IT'S ALL PART OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS POSTCARD FROM 1880 IN THE MANCHESTER MUSEUM ARCHIVES

“festive image of Pleistocene mammals”

“a rink in the glacial period”

THIS IMAGE HAS SINGLE-HANDEDLY PUT ME IN THE FESTIVE MOOD

George Church on Mammoths

George Church is a professor of Genetics at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading geneticists. He recently published a book with Ed Regis called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Church and his team are using CRISPR, a gene editing technology, to insert parts of mammoth DNA into the Asian elephant genome. Ideally, this one day result in a whole population of cold-resistant, hairy pachyderms suited for life in the arctic–animals that are physically, behaviorally, and genetically very similar to the extinct woolly mammoth. This interview has been edited and condensed for length.

How is your lab hoping to make a mammoth embryo?

People go into the Siberian ice to get mammoth remains, and you can get broken DNA, and you can use a sequencing device to turn that into a computer data version of the mammoth genome. You put all the little parts together to make a complete mammoth genome, or you can take important parts of the genome and put them on an Asian elephant’s DNA. Then we put the sequence into an Asian elephant’s egg and get it to start multiplying.

In what ways will the mammoth be different from an elephant?

I have seen some Discourse where person A says something like “We can’t dehumanize the people we’re fighting,” and then Person B goes “Yeah, this was why we shouldn’t have punched that Nazi!” and then Person C goes “Uh, we have to punch Nazis,” and then Person D says “Nazis aren’t people!” and then the whole Discourse Cycle starts up again. 

The problem, I think, is that we are taking “don’t dehumanize” as code for “be nice to?” And that’s not what it is. “Don’t dehumanize” means understanding there is not a profound difference between yourself and a person who believes something repugnant. Otherwise, it becomes too tempting to think that a repugnant belief is some kind of monstrous mental defect that we get to just magically Not Have, because we – after all – are people, and Nazis are Not People. 

If we believe that we are immune to repugnant beliefs, we become incredibly vulnerable to them. Sorry if I’m being redundant here, but I really want to spell this out: If we think that Nazis aren’t people, we open a door that is going to kill our ability to be useful, effective, intersectional activists. We will absolutely become complacent. Beliefs will creep up slowly in our brains, because that’s what brains do, they gather information and make just whatever crap soup out of it, and we – if we sense the development of these ideas at all – will go “Well, this must NOT be a repugnant belief, because only Not-People have repugnant beliefs, and I am a Person!”