievements of scientists. Nature can ground good intentions into dust, and if it does, we must live with the consequences.
“What are you going to get out of this?” asked Karl Flessa, a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona. “First of all, I think you’re going to get a bit of a freak show in a zoo somewhere.”
Asian elephants are endangered, and while Church said the project could help them survive by expanding their habitat and facilitating further study, Flessa is skeptical.
“And then if you’re going to release a herd into the Arctic tundra, is that herd going to go marching off to its second extinction in the face of global warming?” she asked.
If the mammoths are resurrected, could they run amok like the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”? Perhaps. But the danger may be more nuanced, more insidious, than that.
The disappearance of the mammoth upset the ecosystem thousands of years ago, and its reintroduction could change it thousands of years later. Church and his fellow scientists are working on that hypothesis, but we simply do not know, and maybe we should leave it at that.
Bringing back long-gone species may be more more insidious than we can imagine