“This is Remus. He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years.” So claimed Time magazine above its cover image of a white-coated canine. You’ll be hard-pushed to find a knowledgeable scientist who agrees with the claim.
Remus is a genetically modified grey wolf created by the US “de-extinction” company Colossal Biosciences (valued at $10bn), which has long advertised its intention to recreate the woolly mammoth by gene editing of elephant genomes. By tweaking a handful of regular wolf genes, the company has been able to give Remus (and two other pups, one a twin called, naturally, Romulus) some of the traits thought to be present in ancient dire wolves. To wit: Remus is big and white.
Dire wolves were a species of the Americas that diverged from grey wolves 5.7 million years ago and went extinct more than 10,000 years ago. They will have differed from grey wolves in thousands of genetic particulars – in fact, they were arguably not wolves at all, but closer to coyotes and jackals. The notion that you can recreate them by modifying a few genes is silly, and probably the press only swallows it because we have been groomed to attribute quasi-magical powers of biological determination to genes. Worse, there is no good reason to even want to make dire wolves “de-extinct”. The world they were adapted to doesn’t exist now; they’re not an endangered species, but a vanished one.
So Colossal’s claim that this is “the first successful case of de-extinction” is wrong in fact, void of motivation (except commercial), and ethically questionable – these wolves have been genetically modified for no medical or ecological reason. Scientists are furious. “To see this work being done with such a casual disregard not only for the truth, but for life itself is genuinely abhorrent to me,” said one palaeoecologist.
You might have first encountered dire wolves in Game of Thrones, and Colossal was loaned the Iron Throne from the series (by film-maker Peter Jackson, who has reportedly invested in the company) for a photoshoot with Romulus and Remus. George RR Martin is another investor and acts as “cultural adviser”. Who can resist that story? Not Time, and not the New Yorker, cannily offered an exclusive by the company; “The dire wolf is back” was its breathless headline. Of course this is not an exact replica, says Colossal’s chief scientific adviser, Beth Shapiro – it’s “childish” to expect that. Rather, it’s a replica of the dire wolf “phenotype”, which in this case means basically a wolf that’s big and white. Such linguistic quibbles tend to vanish in the hype. “I’m holding the first dire wolf cubs in 12,000 years,” said Colossal’s chief animal officer, Matt James, after the twin pups’ caesarean birth.
Colossal’s biggest goal, literally, is the mammoth, which the company imagines roaming Siberia (to no discernible purpose). So far they’ve made long-haired mice – cue jokes about scaling up. Perhaps they’ll succeed in making long-haired elephants. They’re certainly making what the co-founder, Ben Lamm, calls “a fuck ton of money”.
What they haven’t made is a dire wolf. And the problem goes beyond misleading the public. If, hypothetically, you were part of a government administration that regards anything green-tinted, such as conservation of species and habitats, as ideologically dubious, and that considers it is “innovation – not regulation – that has spawned American greatness”, you might be inclined to rejoice in this apparent technofix. And so it is: those are the words of Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, who is “excited about the potential of ‘de-extinction’ technology” and considers that “the revival of the dire wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder”. No need for pesky laws and regulations to protect endangered species, because we can always resurrect them!
It doesn’t much matter whether Burgum believes this nonsense; the point is that, thanks to Colossal, he has a story justifying the removal of yet more conservation regulation.
Burgum’s meaningless comment that “the dire wolf revival… embodies strength and courage that is deeply encoded within the DNA of American identity” points to something deeper. The idea of a mythical natural heritage embodying a sort of cultural virility, and which can be recaptured via science, appealed to the Nazis, too. Lutz Heck, director of Berlin Zoo and a member of the SS, dreamed of resurrecting the ancient auroch by the back-breeding of other bovines, as a symbol of the age of Aryan racial purity. Of course de-extinction is not itself “Nazi science”, but let’s just recognise that Elon Musk loves it.
