Undoing Extinction? How Russia Plans to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth

I originally posted this article on Medium.com. It's a subject I'm fascinated by, so I'm also posting it here!

I was a kid when Jurassic Park came out, allowing me and many other moviegoers to see, for the first time, how a living and breathing dinosaur might have actually looked and acted. These weren’t stop-motion monstrosities, nor were they the way-too-flexible appearing CGI creatures we often see in blockbuster films today. Moreover, unlike in Jurassic World, these dinosaurs looked like they were living in a park that actually could exist in the real world.

Now, we’ve learned a lot more about dinosaurs since that first film hit theaters. We know that many of them had feathers, for example. We also know that we cannot use the same methods as the films to extract dinosaur DNA for cloning, although we have recently discovered some soft tissue. It seemed like cloning any prehistoric animals was off the table for the longest time, but then the permafrost in Siberia started to melt…

Before you get excited, the permafrost melting is far from a good thing. It’s creating greenhouse gas bubbles that could hurt our planet very badly, and the ground that currently traps these bubbles looks more than a balloon than the earth! The amount of carbon beneath the stores of permafrost is estimated to be twice that which is in the atmosphere.

But how did Siberia wind up in such bad shape?

Tens of thousands of years ago, the woolly mammoth, mastodon, woolly rhino, and other Pleistocene creatures roamed Europe. With so many large, heavy animals wandering about, you can imagine the effect they had on the landscape. They tramped bushes, uprooted trees, and kept the area looking less like a forest and more like a frozen savanna.

Since the extinction of these animals, the landscape has changed radically and gradually warmed. For most of civilization, this wasn’t a problem, but scientists are now realizing that the extinction of the Pleistocene ecosystem is about to cause Earth some mammoth-sized problems.

Russian scientists began gradually reintroducing Pleistocene-like conditions in select areas of The Siberian Arctic, which Russia calls Pleistocene Park. It’s currently home to thriving herds of musk ox, bison, horses, reindeer, and yaks, not to mention select predator animals to keep the numbers in check. The idea was to see whether these animals alone really could replicate the Pleistocene landscape, and if they could, would it really cool temperatures?

As it turns out, the experiment has been successful! The return to grasslands has actually cooled the landscape by reflecting sunlight, thus less heat manages to penetrate the ground. The only problem is that they need larger animals — something like an elephant.

The idea of cloning something like a mammoth sounded like science fiction for the longest, but if anything good has come from the melting permafrost it’s the mostly intact carcasses of creatures such as mammoths and cave lions it’s uncovered.

One such mammoth was Buttercup. She was a young mammoth who lived some 40,000 years ago, and when she, unfortunately, died before her time, her body was perfectly preserved. By body, I mean her blood included. A vial of blood was successfully extracted, and for the first time the idea of cloning a mammoth, or at least creating a hybrid of modern elephant and mammoth, became something feasible.

The race is now on, with researchers from Russia, Harvard, and even South Korea all rushing to be the first to clone or hybridize a woolly mammoth, bringing this long-extinct marvel into the modern world.

In one corner is Hwang Woo-suk of Sooam Biotech, a South Korean veterinarian and cloning expert. He was unfortunately convicted of embezzlement and served a two-year suspended sentence in 2004, and his company, which claimed to have cloned human embryos, was found to have falsified data. He’s making a comeback and working to undo his previous mistakes, however.

His approach to cloning a mammoth (he’s going for full-on cloning, not hybridizing) is to first start with cloning a prehistoric horse. He’s still on the search for a live cell from a frozen Pleistocene horse but believes if he can handle that, he can easily handle a mammoth.

Then we have George Church from Harvard teaming up with Russian scientists, who also says he can clone a Neanderthal if only a willing woman would step up. His goal is to create a mammoth-Asian elephant hybrid as a good first step. He’s using CRISPR to edit the genome of an elephant, essentially by copying and pasting the genes he believes are responsible for what made the woolly mammoth, well, woolly. Not to mention store fat in specific ways to stay warm!

So while we may not have a Jurassic Park anytime soon, we may well have a functioning Pleistocene Park!