Yes, we’ve all heard that three white dire wolves are running around at some secret location, and we’ve heard about Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based firm that, it says, is going to fix the “colossal problem” of extinction. The main way they propose to do it—and the bit that’s gained all the attention—is to “de-extinct” animals by finding fossil DNA of extinct species, sequencing some bits that presumptively code for a few of their traits, and then, using CRISPR, put those bits into the fertilized eggs of a living species that’s a close living relative. That way you get a hybrid animal, which is by necessity genetically about 99.9% or more of the living species but with a few traits of the extinct species. Then–voilà–you can say you have “de-extincted” the species. The misleading hype involved in that verb is obvious.
For example, dire wolf genes were extracted from fossil specimens, and 15 of those bits were edited into 14 genes in the fertilized egg of a grey wolf (they actually put in 20 bits, but 5 of those involved mutations existing in dogs and wolves. Since the grey wolf genome has 2.4 billion bases, you can see that only a tiny bit of dire wolf genome went into the wolf genome. The edited wolf egg was then transferred into surrogate dog mothers, and the mostly-grey-wolf hybrids were extracted by caesarian section (the dogs weren’t killed). Voilà: they got three largish white wolves that they called dire wolves. (The white color, by the way, did not come from the dire wolf DNA bnt from dog or coyote mutations. They edited whiteness into the hybrid because dire wolves were white when they featured, much larger, in the t.v. show Game of Thrones. We don’t know what color the dire wolves really were, but I doubt it was snow white. They did not live in snowy areas.)
The Big Project of Colossal, however, is the “de-extincting” of the woolly mammoth, a project I’ve discussed on this site before. (The dodo and thylacine are also on tap to be edited back to life.) Colossal promises that we’ll have faux mammoths—which paleobiologist and mammoth expert Tori Herridge denigrated as “elephants in a fur coat” because a few of the changes will involve hairiness—by 2028. Good luck with that!
There are many problems with the “de-extinction” scenarios that have nevertheless raked in $435 million for Colossal thanks to donors like Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods. And although other scientists like Tori and Adam Rutherford have described some of these problems, I decided to summarize them all in one place for American readers. Thus my op-ed in today’s Boston Globe, which you can find here, though it may be paywalled. Clicking on the headline below, however will take you to a non-paywalled archived version of the text.
The article summarizes four major problems with “de-extinction”, which you can read in the article. The Globe had a special piece of art made to illustrate my article, and I absolutely love it (see below, and notice the hook). The illustration is the creation of Patric Sandri, a Swiss artist. Thanks to the artist and especially to my editor, who was perhaps the most amiable and easiest op-ed editor I’ve ever worked with.
Enjoy (unless you work for Colossal)!
Love the sparkly tip on the tusk. A kind of visual wink at the reader. “Objects in this mirror may be closer (to an elephant) than they appear.”
Very good!
Excellent op-ed! It was a pleasure to read. Congratulations!
It’s really nice that your sensible take on this is getting wide exposure. You are playing a key role in exposing this Theranos II.
Excellent op-ed. I thought the arguments you make (except the environmental mismatch one – I’d not thought of that) were pretty self explanatory already even from a brief reading of what Colossal have said they’re doing – but later I realized one would have to have some basic grip of genetics – and most people don’t.
Along those lines… at the risk of sounding arrogant – I’m often amazed at the lack of public understanding of MANY things: exponentiality, scale, normal distributions, randomness, even “per capita” are beyond many, many people it seems.
D.A.
NYC
A riff on Clarke’s Third Law:
Any sufficiently strong brew of ignorance and stubbornness is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Not entirely our fault, as TheMedia@ insists we should either be at each other’s throats and/or buying something all the time.
Colossal has become the P. T. Barnum of zoology.
Good timing on their part, what with a carnival barker in the WH.
Astonishing the amount of money that this can raise, yet when my colleagues and I try to raise $ on a startup with proven technology to revolutionize ID of specific bacterial species in blood (ref. to sepsis) is an hour, all we get is “You’re at too early a stage.” and “How soon can I get my money back out.”
Guessing 2028 is the expected time when the gig is expected to be up. I think that, “Show me the damn dodo.” might do it.
Nice closing line, too.
“Show me the damn dodo.”
Hasn’t that been tried by someone?
Thanks Jerry. Loved the car analogy. Generating a herd of actual mammoths might finally provide an excuse to annex Canada in the search for tundra for them to roam.
Well done.”De-extinction” is ludicrous.
Thanks Jerry! This will now be required reading in all my Biology courses, especially Intro Bio!
Howie
It might be good to have them read some of Colossal’s stuff and then discuss it so they can find out the problems on their own!
This hullabaloo about calendars is absurd on many levels. A calendar is nothing more or less then a human contrivance to organizing our thinking about time, it is not a feature of nature. The idea that there is “truth” or “wisdom” in the Māori calendar or any other calendar is preposterous. If we put aside silly ideas about astrology and superstitious ideas about the moon’s alleged influence on human affairs and judge a calendar just as a system of reckoning time, the only question that makes sense is whether the Māori calendar is more or less convenient for New Zealanders than the Western calendar.
I am reminded of an amusing event that happened early in my teaching career. I was teaching a fluffy math course called Math Excursions. I taught students the simple math trick to calculate what day of the week was May 1, 1829 if I start out knowing that May 1, 2025 is a Thursday. I mentioned in passing that America and other Anglophone countries are unusual in regarding Sunday as the first day of the week. I told them that most Europeans and Latin Americans run the week from Monday to Sunday rather than from Sunday to Saturday. A student piped up, “They’re wrong. Everybody knows that Sunday is the first day of the week.” I tried to explain that there is no right or wrong about it, that a week is only a human convention and not a feature of nature. Most of my students understood, but some didn’t.
I think you put this on the wrong post.
To explain the genetic issues to a friend based on the number of genetic differences between gray wolves and dire wolves, I calculated: if gray wolves are here in Los Angeles, and dire wolves are in New York, then Colossal’s animals are just across the street from me.
Great article, thanks!
This attitude of “we can screw over the planet because we can always fix things with technology” reminds me of Elon Musk’s and others’ perspective that we can escape our ecological sins simply by colonizing Mars and the rest of the universe.
Before we go to claim Mars for our own, I’m sure there will be worldly pronouncement that the planets “belong” to all of us and we should be careful not to… (whatever). Betting us pesky humans can ignore that and trash Mars, too.
Really excellent, thank you. This will be my go-to for quotes on this subject.
I do not understand why extinction is a problem, let alone a colossal problem…it seems to me it is just part of life. In any case the op-ed was beautifully and cleverly written. Thank you very much for the opportunity to read it.
I take a more nuanced view of the de-extinction process. Yes, I agree the company hasn’t actually produced dire wolves and that will surely be the case should they resurrect a woolly mammoth. And there are lots of obvious ethical and practical issues about those that have been extinct for a long time. But for those recently extinct and for those extinctions definitively caused by humans, I think there is a more practical and ethical case for their work. The thylacine of Tasmania, passenger pigeon, dodo, and others can probably be brought back in their genetic entirety (yes, their genetic variation will be more difficult to replicate) and they would have some valuable ecosystem services to provide. We also have the functionally extinct, like the northern white rhino (only two females survive) which could also benefit from this technology. I actually wish the company would focus on these animals first and perhaps consider the Pleistocene animals at a later time when more of the technical and ethical issues have been addressed in a better way.
An excellent article – thanks!
LOL!
Great close…
“In other words, a mammoth mess.”
Or even a Colossal one.
It’s been said before, but let’s save what we still have.
Re funding sources for Colostomal Biosciences:
Has-been celebs for has-been species?
haha, good point
The real harm here imo is it may be promoting science as bullshit and scientists as bullshit artist.
This approach to “de-extinction” is less resurrection and more genetic cosplay. What we’re witnessing is not the return of a lost species, but the engineering of a cosmetic echo—a modern creature wearing a genetic costume stitched together from fragments of the past. The core organism remains overwhelmingly that of a living species, modified by a few inserted genes whose phenotypic expressions we only partially understand. This raises pressing questions about the authenticity and purpose of such scientific efforts.
Is editing a handful of genes enough to claim the revival of an extinct species? The dire wolf project, as described, involves inserting 20 bits of ancient DNA—only 15 of which may be truly unique—into the 2.4 billion-base genome of a grey wolf. That’s less than a drop in a genomic ocean. Can we justify calling the result a “dire wolf” when over 99.999% of its genome belongs to a different species? And what does that do to our understanding of identity in biology? Are we creating animals, or narratives?
Moreover, how confident can we be in selecting which genes to transfer when we barely understand the complex interactions behind phenotype, behavior, or ecological function? If dire wolves were pack-hunters with unique social structures or sensory abilities, are we capturing any of that with just a few gene edits? Or are we merely creating curiosities—designer animals molded more by pop culture than by scientific fidelity?
There’s also an ethical and ecological dimension: Should we pursue genetic nostalgia when so many extant species face imminent extinction? Could this technological theater distract from the harder, less glamorous work of conservation?
In the rush to make headlines, we risk reducing genetic history to a set of aesthetic tweaks. True de-extinction would require not just genetic similarity but ecological reinstatement, behavioral fidelity, and an honesty about what we are—and aren’t—bringing back.
Are we reviving species, or just resurrecting myths?