ABC News (and me) on the Dire Wolf “de-extinction”

A reporter from ABC News interviewed me yesterday about the Dire Wolf, and her piece appears on their website today (see below). I had to find it myself because, as is usual, when I ask reporters to send me the link to a story for which I was interviewed, they all say “yes”, but only about 10% ever do.  Frankly, I think it’s kind of selfish to exploit scientists for their expertise and not even send them a lousy link.

Well, I digress, but this is in line with the kind of science journalism that has often accompanied the Dire Wolf story. Fortunately, the ABC article is pretty good.

First I’ll add a few comments.  My own view is that Colossal has behaved in a sleazy and overly secretive way with respect to their “de-extinction” and “we-are-big-conservationists” claims.  Some of the secrecy seems unwarranted. For example, they told the New Yorker reporter who wrote about the “Dire Wolf” what genes they had edited, but did not permit him to publish their identity.  Since the faux Dire Wolves are now romping around a secret pasture monitored by drones, there’s no chance that anybody else is going to do what Colossal did, so no need to hide the genes.

The paper about the “woolly mouse” is on bioRχiv, but is still not accepted for publication. (The accompanying note says “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review.”)

And Colossal Bioscience is getting considerable flak from the better science journalists, and is getting peevish about it. They issued a press release yesterday that was defensive, clearly a response to the pushback they’re getting and heavily concerned with species definitions, trying to argue that the dire wolf is a “new species” even though it’s just a gray wolf with 20 DNA letters changed.  Here’s short excerpt of the two-page release:

We invested over a year collaborating with academic colleagues to improve the dire wolf paleogenome and decode the dire wolf’s evolutionary history. Our scientific manuscript has been submitted for peer review and posted to the preprint server–please go check it out.

I cannot find the preprint of the Dire Wolf paper anywhere on the web. If you can find it, let us all know. It would of course list the genes that had been changed.

You can read the ABC article by clicking below; it’s free. The article includes a ten-minute video of the project showing the “Dire Wolves” (I have to admit that they’re cute).  Note that Colossal decline to let the reporter see the faux Dire Wolves “up close,” though they showed her the videos.  And Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm asserts that they are on target to produce woolly mammoths by 2028! I’m ready to bet a thousand dollars that that won’t happen—especially if you define “de-exincted woolly mammoth” as being something with at least 50 gene edits that’s ready to release on the tundra.

Three quotes from Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal Biosciences, from the video in the article:

“. . . that animal looks like a dire wolf, it will behave like a dire wolf, and it is a dire wolf.”

“When I saw them born, and they were white, I was like: ‘we’ve done it–those are dire wolves.'”

“I think that the best definition of a species is if it looks like that species, if it is acting like that species, if it is filling the role of that species, then you’ve done it.”

They are heavily invested in the claim that this really IS a dire wolf.  The press release makes that clear, as they’re trying to revise species definitions so that the Dire Wolf qualifies as a new species. From Colossal’s press release:

So many experts out there are demanding that species are defined solely by their DNA. That’s some version of “insane”. Even evolutionary biologists can’t agree on species definitions. Mammoth species? Defined by teeth ridges. Ancient bison? Horn shapes. And so arbitrarily that someone accidentally mixing up length and width measurements had zero impact on species classification. Brown bears and polar bears, humans and Neanderthals, wolves and coyotes are all different species unless you apply the most commonly taught species concept, which would classify them as the same species because they can interbreed and produce healthy, fertile offspring.

Getting dragged into arguments about species definitions is a distraction from the real achievement. This is the most significant advancement in gene-editing in history. Even our harshest critics admit it. As one of our founders stated, “this is the moon landing of synthetic biology.”

. . .We get it. We totally understand that some scientists are not comfortable calling these dire wolves because they feel like the wolves are not sufficiently genetically similar to a particular extinct individual to merit that name. That’s ok with us.  This is not a fight that we care about. We’re calling them dire wolves, and if you prefer something else (how about “Colossal’s dire wolves”?) that works too. And maybe also take a breath and think about what the birth of these technologies means to the future of our planet instead of nitpicking terminology.

This is a fight they don’t care about? I think they should care, at least a bit. They are calling these tweaked canids members of a new species, the “Dire Wolf”.  I prefer “gray wolves with fifteen DNA letters from dire wolves” or, better, “genetic variants of the gray wolf.” The whole hype around this animal is that it is a new species that existed in the past, not simply a minor variant of the gray wolf that is nowhere near being genetically similar to the extinct gray wolf.

Quotes from the ABC piece, including what I said:

Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, the company behind the revived dire wolf and based in Dallas, said it is “a scientific breakthrough for global conservation efforts” and is even trying to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth by 2028.

However, bioethicists and ecologists say they are skeptical that the animals created are actually dire wolves and said there are ethical concerns including where the animals would be kept and if they could ever survive in the wild.

“All claims of de-extinction are the invocation of a metaphor, and what they have produced and what they will at some point produce, may be technologically impressive, but they are not and never can be the actual previously extinct creatures,” Samuel Gorovitz, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University and a leader in the development of the medical ethics field, told ABC News.

“Only adult dire wolves can raise a dire wolf and there aren’t any. … One thing that we know for sure, that they are not, is dire wolves.”

. . . Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke professor of conservation ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, called the news of the resurrected dire wolf a “colossal fabrication” and referred to the species created as a “designer dog.”

“This is just a big dog with a few genes inserted from a once extinct wolf,” Pimm told ABC News. “Incidentally, a dire wolf is not really closely related to a regular wolf.”

He went on, “It’s about as different to a regular wolf as we are from chimpanzees and if you inserted a chimpanzee gene into a human, I think that will be a horribly unethical thing to do.”

One of my beefs is that none of Colossal’s projects involve changing the behavior of the “de-extincted” organism, even though behavior is absolutely critical not only in bringing back a species as it really was, but allowing it to survive in nature.  Remember, wolves and mammoths are social animals, programmed to learn many things from their parents. And they have genetically coded behavioral repertoires whose genetic basis we do not understand. For example, maybe lichens tasted good to a Woolly Mammoth but wouldn’t to a replica tweaked by Colossal. Such a difference, if it existed, would likely be genetic.

A few more criticisms from the ABC piece:

However, today’s environment does not resemble the environment in which historic dire wolves lived and releasing them into the wild could harm the ecosystem.

“It has to live somewhere, and it isn’t clear what the environment was that the dire wolf lived in, or what it ate, or sort of its behavior, and so you kind of face a possibility you won’t know where to keep this animal that you made healthy,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told ABC News.

He added that the behavior of dire wolves was likely shaped by the packs they roamed in or packs that they may have competed against. However, those groups also don’t exist anymore.

“If you bring back something that’s been dead 10,000 or 40,000 or 100,000 years, you need to bring back its environment, not just the animal,” Caplan continued. “Otherwise, you potentially are going to have issues.”

Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said there is no way to release the “de-extincted” dire wolves back into the wild because they wouldn’t know how to survive.

Coyne told ABC News that if the revived dire wolves are let loose into the wild “without the social group that they’re evolved to be in” it would be hard to expect them to “behave properly” around other animals because they’ve never been exposed to other species.

“So that’s also unethical, because those animals are kind of separate. They’re not going to have the right thing to eat, it’s not going to know what to eat, how to eat, probably got the wrong digestive system. … So that’s one of the ethical considerations.”

Colossal Laboratories did not reply to ABC News’ request for comment on these concerns.

Of course they wouldn’t!

Again, I think there is a destructive and perhaps unwitting collusion between Colossal and much of the press. Now the ABC piece by Mary Kakatos is fine, and gives the proper caveats and room for critics, but a lot of pieces don’t (see the New Yorker piece, for instance).  But the press isn’t going to get clicks by saying that “this is not a real Dire Wolf,” so they amp up the gee-whiz factor and dial down the critics. And, as you see above, Colossal is perfectly happy with the rah-rah press coverage. The real losers in all this are the public, who miss the chance to learn something about genetics and conservation.

And, by the way, Colossal should stop spreading the view that de-extinction is one way to keep us from worrying about endangered species, implying that we can always bring them back again with cloning, Crispr and surrogate mothers!

UPDATE: Beth Shapiro defends the criticisms leveled against the Dire Wolf project. Many of her points was in the press release. Click to hear (h/t Matthew Cobb). She is quite defensive.

An analysis of this statement followed by a thread. I can’t embed the Bluesky post, but click on it to go to the thread: