Biotech company's "resurrection" of extinct wolf species raises controversial questions

American biotech company Colossal Biosciences has announced they have created the "world's first successfully de-extincted animal," using ancient DNA and gene-editing technology to create hybrid puppies that they are calling resurrected dire wolves. 

So far, three snow white pups have been born — two males and a female — and are according to an article by CBC being kept in an undisclosed location in the northern US, a region where ancient dire wolves likely roamed before going extinct 13,000 years ago.

“Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm is cited on the company's website. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”

However, critics point to a number of reasons why this scientific breakthrough is controversial. First, the new animals are not real dire wolves, they are hybrids that resemble the extinct animals. The company made 20 edits on 14 grey wolf genes to create traits specific to dire wolves, like white coats, bigger heads and longer fur. But grey wolves have more than 20,000 genes, so the newcomers are still mostly grey wolves.

It is not known whether these animals will be able to breed with each other.

Lamm and George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, founded Colossal in 2021 with the goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth. Since then, the private company, valued at about $10 billion, according to Bloomberg, has expanded its plans to include the de-extinction of the Australian thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) and the dodo.

They have already created a woolly mouse by editing mouse genes with known woolly mammoth mutations. The company has also said it's exploring reviving the dodo, using a chicken as a template.

If successful, these so-called de-extinct animals will be unique in the world. However, while it would be an amazing experience to see a living woolly mammoth — or an elephant that resembles one — that animal could end up as an oddity in a zoo, captive and alone for the rest of its life.

One problem is that the ice age environment these animals lived in no longer exists. The Arctic and the rest of the planet has warmed a great deal since they inhabited it, and the trend continues today. That means the animals will have to adapt to a new environment, or special habitats created to care for them.

While the production of genetically modified animals that resemble extinct species is a novel demonstration of the power of modern gene-editing techniques, it would require a tremendous effort, including significant technological breakthroughs and millions — if not billions — of dollars to bring back thundering herds of woolly mammoths or sky-darkening flocks of passenger pigeons.

There are also ethical considerations, considering cloned animals have a low survival rate and there are serious risks to the surrogate mothers.

By Nazrin Sadigova