Those wags at MIT''s Technology Review may have been as surprised as anyone when a prank article in their April 1984 issue hit the news wires and made headlines all over the world. Scientists in the U.S. and U.S.S.R., the article claimed, had successfully mixed cells from a woolly mammoth (extinct for some 10,000 years) and a contemporary elephant to create a creature that was half and half.
The magazine's editor, John I. Mattill, explained the hoax in his October issue, by which time the tale, if not the animal, had taken on a life of its own.
But the story doesn't end there. In a rare case of life imitating hoax, the New York Times reported in September 2021 that a team of scientists and entrepreneurs led by Harvard Medical School biologist George Church had formed a company to bring back the woolly mammoth by editing elephant DNA.
Can the hotheaded naked ice borer (to be covered in a future installment) be far behind?
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