Science Marches On

What could you do with $15 million? Well, let's see. You could buy sixty $250,000 houses and give them to people in need...you could pay for 745,000 dark meat chicken boxes from Popeye's...you could underwrite the salary of a top professional athlete for a season...or you could revive the woolly mammoth.

Yes, woolly mammoths went on the extinct list 10,000 years ago, but a biologist by the name of George Church has raised $15 million and he wants to bring them back. His plan is to read and edit the DNA code of Asian elephants, who share a common ancestor with the mammoth.

I share a common ancestor with Thomas Jefferson, but you won't see me moving to Virginia! Although they do have nice hams down there.

Church didn't just ride into town on a head of cabbage. He is a Harvard Medical School graduate, and his assertion is that it would only take about fifty changes to the Asian elephant's genomic code, and there would stand your brand new 2022 model mammoth.

 

And because all scientists seem to like to tinker around, Church's plan to to refine his Frankenstein creature so that it can stand up to climate change and find itself genetically fit to live in the Arctic.

“Our goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but it is going to look and behave like a mammoth,” he said. “Not because we are trying to trick anybody, but because we want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40C, and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do.”

Just like the time someone tried to put a Ford V-8 motor on a skateboard, there are still bugs to be worked out. No one before has ever tried to harvest an elephant embryo and then create an artificial womb to bear a baby mammoth during a two-year gestation period. 

Listen, I'm all for science. I have a knee that is basically metal, and some dead person's bone replaced a part of my spine (thank you, anonymous donor!) But is there a need for a new version of the wooly mammoth? I mean, maybe Auburn could use something new for a football team mascot, but beyond that, do we need wooly mammoths parading around the arctic, having seals and penguins and polar bears walking up, saying, "You must be new here..."

Charley Weaver used to tell about a guy who developed a tonic that would grow hair on a billiard ball. He went broke, because no one wanted a hairy billiard ball.