Colossal Biosciences finally admits they haven’t “de-extincted” dire wolves

As you know, Colossal Biosciences, a company heavily funded by donors who include Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods, claims that it “de-extincted” the defunct dire wolf, and says it will have woolly mammoths on the ground within three years.  This claims are grossly misleading, as I pointed out in a recent Boston Globe op-ed. 

The press and much of the public, of course, reacted with joy at the notion that we could bring back charismatic extinct species, although here and there scientists like me would show why these claims are overblown, largely because the “de-extincted” species would represent only modern species that had had just a tiny handful of genetic edits making them resemble the extinct one.  Important adaptations in the extinct species, most notably those involving physiology and behavior (the latter would require edits to genes in the brain that we don’t know), would not appear in the de-extincted species.  As I wrote in my piece:

. . . . . most important, “de-extinction” is not de-extinction. The company says its claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf is legitimate because its edited pups meet some of the criteria for species “proxies” established in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But that claim is bogus. What Colossal has made is simply a gray wolf with a handful of genetic tweaks changing its size and color.

In the case of the mammoth, what we (may eventually) have is an Asian elephant with a handful of mammoth traits. And a handful of mammoth traits does not a mammoth make. I can paint my Ford Taurus bright red and even attach the Ferrari insignia to its hood, but it’s still a Ford Taurus, albeit with a handful of Ferrari traits. The Ferrari-ness of a Ferrari permeates every feature of a Ferrari’s engineering, just as the mammoth-ness of a mammoth permeates every feature of its biology. We know from ancient DNA studies that mammoths differ from Asian elephants at 1.4 million sites along its DNA, yet Colossal plans to mammoth-ize only a tiny fraction of these. Victoria Herridge, a mammoth expert, has described Colossal’s “mammoth” as nothing more than “an elephant in a fur coat.”

Now, according to a New Scientist article below (click headline to read archived version, or find it here), the chief scientific officer of Colossal has finally admitted, after claiming otherwise, that they really haven’t produced dire wolves. As we critics maintained, they’ve produced grey wolves with a few traits that might have been present in dire wolves. But even their admission of having distorted what they did is disingenuous, as they claim they never said what they in fact did say.

I’ve put an excerpt (indented) below:

Excerpt:

The dire wolf is “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal”, Colossal Biosciences claimed on 7 April. And many people seemed to believe it. New Scientist was one of the few media outlets to reject the claim, pointing out that the animals created by Colossal are just grey wolves with a few gene edits.

Now, in a subsequent interview, Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro appears to agree. “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned,” she tells New Scientist. “And we’ve said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they’re calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry.”

I haven’t seen the interview, but. . . .

Richard Grenyer at the University of Oxford says this is a major departure from what Colossal has said previously. “I read that as a clear statement of her view of what they did and didn’t do – and that what they didn’t do was bring back a dire wolf from extinction.”

“I think there is a serious inconsistency between the contents of the statement and the actions and publicity material – including the standard content of the website, not just [the] press briefing around the dire wolf – of the company,” he says.

For instance, the Colossal press release announcing the birth of the gene-edited wolves refers to them as “dire wolves” throughout. Shapiro defended this claim in an interview with New Scientist on 7 April.

“We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal,” she said at the time.

I know of no biologist who adheres to the morphological species concept, and even if they do, they wouldn’t say “if they look like species X (with “like” being totally ambiguous), then they are members of species X. A superficial resemblance is not enough, and even then we don’t know what the real, extinct dire wolf looked like.

See my analogy with the Ferrari above, or, in a funny analogy in a NYT critique of Colossal, there’s this:

Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”

If you’ve followed Colossal’s statements, or gone to the de-extinction part of its website, the company is still claiming that it’s more or less bringing back species, though as I recall from earlier versions, they’ve walked back some of their claims. Now, for instance, they single out just six physical or physiological traits in the woolly mammoth that they’re trying to tweak, and they are still claiming that their efforts will make serious inroads on the problem of species extinction.

Here’s a kicker. Colossal engineered white coats into the three faux “dire wolves,” apparently because the animals (made famous by the t.v. series “Game of Thrones) were white on television. But. . .

It is actually unclear whether the gene-edited wolves look like dire wolves. For instance, there is some evidence dire wolves had reddish rather than white coats, according to Claudio Sillero at the University of Oxford.

And here’s one more claim that isn’t all what it seems to be:

Yet even when Sillero and other experts put out a statement saying the gene-edited grey wolves aren’t dire wolves, the company stuck to its guns. “[W]e stand by our decision to refer to Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi colloquially as dire wolves,” Colossal said in a statement on X. [JAC: Don’t bother looking up the tweet, as it’s no longer about dire wolves.]

But in her more recent interview with New Scientist, Shapiro claims Colossal made it clear from the start that the animals are just gene-edited grey wolves.

“We didn’t ever hide that that’s what it was. People were mad because we were calling them dire wolves,” she says. “Then they say to us, but they’re just grey wolves with 20 edits. But the point is we said that from the beginning. They’re grey wolves with 20 edits.”

Well, this is partly true. There were indeed 20 edits in the gray wolf genome, made in 14 genes, but five of those edits weren’t taken from the ancient DNA of the dire wolf; they were taken from mutations in dogs and gray wolves that resembled what Colossal thought dire wolves looked like. (We’re still not sure.) And among those five dog/wolf mutants were the color alleles that turned the faux wolves white.

On Colossal’s website, you can still see them claiming that they de-extincted the dire wolf:

Note Colossal’s claim that they “successfully restored a once-eradicated species”.  Now that is simply wrong. They used 15 edits taken from the dire wolf genome to produce a gray wolf that has only a tiny, tiny portion of dire wolf genome. Were I in Colossal, I’d simply drop the word “de-extinction.” But of course you don’t attract donor or make money by saying that you’re “tweaking an existing species to look like an extinct one.”