How mammoth cloning became fake news

George Church, artificial wombs, elephant embryos, and a gullible science media

According to the Guardian, New Scientist, and many other press outlets, the Harvard geneticist George Church announced last week that he is going to produce elephant embryos with woolly mammoth genes within two years.

Media outlets this week have run more than 60 stories about Church’s press announcement, with breathless headlines, like “Woolly mammoths ‘to walk the earth again in TWO YEARS’ after massive breakthrough”, or “Woolly Mammoth Could Be ‘De-Extinct’ In 2 Years, Scientist Says”.

Now Church is a smart biologist. He knows that neither he nor anybody else is going to make a live woolly mammoth in two years. His interviews with the press, like the one reported by New Scientist, seem to have included lots of caveats admitting that the whole project falls short of “Jurassic World”-level science. Most media outlets ignored those caveats, and ran with clickbait headlines anyway.

Is this just another case of the media sensationalizing what is otherwise a good science story? Five reasons convince me...