A Belgian company wants to create woolly-mammoth burgers

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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. Just a strand of Elvis’s hair would do. Pluck out his DNA and it could be copied millions of times using a technique called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

That was the business plan pitched in the 1990s by Kary Mullis, an American biologist. Mullis had helped develop PCR in the 1980s; in 1993 he shared a Nobel prize. “StarGene", as his company was known, hoped to make money by selling jewellery stuffed with celebrity DNA.

The idea never quite worked out. But that has not stopped a slew of newer firms also hoping to mine gold from dead individuals—or even entire species. Paleo, for instance, is a Belgian startup that creates synthetic proteins for the artificial-meat business.

Driven in part by a “childhood fascination with prehistory", Hermes Sanctorum, the company’s CEO, is keen to expand the business into making woolly-mammoth burgers. Working with the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden, the firm has obtained fragments of DNA from mammoth teeth found in the Siberian permafrost that are up to 1.2m years old. These fragments were combined with DNA from Asian and African elephants, the mammoth’s nearest living relatives, to reconstruct what the firm hopes is the mammoth version of the gene that encodes myoglobin, a protein that helps give meat its rich taste and vibrant red colour.

That gene was inserted into the DNA of yeast, which duly began turning out mammoth myoglobin. The protein was mixed with binders such as potato starch, oil, salt and other flavours so that it resembled the taste and texture of a burger. Paleo’s patent claims the myoglobin causes a range of chemical