I’D LIKE TO start by saying what an unpredictable and enjoyable adventure this entire exploration of de-extinction has been. It all began on a dance floor on the outskirts of Chicago at the Third Coast Audio Festival, where I met Sara Robberson Lentz, who would later become my collaborator on a radio production about “the art of de-extinction” that we made for the Science and Creativity series on WNYC’s Studio 360. Thank you, Sara, for taking that first plunge with me, and thank you, Ann Heppermann, for being a boon to the piece with your edits.
The next nesting ground for my work on the subject was also in radio, but this time at the “Mothercorp,” as we Canadians call it: the CBC. When the team at CBC Radio One’s Ideas accepted my pitch for an hour-long feature documentary about de-extinction, I had no idea what I was truly gaining from the opportunity. Not only was it an honor to produce for their national show, but because my story attracted the ears of a particularly skilled staff producer with a passion for science, I ended up many times more fortunate from the commission: I met my CBC radio mentor, Sara Wolch, who I am so grateful to have been trained by. Thank you, Sara, for not going easy on me in the editing room. Without these radio productions, there would be no book.
And neither radio production would have been possible without the many experts and inspiring individuals I was able to call on for their ideas, knowledge, and opinions. I must, therefore, extend a big thank-you to the owners of the voices that weave those pieces into what they are: Stewart Brand, Ben Novak, Isabella Kirkland, David Ehrenfeld, Beth Shapiro, Hendrik Poinar, Dolly Jørgensen, Norman Carlin, Thomas van Dooren, and Mark Peck.
Then a huge surprise occurred one day when I got a one-liner in my email that read something to the tune of “Great radio show, now how about a book?” signed by the head of a publishing company. I had to triple check to make sure that this wasn’t a piece of auto-drafted spam before I took it seriously. And am I ever delighted that it wasn’t. Thank you a thousand times to Rob Sanders, publisher at Greystone Books, for taking a leap of faith in me and sensing that I would be up for the assignment. Your great enthusiasm for the subject has been hugely supportive from the start. My very talented editor at Greystone Books, Nancy Flight, has been a joy to work with, and these pages have benefited in uncountable ways by her sharp sense that always sees how a sentence can still be clearer. I am so grateful for the efforts that the entire team at Greystone Books—from marketing and communications to design and administration—has poured into this project. And I am humbled that my book is being published in cooperation with the David Suzuki Institute as a result of working with this very special publisher.
It is a great honor that George Church, one of the world’s most revered scientists working not only in de-extinction but in genetics as a whole, agreed to write such a stimulating foreword for this book—thank you very much, George.
I would not know much about de-extinction at all if it weren’t for the many incredibly smart sources I met as I was researching this book and my other productions. I owe much gratitude to everyone who agreed to speak with me and/or write to me about the ideas explored in these pages, sometimes on several occasions, sometimes taking a lot of their time. These people (in no particular order) are Ryan Phelan, Stewart Brand, George Church, Ben Novak, Hendrik Poinar, Bobby Dhadwar, Dolly Jørgensen, Thomas van Dooren, Andrew Torrance, George Poinar Jr., Henri Kerkdijk-Otten, Nikita Zimov, Tom Gilbert, Stuart Pimm, Phil Seddon, Vincent Lynch, Josh Donlan, Beth Shapiro, James Mwemba, Joel Sartore, Luke Griswold-Tergis, Norman Carlin, Mark Peck, Max Holmes, Matt Ridley, Donna Haraway, Kent Redford, David Ehrenfeld, Joseph Bennett, Isabella Kirkland, Marguerite Humeau, Persephone Pearl, Carl Zimmer, Mikkel Holger Strander Sindig, Heath Packard, Zack Denfeld, Cat Kramer, Maja Horst, and Sarah Davies.
Thank you also to the lovely people at Quercus Group, who housed us while we were in Kenya meeting rhinos.
A big thank-you goes out to Charles Yao, for sharing his excellent insights about the world of publishing, and, by extension, the advice of Kelvin Kong. I owe the same to the wonderful Eliza Clark and Laurel Braitman. I sincerely appreciate the time my friend Anders Meldgaard Kjemtrup put in to critique the first draft, as well as Tom Gilbert and Johan Andersen-Ranberg, who lent their scientific expertise as reviewers of the entire manuscript. A huge thank-you also goes out to Ben Novak, who kindly reviewed the chapter that he most prominently appears in, and to Chris Widga, who generously reviewed the chapter about mammoths. I am bowled over by the attention span of my fact-checker Chris Morgan. Thank you also to Stephanie Fysh and Dawn Loewen, whom I had the pleasure of working with at the copy editing and proofreading stages respectively.
Thank you to my amazing dad, Joe Wray, whose long talks with me on the weekends during my childhood about science and ethics whetted my appetite for doing the work that I do now, and thank you to Nancy Jane Wray for being the whip-smart lifelong conversant with us on these topics that she is. I endlessly admire the ability of my mom, Toni Wray, to support and be resilient, which helped me get through this project as I crazily took it on right when I was starting a PhD about a different subject. My deepest gratitude goes to my love, Sebastian Damm, the most charismatic creature of them all.