This year there was huge news when scientists at the company called Collosal brought back the dire wolf! Some say these cute, white pups are not really dire wolves, but that didn't stop a huge media buzz. One of the wolves even made the cover of TIME Magazine … with the line "He's a dire wolf. The first to exist in 10,000 years. Endangered species could be changed forever." So, what exactly is going on here? Who is this company? And, is this a good idea or could it have dire consequences?? This story comes to us from our friends at Vox's Today, Explained. Transcript: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsTodayExplainedDireWolves In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet the pups (02:06) Did we really bring back the dire wolf? (14:34) Should we be doing this? This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Follow Science Vs on Spotify, and if you wanna receive notifications every time we put out a new episode, tap the bell icon! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the story behind the dire wolves?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Earlier this year, there was this huge news that scientists had brought back the direwolf.
Meet Remus and Romulus, the first two direwolves since the Pleistocene era.
This is a promotional video from the company that made these wolves, Colossal. And in the video, you can see these gorgeous little white pups.
At just 15 days old, the pups take their first wobbly steps before a much needed nap time.
Chapter 2: How were the dire wolves created?
The pups, who are now more than six months old, were made by taking the DNA of a grey wolf and then tweaking 14 genes in it to make them bigger, give them lighter coats, have larger teeth and jaws than a grey wolf would have. And when folks found out about these animals, there was this huge media buzz with headlines plastered all over the place.
One of the wolves even made the cover of Time magazine with the line, quote, "'He's a dire wolf, the first to exist in 10,000 years. Endangered species could be changed forever.'" But is that right? Did scientists really bring back the dire wolf? What exactly is going on here? And is this a good idea? Or could it have dire consequences?
That's what our friends over at Today Explained wanted to know. So today, we're going to share their episode looking into this. After the break, co-host of Today Explained, Sean Ramaswaran, will take it from here.
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Direwolves, not just a thing from Game of Thrones, not just Jon Snow's best friend. Direwolves walked the Americas for millennia, up until about 14,000 years ago when maybe their primary food source dried up or humans hunted them to extinction, no one was taking notes. But we know they were a bit bigger than gray wolves, they ate a lot of meat, and their bite could crush bones.
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Chapter 3: Are these really dire wolves or something else?
Not a lot of people have seen these direwolves that have come back from extinction up close and personal. Like DT Maxx from The New Yorker is one of the few who has.
Okay, so first of all, we just got to get this out there. We either have to put direwolves in quotes or we have to give them a name. Like, I don't know, we could do anything like... How about Diet Direwolves? Yes, exactly. These so-called direwolves were created by extracting DNA from a 72,000-year-old direwolf inner ear bone and a 13,000-year-old direwolf tooth.
They determined its closest living relative is the gray wolf, so then they made 20 edits to gray wolf DNA to include those direwolf-specific genes.
That animal looks like a direwolf, it will behave like a direwolf, and it is a direwolf.
This is insane, actually. These are not direwolves by any definition.
But the other point is it doesn't really matter when you're seeing them because, you know, you're seeing something, you know, that's absolutely amazing. I mean, you're seeing something that, so there's two bright white wolves. I did not see them where they live. I saw them where they were brought to be seen, which was far, far away.
And you can't tell us where that was, but it's somewhere, somewhere in the northern United States, I've read.
Yeah, look, I do hold bigger secrets as a journalist, but I'm not supposed to tell you where. But so what happens, okay, so first of all, I see a couple of people I know from the reporting on the piece. I see George Church, who looks as much like Gandalf as any human being on this planet who holds tenure.
And I also see Ben Lamb, the guy who founded the project, looks a lot like, it's Johnny Snow, right? Yeah. The point is, like, it's the perfect setup. And then there are these two bright white teenage wolves. So, you know, even any wolf is impressive. So it's not... I mean, I have actually seen wolves before for another article, strangely enough.
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Chapter 4: What is Colossal and who is behind it?
The dire wolf is not, let me just get this out there for everybody. The dire wolf is not, there's a difference between being extinct for 40 million years and being extinct for 14,000 years. They both sound like a long time to us, but it's just not comparable. So you can get, you can get,
i can't get you can't get but beth shapiro could get viable ancient dna now what you do with that dna is you read the genetic sequences and then you recreate them right and you're gonna put that dna into cells and the cells are gonna replicate and you're gonna have an animal ultimately once you put in an embryo and then implant it in a womb you're gonna have an animal that has those genes being acted on
That makes it sound like you or I could probably do it with just a little bit of help. But it's not that easy because there are problems, you know, at every step of the way. And it's a little bit like if I described to you how to hit a home run, you'd be like, yeah, okay. There's the force and there's the counterforce and there's the angle of the swing. But most people don't hit home runs.
You mentioned someone named Beth Shapiro, who's now, I think, one of the leading scientists over at Colossal. And someone like Beth Shapiro comes from, I believe, UC Santa Cruz out in California, where she was doing versions of this kind of work, if not trying to, you know, revive the woolly mammoth. Can Colossal work faster than your, I don't know, typical elite university lab?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can get that much money going at a university lab without a fair amount of grant writing. I mean, grant writing is slow, and getting funded is slow. There's a guy named Lova Dahlin, who's a Swedish mathematician. Wooly Mammoth guy. And I think he made a really good point in my piece that nobody's really picked up on.
And I think it's about the money, which he said, like, the people who invested in this company weren't going to give, you know, I'm paraphrasing him, $100 million to the World Wildlife Fund. Like, you know, they're tech people. They probably would have bought Bitcoin with it otherwise. Like this, you know, Peter Jackson said that owning, being a part of Colossal was as much fun as movie making.
You know, I think that kind of tells you something. I don't think if they'd been doing this in Bess Shapiro's old lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he'd have thought it was as much fun, you know, as moviemaking.
To bring this back to where we started, DT, with Romulus and Remus, these two diet dire wolves. What happens to them? You love that. I do. I'm going to stick with it.
What happens to them? Where do they go? You know, never say never, but I think they're expected to live out their lives. I think a wolf gets the same 15 years, I think, that a smaller dog gets. live out their lives. They will not hunt. They will be given like, I don't know if you've ever been to a zoo and seen what they feed the lions and tigers.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do scientists face in de-extinction?
I think there is a lot of excitement. It's definitely cool to bring back extinct species, but there's a lot of questions we have about where these animals will live, what their lives will be like, why we're doing this, what the long-term view or vision is, and a lot of that depends on how the technology is then used and what happens.
Well, let's talk about, to start with, what do you think of the ethics of the process by which these direwolves have come to be? Obviously, let's just think about whatever animal it was that birthed these direwolves, not a direwolf, I assume.
Right. So there's a few issues that come up. One is we're making a bunch of dogs pregnant to produce them. And I have concerns about the dire wolves. But more importantly, the company has said that its longer term plan is to produce or reproduce or to create a woolly mammoth. And with that, there are even bigger concerns because that you'd have to take elephants.
You'd have to get many elephants, female elephants, anesthetize them. You'd have to stick probes up their vagina to extract eggs. You'd have to then get many elephants pregnant. Hopefully some will not miscarry. Some will miscarry. Then you'll have to do C-sections on the elephants. to get the woolly mammoths out. So that's going to be very cumbersome, and it's going to hurt a lot of elephants.
So dire wolves, we have three of them that were created, and I should say they're not really dire wolves. They're gray wolves that have had about 15 of their genes changed. So of 80 potential genes that could be changed, they've changed 15. And when we're mucking around with nature and changing genes, mistakes get made. Genes have multiple functions that we don't always know about.
So, for instance, five of the genes that Colossal was going to change because they were in dire wolves but not in gray wolves, the researchers decided not to change because these genes would create deafness and blindness in the dire wolf. We don't always know when we're altering genes what the effects are going to be. Genes have multiple effects.
About five years ago, Dr. He Jiankui in China genetically engineered three children. He took the embryos and he wanted to disable a gene called the CCR5 gene to prevent HIV from getting in the cells because he was going to work with HIV positive fathers. But in disabling that gene, other viruses are more likely to enter the cell. So West Nile virus is more likely to enter the cell.
So you may disable a gene because you want one thing or put a mutation in or change a gene because you want one thing, but other things may happen. So these wolves may end up having other kinds of medical problems. These are big animals. They're 150 pounds. Colossal has them on about three square miles, whereas normally they usually live in areas between 50 and 1,000 square miles.
So we're keeping them at a very constricted space. They're at risk of other diseases. So I'm concerned about their welfare.
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Chapter 6: How much funding has Colossal received?
And throughout listening to you describe many of them, I hear the potential for death lurking at every corner, which is, I guess, an irony of this process known as de-extinction, is that it sounds like you sure got to kill a lot of animals to get to the point of bringing back an animal that, as we heard from DT earlier, might end up simply just dying off again.
Which I guess gets to the point of cruelty. Where is the regulation when it comes to this process of de-extinction?
Well, there are no regulations, and that could create problems. So there have been guidelines that were developed before we actually had any extinct animals to look at. There was one animal, a goat in the Pyrenees, the mountains between Spain and France, that was brought back and lived for 10 minutes. So the guidelines we have aren't very good, and we have no government regulations on this.
And in fact, President Trump's Secretary of the Interior, Doug Borgum, came out the other day and said, it's great that Colossus is doing this because now we don't have to worry about driving other animals into extinction.
If we're going to be in anguish about losing a species, then now we have an opportunity to bring them back. I mean, pick your favorite species and call up Colossal and instead of raising money to get animals on the Endangered species, let's figure out a way to get them off. And this is one tool, biodiversity, what it can do for everybody.
Let them go. We don't need regulations, was his point, to protect animals. Any animal that disappears, we'll just clone it back. And I think a lot of the company, Colossal, is worth $10 billion. It'd be great if we can help animals that are on the verge of extinction and help them survive, given that we are losing, as Colossal says, we're losing a lot of animals every year.
And we will be losing more, partly due to climate change. Let's work on protecting those animals that are still here and have a place to live.
We've talked about a lot of the risks here, a lot of the drawbacks. I want to talk about some of the potential benefits. Do you see some good there if we do indeed get some medical or scientific breakthroughs out of this company's work?
I mean, there's been talk of rebalancing habitats, fixing mutations in endangered pink pigeons, vaccinating elephants against herpes, sharpening our tools for fighting diseases. There's apparently some potential there.
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Chapter 7: What is the potential impact of bringing back dire wolves?
Dr. Klitzman, I thought of one silver lining in all of this. If what you're saying is true, someone still cares about being on the cover of Time magazine.
You mean that we still have magazines?
Yes.
And I should say, I realize I'm coming across as very negative. I don't mean to come across as negative. I think that science is very important. I think given decreasing amounts of money for science, it would be great as we as a society could spend it where it's going to lead to the most bang for the buck. We're at the cusp of, for instance, new vaccines.
All kinds of new vaccine research that NIH was about to start is now ending. I think that near-term or low-hanging fruit is there that we can invest in that will be able to help millions of people.
Dr. Robert Klitzman, Columbia University. Dr. Devin Schwartz made our show today. He was edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd. My name's Sean Ramos from The Show Is Today Explained.
That was Today Explained, which is made by Vox. Today Explained comes out every day and digs into all sorts of stuff in the news, from direwolves to doomsday preppers, allergies to baby Botox. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and regular science besties will be back next week. I'll fact you then.
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