Carl Zimmer and Catrin Einhorn are the authors of a new article in the NYT about our old friend Colossal Biosciences, which you’ll remember as the outfit in Texas that has promised to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth, the thylacine (marsupial “wolf”), the dodo and the moa, after having claimed that they’ve already de-extincted the “dire wolf”.
As I’ve written at length here (and in an article in the Boston Globe), Colossal has not de-extincted anything. It simply edited 14 genes in a gray wolf cell, and then put that cell into the nucleus of a domestic dog egg. What came out were three slightly tweaked gray wolves, white in color and, Colossal says, larger than normal wolves. But 14 changed genes in a genome of about 20,000 protein-coding genes, and having 2.5 billion DNA bases, does not turn a gray wolf into a dire wolf. Their response was that a dire wolf is anything that you think resembles a dire wolf, no matter how much. That is disingenuous.
I lost respect from Colossal when they decided to double down on their claim that they’ve brought something back from extinction, which they surely have not. And their claims that they will release these things into the wild—their ultimate aim—is ridiculous. The three faux white dire wolves (I doubt the original was even white) are kept secretly on an enclosure somewhere in the West, with only a few toadying journalists or donors allowed to visit them.
Likewise, Colossal’s promise to give us woolly mammoths by 2028 is unbelievable, for they won’t be able to put an engineered Asian elephant egg into the endangered Asian elephant, much less produce a creature that has more than a minute fraction of mammoth DNA. On top of that, Colossal says their aim is to release these faux mammoths on the tundra, which won’t happen, and that when they do so, it will help with global warming since the furry elephants’ trampling on the permafrost will prevent release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, ameliorating global warming. Gullible donors like Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, and Tom Brady have swelled Colossal’s coffers by $400 million, and it’s now worth, notes the article below, more than $10 billion.
I think that when Colossal realized it couldn’t make good on its de-extinction promises, it started investing in other projects. One of them is described in this article in the NYT (click below or find it archived here). What they propose to do, with the promised help of the Trump administration, is save the DNA from endangered species. Now this project has its good aspects, for if Colossal sequences a lot of new genomes and publishes the sequences (which it promises to make public), we could learn quite a bit about evolution. And the American taxpayer doesn’t have to foot the bill for any of it. But Colossal has no experience in “biodiversity banking” of this sort, even though nonprofit conservation organizations like the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has been doing it for over half a century (Colossal is decidely a for-profit company). The San Diego noprofit has in fact created clones of black-footed ferrets, a highly endangered species, from biobanked material, so at least it has something useful to show for its efforts.
Further, if Colossal is doing this for “de-extinction” purposes, and will retain sole possession of the material, as it will do, then it is preventing other organizations or scientists from using what is “banked.” The U.S. government has no business partnering with such an enterprise. I don’t worry about de-extinction because that is (pardon the pun) a dead issue. But the concentration on biobanking may, as the authors note, “erode support for on-the-ground conservation,” which mainly involves saving existing habitat and keeping humans from destroying new habitat.
A few quotes from the article, which, as science journalism should, maintains a neutral viewpoint while emphasizing both pros and cons:
The Trump administration and a company that is promising to bring long-gone animals back from extinction announced a partnership on Thursday to preserve cells, tissue and DNA from threatened and endangered species.
The company, Colossal Biosciences, said its goal was to store samples from every animal and plant protected under the Endangered Species Act, which includes more than 2,300 listings worldwide.
As more species face the risk of extinction, scientists see such biobanks as a critical backup. But concerns are also growing that the rise of genetic engineering and efforts to revive extinct species will erode support for on-the-ground conservation, which often requires protecting habitat from drilling, mining and other development.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration has been rolling back protections on land and water, including through actions to weaken the Endangered Species Act, in favor of expanded oil and gas exploration, commercial fishing and other economic activities.
“This partnership brings together the scientific expertise of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the ingenuity of the private sector to develop new tools that can help recover species, preserve critical genetic resources, and strengthen the future of wildlife conservation,” Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, said in a statement.
Under a memorandum of understanding, Colossal and the Fish and Wildlife Service will collaborate to identify high-priority actions, and the government will provide a list of which species it wants to prioritize.
Well, I’d prefer that a consortium of scientists decide which species should be prioritized, and I’d prefer that the material be given to the San Diego Zoo organization rather than to Colossal, which will have sole use of the material and is a for-profit organization. The agreement is supposed to run for five years, and that Colossal gets to keep all the samples it collected with its own funding, equipment, or personnel”, which means pretty much all the samples.
Colossal has been busy doing other stuff, too:
After beginning its de-extinction efforts, Colossal branched out into biobanking. In February, the company announced a partnership with the United Arab Emirates to build what it calls a BioVault in Dubai, intended to store cell and tissue samples from more than 10,000 species.
Why Dubai? Why not store all the material in one place? Who knows? And they clone pets!
[Colossal] currently gets revenue from cloning pets and horses through a company it acquired last year, and claims to have future sources of revenue from licensing technology it develops for its de-extinction projects.
The article notes some criticism of Colossal’s proposal, too (I’m not quoting the criticism of the “de-extinction” endeavors, which the article also mentions):
But some conservation biologists expressed worries about depending so much for the long-term guardianship of precious samples on a private company.
“It seems like a bit of a risk for the U.S. government to place biomaterials in a for-profit company that doesn’t have a very long track record,” said Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, which operates a storage effort called the Frozen Zoo that has been preserving cells for about 50 years.
and
Gabriela Mastromonaco, chief science officer at the Toronto Zoo, called the U.S. plan laid out in Thursday’s announcement hugely ambitious.
“To collect every threatened and endangered species, that is a massive endeavor,” she said. “That means tracking, trapping, immobilizing, and getting your hands on a lot of animals.”
She expressed concern that the initial announcement was short on planning details that would be standard in many other nations.
. . . Dr. Mastromonaco of the Toronto Zoo said the announcement left many questions unanswered, such as how Indigenous communities would participate in decisions about the program and the rules for who gets to use the samples for research. She said she was addressing these questions herself as Canada develops its own plan for biobanking wild species.
and
Concerns that genetic engineering would replace critical conservation work heightened when Mr. Burgum, the interior secretary, celebrated the company’s announcement on X, writing that “the marvel of ‘de-extinction’ technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.” The Fish and Wildlife Service is part of the Interior Department.
Colossal executives emphasize that their efforts are intended to add to conservation strategies, not supplant the important work of protecting habitat.
I guess Colossal needs government cooperation since that’s required to collect DNA samples from endangered species. But if Colossal is dong this “for public good and impact” as Colossal CEO Ben Lamm has said, why do they retain the sole right to use the material? Even if it’s collected by Colossal, the permission to do so has to come from the U.S. government, and we should not be entangled with a private, for-profit company that will store material only it can use.
I see Colossal as having provided some valuable knowledge, but also largely as a pack of grifters, making promises they cannot keep and distorting what they have done. In my view they should stick to cloning Fido and Fluffy for rich pet-owners who want to “de-extinct” their postmortem pets.
h/t: Don
Aside from your remarks, Jerry, all of which are absolutely correct, there are additional dangers in letting important programs up to private companies.
Very few, if any, of these companies are built for long-term research or development. All it takes for the project to crash is for a few executives to lose interest, and then they WILL shut it down. Same goes for investors: if they feel that the return on their investments are not coming quickly enough, or th results are no as they planned (Which is not infrequent in research and development projects) they can shut the projects down.
If the entire kit and caboodle is private, then fine: they can do as they wish. But having public funds put into such a project (especially when there are more and better planned conservation options) is, IMO, a misuse of public funds, even if the stated goal is a good one (which I m not sure is the case here).
Many people these days sneer at public research, believe in g that the private sector can do things faster and better. That may be true in some cases, but it there is plenty of historical evidence that government (along with nonprofit) research put the US in a leading position in many fields, from nuclear to electronics to biomedical research. Sometimes that was in collaboration with the private sector—that is true. But for long term projects, short-term for-profit companies are not the way to go.
“… if they feel that the return on their investments are not coming quickly enough,”. To my mind, that is the most mysterious aspect of Colossal Biosci. What is the source of revenue in its business plan? Does it propose to rent out herds of “de-extincted” wooly mammoths to clean the Arctic tundra? I suppose investments in Colossal Biosci are in fact speculative bets that the share prices will rise just on the basis of publicity—in which case long-term projects are in even more danger.
So far they seem to be pretty good at non-biological cloning of bigger fools.
Never underestimate the value of publicity. Colossal’s high profile claims garnered widespread (largely undeserved) publicity, and the Trump administration was seduced by the glitter. We’ll just have to wait and see whether the data they gather will be made broadly available. We’ll also need to wait and see if anything they obtain is of any real value. And, as Starwolf says, Colossal, too, may drop the project in a heartbeat the minute they identify a shinier object to pursue.
Yep it seems like a way for Colossal to attract investment after the dubious de-extinction efforts.
I think Mark is also right about the Trump administration’s motives.
Make no mistake that this is, to the Trump admin., merely a way to give themselves permission to continue developing drilling and mining and deforestation operations on public lands. Further, with this going on, there will be a down-sizing of government funding of conservation efforts.
My question is: How does this play out with endangered species outside of the US? I don’t think that anyone can just tap into the DNA of protected species beyond our borders without permission from the government there.
No, you’re correct. This agreement can be with the U.S. only.
Simply put, a possible Trump administration motive is that once you’ve saved a species’ DNA killing them off in the wild is obviously no longer as big a deal to ignorant parts of the public.
Colossal’s new project of biodiversity DNA banking is reminiscent of Nikolai Vavilov’s plant diversity seed bank in the 1920s-30s USSR. An instructive and gripping account of his life is: The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century. By Peter Pringle, Simon and Schuster, 2008.
I’m curious – Is George Church involved with Collosal? He’s a smart guy. Doesn’t he see the failings and no truths?
Is it too late to preserve WASPs?
We Are Satan’s Peoples ?