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The inspiration for my first book came on a railway platform in Tokyo. It was a chilly night in early January 1998, and my wife Mutsumi and I were waiting for a bullet train that would take us across the country to her hometown, Tsuruga, on the Sea of Japan. I bought a can of hot coffee from a vending machine to help keep warm on the outdoor platform, and from a kiosk picked up a copy of the Japan Times, a daily newspaper in English. I spoke very little Japanese then, and am embarrassed to say that I've progressed hardly at all in the last four years. That's a problem, as my mother-in-law speaks only Japanese. Our conversation is limited to gastronomy: She feeds me and I grunt in delight, as she's a terrific cook.

But that winter evening, a delicious supper in Tsuruga was still a three-hour ride away. As we sat in the train, I skimmed the newspaper's headlines, hoping to find a story that would grab me. One did. It was about a Japanese scientist who intended to breed a woolly mammoth. He was so besotted with the idea that he had traveled to Siberia the previous summer to search for mammoth tissue in permanently frozen ground north of the Arctic Circle.

The researcher, Kazufumi Goto, dreamed of finding intact mammoth sperm, from which he would select one bearing an X chromosome -- thus ensuring a female offspring -- and inject it into an elephant egg. If an embryo developed, Goto would transfer it into an elephant surrogate mother, which two years later would give birth to a half-mammoth, half-elephant. One of the hybrid's eggs could then be inseminated with mammoth sperm to get a creature even more mammoth-like. After three generations, in theory, Goto could produce an animal that was nearly 90 percent mammoth. One of his colleagues had proposed an even more breathtaking strategy: finding pristine mammoth cells and cloning the beast, the sort of feat that Scottish researchers had pulled off the preceding year with Dolly the sheep.

Reading the article I thought, This is crazy! Crazy in a fun way, though, and certainly worth pursuing as a story for a U.S. magazine. It did not occur to me to write a book about maverick researchers bent on resurrecting the mammoth. That idea would come later, after much coaxing -- and after a few revelations about mammoths, and about my own desires.

My first task after returning home to Washington, D.C., that winter was to "ground-truth" the story: first of all, to determine if Goto were a bonafide scientist. Mutsumi tracked him down at Kagoshima University, where he worked at the time as a professor. (He has since retired to run a family-owned kindergarten.) Goto spoke English fluently, so I was able to talk with him at length about his project. He sounded solid over the phone, and colleagues spoke highly of his talents as a reproductive biologist. My day job then and now is at Science, a magazine for the scientific community. At Science we strive for stories that appeal to a broad audience, and a few of us enjoy tagging along with scientists to chronicle their adventures in exotic lands. Mammoth cloning, however, was a bit too heavy on the Far Side for Science's tastes, which allowed me to take the idea to Discover. I freelance occasionally for the popular science magazine as a way to stretch my storytelling abilities and reach a wider audience. I'd enjoyed working with a former editor there, Carl Zimmer -- an accomplished book writer, he authored the enthralling Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures -- and was thrilled when he commissioned me to write about the Goto group's hyperborean escapades.

That summer Mutsumi and I headed off to Siberia, where we touched the remains of Ice Age animals, frozen emissaries that few people have ever glimpsed. This adventure I recounted, in part, in the Discover article, and expanded upon later in Mammoth. But I was not convinced that the cloning effort alone would sustain a book-length narrative. My book agent, Kerry Nugent-Wells, played a decisive role in nudging me into book-writing mode. She had represented a colleague of mine at Science, Charles Seife, on his first book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, and knows well the ingredients that go into a popular science book. While Kerry and I enjoyed tossing around potential book ideas, we found reasons to shoot each of them down. The underlying problem was that I could not develop a passion for any of the topics, something that would be essential for enduring evenings and weekends for the foreseeable future delving into a subject. Kerry thought my Siberian adventure story might work as a book, but once again, my gut reaction was, Do I really want to spend months learning about an extinct creature? Another concern was that if researchers failed to clone a mammoth, the ending would be a downer.

It took a second idiosyncratic explorer to cast a different light on mammoths. In the spring of 1999, around the time that my Discover article appeared, I heard about Bernard Buigues, who had found what appeared to be a complete mammoth carcass in an even more remote and forbidding corner of Siberia than the Japanese group was working in. Later that year, the Discovery Channel planned to film Buigues's attempt to airlift a block of permafrost containing the mammoth's remains to a cave, where he and his scientists would slowly thaw it out. Now there were two teams to follow over the course of a book. Perhaps it would work after all. It didn't take any more persuasion for me to try to craft a book proposal. I'd never written one before, but Kerry was there to alternately hold my hand and crack the whip. Writing a proposal is not something you can dash off in a few days: You must chart the major features of a book's topography, which requires getting a good handle on the terrain that the book may cover. That means hours upon hours of research and introspection about the sort of tale you want to tell. I searched for storytelling clues in books as diverse as Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, Dava Sobel's Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, and Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear.

While researching the proposal, I became hooked on mammoths. The folklore and history of the beast was captivating. I learned, for instance, that the indigenous Siberians believed the mammoth to be a giant underground rat that died if exposed to air or light -- thus the reason they would come across its bones or flesh, but never a living specimen. I learned about Thomas Jefferson's fascination with mammoth bones and his belief that mammoths roamed the prairies west of the Mississippi River. And I devoured tales of the 18th- and 19th-century explorers who combed Siberia for frozen mammoths. Suddenly I, like Goto, was besotted.

My desire to know more about these fabled creatures kept me inspired, as did my adventures on the tundra -- I traveled to Siberia three times to research the book, the last trip in autumn 2000, when temperatures plunged as low as -35 degrees Celsius. Back in the warmth of my study in Washington, D.C., Mutsumi was my succor through the grueling months during which Mammoth took shape. She spent hours at the Library of Congress helping to research the book, and when my eyes began to swim late at night she made maccha, or strong green tea, to perk me up and force me to put a few more words on the electronic page. Indeed, she was my mammoth force majeure: If it weren't for Mutsumi, I wouldn't have been on that Tokyo platform and might never have learned about Goto's quixotic quest or Buigues' Arctic drama. At least, that is, until some other lucky person came along to write the book.

Richard Stone is the European News Editor at 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. (Visit his website for photos of and more information about the mammoth!)

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Erika Warmbrunn
Todd Balf

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