Book Review: How to Clone a Mammoth

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How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction
by Beth Shapiro
Princeton University Press, 2015 (($24.95))

It has been several millennia since the last mammoths died out, after more than 100,000 years of dominating Arctic ecosystems. But the hairy elephants could return within decades, brought back to life by recent breakthroughs in biotechnology. In this lucid road map for the nascent discipline of “de-extinction,” Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist, examines not only how we can resurrect long-vanished species but also when we cannot or should not. Cloning a mammoth from frozen remains, for example, is unlikely to succeed, she writes, because it requires living cells; efforts to introduce mammoth genes into existing elephant species are more plausible. Most poignantly, Shapiro argues that without revitalizing ecosystems in which a resurrected species might flourish, in many cases de-extinction could be too cruel to countenance.

Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight, and is a senior editor at Scientific American. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: the Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science, and many other publications. A dynamic public speaker, Billings has given invited talks for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Google, and has served as M.C. for events held by National Geographic, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, Pioneer Works, and various other organizations.

Billings joined Scientific American in 2014, and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

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Scientific American Magazine Vol 312 Issue 5This article was originally published with the title “How to Clone a Mammoth” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 312 No. 5 (), p. 82
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0515-82d