Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  Of course, his thoughts were absurd. The preparations for this moment had taken weeks and had involved dozens of scientists from South Korea and Russia. Minh himself had spent most of the past ten days climbing up and down the winding trail from their base camp, situated in a small clearing halfway down Muus Khaya, checking and rechecking his calculations. Today alone, he’d been in the ice cave since five in the morning, ignoring the growing numbness in his fingers and toes as he readied his team for the final moments of the excavation project.

  Minh hated the cold, and he couldn’t wait to get back to the relative comfort of camp. A canvas tent fortified with yak fur, as desperate as it seemed, was leagues better than a frozen hole carved into the face of one of the northernmost mountains in the world. Minh could tell, by the graying sky peeking through the heavy clouds that dominated the view from the cave’s opening, that it would already be getting dark by the time he made his way down to camp. And the temperature would drop even further, maybe ten or twenty degrees, which would slow his descent to a crawl, even with the assistance of the pair of Yakut hunters he’d added to his team just days ago.

  Minh didn’t relish the idea of climbing down in the dark, but the idea of spending the night in the ice cave was even more distasteful. A scientist, a geneticist by training, Minh certainly didn’t believe in ghosts. But he couldn’t help thinking that if apparitions did exist, this was exactly where you’d find them.

  “Ten seconds,” one of the demolition experts from his team called out, from behind another wall of sandbags a few feet closer to the ice wall. “Base camp has been notified, the director has given the go-ahead. Beginning countdown.”

  “Ten. Nine. Eight.”

  Minh hunched lower, his face just inches from the solid, blue-tinged floor of the cave. Despite the cold, the place was physically beautiful. Minh could still remember the moment when he’d first made the climb up the mountain and set his eyes on the natural geological formation, taking in the sheer walls and floor, the arched ceiling nearly twenty feet above. Aside from a sprouting of stalagmites near the inside corner of the cavern, and a pile of debris from a past avalanche that had to be cleared out, partially obscuring the opening of the cave from outside view, the cave had looked like this—pristine, frozen, timeless—for tens of thousands of years. It was a perfectly preserved time machine just waiting for his team to stumble through the yawn of the cave’s mouth.

  A cave halfway up Muus Khaya had not been Minh’s or his team’s first choice for their expedition. The task of moving equipment up and down the rough trail to base camp—let alone transporting whatever specimens they’d manage to recover, via all-terrain vehicles, to the airfield in Teply Klyuch, for the trip back to Seoul—made it a logistical nightmare. Their original plan had been simpler and more elegant—and it had worked. With the assistance of the Russian military, they’d taken boats down the Yana River and used enormous fire hoses to blast holes in the icy cliff faces that lined the banks. They’d made some incredible finds, gathering many wonderful specimens for the foundation’s labs. Minh would have been content with what the hoses and man-made caves had provided, until he heard the stories from the handful of Yakut hunters they’d hired to help them along the Yana: stories of a natural cave, containing specimens much better preserved than anything they’d retrieved by blasting ice with their hoses.

  That first day up Muus Khaya, Minh had learned to trust the Yakuts. Minutes after entering the natural ice cave, he’d found his first specimens: two Siberian cave lion cubs, in nearly perfect condition, buried under only a few feet of clear, bluish ice. More than twelve thousand years old, and yet so untouched and undamaged that it seemed they might spring up onto their feet at any moment. Thrilled to his core, Minh had managed to put off celebrating long enough to bring in the portable ultrasound devices and begin scanning the floor and walls for potential other finds. And that’s when he’d made an even bigger discovery.

  “Seven.”

  “Six.”

  “Five.”

  Minh began to tremble, resisting the urge to raise his head above the sandbags, to check the charges one last time. Even without looking, he could picture them, positioned in a small ring affixed to a section of the back wall of the cave, right against the floor. Just enough explosives to blast away a cone-shaped section of the ice, to a depth of precisely nine feet.

  “Four.”

  “Three.”

  “Two.”

  It wasn’t ancient lion cubs that had brought Minh to the Arctic, or had sent his team up and down the Yana blasting caves into the ice. To be sure, the cubs were a fantastic find—they had already been sent back to the labs at the foundation, and the scientists had already begun harvesting the extinct animals’ well-preserved cells. But Minh’s superiors in Seoul had a much larger target in mind than simply attempting to revive an extinct species.

  As a senior geneticist at the foundation for the past five years, Minh understood, better than most, how far his company’s cloning technology had advanced since the scandal that had nearly shut down the company more than ten years ago. Sooam itself was best known for its business of cloning dogs for profit, charging clients, mostly wealthy Americans, one hundred thousand dollars a pop to bring beloved pets back to life via a cloning factory that could turn a skin sample into a viable canine embryo, but the foundation had advanced the art of cloning to include many large mammals for altruistic purposes, from cloned pigs that might one day aid in the cure of diabetes to cloned cows that could solve the world’s hunger problems. And yet, no matter how far the foundation had come—leading the world in cloning science—it couldn’t wash away the stain from a decade ago.

  Minh could still remember the photos from the newspapers, days after the foundation’s founder, Hwang Woo Suk, had been expelled from his professorship at Seoul National University, his laboratory raided by government agents, his awards and accolades rescinded. Just a few years earlier, Hwang had risen to international fame by publishing a couple of papers in Science, announcing that he had cloned the first human embryo, creating a stem cell line that could be used for everything from curing disease to growing organs for transplant. But shortly after the announcement, rumors began to circulate that Hwang had reached this achievement using eggs donated by his own grad students—that in fact, he had personally brought at least one student to the harvesting table—raising enormous ethical questions about the voluntary nature of those donations. Even worse, most of the data in his two articles allegedly were falsified. More than just a simple fudging of numbers, it appeared that Hwang’s team hadn’t successfully cloned human embryos at all.

  Facing jail time, Hwang was photographed collapsed in a hospital bed, unshaven, suffering from depression and exhaustion. The incident was still considered to be one of the biggest scientific frauds in history.

  And yet, somehow, Sooam Biotech Research Foundation had survived, crawling out of the hole Hwang had dug, building on the cloning science he had developed. Hwang himself was still at the helm of the company—reclusive, refusing to give interviews, silently building his business in the hopes of reclaiming his standing in the scientific community. To Minh, Sooam was at the forefront of commercial cloning, pushing the science beyond the laboratory on a daily basis. Dolly the sheep was an experiment; Sooam’s cloned canines were a real-world, profitable, and in Minh’s mind, noble application.

  It was those efforts—a formerly lauded scientist, at the forefront of a new technology, trying to rebuild his reputation—that had led Minh to where he was now. Down on his hands and knees behind sandbags against a floor of solid ice, he was waiting for explosives to reveal something so big that it would erase the biggest scandal in scientific history.

  “One.”

  Minh shut his eyes against the searing flash of white light. Then the sound hit him—a vicious crack, like that of a huge leather whip inches from his ears. It nearly rolled him over. Steadying himself, he rose above the sandbags.

  The demolition
tech was already pushing past the small piles of crumbled ice and rock that had been blown out of the precise hole, using gloved hands to clear the last few mounds of debris. Then the man stood back, giving Minh a clear view of what the blast had revealed.

  Even from across the cave, he could see the thick clump of red hair. His heart raced at the sight. The images he’d seen on the ultrasound had been confirmed. The sample was likely to be well preserved, judging from the state of the prehistoric cave lion cubs that he collected. This natural, frozen time machine of a cave was the best environment for finding what they needed.

  Most geneticists did not believe that any prehistoric cells found in the Arctic could survive the tens of thousands of years of radiation that had followed their entombment. The DNA in the cells in the specimen in front of Minh could have deteriorated too much to be useful in any cloning experiment. But Hwang and others scientists at the foundation believed that there was still a way to clone an extinct animal:

  They didn’t need an intact or undamaged cell, just a single intact nucleus, which was more likely to be found in a well-preserved specimen.

  Minh took a step forward from behind the sandbags, his legs trembling as he approached the red mound of fur. He could see that the specimen was almost entirely intact. A calf, from the size of it, curled in a fetal position, thick legs crooked beneath its body, its head still partially covered in ice.

  Cloning an entire Woolly Mammoth from a single nucleus would be an enormous achievement. And if they could somehow do it before anyone else—before the Americans, who, like everyone else, were now fully armed with the power of CRISPR—the foundation wouldn’t just be resurrecting one of the world’s most impressive creatures, Hwang and his scientists at the foundation would be redeeming themselves, reviving their own reputations, right along with it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Late Spring 2013

  TWO HUNDRED FEET ABOVE THE PLACID WATER OF A GLACIER-FED LAKE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, PACIFIC NORTHWEST.

  A DH-6 de Havilland Otter seaplane banked left over a liquid glade of pure azure, barely two hundred yards from a jutting wooden dock that was its destination. The steel propellers purred against a fine spray kicked up by the twin pontoons’ closeness to the surface of the lake. Inside the lavishly refitted cabin of the plane, Luhan held tight to the cushioned seat beneath her. It was only twelve hours ago that she’d left her apartment in Boston. Here she was, looking out the window at a scene ripped from a postcard, surrounded by leather furniture, cherrywood paneling, and even a crystal and glass bar that would not have been out of place in the presidential suite of a Four Seasons hotel. The guy sitting next to her was some sort of nuclear physicist, the two young men behind her were Silicon Valley millionaires, and the private resort she was heading toward would be chock-full of more of the same.

  As the plane hit a pocket of air and jerked up, then down, her fingers whitened as she clenched her seat. She wasn’t afraid of flying, and she wasn’t afraid of water, although putting the two things together seemed a little mad. But then again, nothing about this trip could be described as normal.

  When Dr. Church had offered her the opportunity to represent the Church Lab at a prestigious and exclusive annual private gathering of scientists, businessmen, and forward thinkers from a multitude of tech-related industries, Luhan had jumped at the chance.

  The first leg of this junket, the flight from Boston to San Francisco, had taken place on a luxury private jet. Not from Logan, but from a gated private airfield thirty minutes north of the city. No TSA agents, no baggage check—just a polite woman glancing at her passport as she boarded a silver, bullet-shaped airplane, its sleek interior appointed with wood cabinetry.

  Then the jet had taken off, rising almost vertically over the runway, the acceleration pressing her back into her soft lounge chair so hard she nearly spilled her glass of champagne. There were seat-belt lights and a stewardess on board, but nobody made an announcement about tray tables or turning off electronic devices. Her cell phone had worked the entire flight, and she’d sent so many texts to Bobby and the rest of the team, they’d probably thought she’d gone insane.

  A few hours later, she’d landed, after a nearly vertical descent. By the time she boarded the Otter she felt as if she were living someone else’s life. Biologists didn’t travel in leather-lined seaplanes to resorts on glacial lakes in British Columbia.

  She was considering asking the physicist what he thought, when her ruminations were interrupted by a loud splash. She was jolted forward, as plumes of water spouted outside her window. Then the plane slowed until it was bobbing gently on the lake, still a ways from the dock. The door to the cockpit swung open and the uniformed copilot/steward for the short trip smiled at her and the rest of the passengers.

  “Welcome to Canada.” He smiled amiably. “If you could please keep your seat belts fastened as we paddle toward the dock, that would be much appreciated.”

  Looking out the window, Luhan could see that a caravan of SUVs was waiting, engines running.

  * * *

  Nine the next morning, and Luhan had already been up for more than four hours, most of that time spent outside in the woods, breathing air that seemed supernaturally clean and pleasantly overoxygenated. She’d hiked through redwoods and up cliff faces; she’d traversed part of the lake on an elegant little sailboat; and she’d had Italian coffee and expensive French pastries brought to her as she sat on a makeshift viewing platform, watching through a pair of high-powered binoculars as a bear caught fish in a nearby stream.

  She had been so inspired by everything she’d seen that she’d almost forgotten about the frustrations back at the lab, the wall they’d run into involving elephant stem cells. The failure was doubly difficult to face, after all the progress she’d made on the other components of their work. The Mammoth sequence they’d gotten from the Reich lab had been accurate enough for their uses, and she’d had no problem finding matches for the four major traits they had been searching for—ears, subcutaneous fat, hemoglobin, and hair. She’d also found many of the other traits they hoped to implant in their elephant cells—mostly related to hair length and growth, and cold-weather survival. The CRISPR technique had proved suited to the job, and Quinn had demonstrated that the synthetic genes they’d created could indeed be cut into the DNA in the elephant cells. But since they didn’t have usable stem cells, they couldn’t go any further than that. Without generatable stem cells, they could implant DNA from a Woolly Mammoth into an elephant, but it wouldn’t generate Woolly Mammoth traits; they needed stem cells in order to make an elephant a Woolly Mammoth.

  Still, seeing the bear in its natural habitat was quite compelling, even though a bear wasn’t nearly as compelling to her as a dragon.

  When she entered the Western-themed restaurant at the five-starred resort, her thoughts were back on the Woolly Mammoth. If they somehow figured out how to get past their lack of stem cells, somehow did manage to generate the Mammoth traits from the inserted genes, what then? At the first meeting of the Revivalists, that was as far as they had needed to go, but to complete the task Church had set for them, they would have to think even farther along the timeline. They would have to place those stem cells into a fertilized egg, then place the egg into an elephant’s womb. The Woolly Mammoth Revival team could spend years using CRISPR to put genes into cells, but that alone wouldn’t provide them with a baby Woolly Mammoth.

  Between now and Church’s end goal of Pleistocene Park, on the other side of the world, they were going to need a fertilized egg and a viable womb. Then they would need a place to take care of a pregnant elephant, and if they were lucky, the baby that came next.

  Luhan shook her head, to bring her mind back to her lunch meeting. Moving through the restaurant—wagon wheels on the wall and a pair of shotguns hanging from brass hooks near the ceiling—she remembered what Bobby had said about science fiction being real only when you removed the fiction. During the flight to San Francisco, she�
�d spent some time leafing through articles that had recently come up on her iPad’s newsfeed about what her team jokingly called “the competition”—the South Korean company that had just announced its own efforts to clone a Woolly Mammoth from frozen material they’d pulled from the Arctic ice. Apparently, they had partnered with a Russian university, and perhaps the Russian government, to try to find genetic material that had somehow been preserved well enough for cloning to be possible.

  Like her mentor, Luhan doubted that their efforts could succeed. She couldn’t imagine they would find any usable DNA in organic material from thousands of years ago. Dr. Hwang, with his scandalous past, was motivated to make such a grand announcement. But no matter how good a Mammoth looked coming out of the ice, its cells and DNA were likely too degraded to be usable.

  Then again, as Church had told his lab over and over, nothing in science was to be written off—nothing was impossible. Motivation—whether it was reputation, profit, ego, or altruism—could spur awe-inspiring innovation.

  Luhan reached a long table that dominated the middle of the restaurant and took the one empty seat. A youthful man was sitting next to her: short brown hair, deep-set blue eyes, wearing a suit over a white button-down shirt, open at the collar. Over the next several minutes, half a dozen people came up to him to shake his hand and try to engage him. It was obvious he was someone important. But it wasn’t until he introduced himself that Luhan realized she was sitting next to one of the richest men in the world, Peter Thiel.

  Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund had organized this annual meeting at the Canadian’s resort, and the enigmatic billionaire had been a financial presence, both philanthropic and for profit, in genetics and medical science for quite some time. The gathered entrepreneurs and scientists represented just a handful of those whose work Thiel found intriguing.