In 2013 a remarkably well-preserved mammoth was excavated from the permafrost on Maly Lyakhovsky island, northern Siberia. It was May, and a balmy -10C. Snow lay on the ground. But when the team cut into the frozen carcass, a dark red-brown fluid oozed out. A fluid that looked exactly like blood.
Nothing like this had ever been seen before, and hopes ran high – still run high, in fact – that this might hold the key to mammoth cloning.
For a while, the likelihood of anyone getting anywhere at all with such a project was so remote it seemed pointless to worry – why talk about “should”, when there was no “could”? But two groups with two different approaches – Sooam in South Korea and George Church’s lab in the US – are committed to taking their cloning efforts from the theoretical to the actual, from the lab to the tundra. As these cloning efforts gather steam, it’s time to have a serious conversation about the ethics of cloning.
I’m a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and I live, sleep and dream mammoths. I doubt that there are many people in the world who would like to see a real-life woolly mammoth as much as I do. And yet I think cloning one would be ethically flawed.
Any attempt to clone a mammoth would probably require a living elephant – likely to be Asian – to act as a surrogate. To go through 22 months of pregnancy, carrying an animal of a completely different species as part of the experiment. An intelligent, social animal, at the brink of extinction, and one we know doesn’t do all that well in captivity.
And not just one elephant. In reality, many surrogates would be needed before a successful baby mammoth was born.
There are very good reasons for using animals in scientific research, but there are also strict ethical codes of practice that demand that the potential benefits of the research outweigh the suffering to the animals involved.
Does the potential benefit to humanity of cloning a mammoth outweigh the suffering an Asian elephant surrogate mother might experience? I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument that it does.
So, why should we clone a mammoth? Because it would be cool to see one? That’s not going to cut it, I’m afraid.
Because it advances technology and the sum total of human knowledge? OK – but why a mammoth? Why not some other extinct creature that could be born of a surrogate better suited to life in captivity, or one that requires no animal surrogate at all? Church’s group are also trying to bring back the passenger pigeon, for example, and here it’s only the eggs that are manipulated in the lab. Granted, that’s not possible for mammals, but maybe a mouse would be a better starting point. For some reason, however, cloning an obscure species of extinct rodent doesn’t seem to capture the imagination.
What about the advances that could be made in understanding elephant reproductive biology? After all, zoo breeding programmes for elephants aren’t hugely successful, and Asian elephants are on the brink of extinction. So why not just put the effort in to doing the research into the reproductive biology of those living species where the results may be more directly transferable? If the reason is that it’s easier to get funding for cloning a mammoth, then all of us need to take a good long look at our priorities.
Because by bringing back the woolly mammoth, we could restore the ecosystem of the mammoth steppe and potentially stabilise the tundra terrain in the high Arctic? The idea being that this would mitigate the risk of permafrost melt, and the release of huge amounts of methane gas stored there, which would be bad news for our already warming planet. The problem here is that we don’t yet fully understand the role of the woolly mammoth as an ecosystem engineer, and it is unclear still whether the mammoth steppe disappeared as a result of the loss of the mammoth or whether the mammoth disappeared because its habitat was lost, along with its ice age world. It’s a big gamble to put your climate-change mitigation hopes on a herd of woolly mammoths – and if it did work, it would require numbers in the hundreds of thousands to have an effect. That’s going to take a long time, and a lot of surrogate elephant mums, to achieve. And have you seen the rate at which climate change seems to be progressing?
It will make a huge amount of money for the person who clones – and maybe patents – the woolly mammoth. After all, for all my protests, I’d pay to see one if it was there, wouldn’t you? This might justify the economic outlay, but an ethical justification it is not. I think that the real reason – the only reason really – that people want to clone a mammoth is the hope of salvation.
There’s a reason the terms “de-extinction” and “rewilding” are so powerful and that’s because they imply a return to a time, a state of grace, a place that was somehow unspoiled. Cloning a mammoth offers us the hope of undoing the excesses of humanity, bringing back the creatures whose extinction we helped bring about. I see it in people’s eyes when I explain that Church’s CRISPRs method isn’t cloning exactly, more just making a genetically engineered elephant that can handle the cold – this just isn’t as emotionally satisfying as the Sooam approach: taking an actual mammoth cell nucleus, DNA intact, and popping that into an elephant egg. People want to believe they are getting back the “real thing”. I get it. Sometimes the ice age world is so real me that my throat aches and my eyes sting a little when I think about what we’ve lost, the animals we will never see. But here’s the irony – if we feel like that about the mammoth, just think how our kids might feel about the elephant if we let it become extinct. We really ought to be focusing on that, and doing everything we can to stop it from happening.