Obviously George Church is smarter than me, so I'm sure he's thought of all the complexities, but this seems really fucking stupid if, in fact, the Mammoth is actually the company's goal.
I'm all for unextincting various things. But mostly big things... no bugs, or things that can easily escape. Big, fuckoff wooly mammoths? Sure! Do it! Because, in the process, we are going to learn a lot about biological processes we don't have a grasp on today. Heck, even the reproductive systems of elephants have barely been analyzed! And, if the chance-in-a-billion happens and a wooly mammoth walks the Earth again... then science is going to have to finally come face to face with the harsh and icky reality of psychology. So much science operates in the biomechanical realm, and shies away from the psychological impacts of what it does. But when the baby mammoth dies of depression because it hasn't got a momma, science can no longer shirk the responsibility it has for the mental well-being of its subjects. And I suspect that timeline will coincide nicely with the one where the first glimmers of true AI come to light/life... and the geeks will be beset on all sides by squishy icky gooey feelings. That collision needs to happen sooner rather than later. So I hope they make a mammoth soon.
I feel like it wouldn't be that difficult to provide a surrogate mother to a newly... hatched? De-podded? Unextincted mammoth. Agreed on all other points. More scientists and engineers need to devote some brain power to the ethics of the things they are asked to do. There is a difference between ethics education in the sciences as a continuing education requirement and as something that is enforced in more than letter.
I suspect they'll use an Asian Elephant female as a surrogate. The problem is finding one that is pregnant or just had a baby, right at the precise moment the "mammoth" is born, and then the Asian elephant connecting with the mammoth baby, since elephants only have one baby like every 7 years, or something crazy like that. If she doesn't have the recent-birth hormones coursing though her, will she identify as the mother of the mammoth? And if she has recently given birth, can she mother two offspring at once? Or will they take away her "real" baby and hope she connects with the mammoth as hers? And what happens to the "real" baby...? It's ethical questions all the way down...
The book was much clearer on this: Jurassic Park did their gene splicing on Xenopus frogs, whose principle "tell the kids about it" trait is their ready ability to change sex. I mean, Edmund Scientific sold their eggs as "X-Ray Frogs Mysteriously Change Gender" in the back of Boy's Life and Popular Mechanics for fifty years. They're great for research because you don't even really need to worry about breeding them as they pretty much auto-select. That whole "Nature finds a way" thing was David Koepp blithely erasing the bit where Jurassic Park failed through abject stupidity because it stretched credulity that scientists could simultaneously be so brilliant and so bone-headed. At least it did before gain-of-function research on highly-contagious pathogens.
Some of the dumbest people I know are highly accomplished surgeons. The longer I've been in science the more I've come to think that scientists are as fucking dumb as everyone else. If you ever want a very dull but informative read, the Mismeasure of Man is a great one. It chronicles the saga of trying to use science to keep the whites on the top of the heap after the fall of slavery (proto-eugenics, say). This science was done by the greatest luminaries of the time, led by the chief of zoology at Harvard. Science, fact gathering, knowledge, etc, are very often used as the basis to do really nefarious and dangerous stuff, but they know how to couch their actions in such esoteric language that makes it seem as if it can't be captured in simple terms such as "torture an elephant in hopes of torturing a mammoth." People love to mistake "science" for "truth", when in fact science is nothing more than a systematic way of asking and attempting to answer questions. It's a tool. Period. One can use one's hammer to build a house for the homeless, or one can use it to smash skulls. It isn't the hammer's fault either way. Note that I say all of this as someone who makes a living torturing small animals in hopes of making medicines that will end a lot of grief for a lot of people. It would be very easy to construct an argument that I'm the bad guy. It's a matter of perspective, values, and relative value of, say, mice vs. humans.