Let’s start with what should be obvious: The wolf pups are not dire wolves, and they haven’t been “de-extincted.”
The fluffy white canines — Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi — unveiled this week by Colossal Biosciences are closer to something like designer dogs. More precisely, they are genetically modified, hybridized modern wolves, gestated in the womb of a domestic dog. But that wouldn’t sound as impressive on a magazine cover.
Thousands of years before we had the slightest idea of how genetics worked, humans were altering the genes of wolves and their dog descendants through breeding and domestication, making them particularly fitting candidates for Colossal’s bid for scientific spectacle. By editing the DNA of existing gray wolf cells to include some traits from long-extinct dire wolves (like their white hair and large size) and using them to create viable embryos with cloning technology, Colossal claims it has created “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal,” one “made famous from the HBO hit series Game of Thrones.” The fantasy TV reference is a bit too on the nose.
Whatever species they are, what is true is that Colossal has created novel animals for whom humans are now morally accountable — a responsibility that the nascent field of de-extinction, which insists it is an ally of conservation, has not shown itself prepared to fulfill.
While many people might imagine that de-extincting animals risks a Jurassic Park-style meltdown that puts humans in danger, the real threat is the other way around: It’s the harm that we do to the animals. As writer Dayton Martindale put it in a 2023 Vox piece that’s worth reading in full, de-extinction’s “technical challenges are enormous, [and] the ethical ones are even more so…both the surrogate parents and newborn clones face a risk of suffering and trauma, used as mere instruments in a research project of unclear benefit.”
What even is de-extinction, and what is the point of it?
Colossal, the leading company in the de-extinction industry, seeks to bring back long-gone species, such as woolly mammoths, dodos, and Tasmanian tigers. To do that, it pieces together the genomes of these animals — an especially arduous task for ancient species like the mammoth and the dire wolf, whose DNA has become fragmented in their remains over many years — and compares them to the genomes of closely related species, such as modern elephants and modern wolves. Researchers then identify genes that are unique to the extinct species, edit some of them into cells taken from one of those closely related living species, and use the edited cell to create embryos that will, if all goes well, grow into de-extincted hybrid creatures.
In the case of Colossal’s “dire wolves,” cells were extracted from the blood of living gray wolves, and their DNA was modified with 20 edits that the company says are responsible for the dire wolf’s most distinctive physical traits. The embryos that would become the animals Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi were then implanted to grow inside large dogs and delivered by cesarean section.
The first clue that what Colossal did is less than full de-extinction is that those 20 edits are far fewer than the actual number of genetic differences between gray wolves and dire wolves.
“The grey wolf genome is 2,447,000,000 individual bases (DNA letters) long. Colossal has said that the grey wolf and dire wolf genomes are 99.5% identical, but that is still 12,235,000 individual differences,” Nic Rawlence, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told me in an email. “So a grey wolf with 20 edits to 14 genes, even if these are key differences, is still very much a grey wolf.”
In other words, Colossal has modified a small number of genes corresponding to traits that are visible and thrilling to 21st-century human eyes, which was enough to convince the public — and many science journalists — that the company has breathed new life into a dead species.
Why do all this? It depends on who you ask. The most generous answer is that well-resourced startups, such as Colossal, can harness this effort to advance tools like gene editing and advanced cloning, which could be used to help conserve currently endangered species by, for example, inserting genetic diversity or disease resistance into shrinking, struggling populations.
“Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world. And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it,” the company states on its website, which features a characteristic aesthetic that lies somewhere between Jurassic World and a spy museum.
Concurrent with the dire wolf announcement, Colossal revealed that it used similar techniques to clone critically endangered red wolves, resulting in the births of four red wolf pups, which could eventually prove useful in reviving a species that currently has fewer than 20 members in the wild.
But it’s not as though working on red wolf genetics requires the company to try to resurrect dire wolves, which went extinct not because of human action, like the red wolf is in danger of doing, but because of competition with other species and climate change. So why not work directly on conservation?
One answer might be that, because long-extinct species pose the hardest biological challenges, working on de-extinction in these animals pushes scientists to develop cutting-edge genetic technologies, kind of like how the moon landing accelerated the development of computers and satellite-based navigation. Perhaps it could even help bring about reproductive technologies for humans, such as artificial wombs.
Colossal also says that it’s “proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem,” suggesting an ecological imperative not just to conserve existing species but also to revive ancient ones. (It’s made similar arguments about woolly mammoths.) But this makes little sense because dire wolves, like woolly mammoths, have been extinct for thousands of years and lived in an ice age ecosystem that no longer exists. And again, these are not dire wolves.
De-extinction critics have pointed out that the technology creates a moral hazard: It could simply be used as an excuse to allow vulnerable animals to go extinct and assume we can just bring them back later. And they have a point. Soon after Colossal’s news about their wolves this week, the Trump administration embraced the technology and suggested removing legal protections for endangered species.
“If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back,” US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told his staff on a livestream, according to a Washington Post report. “Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.” Burgum has met with Colossal, the Post reported, and discussed using its cloned red wolves.
It’s worth understanding here that although endangered species have been cloned before in an effort to preserve their genes, releasing them into the wild is another matter entirely. Re-introducing captive-bred species is incredibly hard because these animals have not grown up learning how to survive in wild ecosystems — and the challenge is even greater for animals produced through cloning, who often suffer from health problems. These captive creatures are more likely to suffer in zoos than to live freely in their natural habitats.
Whether or not de-extinction could theoretically offer future benefits for species on the brink may be the wrong question. It would be better to ask: Will humans change their own behavior enough to make the sacrifice of animals used in this research worthwhile, by making it possible for revived endangered animals to survive in the wild? In other words, is “de-extinction” worth the ethical costs?
The case for simply not
Beneath the idealized explanations for de-extinction, there’s the sheer allure of playing God, the thrill of creating life, and the fundamental reality that de-extincted animals are under the control of private companies. They are technologies, created as a means to an end of developing better genetic engineering. They are the product of animal experimentation, and there are essentially no legal limits on the type of experiments that animals can be used for under the Animal Welfare Act, the federal law that governs animal research.
Critics point out that de-extinction not only requires keeping surrogate mothers from a closely related species in captivity and often confinement but also performing embryo transfer, an invasive procedure. Cloning has become safer since its early days, but it still carries a high risk of failure and miscarriage.
Newly cloned animals, too, can be prone to serious health issues. Remember that Colossal’s wolves bear only a few similarities to dire wolves: That Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi have now survived for some months is a promising sign, but there could certainly be unforeseen health complications in a gray wolf whose phenotype has been altered to resemble a different species, even as most of its genes remain the same. Whatever suffering they experience will be the responsibility of the company that created them.
For Colossal, there are also commercial opportunities that could flow from controlling access to brand-new, charismatic animals. Perhaps most troubling, de-extinction could simply represent a path toward familiar, profit-driven models of animal exploitation, such as exhibiting animals in zoos. Harvard geneticist George Church, who co-founded Colossal Biosciences, has said that de-extincted woolly mammoths could be used for “tourism, meat, hair (following a sheep model of seasonal removal), and maybe legal ivory.”
Even a skeptic can acknowledge that Colossal’s new wolves are a technological marvel, and only a heartless cynic wouldn’t see that they’re incredibly adorable. A video released by the company captures tiny Romulus and Remus letting out high-pitched baby howls, a moment that is wondrous and breathtaking — yet utterly tragic. Wolves are extremely social animals that howl to communicate and bond with their packs, but these wolves are alone in the world. They have no older relatives that can teach them how to be a wolf, nor can they live in the wild.
Colossal’s plans to “revive” woolly mammoths — which really means creating elephants with some mammoth genes — pose concerns that are just as urgent for those intelligent, sensitive, and social creatures.
The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, has called the wolves “the luckiest animals ever.” They live on a 2,000-acre nature preserve, far more space than zoo animals get, they’re fed, and they get constant veterinary care. But in the wild, gray wolves’ “hunting territory can range anywhere from 50 to 1,000 sq. mi.,” Time points out in its cover story on the wolves. “Against that, Colossal’s three dire wolves spending their entire lives in a 2,000-acre preserve could be awfully lonely and claustrophobic — not at all the way wild dire wolves would live their lives.”
This isn’t de-extinction or conservation, but invention. Modern humans are as gods, with the power to conjure new creatures into being — and if we’re being honest, we do it not for their sake but for ours. Our record of treating non-human animals as our playthings offers little reason to believe we will wield that power with restraint, humility, or care.
Update, April 10, 2:05 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 9 and has been updated with details of US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s embrace of de-extinction technology.