A biotech company claims it has facilitated the first howl of the dire wolf (an extinct canine) heard for 10,000 years. And there’s a video. A scientist holds up two white-coated cubs in his arms. Although their howling, really, is more like a series of yelps, they are meant to be the first of something big. They’re called Romulus and Remus, Colossal Biosciences, says. And they are the beginning of a new project to bring back from the grave a long-gone wolf species. A species that is often in fiction, often in fossil, but not often live and in colour.
The de-extinction (which is what Colossal, never notably underselling, calls its process) of the dire wolf was announced with a cover of Time magazine, a profile in the New Yorker, and much social media publicity. There are many good reasons why. The cubs are very sweet. They have big blue eyes. Colossal has told us we can watch them grow up on YouTube, where there will be a lot of footage of the two of them. And, Colossal tells us, there will be more where that came from. Certainly, there will be more.
In the comments under the post Colossal put up on Twitter announcing this project, eager punters placed bets and orders. Can you bring back the mammoth? Colossal said they were already working on it. Elon Musk put in a personal request for mammoths who were small enough to be household pets. Colossal did not respond to that one. What about dinosaurs? Colossal said it might be too much of an ask.
But what really, is the process of ‘de-extinction’? It is not, in case you were wondering, caused by isolating some ancient DNA from a sample of bone or hair or blood trapped in a mosquito trapped in amber, the stuff of science fiction. Instead, this is an intriguing and path-breaking process, but it is not necessarily the one you first thought of when you heard this news.
To a degree, this is fairly classic tech-company hype, hype over reality. Colossal has verifiably produced some cubs which they claim to be of a formerly extinct species. But the cubs are not, at least not Jurassic Park style, copies of an earlier organism.
Instead, something similarly clever but less revolutionary has been done. In practice what Colossal has achieved is selectively breeding pre-existing wolf types to resemble more closely what they believe the previous dire wolf phenotype was. They identified a certain number of genetic differences between modern wolf types and dire wolf types, and put them together with a secret cocktail of selective breeding and gene editing via CRISPR (a very buzzy technology which bolder advocates claim will allow future scientists to assemble organisms from DNA like puzzle pieces, adding a little here, a little there, until you have precisely what you want).
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is not de-extinction in any meaningful way. What it is instead is a process of artificial selection sped up and with a good PR campaign in tow.
Colossal has already created a lot of headlines in its efforts to ‘de-extinct’ the woolly mammoth. Again, it says the best way to do this is not to find intact ancient mammoth DNA and implant it into, for instance, an African elephant embryo. But instead, the solution is to get elephant DNA or elephant embryos and to modify them using gene editing, until they resemble mammoths in appearance and characteristics, in carefully chosen ways.
Some of the proofs Colossal have offered of this process are enjoyable. The most media friendly one was the creation of a new and charming species of lab mice, these ones exceptionally woolly, to prove that it should be possible to make elephants develop hair and fur like a mammoth would have had. The woolly mice are sweet, but are they mammoths? Are they mammoths in any real way?
Is this de-extinction? I don’t think it is. It’s a series of cosmetic procedures, done at a level even deeper than the skin – a Hollywood dream, something the world’s plastic surgeons would kill to possess.
It’s not bringing a species back from the dead. But what Colossal hopes to offer is par for the course.
We already live in an era of designer children via IVF, of the expensive but quite common cloning of beloved deceased pets. Colossal has made impressive progress on basically the same thing. And claims like the ones it makes are going to proliferate. But for the moment at least, it’s still a sell. The wolf pups are pretty, but they’re not dire wolves. At least, not yet.
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