In 2019 I was in favour NRC in Italy, just outside Milan, in the lab of fertility expert Cesare Galli. A name like one Asterixalbum, and in the metal tanks he showed us something that had at least as much potential as a magic potion. Straws with frozen rhino sperm. Galli’s goal was to bring back the extinct northern white rhinoceros in the wild. With the frozen sperm (from the deceased last male of the subspecies) he had fertilized two eggs. Now he hoped to give the northern white rhinoceros a new start with those embryos. A noble goal, but Galli had another motive. “The goal is to be the very first,” he said. “It’s about winning that gold medal.”
I put the above on paper on Sunday evening, as the start of a column. On Tuesday I wouldn’t have much time due to a course – I decided I could work ahead once. But then came the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, and everything else suddenly felt futile.
The anecdote about Galli would form a bridge to the American start-up Colossal Bioscience, which wants to bring the extinct Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth back to life, among other things. Last week, the founders had announced with great fanfare that they now also hope to resurrect the dodo, or at least a bird that closely resembles it. The desirability of something like that, that’s what I wanted to write about. The working title: ‘Nothing but good about the dodo’.
But my mind kept wandering to the tremors. 7.8 and 7.5. Figures that sounded clinical next to the ever-increasing death tolls. Interviews with survivors, with rescuers. Photos of half-collapsed apartment buildings, turned into lurid dollhouses: look, there’s another cot there, and there in that kitchen a refrigerator. Useless terms from my old geology textbooks resonated in my head: left-lateral strike-slip fault, transform fault. A sentence flashed into my mind The broken book, the book that the New Zealand writer Fiona Farrell had just started in 2011 when her hometown of Christchurch was hit by a major earthquake. „The quake sent a jagged tear right through my text.”
Colossal Bioscience is called one in the business world unicorn, a startup with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion. A unicorn saving a dodo, a modern fairy tale. The paleogeneticists involved say they want their research to help current endangered species. But they seem to have the same ambition as Galli: to win the main prize. Shake science to its foundations.
We are now waiting for a unicorn that can predict earthquakes. A start-up with one goal: to live happily ever after. That would really be a fairytale.
Gemma Venhuizen is biology editor at NRC and writes a column here every Wednesday.
A version of this article also appeared in the February 8, 2023 newspaper