Dire Wolves! They're Back?

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Earlier this year, there was this huge news that scientists had brought back the dire wolf.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Meet Remus and Romulus, the first two dire wolves since the Pleistocene era.

• 0:23Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  At just 15 days old, the pups take their first wobbly steps before a much-needed nap time.

• 0:43Wendy Zukerman?

  The pups, who are now more than six months old, were made by taking the DNA of a gray wolf and then tweaking 14 genes in it to make them bigger, give them lighter coats, have larger teeth and jaws than a gray 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."

• 1:26Wendy Zukerman?

  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, Shaun Ramaswarin, will take it from here.

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• 4:40Speaker 04

  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. And now we know that apparently direwolves are back?

• 5:12Speaker 04

  A startup called Colossal says they've brought these pups back from extinction. They say they've got three of them, but are these direwolves they brought back actually direwolves? And whether they are or aren't, should we be trying to bring direwolves back? Like, why?

• 5:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  OK, 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...

• 5:53Speaker 04

  How about "diet direwolves"?

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. These so-called direwolves are created by extracting DNA from a 72,000-year-old...

• 6:02Speaker 06

  Old dire wolf inner ear bone and a 13,000 year old dire wolf tooth. They determine its closest living relative is the gray wolf. So then they made 20 edits to gray wolf DNA to include those dire wolf specific genes. That animal looks like a dire wolf. It will behave like a dire wolf and it is a dire wolf.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  This is insane, actually. These are not dire wolves by any definition.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  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 lovely. 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.

• 6:47Speaker 06

  And you can't tell us where that was, but it's somewhere, somewhere in the northern United States. I've read.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do hold bigger secrets as a journalist, but I'm not, I'm not supposed to tell you where.

• 6:59Speaker 05

  But so what happens, okay, so there, so first of all, I, I see a couple of people I know from the reporting on the piece. I see George Church, who looks as, 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, um, it's Johnny Snow, right? The point is like, it's a perfect setup. And then there are these two bright white teenage wolves. So, you know, even any, any wolf is impressive. So it's not, I mean, I have actually seen wolves before for another article, strangely enough. So a wolf carries its own weird kind of authority with it, but these, they do look different. And again, I'm not an animal morphologist, so, you know, I've been told pale, but they're

• 7:43Speaker 05

  white and they're, they're like celebrities. I mean, there's no other way, you know, there's no other way to describe it, that they're, they're delightfully blissfully heedless of how much like money and effort has gone into the creation of them. They're basically, you know, they're, they're in this enclosure. They're doing little things wolves do and dogs sometimes do. One pees, the other rolls in it, but you know, they're, they're majestic. They are going about their quasi meta dire wolf existence blissful disregard for any controversy about what you want to call them or or blissful disregard of whether they should have been brought back in the first place.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Tell us more about this company that brought back the diet dire wolf version that you saw.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  We could do this all day.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  It's called colossal. It's run by a dude named Ben Lamb. Who is he? What is he trying to do here?

• 8:41Speaker 05

  I so I mean, Ben Lamb is kind of amazing. I'm I am pretty much in awe of Ben Lamb. He's a guy who's already maybe forty something. He's already had like four or five successes by which he started up four or five companies and they were bought out by larger companies, which is kind of what you want to do when you're a startup guy. And then, you know, one day he meets a guy named George Church. Church being the Gandalf of our earlier narrative, if that survives. And Church is a Harvard professor, a guy who's gotten a million patents and loves to do deep thinking. He's a big kind of what if guy, like, what if we were to bring back the Neanderthal?

• 9:24Speaker 05

  And then the press goes, ah, and then George Church goes, I was just considering it. I was just thinking about it. You guys calm down. So George Church and Ben get together and they basically what Ben says is if you had all the money in the world, George, what would you bring back? What would you want to do with your time? And and George says, I'd bring back the woolly mammoth.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Sick. I mean, I don't know if it's responsible, but it sounds cool.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  Right, right. Exactly. And, you know, they get together. It's like, let's put on a show, right? And, you know, this being Ben Lamb, super talented, perfectly adapted, modern entrepreneur, and he raises my basically, I don't know the details. I think he raises money with a phone call because he's got a great second idea. And his second idea is while we learn how to de-extinct these animals, we're going to learn an awful lot of interesting biomedical tech and that we could sell. That's where we make our money. We're not gonna make our money. He's very, very firm on this. There will be no Jurassic Park. We will not display these animals. You know, let's check back in in five years.

• 10:33Speaker 05

  But we will spin off the biotech, and the biotech is honestly probably worth even more than, what is Disney World charged now or Disneyland?

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Hundreds, hundreds.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  All right, so maybe I take that back. Maybe the better business is displaying them.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  How much money have they raised to do this? And how much is this company that they're running colossal worth at this point?

• 10:56Speaker 05

  All right, so they've now raised over $400 million and their valuation, which is a kind of complicated metric involving what shares are worth, is over $10 billion, which puts it at the size level of Moderna. They've had an insane, insane first, you know, first few years.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  And I ask you this, not because like Paris Hilton or Peter Jackson, I'm planning on investing in this company, but because I wanted to establish that people are taking these people seriously. And now that we've established that, do us a favor and tell us just how hard it is to do what this company says it wants to do.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  The dire wolf, you know, 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 you know, 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 it in embryo and then implant it in a womb, you're gonna have an animal that has those genes being acted on.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  That's, 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.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  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 revive the woolly mammoth. Can Colossal work faster than your, I don't know, typical elite university lab?

• 13:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can get that much money going in 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 woolly 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, 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.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  You know, I think that kind of tells you something. I don't think if they'd been doing this in Beth Shapiro's old lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he'd have thought it was as much fun, you know, as movie making.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  To bring this back to where we started, DT, with Romulus and Remus, these two diet dire wolves. What happens to them? I do. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with it. What, what happens to them? Where do they go?

• 14:33Speaker 05

  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. And, you know, they will not be, 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, they feed them like something they would have hunted, but they didn't hunt it. Like, just oozing, bleeding.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Massive amounts of meat, and I think that's what the dire wolves are going to get. But they're not planning to breed them, which I don't entirely understand. Colossal talks a lot about reintroducing some of their animals into the ecosystem to do environmental good. I don't think the dire wolf was conceived by them with that as a possibility. First of all, I mean, people don't want dire wolves in their backyard.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  When you realize that these diet wolves would just die out, did that bum you out? What did you make of that?

• 15:31Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, I did. It was absolutely, you know, there were a number of sad moments in reporting this piece. I mean, first of all, you have to kind of come to grips with the immensity of the damage that humans have done and for how long we've been doing it, because the dire wolf is essentially driven extinct mostly by human activity, you know, 14,000 years ago. But I don't know, when you realize that this whole thing is kind of to show we can, yeah, it becomes sad because wasn't, isn't one of the reasons that we used to drive animals extinct because we could, because there was money in it?

• 16:16Speaker 05

  And isn't it kind of weird that we're now de-extincting an animal, you know, kind of because we now have this, this technology that can reopen the door that we see, we thought that we had absolutely and, and, you know, incontrovertibly closed before. So the whole thing leaves you a little bit blue.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  DT Maxx, read his profile of the dire wolves over at newyorker.com. The Ethics of De-extinction, when Today Explained is back.

• 17:02Wendy Zukerman?

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• 19:22Speaker 02

  You're listening to Today Explained.

• 19:26Speaker 06

  I'm Robert Klitzman. I'm a professor of psychiatry and director of the online and in-person Masters of Bioethics programs at Columbia University and the author of Designing Babies: How Technology Is Changing the Ways We Create Children.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  And when we look at these diet direwolves in the northern United States somewhere by way of colossal, do we feel more good or bad?

• 19:50Speaker 06

  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.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  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 direwolves, 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

• 21:06Speaker 06

  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, direwolves, we have three of them that were created, and I should say they're not really direwolves. They're graywolves that have had about 15 of their genes changed.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Eighty potential genes that could be changed, they've changed fifteen. 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 gonna 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. So we don't always know when we're altering genes, what the effects are gonna be. Genes have multiple effects. About five years ago, Dr. Heijiang Kui in China genetically engineered three children.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  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 gonna work with HIV-positive fathers. But in disabling that gene, other viruses are more likely to enter the cells. So West Nile virus is more likely to enter the cells. So you may disable the 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 in a very constricted space, their risk of other diseases, so I'm

• 23:04Speaker 04

  concerned about their welfare. So it sounds like you have a host of concerns. 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 gotta 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.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Which I guess gets to the point of cruelty. Where is the regulation when it comes to this process of the extinction?

• 23:49Speaker 06

  Well, there are no regulations and that could create problems. So there had 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. It was brought back and lived for 10 minutes. So the guidelines we have aren't very good and we don't really have any, we have no government regulations on this. And in fact, the Trump's, President Trump's Secretary of the Interior, Doug Borgen, 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."

• 24:29Speaker 04

  If we're going to be in anguish about, about, about losing a species and now we have an opportunity to bring them back, I mean, pick your favorite species and call up Colossal and, and instead of, you know, raising money to get animals on the endangered species, let's figure out a way to get them off. And this is one tool, increase biodiversity, what it can do for everybody.

• 24:48Speaker 06

  Let them go. We don't need regulations, was his point, to protect animals. We can just, any animal that disappears, we'll just clone it back. And I think a lot of the, 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.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  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, there's, there's apparently some potential there.

• 25:52Speaker 06

  So unfortunately, the moment President Trump has been cutting back hugely on research at NIH and the National Institutes of Health.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  Has funded immense amounts of research that have led to immense human benefit, partly because it's been available for, in the public domain, research is published, which this company hasn't published many of its key findings. So you could argue that there is a greater need to, A, focus public dollars on this, on research, which are now being drastically cut back. And secondly, a question is whether or not the prime aim here is to help nature, help endangered species, or to make money, right? And if, I think, as DT wrote in his piece, the company only plans to create maybe three or five dire wolves, what's the point? Is it to develop science that they can then sell?

• 26:47Speaker 06

  Or is it to create these animals, which create huge publicity? And this has been the front cover of Time Magazine. It's been on every major news network. It's been on every major newspaper. They're trying, as I understand, to raise more money. So this gives them great profile. We're going to bring back these five animals. But is it to help nature? Or is it to raise more money? And this is sort of the poster child for them. The woolly mammoth, too, which is their long-range goal, they say, well, it could lead to meat and fur and tusks, and they may decrease global warming by tamping down permafrost. Well, there's very, there's decreasing amounts of tundra, icy tundra for them to live.

• 27:31Speaker 06

  To have an industry of mammoth fur and meat, you need a lot of these animals, and we don't have the space for them. Maybe Russian Siberia somewhere does. Good luck with that. The Russians aren't exactly our best buddies at the moment. And even if these animals do, wherever they walk, press down snow, the snow's going to melt further because of climate change. So you're not getting at the source of climate change. So I'm not sure how much the end result is going to be actually helping animals versus making money.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:14Speaker 06

  You mean that we still have magazines?

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:16Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. And I should say, I- 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.

• 28:27Speaker 06

  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.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Dr. Robert Klitzman, Columbia University. Dr. Devon Schwartz made our show today. He was edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Andrea Kristin's daughter and Patrick Boyd. My name's Sean Ramisverum. The show is Today Explained.

• 29:33Wendy Zukerman?

  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 dire wolves to doomsday preppers, allergies to baby botox. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Wendy Zukerman, and regular science busters will be back next week. I'll fact you then.

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