Category: genetics

My Boston Globe op-ed about the fallacies of “de-extinction”

May 1, 2025 • 9:40 am

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)!

Illustration by Patric Sandri for the Boston Globe

Colossal Biosciences responds to criticism of the Dire Wolf “de-extinction”, but not convincingly

April 13, 2025 • 9:45 am

Colossal Biosciences®, of course, recently announced the “de-extinction” of the dire wolf, which involved editing a gray wolf genome in 20 places (DNA bases), all edits involving 14 genes.  15 of the 20 sites change apparently involved substituting dire-wolf based nucleotides for wolf bases, while the other five, mainly involving coat color, were simply mutations already known to lighten the coat color in dogs and wolf, and the edits were based on dog and wolf DNA. These five edits made the dire wolf pups turn out white, though we’re not sure that the original dire wolves were white.  As for the other changes, well, we’ll have to see how they affect the three “dire wolves'” morphology when they grow up, as they’re just subadults now.

In the end, though—and I think Colossal should agree—they produced three gray wolves (Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi), each with 15 DNA bases taken from a sequenced dire wolf genome.  This means that, because the wolf genome has nearly 2.5 billion base pairs, and because are over twelve million DNA base-pair differences between the dire wolf and gray wolf genome, there were tons of dire=wolf genome that was not edited into the egg used to produce the three faux dire wolves. A quote from Vox (archived here):

“The grey wolf genome is 2,447,000,000 individual bases (DNA letters) long. Colossal has said that the grey wolf and dire wolf genomes are 99.5% identical, but that is still 12,235,000 individual differences,” Nic Rawlence, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told me in an email. “So a grey wolf with 20 edits to 14 genes, even if these are key differences, is still very much a grey wolf.”

Those 15 edits, then, constitute 0.0000012 of all differences between dire wolves and gray wolves, or .000012%.  As many science journalists have noted, Colossal has not produced anything close to a dire wolf, but simply a gray wolf containing a tiny, tiny fraction of the genes that differentiate the two species. Some of the genes they used may have been published in Colossal’s new preprint on the dire wolf (see below), but it gives little information about which genes they used. They clearly didn’t use genes that differentiated the physiology, digestion, or any behaviors that differentiated the two species, because those genes can’t be identified.  Yet surely if you want to “de-extinct” a species, you need more than just a few superficial changes in appearance to “resurrect” the extinct one. Well, that is apparently not Colossal’s view.

Much of the press around the Dire Wolf has been critical, with the exception of places like Time Magazine, which put one of the offspring on the cover with a photo and the word “extinct” crossed out (along with a photo saying “This is Remus” He’s a dire wolf”). But genuinely savvy journalists didn’t have to dig hard to find the hype in Colossal’s claims, some of which I myself pointed out at ABC News. I’d say that about two-thirds of the press stories have been sufficiently critical to raise doubts in the minds of readers.

That has clearly upset Colossal, which of course expected huge approbation and thje public’s acceptance that they had truly “de-extincted” the dire wolf. Instead they got the press kvetching about the company’s hype. (Granted, Colossal did accomplish good stuff like sequencing the dire wolf genome and making twenty edits to a gray wolf cell, which is a technical accomplishment although making multiple edits is pretty routine these days). What seems to have most upset Colossal and their chief scientific adviser, Dr. Beth Shapiro, is criticism of the claim that they had created a “new species” in the lab (the “dire wolf”) of course.

To evolutionary biologists who employ the “Biological Species Concept” (BSC)—one of over 20 such concepts, but the one, as I argue in my book Speciation with Allen Orr—the concept that makes the most evolutionary sense—the “dire wolf” is almost certainly not a new species.  If it were, it would be reproductively isolated from gray wolves (and dogs), so that if they were to cohabit in the same place, they could not produce fertile hybrids.  But I bet ten to one that if you put a bunch of grey wolves in the secret hidden pen where the three “dire wolves” are kept from prying eyes and are monitored by drones, they’d all hybridize and produce fertile puppies. End of the “new species” story.

Sadly, Colossal won’t do that experiment. But it doesn’t matter because Colossal has rejected the BSC in favor of the morphological or typological species concept, in which individuals are said to belong to different species because they look different.  This concept is next to useless because it’s completely subjective: how different do individuals have to look before they’re put in different species? (The evolutionist Ernst Mayr discussed the intellectual vacuity of morphological/typological species concepts beginning in 1942.)

Granted the BSC has its own problems (what do we do with geographically isolated populations who do not have the opportunity to interbreed?), but, as we show in our book, it does a lot of biological and evolutionary work, including giving us a research program for how species originate: why nature is lumpy instead of being a continuum. (The question of “What is the origin of species?” becomes “How do reproductive isolating barriers evolve?”, a question that is actually how people approach the origin of species when they do research.)

It’s clearly in Colossal’s interest to adopt the morphological species concept because they say they’ve produced an animal that looks different from gray wolves in a few traits. And so they can shout “We’ve got a new species!” from the rooftops. But many people aren’t buying it, and so this week Colossal sent out a press release to inquisitive reporters, which I quote below. It’s quite defensive! Bolding is mine.

We’ve been hearing critics call us “insane” for labeling Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi “dire wolves” instead of “designer dogs” or “fancy gray wolves.” While we didn’t anticipate this would become the major talking point for a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will fundamentally transform biodiversity conservation, fine. Let’s go.

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.” Colossal identified 14 genes we could modify to resurrect the key traits that defined dire wolves, and then we did it. Why is the scientific community wasting time bickering about species concepts rather than celebrating this monumental achievement and its implications? It’s obvious most critics would rather complain than contribute. Through our dire wolf and woolly mouse announcements, Colossal has generated more attention and funding for conservation than anyone has in decades. That’s the kind of “insanity” the world needs.

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. We generated high-quality ancient genomes from dire wolves that lived 13,000 and 72,000 years ago. Our analyses show that dire wolves interbred extensively with the lineage that ultimately evolved into gray wolves, suggesting that dire wolves and gray wolves are much more closely related than previously thought. This is contrary to the “scientific fact” that they were closer to jackals, which originated from a science writer’s misinterpretation of the previous paper. Our higher quality genomes allowed us to uncover the evolutionary history of dire wolves and dig more deeply into the genes under selection in their lineage. These discoveries enabled us to resurrect the traits that made dire wolves larger, stronger, and phenotypically unique: traits that are now embodied in Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.

Why did we stop at 14 genes and 20 edits? Because we didn’t need more and because we prioritize animal welfare. Every modification carries risk, and our primary goal was creating healthy animals with extinct traits. We meticulously evaluated each edit for safety and successfully birthed healthy animals that both resemble dire wolves and manifest the traits we targeted. Now critics are having meltdowns because we didn’t make hundreds or thousands of unnecessary, risky edits just to satisfy one particular interpretation of what constitutes a species? No thank you.

Yes, dog breeders have been transforming gray wolves into the animals that we rely on for work and companionship for thousands of years. Maybe tens of thousands. But the ability to dramatically alter an animal’s appearance and behavior in a single generation? That’s new. The implications for conservation are immense. This is the future. Show us what YOU’RE doing to ensure a world with wolves, poodles, pandas, whales, and (assuming agricultural advances) billions of humans. We’re convinced our brand of “insanity” is exactly what’s needed to get there.

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.

That last sentence is pretty hostile, but reflects a certain defensiveness of Colossal about its achievements that does it no good. Will people like Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, and Peter Jackson, who gave big donations to Colossal, think twice about what they funded. (Probably not; they’re rich as Croesus.) Colossal is saying, “we’re helping the environment; what are you doing?”

I’ve bolded two bits above. The first is their paper on the “dire wolf”, submitted for publication, which you can find on bioRχiv by clicking on the title below (download pdf here.) . The paper doesn’t say which edits were made from the dire wolf genome into the wolf genome, but that’s irrelevant when assessing if they’ve “de-extincted” the dire wolf.  It’s largely about phylogenetics, and shows that the dire wolf and gray wolf are separated by about 4.5 million years. It also gives the names of 80 genes whose DNA sequence shows that they seemed to be under positive natural (including sexual) selection in the dire wolf, and perhaps some of these genes were used in producing the faux dire wolf.  Note that they also claim they changed the behavior of the gray wolf through their edits, but I have seen no evidence of  that.

The second bit is their defense of using a morphological species concept. It’s clear that Shapiro and Colossal are buying into a morphological species definition that’s something like: “If we edit the genes of a living species so it superficially resembles an extinct species, having a few of its traits, then we’ve “de-extincted” the extinct species. Below they refer to the IUCN, the International Union for  the Conservation of Nature, a worldwide organization devoted to conserving habitat and species. They say they are using the IUCN’s definition of “de-extinction:, but they leave out the caveats that IUCN attaches to that word (it prefers “proxy”). This is unconscionable cherry-picking in defense of misleading scientific results.

When I posted on Twitter about the critical ABC News piece on de-extinction, because I was quoted, I got a comment from, of all people, the concerned scientists at Colossal:

But have a look at the IUCN SSC Guiding Principles on Creating Proxies of Extinct Species for Conservation Benefit”: page 1. Bolding is mine

Note on Terminology

The term “de-extinction” is misleading in its implication that extinct species, species for which no viable members remain, can be resurrected in their genetic, behavioural and physiological entirety. These guidelines proceed on the basis that none of the current pathways will result in a faithful replica of any extinct species, due to genetic, epigenetic, behavioural, physiological, and other differences1 . For the purposes of these guidelines the legitimate objective for the creation of a proxy of an extinct species is the production of a functional equivalent able to restore ecological functions or processes that might have been lost as a result of the extinction of the original species. Proxy is used here to mean a substitute that would represent in some sense (e.g. phenotypically, behaviourally, ecologically) another entity – the extinct form. Proxy is preferred to facsimile, which implies creation of an exact copy. The guidelines do not consider the application of techniques to address the conservation of extant species, such as cloning of extant rare species or the introduction of genetic variation into extant species that are at risk of inbreeding.

“De-extinction” is therefore here used in a limited sense to apply to any attempt to create some proxy of an extinct species or subspecies (hereafter “species”) through any technique, including methods such as selective back breeding, somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning)2 , and genome engineering (see Section V). Where possible the term “proxy” will be used to avoid the connotations of “de-extinction”.

Note again that they say a “proxy” is this:

For the purposes of these guidelines the legitimate objective for the creation of a proxy of an extinct species is the production of a functional equivalent able to restore ecological functions or processes that might have been lost as a result of the extinction of the original species. Proxy is used here to mean a substitute that would represent in some sense (e.g. phenotypically, behaviourally, ecologically) another entity – the extinct form.

And they add that de-extinction is the attempt to create such a “proxy”, a word they prefer to “de-extincted.” But is the dire wolf a functional equivalent of the original dire wolf, “able to restore ecological functions or processes that might have been lost” through extinction?  Who knows? Even under the IUCN guidelines, Colossal hasn’t performed an act of de-extinction.

Here’s a defensive four-minute statement from Beth Shapiro, who I’m pretty sure had a hand in the press release above, as there are a lot of similarities (for example, the concentration on species concepts and the IUCN).

Colossal should really cool its jets on the “de-extinction” front. They are not helping themselves by being defensive and pretending that they did something that they didn’t. And their emphasis that their real goal was always to “restore ecological function and enhancing biodiversity” is not convincing given the history of what the company and its founders said.  Bringing back the dire wolf, the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the thylacine—such acts won’t do much to restore ecological function. And since the edited animals won’t be released, any “enhancing biodiversity” will be done by putting new forms of animals in zoos or reserves, which don’t constitute “nature.”

I think I see a d*g tail wagging behind Shapiro’s chair in the video.

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

April 11, 2025 • 9:45 am

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:

More on the “dire wolf”: Adam Rutherford is furious

April 9, 2025 • 10:45 am

Like me, Matthew Cobb, and all straight-thinking scientists, geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford is sick of hearing claims about the return of “de-extincted animals.” The latest one is the Dire Wolf, a tricked-out gray wolf I wrote about yesterday. (See also Rutherford’s strong critique in the Guardian of the woolly mammoth de-extinction project.) The hype about the “de-extintcted Dire Wolf” involves making only 20 DNA base changes in 14 genes of the Gray Wolf (there are probably a bit more than 20,000 genes in wolves), so that only a few superficial characters like body size, jaw structure, and color were changed in the wolf genome. (The “Dire Wolf” came out white, but that was done using edits of wolf genes, not the insertion of color genes from the ancient DNA of Dire Wolves. We don’t know if real Dire Wolves were white.)

All these de-extinction projects involve changing just a few genes among thousands in the genome of living species, making something that only superficially looks like an extinct species. But, as Adam points out in his piece I highlight below, we know nothing about the behavior, gestation, physiology or digestion of these ancient creatures, and so are powerless to even get close to a real Dire Wolf—even if we had the ability to edit thousands of genes or even to insert a Dire Wolf genome into a wolf cell whose nucleus had been removed. (We can’t do that.)

Yet despite this, Colossal Bioscience keeps proclaiming that it’s resurrected an extinct wolf, and will soon be bringing back other extinct creatures like the dodo and thylacine.  This is pure hype, and it’s not gonna happen—not in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our kids.  Yet compliant journalists play along with Colossal, pretending that, yes, the Dire Wolf is back and the woolly mammoth is right around the corner.  To anybody who appreciates accurate science writing, this unholy collusion between the media and Colossal is reprehensible.

And so Adam has gotten more and more pissed off in the past few days, finally writing a short piece on his Substack post that takes the whole de-extinction hype apart. And it’s laden with plenty of expletives and profanity! I don’t blame him, for that same language goes on in my brain, but I lack the courage to put it on paper. But I’ll quote him below.

First, Adam announces his piece with a link.

The resurrection circus keeps clowning, but make no mistake, Dire wolves remain very extinct. An angry, sweary piece by a frustrated geneticist. arutherford.substack.com/p/dire-wolve…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T06:22:55.899Z

The link is above, or you can go to his Substack site and read it (for free, but subscribe if you want to support his writing). Click below:

A few excerpts:

Extinction, with that one shitty exception, is forever. I’ve talked about this incessantly, with increasing humourlessness, for a number of years, once explaining to an Irish priest on live radio about the difficulties in artificial insemination due to the right-angled bend in the vaginal tract of an African elephant. Last year I appeared on the Infinite Monkey Cage and shat on the whole idea from a great height. This was unlinked to any particular press release, just a very popular subject that is worthy of interrogation, and ripe for a few gallows humour gags. Last month, when Colossus Bioscience – the company fuelling the mammoth resurrection gargleballs – released an un-peer-reviewed paper in which they unveiled a genetically modified mouse, its genome edited to include mammoth versions of a couple of genes. The hirsute mouse came out not cold adapted as was intended, but certainly a bit hairy. My write up was in the Guardian, and there’s little more to add to it.

Today, the press is awash with fawning headlines about the successful de-extinction by Colossus Bioscience of the Dire Wolf. Three pups are now alive, and they are cute.

Let me be absolutely clear on this though: no matter how cute they are, this story is absolute bollocks. No amount of fancy pictures, cool legendary names (Romulus, Remus and one from Game of Thrones), or American-brand biotech TED-style glossy hubris can change this. I’m just going to list the ways that this vexes me, and should vex you too.

ONE: The newborn wolves are not Dire Wolves. There isn’t a definition on Earth by which they could be considered Dire Wolves. Romulus, Remus and the one from Game of Thrones are Grey Wolves, an entirely different species, whose genomes have a very small number of edits that make those genes a bit more like Dire Wolf versions of the same genes. They are, by any sensible definition, genetically engineered grey wolves.

There are four ways that Rutherford’s kishkes are roiled by Colossal, but I’ll let you read the list. He does, however, make a good analogy to explain how far Colossal was from creating a genuine Dire Wolf, or even a Dire Wolf-ish canid:

I’m trying to think of an analogy: we often use books and words as metaphors for genetics. There are around 19,000 Grey Wolf genes, and Colossus Bioscience have made TWENTY individual edits of single letters of DNA in 14 genes. Certainly, that is enough to make a noticeable difference to the phenotypes in question, but if you think that renders it a different species, it’s back to Evolution 101 for you.

Consider this: My longest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Lived, has around 120,000 words. The US version has words like colour, flavour and favourite edited to be color, flavor and favorite. There are 79 uses of the word colour, colours or coloured in the UK version. So there are four times more edits in my book than in the wolf genomes. Is it still the same book? OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS.

And of course he points out that dire wolves ran in packs, but “these three Grey Wolves have been brought into the world without their packs, without wolf parents (their surrogate mothers were dogs), as gaudy boutique animals for a greedy, morally suspect company.”  Yep, we can’t resurrect their social life, which we know nothing about, so we’ll never be able to let these things go free in nature, where they’d probably revert to gray wolves quickly. They’re only good for gawking at.  And we have learned almost nothing about the Dire Wolf from this project. It is the media’s distortion of what was done, and its credulous acceptance of this exaggeration, which leads Rutherford, Matthew, and I to a state of peevishness.  For in the end this kind of science reporting simply deludes the public.

Rutherford, like many of us, has great respect for Carl Zimmer’s science reporting, but Adam thinks that Zimmer reverted to “client journalism” in his NYT piece on the Dire Wolf (free access), more or less accepting that Colossal had come “close” to recreating a Dire Wolf.  When one respected science journalist disses another, you know that something has gone wrong. Rutherford says this:

Even Carl Zimmer, a mensch and doyen of American science journalism couldn’t quite manage to debunk their claims in the New York Times’ fawning write up.

On de-extinction…‘Colossal Bioscience appear to have done it, or something close’, he writes. Well, they haven’t done it, and if by ‘close’ he means ‘have done minor edits on a grey wolf so that it could barely be described as a hybrid let alone a resurrected species’ then fair game. And I’m pretty sure Carl knows that.

‘Or something close’. Disappointing client journalism from one of the best science journalists.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T22:00:48.349Z

As the Time magazine cover shows below (with one obvious edit by Rutherford), the press guzzled it like a cat with cream.  Rutherford:

. . . the press have just lapped all this wolfshit up, and regurgitated it, mostly without the slightest questioning of the corporate press release. Barely ANY reports have rebutted the dubious claims by Colossus. Time magazine has it on the cover, the word ‘extinct’ crossed out. That scientifically illiterate megalomaniacal fragile lunch Elon Musk tweeted it to his 218 million twitter followers (I will not call it X), with a picture from Game of Thrones.

Clearly, Time crossed out “extinct,” while the insertion “not’ is from Rutherford:

Many of us were surprised that Beth Shapiro, a a highly-regarded molecular evolutionist at UC Santa Cruz, took three years off to become the chief scientific officer of Colossal. Why? One can guess, but I don’t psychologize. At any rate, Shapiro appears to have bought into the Colossal hype, as Graham Coop (an evolutionary biologist at UC Davis) points out below:

Joking aside, this stuff about species concepts is such transparent BS. [deleted & reposted, as first draft was too annoyed.] http://www.newscientist.com/article/2475…

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T21:50:13.253Z

WHAT?  A morphological species concept in which changing a couple of traits creates a new species? How much does the “de-extincted” Dire Wolf have to look like the real Dire Wolf before we can say “we have it back!!”?  This species concept, which I discuss and dismiss in my book Speciation with Allen Orr, has many flaws, including the fact that many truly reproductively incompatible species nevertheless are hard or impossible to tell apart by looking. (These are often called “sibling species.”) Would Shapiro classify Japenese, the Dutch, and sub-Saharan Africans as belonging to different species?

As Coop notes as he quotes Shapiro, what she says about species concepts is “transparent BS”. (Read chapter 1 and the Appendix of Speciation if you want to learn more.)

Coop gets in one more lick:

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:56:25.311Z

Another science communicator joins the crowd of people with a beef against this faux “Dire Wolf.”

Scientists love to debate and argue, but if there are 3 things every scientist absolutely agrees on, it's that:1. Climate change is real2. Vaccines work3. Those are NOT dire wolves 😤🧪

— Science Sam (@samanthayammine.com) 2025-04-08T20:36:29.683Z

And somebody couldn’t resist comparing the Colossal wolf to the famous jackalope!

I’ll close with a few final posts from Rutherford, who, though unable to contain the profanity, is correct in what he says below:

Reposting this from last month, cos it’s the same bullshit from the same company that is flooding your media with wolfshit. Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossiblewww.theguardian.com/commentisfre…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T06:16:47.426Z

Amen, brother! No clones, either!

Apropos of nothing:THERE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BE A CLONED MAMMOTH. <Message ends>

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T16:56:07.751Z

NBC News gets the woolly mammoth story badly wrong

March 19, 2025 • 10:30 am

I’ve posted quite a bit on the futility of attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth via genetic engineering. In my view, it’s close to a scam that deludes the public about what the geneticists really intend to produce, which, as Dr Tori Herridge at the University of Sheffield calls it, is simply “an elephant in a fur coat”. For my posts on this debacle, inspired by conversations with Matthew Cobb, go here. But there are two other useful references that Matthew provided, with links:

An extract from his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

and

The geneticists also want to resurrect the dodo and the thylacine, equally futile endeavors. But despite all the problems that scientists have noted, for some reason many science journalists are still selling the “mammoth resurrection” tale as told by Colossal Biosciences, a company with $10.2 billion dollars in funds.

As I watched NBC News last night, I was upset to see that NBC had also bought the story, selling it as the program’s final “There’s good news tonight” upbeat story. You can watch it below, but do it today as they replace the news each day. Click on the screenshot below and start the segment at 18:29 (turn up the sound using the icon at the left bottom of the screen):

First, Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm says that the company aims, besides producing mammoths, to  “return balance to ailing ecosystems.” That is ridiculous. Is the tundra ailing because of the absence of mammoths, and, if so, will a couple of elephants in fur coats, not adapted to that ecosystem, cure it? Which ecosystem will the dodos “cure”?

He adds, misleadingly, “We actually took the genes that made a mammoth a mammoth, mapped them to mice, and then in only one month we produced living, healthy mice.”  He doesn’t mention the huge mortality in this experiment, nor that they didn’t REALLY use mammoth genes, but mice genes that had a few DNA bases changed to the mammoth version (As I recall, they changed I think only three bases in seven mouse genes.) There was no attempt to insert full mammoth genes into mice, and they really couldn’t because they’d have to insert the control regions, too.

Lamm’s statement is flat wrong, and misleads the listener into thinking that they put mammoth hair genes into mice, making the mice “woolly.” In fact, as I pointed out before, the wooliest of all the mice had no mammoth-informed DNA in it. There is not the slightest indication that the lipid-related gene they put in the mice will increase their ability to withstand cold.

Lamm also neglects to mention the difficulty of getting entire mammoth chromosomes into the egg of an Asiatic elephant, nor the impossibility of constructing the Volkswagen-sized artificial elephant uteruses that would be needed to grow up the “mammothy” embryos to birth.

Finally, in view of the futility of this project, another Colossal officer says that their endeavors have inspired children to love science, and perhaps to save the environment. That’s the Hail Mary call of a dying project.  Note that they project the production of the first mammoth (again, just an “elephant in a fur coat”  for 2028. Only three more years! Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to put a giant fur coat onto an Asiatic elephant and then usher several of these garbed pachyderms to the tundra?

There are many changes–probably millions–necessary to convert an Asiatic elephant to a woolly mammoth, including those affecting behavior and metabolism. They will not accomplish such a conversion. Nor will they accomplish it with the dodo nor the thylacine. But Colossal talks a good game, as you see, and they’ve pulled the wool (pardon the pun) over the eyes of the public and of many credulous journalists. Shame on NBC News for not doing due diligence.

More dreadful science journalistm: The “new” Scientific American touts the Woolly Mouse as a precursor of the Woolly Mammoth; misses all the real problems

March 6, 2025 • 9:45 am

THIS ARTICLE IS DEDICATED TO MY COLLEAGUE MATTHEW COBB, WHO IS BEING DRIVEN CRAZY BY UNHINGED PIECES ON “DE-EXTINCTING” THE WOOLY MAMMOTH

The push to re-create the extinct Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) may be the biggest waste of money in decades, and for several reasons. First, the people behind this are misleading the public by making us think that they’re going to give us a real woolly mammoth instead of a hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant Asiatic elephant, which is what they’re really trying to make. It doesn’t help that credulous and ignorant journalists can’t even see through this.

Second, the endeavor to even make a hairy elephant (they propose to put manufactured mammoth genes with sequences derived from frozen mammoths, into a fertilized elephant egg, and then implant it into an
Asiatic elephant), faces so many obstacles that it seems nearly impossible. And even if it were possible, you’d need to make at least two faux mammoths so they could create a lineage. And where would they live, since real woolly mammoths were denizens of the chilly tundras of northern Asia? (That’s why they had hair.) What would they eat? Asiatic elephants don’t eat the kind of stuff on the tundra, and aren’t equipped to process it, but they’re not going to change behavior and physiology genes.

As I reported yesterday, this ridiculous project is making the news again because, yes, scientists have created a “woolly mouse” by injecting nine genes known to influence hair color and texture IN MICE into mouse stem cells and implanting the lot in mice. They got fuzzier mice, but apparently not the ones shown below, which are in the press release. What they really got are mice less hairier than those shown in the press (see below).

Of course, you can also breed mice that look like this, but we can’t breed Asiatic elephants, though that would be more likely to produce a faux mammoth, because their generation time is too long.  And, as I said, it’s a hell of a lot easier to make transgenic mice than transgenic elephants.  As one wag tweeted about this ludicrous experiment on mice, which is supposed to be a precursor to the Mammoth Project:

GIVE THEM TRUNKS YOU COWARDSwww.theguardian.com/science/2025…

— Marc Dionne (@marcsdionne.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T18:05:25.420Z

. . . AND BIG TUSKS, TOO!

Both Matthew and I have criticized this project for its pretended aims as well as its impossibility (see my posts here, as especially this one), and Matthew is getting depressed at how many journalists have been taken in by the project, now in the hands of Colossal Biosciences (a “de-extinction” company), but most famously promoted by Harvard’s George Church, the founder of Colossal (curiously, Elon Musk had a hand in convincing Church to take this on). In fact, Matthew devotes a big section of his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, to debunking the Mammoth Project.

Now Scientific American, which I hoped would recover from its years of benighted wokeness, has taken up the story. (Click below to read, or find it archived here.)

How did the magazine do? (The author is journalist Adam Popescu and the editor is Andrea Thompson, “covering the environment, energy and earth sciences”.) Well, on first reading I’d give it a C. It does point out some problems to worry about after we produce a woolly mammoth, but is quite thin about whether they can get one in the first place.  For example, it doesn’t even note that an Asian elephant with a few genes that make it hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant is nothing like a Woolly Mammoth, separated by about 6.5 million years of evolution. (That’s about the time separating us from chimps and bonobos.) It is a hairy elephant with no behaviors that would help it survive on the tundra.  And they don’t even mention the problems of implanted a genetically altered elephant embryo back into a female Asiatic elephant. Here’s what I wrote in one post (the quote within is from the NYT):

Further, a lot of other genes differ between a mammoth and an Asian elephant. What guarantee is there that the inserted mammoth genes would be expressed correctly, or even work at all in concert with the Asian elephant developmental system?

But it gets worse. Since you can’t implant a transgenic embryo into an elephant mom (we don’t know how to do that, and we would get just one or two chances), Church had this bright idea:

Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates.

Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy,” he said. “But everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”

The idea has a few precedents. At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers have developed a sealed bag that can support a fetal lamb for four weeks, for example. But Colossal will need to build an artificial uterus big enough to house a fetus for around two years, reaching a weight of 200 pounds.

An artificial mammoth uterus? Seriously? If you think that’s gonna work, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Of course, if you’re going to breed these things, you’d have to make two of them of opposite sexes. Could they even do that?

That, in fact, is another huge problem beyond problem beyond the pretense that they are going to put a lot of mammoth-derived or mammoth-mimicking genes in an elephant and call it a Woolly Mammoth. An artificial womb for a baby elephant would be the size of a Volkswagen!  Scientific American doesn’t mention that problem, either.

Finally, the Colossal researchers apparently also inserted a gene thought to affect mouse lipid metabolism into the mouse (Nature, in the article below, doesn’t mention it), but the Sci. Am. article says in the second paragraph that the Woolly Mice have “cold adapted traits such as the way in which it sotres and burns fat”.  That is a lie. They don’t know whether the gene does that in the mice, and later on Sci. Am. gives the real story:

The team also targeted lipid metabolism, “which is the process by which the body breaks down, synthesizes and stores fats,” Shapiro says. The paper notes that “future experiments will examine the effect of high fat diets and temperature preferences” on the mice to inform further work toward the goal of developing cold-adapted elephant-mammoth hybrids.

So no, the mice are not cold adapted. (See below, too.)

The problems that Sci Am does mention involve mostly things about about the environment and conservation, perhaps prompted by the editor. And they are real problems, but won’t even need to be considered until we get one of these mammoths (the NBC Evening News on Tuesday said that Colossal envisions the Mammoth Release in 2028, which is pure bunk). Below are problems Sci. Am. lists, but they’re all problems that would arise if they created the faux mammoth and then put it into the wild. These are quotes:

But many experts in genetic engineering and conservation are skeptical. Rewilding is risky; species such as wolves and elephants have come into conflict with humans, and others have fallen victim to predators and poachers. No one knows what would happen if a mammoth—or, more technically, an elephant-mammoth hybrid—was released: What would it eat? How would we protect it? Could it reproduce?

. . . . As for saving the climate, “we’re looking at a warming world, and [Colossal’s researchers] want to bring back creatures that are adapted to the cold?” says Elsa Panciroli, a paleontologist at National Museums Scotland, who studies ancient mice-sized mammals. “I study animals from the past, and they should stay in the past. Lack of habitat, human conflict, agriculture, climate change—the idea that they can fix that with gene editing is missing the big picture.”

. . . “In certain ancient species’ DNA, you don’t know what the function of this DNA is, so there are more than ethical problems; there are biological hazards from moving and editing the DNA,” says Yale University geneticist Jiangbing. Zhou “I’m not sure about the potential risks of this type of work, as the function of ancient DNA in live mice may be difficult to predict.”

. . . What happens with the mice or—if the company ever realizes its ultimate ambition—the woolly mammoths is another ethical quandary. “I feel like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, but if we’re going to interfere with nature, there has to be good reason,” Panciroli says. Additionally, reintroduced animals (including elephants) are routinely targeted by poachers, points out Andrea Crosta, founder of a wildlife-crime-fighting nongovernment organization called Earth League International.

. . .“It’s arrogance,” says Sue Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who spent decades fighting whaling and the ivory trade. “I’m not against technology. I’m not saying nature’s perfect. But this is such a waste of money when conservation is dying for lack of funds. To make some strange animal we can gawk at—we should be past that.”

Trailblazing biologist George Schaller agrees. “We need to protect what we have,” he says.

I think I’ll downgrade the grade I give to Sci. Am. to a D, for they completely omit the problems of making anything that resembles a Woolly Mammoth, and then point out problems that would arise if we could and then unleashed them on the tundra. They should have mentioned, as Nature implies below, that the whole project is simply bonkers and will not succeed. (If they do, I’ll eat my hat.) And Sci Am show pictures of hairy mice which are NOT the mice created by Colossal (see below).  Showing those photos borders on duplicity!

Nature, as you can tell by the headline below, does a much better job of pointing out the problems, though it doesn’t mention the Uterus Difficulty or the Behavior and Foraging Difficulty. I give the article an A-, though, because it does say that Colossal isn’t going to produce a woolly mammoth. Click to read:

They point out the main problem in the third through fifth paragraphs:

Colossal, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and is worth more than US$10 billion according to its latest valuation, says the woolly mouse represents an important step towards its goal of engineering Asian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative — with genetic changes for key mammoth traits. “The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and chief executive, in the press release.

But some experts in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago.

“It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”

And note that Colossal created some of their fuzzy mice by inserting into the mice genome not genes derived from mammoth sequences, but mouse mutations already known to make mice hairier. It’s a scam!

Shapiro [from Colossal] defends the decision to include mouse-specific mutations in Colossal’s woolly mice, in part because of the genetic chasm that separates mice and mammoths. “We have to choose modifications that are going to be compatible with healthy animals,” Shapiro says. “We’re not shoving mammoth genes into mice because there’s 200 million years of evolutionary distance between them.”

It’s not clear how many genetic changes would be needed to imbue elephants with mammoth traits. Lamm says Colossal’s goal isn’t to create an exact replica of mammoths, but a creature that can fill the ecological niches that mammoths occupied. “It’s really about rebuilding extinct species for today and looking for lost biodiversity and lost genes that drive those phenotypes.”

Making eight changes to an organism’s genome, as the Colossal team did, is now fairly standard in genetic engineering, Riesenberg says.

Riesenberg and his colleagues are developing methods to introduce dozens, or even hundreds, of Neanderthal-specific changes into human stem cells — to identify the biology that makes humans unique (“One cannot and should not recreate the Neanderthal,” he stresses). Altering an animal’s genome on this scale is one of the great frontiers in genome editing, Riesenberg adds. Even the capacity to make this many changes “would not bring you close to making a mammoth”.

Clearly Nature isn’t enthusiastic about this project, and they shouldn’t be. Even the woolly mice they show are not from their study (see below), but that took another scientist to point that out.

As Dr. Victoria Herridge points out below, they didn’t get the hairy mice shown in the journalism (and press-release) photos by combining the genes they said they inserted into the mouse. Instead, they appear to have inserted other genes already known to cause hairiness in mice, for because people have been breeding hairy “fancy mice” for years. The “mammothiest mouse” produced by Colossal is not the one shown in the pictures.

And so we have the BlueSky threads below from Dr. Victoria Herridge at the University of Sheffield, a paleontologist who studies real mammoths.  She simply takes the Colossal report apart, noting that the hairy mouse pictures used in Sci Am. do not show show the result of combined gene insertions used by the researchers, but some other mutations. Further, she notes that there’s no known effect of the “fat metabolism” genes on fat metabolism of the transgenic mice.  As Matthew adds, “note that the key experiment changing fat metabolism genes HAD NO EFFECT though they said little about that in the paper and the journalists all skipped over it…”

Here’s the hairiest mice that the Colossal people really produced by multiple insertions. They aren’t the ones in the picture above; they’re much more clean-cut! Note her comment on the inefficacy of the fat-metabolism gene.

 

Here Tori shows that Colossal should have used other mouse mutants to confect the mammoth story. Look at the double mutant Fgfr1/2!!!!

Finally, she tried to track down where the mice in all the magazines and the press release came from (the original BioRχiv paper is here).   These mice are in the supplementary materials in the article’s preprint, but involve fewer mutations than the ones touted as “mammothyt mice”:

I asked Matthew if he had ever seen any article in the popular press (beyond what’s in his book) that provided an accurate critical analysis of the Mammoth Project. He said, “no”.  As the warden said in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Science journalism is, by and large, abysmal, though of course there are exceptions.

Finally, some humor from Dr. Cobb, who’s been beleaguered by science journalists about this for years, and always tells them that the project is dumb:

He’s dreaming of eating those damned woolly mice.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T20:25:24.966Z

Now they’re trying to create “woolly mice” on the road to the woolly mammoth

March 5, 2025 • 11:45 am

Matthew Cobb and I have repeatedly criticized the efforts of geneticist George Church and his colleagues to “bring back the extinct woolly mammoth,” because in fact all they intend to do is insert a few genes for stuff like hair into the elephant genome, creating a hairy elephant rather than resurrecting an extinct species (see our posts here and especially the one here).  The NBC Evening News, after showing these fluffy rodents, even said that the mammoths could appear as early as 2028!

And problems are greater than just the duplicity involved in saying that a few inserted genes can re-create an extinct species: they also involve how to put those genes into an Asian elephant egg, and create a womb that will nurture the modified egg and keep the fetus alive. Not to mention that if you want to keep this bogus “species” going, you have to produce at least one male and one female.

The Guardian has given new life to this fiction by saying that the creation of “woolly mice” who carry inserted genes giving them longer and newly-colored hair is the first step to creating the woolly mammoth. The article even even has the temerity to describe the woolly mice as a “new species”, which under any reasonable species definition is sheer nonsense.  It’s a long way from putting extra hair on a mouse to putting extra hair on an elephant, even if that extra hair somehow supports the crazy idea that “we’ve re-created the mammoth!”

Read this mishigas by clicking on the headline:

An excerpt. The bolding is mine:

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates.

The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair.

However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.

The team also disrupted a gene associated with the way fats are metabolised in mice and was also found in mammoths, which they suggest could play a role in cold adaptation.

Note that they don’t know if the gene is associated with cold tolerance, and they changed only nine genes involved with hair. There are probably thousands of genes that differentiate the Asiatic elephant from the extinct mammoth.

As you see above, yes, they got furry mice, which of course are NOT a new species as they can interbreed with house mice.

Why don’t these people have the simple realization that:

a.) You don’t recreate an ancient species by making a modern one that somewhat resembles the extinct one but doesn’t near have the genetic differences that separate them. (What about behavior, for crying out loud?)

b.) You can’t genetically manipulate elephants the way you genetically manipulate mice.

c.) You have to create a lineage of breeding hairy elephants so the “revived species” will perpetuate itself.

But there’s at least one sane person who’s quoted:

Dr Tori Herridge of the University of Sheffield, said: “Engineering a mammoth-like elephant presents a far greater challenge: the actual number of genes likely to be involved is far higher, the genes are less well understood – and still need to be identified – and the surrogate will be an animal that is not normally experimented upon.”

And while some said the goal of reviving the mammoth had drawn closer, others were more sceptical. “Mammoth de-extinction doesn’t seem to be on the horizon anytime soon,” said Herridge.

I suspect Church will be dead before they even get close to their mammoth goal.  If I were in charge, I’d simply give up this tedious and worthless project.

Here’s a reconstruction of the real ancient wooly mammoth from Wikipedia.  How are they gonna make those long, curved tusks?

Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons