Somewhere between financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker and backing Donald Trump’s campaign for president, iconoclast investor Peter Thiel found time to invest $100,000 in an effort to resurrect the woolly mammoth.

That’s according to a new book by Ben Mezrich, Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive one of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures, which chronicles efforts by Harvard University genomics expert George Church to genetically modify elephant cells with DNA retrieved from frozen mammoths.

Thiel’s donation, made sometime around 2015, is one of the previously unreported twists recounted by Mezrich, whose book tells how Church and his students became involved with a long-shot plan to re-create mammoths and release herds of them into the Siberian tundra as part of an elaborate effort to grapple with climate change.

“Just remember. It’s only science fiction until we remove the fiction. Then it becomes real,” Mezrich has one scientist saying in the book.

The Harvard mammoth plan got in motion in 2012 during a gathering of “de-extinction” experts in Washington, D.C. Since then, it’s generated a huge amount of media buzz, but so far no scientific publications—and no mammoth, either.

When I took to Twitter last week to poke fun at the lumbering project—now also the subject of a planned Hollywood movie—one of its backers, Stewart Brand, dared me to put “money on the table” and bet him whether it would succeed.

“Just remember. It’s only science fiction until we remove the fiction. Then it becomes real.”

Brand, described in Mezrich’s book as an “amiable praying mantis,” is the entrepreneur and promoter largely behind recent interest in de-extinction technology. His organization, Revive & Restore, is trying to bring back the passenger pigeon and save the endangered black-footed ferret.

Scientists crowd around the remains of a woolly mammoth. The genomes of several of the extinct mammals have been sequenced.

The mammoth idea, he says, may be the least realistic of these plans, but it’s the one that gets people most excited. “People are having their imaginations grabbed and thrown over the horizon,” he says.

But no one should imagine that de-extinction science—or any type of conservation—is particularly well funded. “The assumption is there must be some billionaire putting money into it,” he says. “The reality is that no big money is going into it. It’s our own money, except for Thiel.”

Bestseller

Mezrich is the best-selling author of Bringing Down the House, based on the exploits of MIT’s blackjack team, and The Accidental Billionaires, about the founding of Facebook, later turned into the movie The Social Network.

In his new book, Church comes off as a mad scientist with a heart of gold, trying to re-create the mammoth and hand it over to a Russian father-and-son team who think herds of them will help restore the Siberian tundra to its prehistoric state and insulate the permafrost, preventing it from melting and releasing a disastrous quantity of global-warming gases.

The research described in Woolly is basically a real-life version of Jurassic Park. But instead of cloning a dinosaur from DNA trapped in amber, Church’s lab has set about using gene editing to tweak the DNA of elephant cells (obtained from the Ringling Brothers circus, Mezrich reports) so it’s more like that of a mammoth. Genes involved in hemoglobin, hair, and subcutaneous fat are just a few that will have to be altered.

At one point, Mezrich describes red pachyderm hair sprouting from the side of an immunocompromised mouse where some genetically altered elephant cells were grafted. And that’s about as far as the science has gotten, he reports. Eventually, though, if enough mammoth DNA were added to an elephant cell, scientists could try to use it to clone a part-mammoth into existence.

A spokesman for Thiel didn’t respond to efforts to confirm he’s the mammoth funder. But Church, whom I ran into this week giving his stump scientific lecture (which is mammoth free, by the way) to a group of Chinese students at MIT, confirmed that it’s true.

Church says he was having breakfast with Thiel when the multibillionaire, who made a fortune backing Facebook, told him he wanted to fund the “craziest thing” he was doing. Church offered three choices: an anti-aging scheme involving gene therapy, a project using real human neurons to create artificial intelligence, and the mammoth.

"I choose the mammoth," Thiel said.

Church says he was surprised at the decision, given Thiel’s software fortune and his widely advertised interest in never dying.