Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  “Sure,” Bobby said. “But it’s hard enough getting live elephant samples. Where do we find elephant stem cells?”

  “Elephant placenta,” Luhan responded.

  Mammalian placenta is rich in stem cells, and placental cells were as young as fetal cells, thus easier to reprogram than adult somatic cells (any biological cell that forms an animal’s body). It was the reason some human couples banked placental tissue after their child’s birth—to freeze stem cells for use in later medical procedures, such as treating leukemia, various cancers such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and nearly eighty other childhood and early adult diseases.

  “You’ve got an elephant placenta lying around?” Quinn asked.

  Luhan smiled, briefly.

  “The next best thing.”

  She turned the laptop toward her, typed in the keywords for another website, and brought up a new video, a live feed of another zoo enclosure. Near the back of the screen, they could just make out what appeared to be a female Asian elephant, her swollen abdomen almost reaching the ground. She was so heavy that it looked as if her knees were about to buckle.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said, quietly.

  “It’s a live cam,” Luhan explained. “Out of Chicago. It’s on twenty-four hours a day. I’ve been watching it on and off for most of the week.”

  “Christ,” Quinn said. “How long has this been running?”

  “I don’t know. An elephant gestates for twenty-two months.”

  Elephants have one of the longest gestation periods of all animals. Eventually, this would become a problem for the Woolly Mammoth Revival—because no matter how quickly they could sequence, synthesize, and implant a gene into a fertilized egg, it would take almost two years for an elephant to give birth.

  “So there are people who actually sit around watching a pregnant elephant online?” Quinn asked.

  “There’s a television channel in the Philippines that just shows an aquarium all day and night,” Bobby said. “People are strange.”

  “What this means,” Luhan interrupted, “is the minute this elephant gives birth, we’ll know. If we can get the zoo to agree, we can get someone to the zoo to get a piece of the placenta. Fresh and ready for use.”

  Bobby thought for a moment.

  “It will only be fresh if we act quickly,” he said. “Which means we’ll have to know right when she goes into labor. We’ll have to be watching this all the time.”

  “I think I might know someone in Chicago who can help us out,” Quinn said. “Won’t cost us much more than the cheapest ticket we can find from O’Hare to Logan.”

  Luhan nodded. Quinn was growing on her. She glanced around the table, at each member of the team, then pointed back at the screen.

  “So who wants to take the first shift?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  April 2013

  Jack Walton had done some pretty strange things to make money in his twenty-eight years of life, and he had put up with a lot of crap to earn a few extra dollars along the way. But as a higher-education lifer—a grad student in the ninth year of what felt like a never-ending Ph.D.—he couldn’t be particularly choosy. He’d worked the door at a strip club in Elgin, Illinois, during his third year in the biology department at U of Chicago. He had locked himself in one of the bathroom stalls while the girls were changing shifts to catch a few extra minutes of work on a paper on unique protein inhibitors found in E. coli bacteria. He’d driven an ice cream truck over two summers, stacking issues of Science and Nature next to the freezer filled with rainbow pops and SpongeBob SquarePants ice cream sandwiches. Just last winter, his fingers chilled to the bone by thirty-mile-per-hour winds and snow that fell in clumps the size of dying angels, he’d sharpened skates and helped tourists lace them up before they tried their luck on a frozen chunk of Lake Michigan,

  But none of the jobs he’d had before had been as absurd as watching an elephant give birth. He’d never done it before—and he damn well never wanted to again.

  Jack was standing near the outer edge of the thick glass enclosure that surrounded the pregnant Asian elephant’s habitat, leaning against a shoulder-high railing. A large white plastic medical-grade cooler was on the ground between his boots. Next to him was one of the zoo hands, a kid barely out of his teens, with curly blond hair and a goofy smile on his face.

  “Incredible, isn’t it,” the kid was saying. “The circle of life.”

  Walton didn’t see anything circular going on, just a lot of blood and mucus and a poor, bulbous elephant crouching uncomfortably on her back legs as the amniotic sac began descending out of her, like a balloon escaping through a valve four sizes too small.

  Walton cringed as the sac inched downward, and the elephant raised her trunk in obvious pain. A half dozen zookeepers surrounded her, coaxing her along. Hundreds more people were watching via the live-feed camera trained on the elephant from near the ceiling of the enclosure. Walton guessed that for a lot of people, like the kid standing next to him, this was a miracle in the making, but to him it was pretty hard to stomach. Then again, there was a reason he’d chosen academia rather than medicine like both of his brothers. He liked the things that were supposed to be inside to stay inside.

  Then again, as the curled-up shape of the baby elephant suddenly became visible, the legs pressing out against the whitish bubble of the sac, he felt a rush of awe. The feeling was short-lived, as a second later, the baby and sac burst out of the mother elephant with the force of a Jacuzzi jet, splashing down to the ground. A stream of thick reddish liquid followed, and Walton quickly averted his eyes as the zoo kid slapped his back.

  “Dude, how cool was that?”

  “It was something. I assume that’s the placenta?”

  Walton turned back toward the enclosure and watched as the mother elephant poked the baby with her trunk and front foot. There was a nerve-racking moment before the baby started moving—then it opened its mouth and made a sound not unlike an infant’s cry.

  “That’s right,” the kid said. “Keep watching, pretty soon he’ll try to stand up. It’s an amazing thing to see . . .”

  “The placenta,” Walton repeated. “Can we go get it now?”

  The kid looked at him in disbelief. “Are you kidding?” he asked.

  As Walton watched the mother hovering over the baby, he noticed that the other zookeepers were keeping their distance as they clapped their hands in joy at what they’d just seen. No matter how excited they were, none of the professionals was moving anywhere near this mother and child.

  “I need it fresh. They were pretty explicit,” said Walton.

  When Justin Quinn had first explained the job to Walton a few days earlier, he had thought it was a joke. Retrieving an elephant placenta and carting it to Boston was bizarre enough, but the reason Quinn and his team wanted the sample was a story Walton would be retelling for years to come. Here he was, toiling away for years on E. coli, and Quinn was playing God with a freaking Woolly Mammoth.

  Sure, it was probably pure fantasy. Walton had met Quinn only once, at a synthetic biology conference in a convention center outside Boston. The kid had struck him as whip smart and superambitious, but he didn’t even have a Ph.D.

  They’d gone out drinking after the conference at some dive bar Quinn knew about in South Boston. They’d met a couple of real winners, a blonde and a brunette who were just bored enough with the local male talent to pretend to be impressed by a pair of biologists who could recite the periodic table by heart. Hell, if Quinn had told his Woolly Mammoth story that night, they might have actually scored, rather than ending up two hours later at a diner by themselves.

  Still, when Quinn had called him a few days ago with the strange job offer, Walton hadn’t even considered turning him down. Two hundred bucks and a round-trip flight to Boston was nothing to sneeze at, considering he had maxed out his credit cards on last month’s rent.

  “Fresh or not,” the zoo kid said, “we’re not getting anywhere near that placenta
for a while.”

  “Why not? I thought Asian elephants were the friendly ones.”

  “Asian elephants are usually pretty docile. I’d even call them friendly. But when an Asian elephant gives birth, that’s another story. They get very protective.”

  Walton raised his eyebrows.

  “Even of their placenta?”

  The kid shrugged.

  “You go in there right now and mess with that elephant, I can’t promise that you’re going to come back out.”

  Walton winced. That sounded pretty definitive.

  “So we wait. How long?”

  The kid gestured toward the mother elephant.

  “Ask her.”

  Christ. Walton could have chosen to work at a real job for a living. His brothers had nice houses and played golf on the weekends. But he had chosen to be a scientist.

  He stood around elephant enclosures with a cooler, waiting to get his hands on some placenta.

  * * *

  Eight hours later, Walton found himself sitting at a bar in a domestic terminal at O’Hare, making eyes at a very pretty flight attendant at a table four feet away. He’d sent her two drinks already, the second of which she was nursing as she talked on her cell phone. She’d smiled at him when the first drink arrived, but since then had pretty much ignored his existence. He was about to write it off as another failed experiment, when she finally put down her phone, downed the rest of drink number two, and slid onto the barstool next to him.

  She introduced herself, Marty something, a pretty name to go with her face. He was in the middle of telling her about himself—well, leaving out the near poverty and the fact that he still lived in a dorm room at twenty-eight—when she glanced down below his feet and saw the huge plastic cooler.

  “You packed refreshments for the flight?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So what’s inside?”

  He thought about making something up. He remembered how one of his brothers used to do transplant runs during med school: He could say he was carrying a heart or a liver—she might have been impressed by that. But for once, he decided the truth was compelling enough.

  “Elephant placenta,” he said.

  When her eyes widened, he grinned.

  “Wait until I tell you what they’re going to do with it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  April 2013

  400 TECHNOLOGY SQUARE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, WARP DRIVE LLC, BIOSAFETY LEVEL TWO REVERSE AIRFLOW LAB, THIRD FLOOR.

  You start off in a sterile changing room. Remove your civilian clothes, fold them up, and jam them into your locker next to your coat and shoes. Then you put on the scrubs. Light blue, elastic band at the waist. Transparent plastic cover over your hair. Latex gloves over your hands, tightened at the wrist. White mask over your mouth and nose.

  Five minutes to get through the first air lock. Ten minutes in the reverse airflow chamber, airborne contaminants filtered through giant vents in the ceiling and floor. Then into the second air lock.

  Finally, you step into a sterile, shiny lab. Everything is white: the cement walls, the smooth, polished floor, the equipment shelves. A glass metropolis of test tubes, beakers, specimen jars, and measuring vessels lined up in rows.

  You head for one of the biosafety cabinets, brand-new, lined in stainless steel, flush with one of the walls. You sit beneath the flow hood, facing a counter partially covered by a glass sash.

  Lined up across the cabinet, your Petri dishes. Tissue cultures, each one containing living Asian elephant cells. The culture medium in the dishes has a pinkish hue.

  The first thing you need to do is express an enzyme—Cas 9, your CRISPR construct. And then you need to feed that enzyme a length of guide RNA. The guide RNA will line the Cas 9 with a specified length of DNA in the elephant cells, like a Band-Aid placed along a skin gash. You’ll place the mixture into a gel electrophoresis unit, hit a button, force a heavy voltage to run through the material to cause the cell membrane to become polarized, allow the DNA inside. Then the Cas 9 will do the rest, slicing through the base pairs at the ends like a microscopic, molecular pair of scissors and inserting the new but ancient DNA into the elephant DNA . . .

  Quinn leaned back in his chair, looking down into the Petri dish, his gloved hands inches above the surface, a tiny pipette hanging from his fingers. The sweat was beading across his forehead and down the back of his neck. It wasn’t just that he had sneaked into his company’s headquarters after hours to work on the Revival project without authorization from his superiors (or from George Church). No matter how practiced he was, this was painstaking, difficult, anxiety-inducing work. After he inserted the CRISPR enzymes, it would be two days before he saw the results. But he was confident that at the very least, they would have proof of concept: They would have inserted a sequence of synthetic Woolly Mammoth genes into an elephant cell.

  And yet Quinn also knew that all of this painstaking work was ultimately futile. Because the cells in the Petri dish in front of him, suspended in the pinkish medium, were not stem cells. Though the placental tissue that his friend from Chicago had provided them had indeed been fresh, they had been unable to generate workable stem cells from the material, no matter how much they harvested.

  A quick search of the literature told them that they were not alone in this failure: It turned out that nobody had successfully generated and manipulated elephant stem cells yet. Mouse stem cells, pig stem cells, even human stem cells had been used in genetic engineering experiments, but never elephant stem cells.

  Luhan had a theory about that. It was widely known that elephants did not get cancer. It was something that researchers couldn’t yet explain—an animal so big, with so many cells replicating at such a rate for so many years, providing so many opportunities for misfires, mutations—elephants should, as a species, be rife with cancer. But cancer in the great gray mammals was exceedingly rare.

  Luhan believed that the same mechanisms that protected the elephant from cancer might be linked to the difficulty in generating their stem cells. Whatever the reason was, it was presenting an enormous roadblock in their work. Not only did they need stem cells if they were eventually going to get the genetic traits of the Woolly Mammoth to express themselves in a growing embryo, there also were finite limits to how much they could experiment with nonstem elephant cells, whether they were skin, blood, or placenta. Living cells, no matter what animal they came from, could divide only a specific number of times before the telomeres that held them together withered and broke, and no longer provided the necessary protection to the genetic material. In human cells, it was known as the “Hayflick limit”: Human fetal cells could divide and replicate only a certain number of times—between forty and sixty—before they stopped dividing and aged. Elephant cells had the same limitation.

  Stem cells, on the other hand—human, elephant, and other animals—did not fall under the Hayflick limit. They could divide—and survive—indefinitely. In fact, it was one of their two main properties: They could self-renew, and were thus immortal. And they were “pluripotent”—which meant they could turn into any other kind of cell, giving rise to everything from skin, to hair, to hemoglobin.

  Which meant that, without stem cells, the Woolly Mammoth Revivalists would never be able to see if their genetic implantation was actually working; their cells would die before any visible traits could be expressed.

  And yet, alone in the lab in Church’s start-up in Cambridge, Quinn didn’t feel frustrated. Quite the opposite, he was elated. And it wasn’t simply the fact that he had sneaked the work into Warp Drive—it wasn’t a safety issue, just bureaucracy—and wasn’t really supposed to be part of the Church Lab at all that was sending adrenaline through his veins.

  He was doing real, frontline science. In that pipette was a string of DNA that hadn’t existed, alive, in thousands of years. Even though it would end up little more than a tiny shift in a single elephant cell trapped in a Petri dish, it was a momentous moment. The
fact that it was, so far, a failure in the greater scheme of things meant very little. Failure was an important part of the scientific process. It was failure that spurred science toward innovation.

  This was where they were: They could put their synthetic genes into elephant cells.

  It was a start, but it wasn’t enough.

  Luhan, Bobby, and Margo were feeling the same mixture of frustration and delight, and asking themselves the same questions.

  Had they hit a wall they couldn’t breach?

  Or was there some other way to go?

  PART FOUR

  There’s a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It’s kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don’t know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

  —GEORGE M. CHURCH

  You can’t just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world.

  —GEORGE M. CHURCH

  People think it’s great to be ahead of your time, but it can actually be quite painful.

  —GEORGE M. CHURCH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  May 2013

  MUUS KHAYA, SAKHA REPUBLIC, SIBERIA, ELEVATION—PARTWAY TO A PEAK OF 9,708 FEET.

  Three hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.

  Geneticist Jy Minh, senior scientist of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation out of Seoul, South Korea, crouched low behind the row of sandbags at the edge of the natural ice cave. He pressed his hands tight over his ears, waiting for the first charge to go off. No matter how prepared he was for the moment, no matter how carefully he had supervised the placement of the tapered explosive pills, how painstakingly he’d checked and rechecked the detonation caps, he couldn’t keep his mind from reviewing all the things that could go wrong. What if he’d miscalculated the strength of the chemical explosive, or the sturdiness of the cave roof? What if he’d set the charges in the wrong place, or had missed something on the ultrasound readings they’d made of the cave wall? What if, somehow, he was about to blow them all to hell?