In a wildly misleading announcement for what is still an amazing achievement, researchers at a Dallas-based startup claimed they’d created dire wolves, a species that has been extinct for more than 12,000 years. To make the news more irresistible, there were images of adorable white fluffy pups named Romulus and Remus.
Scientists outside the company, Colossal Biosciences, say the pups aren’t really the same dire wolves that roamed North America during the last Ice Age. But they do represent an impressive feat of genetic manipulation that could usher in a new era of designer animals.
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The dire wolf announcement exemplifies today’s P.T. Barnum style of doing science, where projects are funded by billionaires and celebrities and the results are packaged to sell. Colossal made international headlines last month when it announced it had created a genetically modified mouse with a mammoth-like woolly coat.
The company had already announced that it had raised more than $435 million toward its ultimate goal to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth. There are also plans for a dodo bird and Tasmanian tiger.
But what the company is doing isn’t cloning, de-extinction or resurrection of ancient beasts.
“De-extinction has a warm and fuzzy feeling associated with it because it’s trying to rectify a loss,” said University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin. “That’s not what they did here… they took a grey wolf genome, and they modified it to make a new kind of animal.” Designer animals are interesting, he said, but they do not create the sense that their existence makes the world a better place.
“Getting dragged into arguments about species definitions is a distraction from the real achievement,” Colossal said in a statement. “This is the most significant advancement in gene-editing in history.”
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The biotech and genetic engineering company began in 2020 when billionaire entrepreneur Ben Lamm met Harvard geneticist George Church. For years, Church had talked about his dreams of “de-extincting” the woolly mammoth. He was one of the early developers of gene editing, which is used in creating the company’s animals.
Dire wolves, made famous by Game of Thrones, weighed as much as 70kg—about 25% bigger than grey wolves. Lamm told The New Yorker that his company’s popularity was being buoyed by the big-dreaming attitude of billionaire Elon Musk. Some scientists have long dreamt of re-creating mammoths like the fictional scientists who made dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. They’d find preserved DNA, insert it into an egg cell and voila, a clone.
That has turned out to be a lot harder in real life.
But scientists can extract DNA from ancient fossils and study it to locate key genetic differences that separate elephants from mammoths, dire wolves from grey wolves, or Neanderthals from us. The real dire wolf lineage diverged from the ancestors of the grey wolf about 5.7 million years ago, and its DNA differs in hundreds of thousands of places. The scientists compared the ancient DNA with that of grey wolves and picked 20 genetic differences deemed most important to the dire wolf’s distinct appearance and combined them with grey-wolf DNA using gene editing.
Colossal was secretive about the wolf project, unlike its plans for the mammoth and other animals. Its findings haven’t been published in a scientific journal.
If a scientific paper can support details on the creation of the dire wolf-like pups, it will represent a significant breakthrough in genetic engineering, given the unprecedented number of gene edits performed simultaneously.
“Even our harshest critics admit it. As one of our founders stated, ‘This is the moon landing of synthetic biology,’” the company’s statement said.
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Jurassic Park dreams aside, the technology might prove useful for conservation, said S. Blair Hedges, a geneticist at Temple University. But it won’t get to the heart of the biodiversity crisis, he said, which is mostly from habitat destruction. “There are thousands of species… that are going extinct every day,” he said. “There are species that will go extinct without anybody ever discovering them.”
It would be an entirely different scientific achievement if scientists could somehow re-constitute or synthesize all the DNA of a dire wolf, dodo or mammoth. We’d get to see what these animals really looked like. That’s a long way off, but not outside the realm of possibility.
Until then, more designer animals could be on their way, and that’s what we should be discussing. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science.
