Scientific research

Meet the men who want to bring back the woolly mammoth

A few minutes into celebrated Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church’s appearance on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert motioned towards him conspiratorially. “How do you think your work will eventually destroy all mankind?” asked the comedian, peering meaningfully over his glasses and tapping the table. “It’s a couple of options. Do you think it’s going to be like a killer virus? Or more like a giant, mutant, killer-squid-man, who arises from the Pacific, between Easter Island and Chile, and feasts on our flesh?” Colbert’s probing was tongue-in-cheek, of course. But the joke worked because it touched on real concerns. Dr. Church, sixty-eight, has had a long and storied career, including helping to launch the Human Genome Project in 1984.

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Will all whales soon be extinct?

Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, is quick to tell us he’s not a ‘whale hugger’. ‘I didn’t fall asleep snuggling stuffed whales or decorate my room with posters of humpbacks suspended in prismatic light.’ Pyenson sees whales through their ancestral bones, and their contemporary entrails, digging up their past or scrying their future. Spying on Whales begins its surveillance in the fossil-rich site of Cerro Ballena (‘Whale Hill’) in the Atacama desert. Here, in the Miocene layers, he uncovers an entire pod of ancient, stranded whales, stilled in the moment of their deep-time death. It’s an Indiana Jones moment.

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