Time magazine wants you to believe scientists have brought dire wolves back from the dead.
Popularized by the HBO series Game of Thrones, dire wolves are the larger, whiter cousins of the modern-day gray wolves. They once roamed North and South America from approximately 150,000 to 10,000 years ago.
According to Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Bioscience, the company that created dire wolves, the animals were the product of interbreeding between two different wolf lineages from about 3 million years ago. It was previously thought that dire wolves and gray wolves split some 6 million years ago.
However, before Shapiro came to Colossal, she co-authored a paper that attempted to reconstruct the evolutionary history of wolves by sequencing genomes from five fossils, including an inner ear bone from 72,000 years ago found in Idaho.
Instead of extracting DNA from the fossils and creating clones, like the fictional scientists famously did in Jurassic Park, Shapiro started with modern-day grey wolf DNA and then made 20 unique edits to 14 genes in the gray wolf genome. From previous research, Shapiro believed she isolated the genes that controlled things such as size, musculature, hair color, hair texture, and hair length.
Shapiro then took this new genetic material and placed it into the egg of a domesticated dog. Once that egg developed into an embryo, it was implanted into a surrogate domesticated dog.
Shapiro said her creations are dire wolves, telling reporters, “If we can look at this animal and see what it’s doing, and it looks like a dire wolf and acts like a dire wolf, I’m going to call it a dire wolf.”
But are they dire wolves, really?
They do not have the same DNA as dire wolves, nor do they have the same DNA as gray wolves. And how does Shapiro know if her creations, which are still just five months old, act like dire wolves once did? Has she observed dire wolves in person, which have been extinct for 10,000 years? Have her creations survived in the wild yet?
Colossal was created to bring back multiple extinct animals, such as the wooly mammoth and the dodo bird. After creating a “wooly mouse” earlier this year, the corporation raised $435 million, and it now claims a market capitalization past $10 billion.
Colossal made three of the current dire wolf versions, and the goal is to eventually produce an animal with a full genome that matches the extinct dire wolf.
THE ABUNDANCE BROS HAVE ALREADY WON
But at what cost? It took eight surrogates and an average of 45 embryos per surrogate to produce the three “dire wolf” pups they have now. Does anyone care about the cavalier waste of life in the process? What about when this tinkering is transferred to humans, as it inevitably will be?
The alteration of DNA over millions of years guided by the realities of nature is an awesome power to comprehend. The shaping of DNA to meet the whims of investors might be an even more powerful force and far more terrifying.