Apr 10, 2025

Calling out colossal baloney on supposed dire wolf de-extinction Like Read Time: min Just the phrase “dire wolf de-extinction” evokes many things including Game of Thrones. It seems very cool. However, the new claim by biotech Colossal Biosciences that they brought back these unique canines (they were real but are now extinct) seems to me about as real as those giant mythical canines on the TV show. Yet it’s all over the media and only some outlets are questioning the claim. Why should we care if Colossal seems to be hyping what is really just production of moderately gene-edited gray wolves ? This kind of hype is toxic and harmful to science including public trust. Some people, apparently even top U.S. administration officials, now believe the dire wolves are back too. To be clear, the three produced gray wolves with fifteen gene edits making them genetically a smidge more like dire wolves are not a de-extinction event. “We are cute, but we are not de-extincted dire wolves.” Two of the three gray wolves with 15 gene edits to make them somewhat more similar to dire wolves. Colossal Biosciences wrongly touts supposed dire wolf de-extinction What’s the only good news from this story? It’s just April and yet we already have a candidate for The Screamers Science Hype Award for 2025. A top candidate. Scientists have pushed back on this hype. I agree with my colleague Graham Coop in the post below. I also liked a post from another one of my colleagues, Jonathan Eisen, who invoked “Crying wolf” on this arguably fake news. Joking aside, this stuff about species concepts is such transparent BS. [deleted & reposted, as first draft was too annoyed.] www.newscientist.com/article/2475… What’s actually going on here and what about the mammoths? Making this more aggravating, I bet the top scientists at the company know they didn’t achieve dire wolf de-extinction. Beth Shapiro? George Church? If you read Graham’s post above, there’s some major hand-waving in there from Shapiro like “everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.” Not in this case. The firm’s first-ever animal de-extinction claim is clearly wrong. Why would they do that? It could be an effort to raise more capital and get more attention to the company. BBC science journalist Roland Pease also raised the good question of how these de-extinction (dire wolf, mammoth, dodo, etc.) efforts could ever produce some return on investment. I don’t see how unless they potentially sell access to the pseudo-de-extincted animals or license some new tech for some other purpose. Bring back (de-extinct) specific dead pets or people? Mammoths, dodos, and more See more on my view of the company’s efforts that they claim are heading toward woolly mammoth de-extinction . We’re likely to see them incorrectly claim that mammoth de-extinction also worked in coming years too, when in fact they will likely have just made some genetically modified elephants with a handful of mammoth genes. Maybe there’s some intact mammoth cells still frozen in Siberia that could be used for cloning? It wasn’t that long ago that the firm also came out with woolly mice supposedly on the path to making the mammoths return. I still would argue if we’re going to de-extinct something, let’s go for another more decently departed canine that may have been extinguished due to human activity: woolly dogs . Maybe Colossal could put the woolly gene from mammoths into gray wolves and bingo? #mp_form_below_posts4 .mailpoet_form { }