The New Yorker: “The Dire Wolf is Back”

Science journalists were more cautious. They took issue with the fact that Colossal had used analogous genes from mice, not woolly-mammoth DNA, to achieve the effect of long, thick hair. A professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Buffalo did tell the Associated Press that the work was technologically pretty cool. But Nature noted that a Maine research facility has been offering its own long-haired mouse strain, named Wooly, for sale to scientists for the past twenty years.

Lamm was irritated when I mentioned the response to him. We are the most advanced multicellular-synthetic-biology company on the planet, he told me. The science behind the woolly mouse had been extraordinary, he reiterated—researchers had successfully made multiple gene edits on a living organism at the same time, a precursor to the quadruple-axel gene editing used in re-creating the dire wolf. It was the most unique germ-line edit in any animal to date, he said.

I asked Lamm if perhaps some overpromising by the Colossal brand had tamped down the applause. The word “de-extinction” appears nearly five hundred times on the company’s website; ordinary people could be excused for thinking that the word referred to creating an exact genetic replica of a once alive animal. Lamm responded, I was warned when I started this business that some of the scientific community will be, if we are successful, jealous and somewhat frustrated. He added, You would think spending half a billion on deëxtinction and conservation would get them excited.

D. T. Max

I rolled my eyes pretty hard when first reading the headlines about this company bringing back an extinct canine species. It was fairly obvious this was nowhere close to the Jurassic Park-like vision of recovering ancient DNA and recreating a live animal based on this genetic blueprint. Instead, the company spliced in a limited set of genes using CRISPR to mimic the visual appearance of a dire wolf and spun this into a massively overblown narrative. They essentially created a new wolf breed and sold it to the public as reviving an entire species…

Romulus, at three months. He and Remus are identical twins—they came from the same engineered cell line. Photograph courtesy Colossal Biosciences

As with tech journalism, science magazines suffer from the same issue of taking research papers and press releases at face value, uncritically repeating their claims in the name of ‘reporting the news’. I’m quite sure that the public would trust journalism more if writers would make even slight efforts to challenge hyperbolic narratives and explain if and how some scientific achievements are plausible while others are wild exaggerations that are years away from any potential tangible results.

But things somehow got even worse as I was reading through the article. Colossal’s founder, Ben Lamm, seems to think that scientists and conservationists should judge the company’s efforts based on the amount of money thrown at the problem, not its concrete results – a very American attitude that only money counts, that if I am richer I am inherently more successful and my opinion therefore more valid than that of everyone else. This naturally ignores the long list of other issues with de-extinction that aren’t solved with genetic research, like building a viable population that can replicate and live in the wild, and securing an ecosystem for the revived species that won’t immediately be trampled by people.

Until the genome synthesis of mammals becomes a reality, Colossal’s dire wolf may be the closest we can come to the resurrection of charismatic megafauna. Lamm says that Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi will not be allowed to breed; moreover, the company anticipates genetically engineering just three to five more of the animals. They will be kept on their preserve, protected by a ten-foot-high security fence and surveilled by drones—and visited, one suspects, only by the occasional billionaire. Colossal’s wolves are now at the age when their parents would teach them to hunt, but of course they have no parents; in fact, they have never seen other wolves.

The ending of the article downright infuriated me though: apparently the company never intended to ‘bring back the dire wolf’, because they planned for less than 10 specimens to live out their lives on an artificial preserve and never be allowed to produce offspring! How on Earth can you announce with a straight face that you revived a species when you won’t even make an attempt at letting them survive in the wilderness and reproduce?! This reads live a massively expensive publicity stunt – and I’m not even sure what this company is advertising for, as they seem to jump around between projects without delivering on their overblown promises. This is fundamentally the problem with relegating research and projects with societal impact to private companies: their allegiance is to money and profits – the sooner the better; everything that can’t be easily measured by its monetary value tends to be discarded, and projects on longer timescales routinely get passed up because investors aren’t willing to wait for their returns.