Ben Lamm, the 43-year-old denim-jacketed CEO of Colossal Biosciences, claims to have reintroduced dire wolves into the world after more than 10,000 years of extinction. The three animals, it turns out, are currently living in a 2,000-acre enclosure in an undisclosed location, under round-the-clock surveillance. The six-month-old males are named Romulus and Remus after the mythical human brothers who were nursed by a “she-wolf” and founded the city of Rome and their two-month-old sister is called Khaleesi, after the vengeful queen from Game of Thrones.
The obvious main question from the scientific community is whether his three newly minted pups are actual dire wolves, or just engineered lookalikes? “Absolutely the former, insists Lamm: “There’s never been an animal with this number of edits. There’s never been an animal with ancient DNA in it. The fact is that we took a 72,000-year-old skull and a 13,000-year-old tooth and engineered three puppies?”
“It’s a dire wolf,” said Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer. “It is a dire wolf. It looks like a dire wolf. It has dire wolf DNA. There’s nobody in the world that has studied dire wolf genetics more than Colossal, and we have more data than anybody’s ever published on the dire wolf. What we’ve done is taken the key core phenotypes, and the associated genotypes of the dire wolf, and used that to edit a dire wolf. So, this animal looks like a dire wolf, acts like a dire wolf, is a dire wolf, and fills the same ecological niche as a dire wolf.” The new pups, in fact, have 99.5% the same DNA as the dire wolves of yore, Lamm says.
Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, a renowned evolutionary biologist, and 2009 MacArthur Fellow, who specializes in the genetics of Ice Age animals and plants said “All of these percentages are not particularly precise. In the old days, when people were first estimating chimpanzee relatedness to humans, they used several different approaches that resulted in numbers being published that ranged from 95 percent identical to 99 percent identical and, unfortunately, all of these are correct because it depends on what we’re measuring. What’s more”, she explained, “when it comes to the dire wolves, “it’s tough to know what is in the remaining 0.5 percent of similarity. But keep in mind that most of the differences between two individuals are not differences that are important to making the species that species. You and I do not have genomes that are 100 percent identical, but anything that is in that long list of differences between us or between our two dire wolves is probably not important to making a human a human—or a dire wolf a dire wolf.
“What Colossal has created”, she said, “are animals that are 99.5 percent similar to dire wolves because of the shared evolutionary history. They also have 20 additional edits that we have seen bring back dire wolf traits. It’s correct to call them a dire wolf, according to some species definitions. But it’s also not correct, according to other definitions. What will never be possible, she said, is to “bring something back that is 100 percent identical in every way—genetically, physiologically, behaviorally, ecologically—to an extinct species. Especially because a species is more than just the sequence of its DNA. But that wasn’t the intention of this project, and it’s not the intention of any de-extinction project. De-extinction”, said Shapiro, is not about “creating perfect genetic copies of individual animals. It’s about restoring lost ecological functions and enhancing biodiversity. “What ultimately makes this project, as well as all of these other de-extinction projects significant, is how much we will discover along the way that we can use to help protect living species. Habitats around the planet are changing at a pace that is faster than evolution can keep up with. Gene editing could be used to help species become resistant to disease, to restore missing genetic variation, or to correct gene sequences that lead to genetic disease.”
Lamm and the company have their hearts, minds, and dollars set most on “de-extincting” none other than the woolly mammoth, well-preserved frozen carcasses of which have been found in places like Siberia. To do this, they are trying to figure out how elephants can carry and gestate woolly mammoth embryos in their wombs. “That’s late-stage,” said Lamm. All of Colossal’s dire wolves, as well as all of their other candidate species, will be grown inside surrogates, “but then, outside of the surrogates,” he adds. “We do have a 17-person team working on artificial wombs.”
Artificial wombs? “It’s great from an animal welfare perspective,” Lamm explained. “But it also allows for production scale. So, imagine a world where you actually produce 200 northern white rhinos – currently there are just two left in the world and they are both female, a mother and daughter – that have engineered genetic diversity into them. And you do it in a lab and you grow them in a lab, and then you work with rewilding experts. It’ll change conservation forever.”
“When you remove a keystone species,” said Lamm, “whether it’s a mammoth or a wolf, or whatever, you start to degrade that ecosystem. That ecosystem, when it functions at its top rate with the right level of biodiversity – and which includes a predator/prey dynamic – it’s actually a more functioning ecosystem.” And so, the grand theory is this: If woolly mammoths can be restored to sparsely inhabited lands, like the tundra, they could function as ecosystem engineers – and help rebuild at least some of what was lost when the Pleistocene era ecosystem degraded.
The woolly mammoth ecosystem of the Pleistocene era, James told me, was “one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world. It was as biodiverse as the African savanna is today. So, if you can go to an area that’s currently sort of barren of life, and you can create an African savanna type of place, you’re increasing biodiversity.”
The de-extincted woolly mammoth, he adds, is “on pace for a late 2028 first birth.”
A fascinating story, which only time will adjudicate, but the potential sounds fascinating!
