Hair, the bane of every plumber, the glory of woman, the stuff that rolls around like tumbleweed on the floors of the homes of everyone who’s addicted to long-haired cats — hair is the da Vinci code to the Ice Age.
A couple of
scientists at Penn State have reported that the technology now exists to take clumps of mammoth hair and decode it (which they’ve done for a large part of the genome of a mammoth) and then ultimately decode from that the full genome of the mammoth — the elephant-like creature that roamed across Siberia and North America before going extinct around 10,000 years ago. They haven’t figured out the full genome yet, but all that’s required, the scientists say, is to modify an African elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or so places necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. It would be a tedious process, but it could be done.
A lot of scientists presumably would be made busy working out the code all the way to the full genome, but after they finished, they could then use that knowledge to make a new, living baby mammoth. All it would take is a little stirring in a petri dish to turn a mammoth cell into a mammoth embryo. This, in turn, could then be planted in the womb of a living mommy African elephant. Voilà! A blast from the Siberian past.
Visions from Jurassic Park? Well, not quite. A single extinct creature, resuscitated from the heretofore irretrievable ice age, presumably wouldn’t wreak havoc on the world. Instead, it would stand quietly in a corner of a zoo. The price for the new-old pachyderm is cheap — $10-mil — no more than a tenth of what it costs to make a big movie.
Some commentators I’ve read feel sorry for the mammoth. Its destiny would be to live in a zoo, standing around while hordes of homo sapiens stream by, gawking and pointing. At the end of this existence, it would undoubtedly be splayed out for dissection and scientific study and then hauled over to the taxidermist for stuffing. Once plumped up into the proper form for a museum of natural history exhibition (you know, frozen into place with its trunk raised high and one foot lifted up in the air), it would be transported to a — well, a museum of natural history. Talk about full circle.
No, I don’t feel sorry for the mammoth-to-be. I feel sorry for humans. Although we’ve gone through our entire history never figuring out how to handle life in the present — politically, socially, economically, or ethically — we now live in an age in which we possess the scientific know-how to indulge ourselves by making big, expensive, living toys that can take us back to the past.
Unless someone offers a reason why making a mammoth come to life offers us something other than entertainment, I vote we leave the the creature in the past. There, at least, it exists with the profound dignity conveyed on it by time.
