Return of dire wolves is not what it seems
'Dire wolves' recreated by genetics firm Colossal. Credit: AP/Colossal Inc. / Cover Images
The headlines and TV chyrons delivered the breathless news: The dire wolves had returned.
It was kind of thrilling, even if you were not a fan of “Game of Thrones” where the creatures were a baleful presence. The idea that a species that went extinct some 12,500 years ago had somehow come back to life — epitomized by a haunting photo of two young white wolves against a wintry landscape of snow and ice — was intoxicating.
Too bad it wasn’t really true.
The announcement came from a company called Colossal Biosciences, which claimed to have revived the species with cutting-edge genetic techniques that created three pups they named Romulus and Remus (the mythological twin-brother founders of Rome raised by wolves) and Khaleesi (a reference to the “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen, the mother of dragons, the most exotic of exotic creatures).
No question the science is cool. Colossal extracted and sequenced DNA from a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth from Ohio and a 72,000-year-old dire wolf inner ear bone from Idaho and found that modern grey wolves share 99.5% of their DNA with dire wolves. Colossal used gene-editing method CRISPR to edit the grey wolf genome — 20 edits across 14 genes — to bring it closer to the dire wolf genome (think: thick white coats and a 25% larger size), inserted the nuclei from those new cells into donor egg cells to create embryos, and transplanted the embryos into surrogate dog mothers.
The pups that were born are different, for sure, but they’re not dire wolves. How could they be when, as one expert noted, those 20 edits pale beside the 12,235,000 individual differences between the dire wolf and grey wolf genomes? And how could they be, untethered as the pups are from their evolutionary history? Dire wolves were social creatures, each generation learning from its elders. Who is teaching Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi? How would we know whether they are behaving like dire wolves on their secret 2,000-acre preserve somewhere in the northern United States?
Call them dire wolf approximations, and isn’t it curious that they look like the dire wolves on Game of Thrones? And that George R.R. Martin, who wrote the books on which the series was based, is an adviser to and investor in Colossal?
So what exactly has Colossal done, and to what end?
The company is one of a handful of groups working on what’s called “de-extinction,” or resurrection biology. The words exude the excitement of possibility. But they cloak a sad reality.
The number of species going extinct each year is estimated at 10,000 to 30,000 at the upper end — some 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. That kind of loss will wreak havoc on the balance of nature in all sorts of environments, and will deprive humans of future discoveries of, for example, pharmaceuticals that have been derived from the natural world.
To the extent Colossal’s dire wolf “triumph” diverts our attention from saving species headed toward extinction in the belief we can always bring them back, it’s a profoundly disturbing development.
Colossal’s announcement, like previous reports about attempts to “recreate” the woolly mammoth, generated instant comparisons to “Jurassic Park” and its science-run-amok lesson. This isn’t that, though both share a focus on charismatic creatures. It doesn’t seem likely the three wolves will be ravaging the countryside, wherever they are.
What’s chilling in both cases is the idea we can bring species back from the dead. This nothing-is-beyond-our-capabilities ethos is typical human hubris, and would be better applied to trying not to harm species in the first place. The reasons for modern extinctions, after all, stem largely from our behavior — loss of habitat, resources being overexploited, invasive species being introduced, climate change, pollution.
It would be far wiser to work on letting things live, than trying to revive them after they’re gone.
n COLUMNIST MICHAEL DOBIE’S opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
