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…

The Guardian: “Do we need a new theory of evolution?”

In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the “non-Darwinian evolution” that some scientists were now proposing. If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular, he said. This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense. Where once Christians had complained that Darwin’s theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.

Other assaults on evolutionary orthodoxy followed. The influential palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge argued that the fossil record showed evolution often happened in short, concentrated bursts; it didn’t have to be slow and gradual. Other biologists simply found that the modern synthesis had little relevance to their work. As the study of life increased in complexity, a theory based on which genes were selected in various environments started to seem beside the point. It didn’t help answer questions such as how life emerged from the seas, or how complex organs, such as the placenta, developed. Using the lens of the modern synthesis to explain the latter, says the Yale developmental biologist Günter Wagner, would be like using thermodynamics to explain how the brain works.

Stephen Buranyi

I somewhat agree with the premise of the article – that we don’t have the complete picture about how life on Earth evolved – to which I would add that seeking clear-cut answers about events that happened millions to billions of years in the past is an utterly futile endeavor. We may not be able to fully trace how the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped to humans, which happened in our lifetimes, let alone discover the intricacies that led to the emergence of eyes in the animal kingdom.

The New Yorker: “CRISPR and the Splice to Survive”

If crispr confers the power to “rewrite the very molecules of life”, a synthetic gene drive increases that power exponentially. Suppose the researchers in San Diego had released their yellow fruit flies. Assuming that those flies had found mates, swarming around some campus dumpster, their offspring, too, would have been yellow. And assuming that those offspring survived and also successfully mated, their progeny would, in turn, have been yellow. The trait would have continued to spread, ineluctably, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, until yellow ruled.

And there’s nothing special about color in fruit flies. Just about any gene in any plant or animal can—in principle, at least—be programmed to load the inheritance dice in its own favor. This includes genes that have themselves been modified, or borrowed from other species. It should be possible, for example, to engineer a drive that would spread a broken toxin gene among cane toads. It may also be possible one day to create a drive for corals that would push a gene for heat tolerance, to help them survive global warming.

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But as is so often the case, solving one set of problems introduces new ones. In this case, big ones. Humongous ones. Gene-drive technology has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine, a single shard of which is enough to freeze all the water in the world. A single X-shredder mouse on the loose could, it’s feared, have a similarly chilling effect—a sort of mice-nine.

To guard against a Vonnegutian catastrophe, various fail-safe schemes have been proposed, with names like killer rescue, multi-locus assortment, and daisy chain. All of them share a basic, hopeful premise: it should be possible to engineer a gene drive that’s effective but not too effective. Such a drive might be engineered so as to exhaust itself after a few generations, or it might be yoked to a gene variant that’s limited to a single population on a single island. It has also been suggested that if a gene drive did somehow manage to go rogue it might be possible to send out into the world another gene drive, featuring a “Cas9-triggered chain ablation”—or catcha—sequence, to chase it down. What could possibly go wrong?

Elizabeth Kolbert

I postponed reading the article above for quite some time, assuming it didn’t have much added information on genetic modifications and CRISPR – man, was I wrong! The story starts with a fairly common example of invasive species wreaking havoc in an ecosystem unprepared for its presence – in this case cane toads in Australia poisoning unsuspecting predators. And we continue onto the proposed solution from a team of scientists to gene-edit the toads to make them less toxic. The surprise twist for me was this potential technic called synthetic gene drive, which in theory could facilitate the spread of artificially inserted genes in wild populations.

National Geographic: “Bringing Them Back to Life”

I met Fernández-Arias last autumn at a closed-session scientific meeting at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. For the first time in history a group of geneticists, wildlife biologists, conservationists, and ethicists had gathered to discuss the possibility of de-extinction. Could it be done? Should it be done? One by one, they stood up to present remarkable advances in manipulating stem cells, in recovering ancient DNA, in reconstructing lost genomes. As the meeting unfolded, the scientists became increasingly excited. A consensus was emerging: De-extinction is now within reach.

It’s gone very much further, very much more rapidly than anyone ever would’ve imagined, says Ross MacPhee, a curator of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. What we really need to think about is why we would want to do this in the first place, to actually bring back a species.

Carl Zimmer

I found this older magazine piece while writing my blog post about the recent mammoth de-extinction initiative. It occurs to me that I forgot to mention one other hurdle on the path to successfully returning an extinct species into the natural environment: the low genetic variability of the resurrected animals, which would make them more susceptible to diseases and environmental changes. This would affect larger animals with slower reproductive cycles in particular, so the challenge of this mammoth project becomes that much more complicated. It is evidently much easier to prevent species from going extinct, and that’s where the majority of our efforts should focus.

The Verge: “The controversial science behind woolly mammoth de-extinction”

A flashy new biotech startup launched yesterday called Colossal is on a mission to make an elephant-woolly mammoth mashup — with the ultimate goal of promoting biodiversity and combating climate change, it says. The effort has gotten a lot of hype and big-name backers, but scientists who work in conservation are still pretty skeptical.

The science behind Colossal is in very early stages and is mired in ethical quandaries. The company won’t actually bring back a woolly mammoth, which hasn’t roamed the Earth in about 10,000 years. Instead, Colossal’s de-extinction effort aims to create a hybrid between a woolly mammoth and its distant relative (the two share a common ancestor): the Asian elephant, which itself is an endangered species.

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Lamm believes Colossal’s work might benefit the elephants and draw more attention to other conservation efforts. We’re trying to make sure that we do this in the most transparent and ethical way as possible, Lamm tells The Verge. We feel very confident about what we can do to help the elephant lineage… For us it’s about giving the species additional tools to survive. An elephant with mammoth traits would be better able to survive in the Arctic’s cold temperatures, away from urbanization that threatens its species, he says.

But Asian elephants’ home is tropical South and Southeast Asia. They’re also highly intelligent and social animals that form tight-knit groups. They have a culture, Bennett says. All that raises “major” ethical questions for Bennett over whether a mammoth-elephant hybrid would be able to behaviorally manage being transplanted in a new home that’s vastly different from where elephant species currently live.

Justine Calma

A highly ambitious project that I would like to see succeed – but realistically I would give it about as much chance of materializing as Elon Musk’s random wild ideas.

The Guardian: “Invasion of the ‘frankenbees’: the danger of building a better bee”

Honeybees originated in Eurasia roughly 35m years ago, and as long as they have had steady access to flowering plants, they have thrived. But in the modern world, bees face all kinds of dangers. Colony collapse is not a single malady, but rather an amalgamation of different challenges. Alongside the dangers of pesticides, diseases such as Israeli acute paralysis virus, gut parasites and invasive parasites such as the varroa mite can overwhelm the bees’ immune systems. Industrial agriculture imposes its own threats: a mania for monocultures has led to shrinking foraging habitats, while, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, bees employed in commercial pollination, in which hives are stacked high on trucks and driven around the country to pollinate almond trees and other crops, get highly stressed, which damages their resilience and eating habits.

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Beekeepers fear genetic engineering of honeybees will introduce patents and privatisation to one of the last bastions of agriculture that is collectively managed and owned by no one. Think about it, Haefeker told me, the one area Big Ag doesn’t yet control is pollination. And pollination is huge. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that pollinators help farmers grow crops worth up to $577bn (£437bn) annually.

Damage to the bee population, by harming a vital pollinator, is already threatening crops worldwide. Outside FAO’s headquarters in Rome, a neon billboard flashes in English, Italian and Arabic a series of urgent save-the-planet messages. Save the bees tops the list. If bees disappear, food crops and animal feeds, not to mention the raw materials for biofuels (from canola and palm oil), textiles (cotton) and medicines, will simply vanish from much of the planet. It has got so bad in some parts of China that humans already pollinate some crops by hand. In what feels like a riff on a Black Mirror episode, Harvard researchers are working on the RoboBee, a flying robotic pollinator that is half the size of a paperclip and weighs less than one-tenth of a gram. In March, Walmart filed a series of patents for its own tiny robotic pollinators.

Bernhard Warner

If the banana could be a relatively safe target for genetic engineering to protect the commercial variant from a deadly disease, bees are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. The issues are far more complex than in the case of the banana, as highlighted above, so a solution based exclusively on gene editing would have to be equally complex, thus raising the prospects of unintended reactions. The risks involved are enormous, given how crucial honeybees are in pollination and agriculture. I do not think we can afford to play around with the food supply of the entire world…

The Guardian: “People v mosquitos: what to do about our biggest killer”

While our counterattacks are reducing the number of casualties she perpetrates – malaria deaths in particular are declining rapidly – the mosquito remains the deadliest hunter of human beings on the planet.

Taking a broad range of estimates into account, since 2000, the average annual number of human deaths caused by the mosquito was around 2 million. Humans came in a distant second at 475,000, followed by snakes (50,000), dogs and sandflies (25,000 each), the tsetse fly, and the assassin or kissing bug (10,000 each). The fierce killers of lore and Hollywood celebrity were much further down our list. The crocodile was ranked 10th, with 1,000 annual deaths. Next on the list were hippos with 500, and elephants and lions with 100 fatalities each. The much-slandered shark and wolf shared 15th position, killing an average of 10 people per annum.

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They are masters of evolutionary adaptation. Mosquitoes can evolve and adapt to their changing environments within a few generations. During the Blitz of 1940–41, for example, as German bombs rained down on London, isolated populations of Culex mosquitoes were confined to the air-raid tunnel shelters of the London Underground, along with the city’s resilient citizens. These trapped mosquitoes quickly adapted to feed on mice, rats and humans instead of birds, and are now a species distinct from their above-ground parental ancestors.

What should have taken thousands of years of evolution was accomplished in less than 100. In another 100 years, jokes Richard Jones, former president of the British Entomological and Natural History Society, there may be separate Circle line, Metropolitan line and Jubilee line mosquito species in the tunnels below London.

Timothy Winegard

Throughout human history, mosquitos have been a constant companion – and source of plagues and suffering. Despite recent technological advances, diseases spread by mosquito bites continue to cause large numbers of deaths each year, prompting people to invent new strategies to keep the insects at bay. My personal favorite: zapping them with autonomous laser beams!