Woolly by Ben Mezrich

Author:Ben Mezrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Early 2013

Two days later, Bobby wasn’t smiling after cold-calling zoos and conservation parks, trying to get access to elephant tissue. He held a desktop phone against his ear and listened to the braying of the zoo manager on the other end of the line. Bobby was hoping to get a word in before the manager worked himself past all reasoning, but the guy wasn’t even pausing to breathe, his words were just running into one another like a train jumped free from its tracks.

“No,” he said, finally breaking into the frenzied zoo manager’s monologue. “We aren’t going to clone your elephants. We just need a little sample for our experiments . . .

“No, we aren’t going to kill any elephants. Why would we want to kill elephants . . . ?

“Yes, I have seen that movie. Yes, the dinosaurs were very frightening . . .

“Yes, I’ve seen that movie, too. No, we aren’t trying to make scary mutant animals . . .”

He considered hanging up, but he’d already introduced himself as a member of the Church Lab and didn’t want to appear rude. He felt a certain level of responsibility—especially since he was sitting in Church’s office, in Church’s chair.

It hadn’t been his choice to make the calls from there; he’d have been perfectly happy using his cell phone in the café. But Luhan had convinced him he’d sound more official if there wasn’t a din of background chatter behind him. And besides, Church wouldn’t be returning to the office anytime soon.

At the moment, Church was off putting out a huge public relations fire, tangentially related to the Woolly Mammoth Revival project and his work on de-extinction. As Bobby understood it, the problem arose from an interview Church had given to the German magazine Der Spiegel back in January. The interviewer had taken note of a passage in Church’s most recent book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, which had laid out the idea of de-extinction and the science that would allow them to revive the Woolly Mammoth, as well as other extinct species. One of those species Church had mused about in the book was the Neanderthal. After explaining the steps of genetic engineering necessary to revive the Woolly Mammoth, the passage read:

The same technique would work for the Neanderthal, except that you’d start with a stem cell genome from a human adult and gradually reverse engineer it into the Neanderthal genome or a reasonably close equivalent. . . . If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp—or by an extremely adventurous female human.

After the interview was published, it was distorted, in Church’s view, by the MIT Technology Review to make it seem as if Church had already moved well beyond theory in his work—and the Review essentially placed a “Want Ad” for women who would carry to term a Neanderthal baby. Church was at a Martin Luther King’s Day barbecue when his cell phone rang.

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