Overview

In this adventure-filled narrative, science writer Richard Stone follows two groups of explorers- one a Russian-Japanese team, the other a French-led consortium- as they battle bitter cold, high winds, and supply shortages to carry out their quest. Armed with GPS, ground-penetrating radar, and Soviet-era military helicopters, they seek an elusive prize: a mammoth carcass that will help determine how the creature lived, how it died- and how it might be brought back to life.A riveting tale of high-stakes adventure and scientific hubris, Mammoth is also an intellectual voyage through uncharted moral terrain, as we confront the promise and peril of resurrecting creatures from the deep past.

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Of all extinct animals, the mammoth occupies a special place in the modern mind. The combination of physical scale and otherness reminiscent of dinosaurs, together with cave paintings proving that humans once co-existed with these creatures and discoveries of extraordinarily well-preserved carcasses, enable us to imagine the prehistoric relation of the elephant very vividly. Stone's book describes attempts being made at the moment by a number of teams to bring the mammoth back to life, using DNA from animals frozen many thousands of years ago. It is impossible to speak about this subject without referring to Jurassic Park, but, whereas the science in Jurassic Park doesn't stand up, it is more than likely that this work really will succeed. Stone's book has to cover political, moral and financial issues and the fiercely competitive nature of modern research projects as well as the more usual business of chemistry and biology, and he builds a hugely absorbing account of science being carried out under extreme conditions, both physical and psychological, in the race to achieve success in genetic procedures that may have implications for all of us as great as any defining discovery of mankind's past. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Richard Stone is the European News Editor of Science magazine. He has written for Discover, the Washington Post, the Moscow Times, Smithsonian, and numerous other publications. A graduate of Cornell University and a Fulbright scholar in Russia, Stone won the Evert Clark Award for science journalism in 1995 for a Discover article and a Walter Sullivan Award in 2001 for an article in Smithsonian magazine.

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