The conceit of Beth Shapiro’s disturbing and thoughtful new book, How to Clone a Mammoth, is that it is a how-to manual, a cookbook for wannabe lords of (re-)creation. Nine of its 11 chapters describe steps in the process of bringing an animal back from extinction, beginning with how to select an organism to resurrect, and ending with how to look after it once it has been released into the wild. Along the way, the reader is treated to a sometimes dry exposition of the basic principles of the latest recombinant-DNA technology. Somewhere between wild, witty, speculative pop science and tediously technical genetics primer, the book is a bit of an uneven read but well worth the effort, because Shapiro knows whereof she speaks. At the “ancient DNA laboratory” at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she and her colleagues study, among other things, the genetics of the mammoth, a cold-adapted relative of the elephant absent from this planet for 37 centuries.
