Woolly

May 15, 2017
In this dramatized narrative of advances in biotechnology, Mezrich (The 37th Parallel) plunges readers into the Siberian wilderness and the “beautiful chaos” of the Harvard laboratory of George Church, one of the world’s leading geneticists. Mezrich attempts to lend a thriller’s pace to a five-million-year-old story about the extinction and attempted reintroduction of the woolly mammoth. However, early on he gets stuck on a track devoted to Church, an originator of the Human Genome Project. After lumbering over Church’s biography, Mezrich flings readers back to Siberia and into the company of six captured elk that are en route to an arctic refuge where a father-and-son team of scientists, with the aid of pile drivers and a WWII tank, are returning a swath of tundra to its Pleistocene state. Mezrich’s portrayal of these men and their work is disappointingly thin. Instead of fleshing out the work of the Siberian team, the story shifts back to Boston with vignettes about Church’s growing woolly-mammoth-revival team, new competition from South Korea, and petri dishes containing 14 woolly organoids—the building blocks of the future mammoth. Mezrich handles the ethics of de-extinction with the same lightness he uses to describe the science; the result is an unsatisfying book. Agency: WME.