The Human Age (21 page)

Using Gurdon and Yamanaka’s pluripotent stem-cell work, the Clarkes discovered how the Ark’s frozen cargo could repopulate extinct or nearly extinct herds.

“It means we can make any tissue, including eggs and sperm,” Bryan says. “Now, the importance of that is extraordinary, because you could, in principle anyway, reconstruct an entire organism, even
when it’s gone. The Japanese, among others, are trying to implant a woolly mammoth embryo into an elephant which would then give birth to it. There are a lot of mammoths frozen in the permafrost. . . . Of course not for long, because it’s melting.”

Even after ten thousand years of icy slumber, these mammoths are still a treasure trove of frozen DNA, and Bryan assures me that they’d survive freezing for even longer periods of time, and still be viable, if the right method was used.

“I’m very keen at the moment on the idea of freeze-drying cells, you know, like your coffee.”

I try not to picture a jar of freeze-dried woolly mammoth crystals on a shelf beside a jar of dodo crystals, rather like in a country store, but it’s no use.

“The habitat up there in Siberia might be just fine.” Bryan settles back deeper into his chair. “The question then is: What do you do with the mammoth when you’ve got it?! That’s a sort of quandary. Is it better to have two mammoths so they can reproduce and restore the species? I think that would be fun,” he says, clearly charmed by the idea, “and I think they would find habitats they can live in.”

It’s delightful to imagine twenty-first-century woollies, born from elephant mothers (rather surprised at their shaggy offspring?), thunder-stomping through Siberia, maybe sounding an alarm when startled by a de-extincted saber-toothed tiger.

Yet, as we know, mothers teach their babies all kinds of things; our newborn woollies wouldn’t have a mammoth culture. Perhaps they’d imprint on their new mothers like baby ducks and adopt the elephant’s ear-flapping semaphore and yen for dust-baths. Or would they be raised like endangered baby sandhill cranes, who are fed and taught crane behaviors by white-costumed humans flying ultralights? So they’d be woolly mammoths, but not exactly. These mammoths would probably also not have the ancient ancestral suite of woolly mammoth
bacterial DNA in their gut and on their skin—the tumbling parasites and symbiotic companions that help make us whole, although Ann tells me it might be possible to revive mammoth bacterial DNA, since, if the tissue is frozen, there’s a good chance the tiny piggybacked frozen smidges of bacteria that went with it would be there, too.

So woolly mammoths and golden toads and baiji dolphins and North American camels might all haunt the Earth again. Or perhaps less controversially, the cells might be used to insert more genetic variety into dwindling populations of almost-extinct animals. Saving animals on the brink by diversifying their genome doesn’t bother most people; it’s a far cry from reincarnating dead ones.

I’m intrigued by the idea of resurrecting Neanderthals, having learned recently that we
Homo sapiens
harbor between 1 and 3 percent Neanderthal DNA, and when I ask Ann her thoughts on the matter, she’s clearly fascinated by the mystery.

“I hope I’m a very large amount of Neanderthal!” she says, eyes sparkling. “I mean, how fascinating is it? And it appears to be all in the white Anglo-Saxon gene pool! Maybe
we’re
the thick ones. I worry a bit about those guys. Did we polish them all off—or did they die in the cold, or something? I mean if we polished them all off—that’s terrible.”

Her enthusiasm is refreshing, and I must say, she’s the first person I’ve met who longs to be part Neanderthal, though one of her countrymen, William Golding, wrote a poignantly picturesque novel,
The Inheritors
, narrated from the perspective of the last Neanderthal as his species was being exterminated by our quick, sly, talkative
Homo sapiens
progenitors.

“And in the case of some wonderful extinct animal . . .”

“Saber-toothed tiger?” she offers with clear relish.

“Yes! But would there still be a habitat for saber-toothed tigers?”

“Well, that’s debatable. But I personally think biodiversity is good—and if we could bring back some species that we have made extinct, I think I’d rather see them gamboling about in the fields of Kent, or in a woods, than not at all.”

Although that’s as far as she’ll go, Ann realizes that it’s something the Ark will need to think about. They could resurrect the woolly mammoth
or saber-toothed tiger or dodo or anything else that’s extinct. But they’ve decided, for the moment, to stop when they collect the genetic material. With the DNA of two million to seven million species still to back up, their project is far from finished.

“But it won’t stop there,” she says with a sibylline smile.

As we well know (think of the cannibal snails on Moorea), introducing new species can have unexpected consequences. And, yes, de-extinction is a divisive topic, even among the diverse members of the Frozen Ark’s own consortium. A chief concern from naysayers is that it would divert attention from the serious work of conservation—protecting animals and ecosystems from going extinct in the first place. Critics also worry about the DNA of extinct species weaving through wild populations as ancient newcomers, a different kind of invasive species, one from the past. Both concerns are undoubtedly valid. I’m also troubled by how de-extinction plays into an increasingly mercantile view of life in which most anything is disposable and replaceable by a newer synthetic model. On the other hand, like Ann, I’d really love to see a formerly extinct zebralike creature “gamboling in the fields of Kent.”

Collecting DNA is one thing; agreeing on what to do with it is another. From the Frozen Ark’s point of view, there is enough work saving the DNA. Future generations can decide what to do with it in light of the new technologies that emerge. What began as an effort to bank the DNA of only the most endangered animals has now evolved into an urgent banking of whole ecosystems. The Ark goes into an area and collects everything that crawls, flies, scampers, or slithers. In a tropical rainforest with its thick canopy, groups of people spread sheets underneath a tree, and they
shake
it. As I picture raining insects, frogs, snails, and moths, I feel sure Ann finds the shaking and collecting great fun. I know I would. We haven’t named more than about 65 percent of the biomass of all the species on Earth. So, yes,
shake
it down, and freeze it, and take it to the Natural History Museum, and label it—so we can tell whether it’s an ant or bee or moth—and let the taxonomists name it officially later.

Nottingham stores the DNA of the courtship-crooning Mississippi alligator, giant squid with dinner-plate-sized eye, secretive snow leopard, blue-throated macaw from the Bolivian rainforest, iconic African lion, and square-lipped northern white rhino, among many others. My mind’s eye automatically pictures each species in turn. Only about 20 percent of the species are on the endangered species list, and some are not endangered at all. Ideally, the Frozen Ark would store DNA from every species on Earth, but that’s not practical. The mammals would be easy, but the bugs would take a long while, especially the beetles, since there are more beetles than anything else on planet Earth (one of my favorites being the dung beetles who navigate by the stars like ancient mariners).

As I set down my cell phone, Ann notices my screen saver of an insanely cute baby wombat, a face that could melt a thousand hearts, and her eyes widen in appreciation. She’s just returned from a meeting in Sydney, so I ask her how the cancer-plagued Tasmanian devils are doing.

“They can cure the cancer in captivity,” Ann replies, her face showing her concern, “but it’s the ones in the wild that are the worry.” With a grim nod, she continues, “And the koalas have got chlamydia. And I heard some of the wombats are getting sick.”

Just over a hundred of the northern hairy-nosed wombats, the world’s cuddliest marsupial, survive in a tiny plot of Queensland. Though once numerous all across Australia, they feed on grasses, and when humans arrived with agriculture and herds of cattle (essentially four-legged mowers), the wombats simply couldn’t compete. Drought and invasive species have been polishing off the wombat’s supply of native spear, tussock, and poa grasses. It’s hard to picture Australia minus most of its famous creatures. Conservationists are trying to treat them in the wild, but Ann doesn’t think that Australia’s terribly worried about the extinction of its animals.

“They’ve got this beautiful country and everything looks perfect, and there’s not huge numbers of people crashing about,” she says.

“So they think it’s forever.”

“They think it’s forever,” Ann repeats with incredulous fervor. “But I think Americans are more interested in conservation. Don’t you think so?”

In my experience, I tell her, Americans are deeply concerned about conservation, but we have clashing, fiercely defended opinions about how to do it. Some believe it’s essential to preserve our majestic national parks; some, that the parks are a lost crusade and that safeguarding animals in big preserves just hasn’t worked. Some believe in rewilding’s networks of “cores, corridors, and carnivores” to reconnect and rebalance unstable ecosystems; or Pleistocene rewilding—in North America, unloosing elephants, lions, bison, and cheetahs (the closest living relatives of the ancient native megafauna) to roam the Great Plains. Others argue that all of the above are last-epoch thinking, and, as an increasingly metropolitan species, we should weave more of the wild into the cities where we live. Ann feels certain that we need multifaceted solutions.

“You’ve got to try the wild, but obviously that’s all going to go west if one’s being realistic.”

For a moment, I think perhaps she means the expanse of America’s West, then quickly realize she means die, as in following the setting sun.

Ann says firmly, “You’ve got to have parks. And you’ve got to manage your wild.”

“Managed wilderness. You don’t think we can afford to just let nature run wild anymore?”

“No,” she says with conviction. “We really can’t.”

Nature has become too fragmented to just run wild.

Ann tells me of a local solution that works: how in English towns, where terraced housing is commonplace, small back-to-back walled gardens lead onto each other and combine to create long fertile corridors for wildlife.

“So when I go into Cambridge and do a bit of gardening,” she says, “I’m surrounded by all sorts of insects and mosses and butterflies. But in our country home’s garden, there’s nothing. Consider
starlings. They put their beaks down about four centimeters into the soil—that’s how they feed—and that’s where all the pesticides are accumulating in the agricultural areas. The environment would be absolutely fine for them
if
there just weren’t any pesticides in it!”

Hoping to lure pollinators back, what’s known as Plan Bee rewards landowners for planting wildflower meadows for knapweed, bird’s-foot trefoil, red clover, and other weeds favored by insects, butterflies, and bees. They’re called “bee roads,” perhaps in keeping with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of referring to the ocean as the “whale road.” Other English bees have become prosperous city-dwellers, unassailed by agricultural pesticides, and there are now more sparrows, starlings, and blackbirds in the town gardens than in the open countryside.

A sorry image of the English countryside, silent at dawn and devoid of wings, slinks through my mind. All the more reason I like Ann’s “try everything” mindset. Yes to national parks, to rewilding preserves, to wildlife corridors, to city shades of green, to DNA banking, and to any other strategy we can think of that will allow animals to pursue their dusty, feral ways and nature to stay replete with potent life forms.

The office door swings gently open, and Chris Wade pokes his head in to take me on a tour of the lab. A tall man with dark curly hair, Chris does DNA analysis on the samples that arrive by mail, and he’s looking forward to being part of the Ark’s upcoming expedition to Vietnam to collect fresh DNA samples. Walking across the outer office, we enter a shared college lab with pale-blue walls, workbenches, microscopes, and a bevy of white lab coats hanging on one wall like a colony of albino bats.

Chris explains that they take the DNA field samples in several forms to be sure of backups. Dropping a tissue slice into a tube and topping it up with ethanol essentially pickles the tissue. That state of DNA isn’t ideal; it’s not as high-quality as fresh-frozen DNA. But if they put a specimen in a freezer, and the freezer were to break—and
in a lot of countries that’s often a problem—then it would be completely destroyed.

You’d think freezing would kill the cells, but the arkmasters control the rate of cooling, at only a degree a minute, and that slow-motion plunge keeps the cells intact. For safety, they prefer a three-way approach:

“One: Ethanol. Tough as nails,” Chris says, “but there for you in the end—the freezer can go off, everything can go wrong, you will still have that preserved bit. Two: We’ve also got our fresh-frozen tissue slice, which is
perfect
, it’s got everything. Three: And then we’ve got another sample for later cell culture. That’s the ideal scenario, all three methods.”

He leads me to the far end of the lab, through a doorway painted cornflower blue, into a small room, where four tall white Sanyo freezers stand, looking surprisingly humdrum, suitable perhaps for a wintering farm family, not the biggest snow survival fort the world has ever known. I put on green latex gloves to protect my primate skin.

He tugs opens a freezer door that gusts a small white cloud, like the combined souls of ten thousand animals exhaling in unison on an ice floe. Inside the freezer sit row after row of frost-covered drawers. Pulling one open with a gloved hand, I’m surprised to find only carefully arranged rows of short frost-covered vials, each with a label.

“You can lift one out,” Chris says in a tone of voice warning
But carefully!

When I do, I see that I’m holding the future of an African lion. If I blink, a tawny-colored male lion with a shaggy mane is standing on the veldt of my palm. I blink again and the whole animal is nestled in my hand, with room to spare for tall grass, heat mirage, and his pride. What an unlikely way to safeguard the future of animal-kind.