Woolly

May 15, 2017
In this dramatized narrative of advances in biotechnology, Mezrich (The 37th Parallel) plunges readers into the Siberian wilderness and the “beautiful chaos” of the Harvard laboratory of George Church, one of the world’s leading geneticists. Mezrich attempts to lend a thriller’s pace to a five-million-year-old story about the extinction and attempted reintroduction of the woolly mammoth. However, early on he gets stuck on a track devoted to Church, an originator of the Human Genome Project. After lumbering over Church’s biography, Mezrich flings readers back to Siberia and into the company of six captured elk that are en route to an arctic refuge where a father-and-son team of scientists, with the aid of pile drivers and a WWII tank, are returning a swath of tundra to its Pleistocene state. Mezrich’s portrayal of these men and their work is disappointingly thin. Instead of fleshing out the work of the Siberian team, the story shifts back to Boston with vignettes about Church’s growing woolly-mammoth-revival team, new competition from South Korea, and petri dishes containing 14 woolly organoids—the building blocks of the future mammoth. Mezrich handles the ethics of de-extinction with the same lightness he uses to describe the science; the result is an unsatisfying book. Agency: WME.

June 1, 2017
A tale of the resurrection of the woolly mammoth and how "biology and genetics [have] gone from passive observation to active creation."Bestselling author Mezrich (Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs, 2016, etc.) is a fine storyteller who likes offbeat topics. Film producers snap up his books (The Social Network, 21), including this one. The author describes this one as a "dramatic narrative account," and he opens with something out of a Michael Crichton novel: 3,000 years ago, a 200-pound mammoth calf is born, and he's "the last of his kind." Fast-forward to today, where we meet Dr. George Church--"fast becoming the face of the genetic revolution"--in his lab at Harvard Medical School. This is his story as well as the story of the many graduate students working with him on genetic engineering. Their goal is to genetically engineer synthetically sequenced woolly mammoth genes in Asian elephant cells. Meanwhile, Sergey Zimov, a Russian scientist, has been working at his own science center in Siberia studying the permafrost, a "land mass covering as much as 20 percent of the Earth's surface." Zimov's research revealed that it "held a devastating secret"--it was a "ticking time bomb." As the Arctic warms, the permafrost begins to melt, releasing carbon dioxide and methane gas into the air. Eventually, it would "release more carbon than would be created by burning all the forests on Earth three times over," an event that "could suffocate the world." If, Church speculated, a new generation of mammoths could be created and returned to their Siberian grazing grounds, then maybe the ecology of the late Pleistocene could be re-created and defuse the bomb. Mezrich recounts Church's career and accomplishments in genetics as he works toward achieving this lofty goal. Along the way, he also highlights important issues in wildlife conservation. There's a lot of science here, but on the whole, Mezrich does a good job of making it accessible. An enthralling story only occasionally inhibited by languorous prose.

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March 1, 2017
Directed by a world-class geneticist, a bunch of young scientists sequence the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth, splice elements of the sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant, and dream of bringing back a creature long ago hunted to extinction. Not escapist fiction but reality, as reported by New York Times best-selling author Mezrich.

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