The Dire Wolf Is Back
www.newyorker.com
Colossal, a genetics startup, has birthed three pups that contain ancient DNA retrieved from the remains of the animal’s extinct ancestors. Is the woolly mammoth next?

People have been sad about driving animals into oblivion for nearly as long as we have been eradicating them. And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.

Since the nineteen-eighties, various attempts have been made to see if it might be possible, somehow, to reverse the process. In theory, at least, the technological know-how that helped us extirpate so much wildlife could be deployed to bring back a few of our victims. Humans who are pursuing this goal are essentially asking for something that nature has never provided: a do-over.

Ben Lamm is a forty-three-year-old serial entrepreneur who has already had five “exits”—acquisitions of startups by other companies. He lives in Dallas; his estimated net worth is $3.7 billion. Lamm is dyslexic, and when he was younger he found reading difficult. He tended toward graphic novels and video games, but over time he taught himself, he says, to “read for concepts.” Among the interesting figures he has run across is George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Church has endorsed using gene therapy to improve human resistance to radiation, thus facilitating interplanetary travel; he has also written about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals back into existence.

In 2020, Lamm and Church agreed to create a for-profit company, called Colossal Biosciences, whose showcase product would be the deëxtinction of animals.

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  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Colossal says its dire wolf work had key differences. Scientists first analyzed the genome of the dire wolves contained in the ancient tooth and skull. Comparing those genomes to that of the gray wolf—the dire wolf’s closest living relative—they identified 20 differences in 14 genes that account for the dire wolf’s distinguishing characteristics, including its greater size, white coat, wider head, larger teeth, more powerful shoulders, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.

    Next, they harvested endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of bloodvessels, from the bloodstreams of living gray wolves—a less invasive procedure than taking a tissue sample—and edited the 14 genes in their nuclei to express those 20 dire wolf traits. This is trickier than it seems, since genes often have multiple effects, not all of them good. For example, as the company explains in its press release, the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in gray wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without causing any harm in the edited gray wolf genome.

    Hay guys we messed with like a minuscule fraction of the genome of a living relative of an extinct creature whose full genome we definitely understand and now we have a new species!

    God I hate de-extinction. I hate the science, I hate the term, I hate the credulous reporting. NO REALLY 14 SNPs FROM A SINGLE SAMPLE IS ALL IT’S GONNA TAKE TO BRING BACK AN EXTINCT SPECIES, BELIEVE ME AND GIVE ME ALL YOUR VC FUNDING.

    • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Exactly. None of these “de-extinction” ventures are at all legitimate because de-extinction of these old species is a fiction, and the ecological conditions they would need to survive aren’t here anyway.

      This stuff is also highly unethical. Pointlessly breeding animals and making them suffer all to launder VC money.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.

    I hate really hate the media.

    The founders of Colossal aren’t interested all in the natural world. They’re interested in bringing back what they surely think of as a badass animal for their own tech bro cred and even more importantly for money. If they succeed in creating gigantic wolves - those creatures aren’t going to be reintroduced into the natural world. They’re going to be bought by the super-rich and then stuck in cages to be shown off to the much poorer masses.

    Look what we have. And you can never have.

    A silver lining will be at least one super-rich person (hopefully a billionaire) won’t be able to resist trying to pet one of his creatures and he’ll get his throat ripped out.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Theyre not direwolves though. They contain what the researchers think is direwolf genes sampled from bones, but they just spliced these genes into grey wolf DNA and stuffed it into some surrogate dogs. It’s effectively a new species, but it’s no different to selective breeding but more expensive.

    Not to mention these animals can’t exist in the wild. They’d effectively be inbred to fuck immediately and wolves are already struggling to survive due to human predation (especially of prey species) and habitat loss. A bigger, slower, more inbred wolf is going to immediately eat shit.

    This is a Theranos meme stock waiting to explode. The premise is nothing but a ponzi scheme designed to fund some unethical animal testing for some shitty zoo exhibits. The scientists behind this would rightfully be fed to their own subjects in a rational world.

      • Beaver [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Steve Spielberg: in my motion picture, I brought back to life ancient monstrous creatures as a cautionary tale against playing God with science

        Colossal: At long last, we have brought back to life monstrous ancient creatures, similar to the blockbuster hit movie…