Can rewilding rescue the permafrost?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, cloning, DNA, woolly mammoths, rewilding

All the people in Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive one of History's Most Iconic Extinct Creatures are real, as are all the events prior to the last two chapters. Author Ben Mezrich used interviews and published materials to produce a narrative that recounts events over the past half century or so—though mostly over the past twenty-odd years—leading into a concerted effort to produce the DNA needed to revive the species Mammuthus primigenius, the Woolly Mammoth.

The main protagonist is Dr. George Church, a very active and productive genetic researcher. If you've heard his name at all, it is probably in connection with the Human Genome Project. Dr. Church is somewhat self-effacing compared to others who "got famous". Famous or not, he is a prime problem-solver, and gathers problem-solvers around him. That's what you need to tackle a project like this.

I was most intrigued by a side theme of the book, the rewilding of Siberia and possibly northern Canada, with the aim of restoring the permafrost. This entails gathering not just extinct pachyderms, but a number of living cold-adapted herbivores such as Musk Oxen. As I understand it, the large mammals of the Pleistocene fauna could churn the upper surface of the ground, which tends to allow the winter chill to make new permafrost in wintertime but blocks solar heating in summertime. The idea is to keep the huge carbon stores of the permafrost from being oxidized and thus adding many-fold to the greenhouse heating being caused by extra carbon dioxide already released by our burning of fossil fuels. That idea alone was enough to push Dr. Church over the threshold from "We can revive the Mammoth, but should we?" to "We can and we should!"

The larger key idea of the book is the concept, not of simply "finding" mammoth DNA, but learning enough from the DNA sequence to determine the key differences between mammoth DNA and Asian elephant DNA, so as to rewrite critical sections of an elephant genome and thus produce a viable mammoth ovum.

The book ends with a scene of the first mammoth returned to Siberia, perhaps as early as about 2020. However, in an epilogue by Dr. Church, he considers a more realistic figure to be 15-20 years from now. Considering the number of breakthroughs already made, a living mammoth might appear sooner than that. Producing a herd of them will take longer, but a herd is needed to have a useful effect on Siberian (or Canadian) permafrost.

Killer Armadillos

kw: book reviews, science fiction, cloning, genetic creation

A cover blurb from Alternative Words boasts, "Better than Jurassic Park!" Better how? More guts and gore! Stronger soldiers! More cussing! Bigger weapons! Stupider politicians!! Fiercer monsters! Even less likely plot twists! More dastardly betrayals! Prettier scientists in peril!

As a cliffhanger yarn, The Genesis Protocol by Dayton Ward is hard to beat. While Michael Crichton's novels have thrills aplenty, Dayton Ward's books are like the X-Games compared to the Olympics. (By the way, with me that isn't a plus)

The premise: It all began with an innocent idea, "Let's make a jungle in an isolated Utah desert area, where plants and animals that can metabolize pollutants can be developed"—by direct DNA creation, apparently. Of course, nothing funded by Washington can get away without the military getting a horn in. And of course, as the techniques are perfected, the generals get more and better, and more scary, ideas of how to use them.

Thus, the book begins with this secret jungle, full of all kinds of lab-created plants and animals, that has become quite risky to even enter, because of the toxins there the creatures are adapted to ingest, and their own toxic by-products from such ingestion. At that point, I find myself asking, "OK, I thought the idea was to turn poison into water, air, and salt. What's the idea of making bad poisons into worse ones?!?"

The culmination is a set of animals termed "harbingers", supposedly so named for a Victor Harbin, the main military meddler in the background. Of course, for once, you can see the author's machination here, naming a character such that he can name his chief monsters a word meaning "one going before" and "omen". Opens the door to a dandy sequel, no doubt, as does the final chapter, even more.

As science, of course, it is infinitely less plausible than anything in "Jurassic Park", which is already on the bleeding edge of infeasible (see The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World by Rob Desalle & David Lindley). As an escapist adventure story, however, it's quite a romp for the rough at heart.