”After being away for over 10,000 years, we are proud to be able to reintroduce the giant wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.”
Colossal Biosciences' press release on April 7 about the birth of three giant wolves and thus successfully recreating an extinct species became an immediate world news. That it was just giant wolves, or dire wolves, which in recent years have had a popular cultural awakening as pets in the TV series "Game of thrones", did not hurt.
"We can take five, thank you”, commented the official account of the series on social media about the three puppies Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi.
The breakthrough, which the company called the world's first "non-extinction" (de-extinction in English), was achieved by researchers at Colossal who, using gene editing, modified ordinary wolf cells with characteristics they identified in giant wolf cells from DNA that was 10,000 years old, and then let dogs act as surrogate mothers.
However, they quickly received criticism from researchers who argued that it was not actually giant wolves, but only ordinary wolves that had been genetically modified to resemble their extinct relatives.
Research Director Beth Shapiro thinks they have been clear about what they have done, namely replacing certain parts of the cell to recreate the most important characteristics of a giant wolf, she says in an interview with TT in Stockholm.
What we are working on is functional non-extinction. We know it is not possible to recreate something genetically identical to an animal that once lived, and that is not the goal. The goal is to recreate an animal that can fit into the living environment, therefore we choose to call it a giant wolf.
Mammoth and dhole
Giant wolf or not, the puppies that live today in a fenced area in the United States are Colossal's greatest success since it was started by Harvard professor George Church and billionaire Ben Lamm in 2021, with the dream of reviving woolly mammoths. Today the company is valued at over $10 billion and has 130 employed researchers.
In addition to the mammoth, they are trying to bring back the dhole and the marsupial wolf.
We want to develop technology that can both give extinct species new life and help living species avoid extinction, Shapiro says.
The purpose of bringing back the mammoth, which went extinct around 4,000 years ago, is said to be, among other things, that they could contribute to recreating the grassy landscape known as the mammoth steppe, which spread over northern Europe and Asia during the last ice age. This would in turn help counter global warming and protect the Arctic permafrost, according to Colossal.
Linda Laikre, professor of population genetics at Stockholm University, is however skeptical that such a thing can be achieved in reality.
The ecosystem has not stood still. The areas where the mammoth disappeared have changed and evolution has continued for thousands of years since then. It sounds very utopian to think it would work that easily, she says.
But Colossal's goal is to have the first calves born as early as 2028, with elephants as surrogate mothers.
There is a lot that remains to be done in our work with elephants for us to succeed, but we are still holding to the schedule, says Beth Shapiro.
The work for still living species is however an equally important part of the company, she says.
Endangered red wolf
The same day as they announced the giant wolves, the company also announced that they had given birth to four clones of the critically endangered red wolf. If they can reproduce further in the future, it could increase the genetic diversity and strengthen the resistance of the species, the idea is.
It is really proof that the tools can be used to strengthen the biological diversity, Shapiro says.
Linda Laikre at Stockholm University sees above all that Colossal can contribute with technological development.
They will contribute to taking the technology forward on how to handle genetic material, how to move genes between species and so on. It will be of great importance in many situations.
At the same time, she is worried about the rhetoric from the company, which confidently describes its work as "the solution" to the problems of extinction.
The danger is that it signals that things are easier than they are, that one does not see the big problems with extinction because one thinks one can recreate the species that are disappearing, she says.
The big thing is to keep the species that are not extinct, the threats that exist with small populations and the lack of insight and efforts to ensure long-term adaptability for those species.
Beth Shapiro emphasizes that the work for extinct species should not replace traditional conservation work, one must do both. But the attention can never harm, she thinks, and has no problem with them being compared to "Jurassic Park".
– This is not "Jurassic Park", there is no DNA from dinosaurs. But if people think "Jurassic Park" or hear about de-extinction and find our website, then they will get a lot of information about extinction and conservation. Then we can reach people we wouldn't have reached otherwise.
The giant wolf (Canis dirus) was larger and had a more massive skull than today's wolf (although with a smaller brain). It lived in hundreds of thousands of years in today's North America until they went extinct 13,000 years ago when the ice age ended. Genetically separated from the wolf's ancestors 5.5 million years ago, it has turned out that they are not very close relatives of the wolf. Now the company Colossal claims to have successfully recreated the wolf. Here's how it should have gone:
+ DNA was mapped from a 13,000-year-old wolf tooth and a 72,000-year-old wolf skull. + 20 characteristic differences between the giant wolf's DNA and the DNA of the ordinary wolf were identified. + Using gene editing, 15 of them were introduced into wolf cells. The remaining five had shown that they could cause deafness and blindness in wolves, where a protective mutation was introduced instead. + The wolf blood cells were then inserted into empty dog egg cells. Large dogs then acted as surrogate mothers. + Three puppies were born in 2024. They have white, thick fur and are around 20 percent larger than ordinary wolves. Source: Britannica, National Geographic, Science, Colossal Biosciences
