Robert Klitzman
Appearances
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Robert Klitzman. I'm a professor of psychiatry and director of the online and in-person Masters of Bioethics programs at Columbia University and the author of... designing babies, how technology is changing the ways we create children.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
I think there is a lot of excitement. It's definitely cool to bring back extinct species, but there's a lot of questions we have about where these animals will live, what their lives will be like, why we're doing this, what the long-term view or vision is. And a lot of that depends on how the technology is then used and what happens.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Right. Right. So there's a few issues that come up. One is we're making a bunch of dogs pregnant to produce them. And I have concerns about the dire wolves. But more importantly, the company has said that its longer term plan is to produce or reproduce or to create a woolly mammoth. And with that, there are even bigger concerns because that you'd have to take elephants.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
You'd have to get many elephants, female elephants, anesthetize them. You'd have to stick probes up their vagina to extract eggs. You'd have to then get many elephants pregnant unannounced. And hopefully some will not miscarry, some will miscarry. Then you'll have to do C-sections on the elephants to get the woolly mammoths out.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
So that's going to be very cumbersome, and it's going to hurt a lot of elephants. So dire wolves, we have three of them that were created. And I should say they're not really dire wolves, they're wild. gray wolves that have had about 15 of their genes changed. So of 80 potential genes that could be changed, they've changed 15.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And when we're mucking around with nature and changing genes, mistakes get made. Genes have multiple functions that we don't always know about. So for instance, five of the genes that Colossal was going to change because they were in dire wolves but not in gray wolves, the researchers decided not to change because these genes would create deafness and blindness in the dire wolf.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
So we don't always know when we're altering genes what the effects are going to be. Genes have multiple effects. About five years ago, Dr. He Jiankui in China genetically engineered three children. He took the embryos and he wanted to disable a gene called the CCR5 gene to prevent HIV from getting in the cells because he was going to work with HIV positive fathers.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
But in disabling that gene, other viruses are more likely to enter the cell. So West Nile virus is more likely to enter the cell. So you may disable the gene because you want one thing or put a mutation in or change a gene because you want one thing, but other things may happen. So these wolves may end up having other kinds of medical problems. These are big animals. They're 150 pounds.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Colossal has them on about three square miles, whereas normally they usually live in areas between 50 and 1,000 square miles. So we're keeping them in a very constricted space. They're at risk of other diseases. So I'm concerned about their welfare.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Well, there are no regulations, and that could create problems. So there have been guidelines that were developed before we actually had any extinct animals to look at. There was one animal, a goat in the Pyrenees, the mountains between Spain and France, that was brought back and lived for 10 minutes. So the guidelines we have aren't very good, and we have no government regulations on this.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And in fact, President Trump's Secretary of the Interior, Doug Borgum, came out the other day and said, it's great that Colossus is doing this because now we don't have to worry about driving other animals into extinction.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Let them go. We don't need regulations, was his point, to protect animals. We can just, any animal that disappears, we'll just clone it back. And I think a lot of the company, Colossal, is worth $10 billion. It'd be great if we can help animals that are on the verge of extinction and help them survive, given that we are losing, as Colossal says, we're losing a lot of animals every year.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And we will be losing more, partly due to climate change. Let's work on protecting those animals that are still here and have a place to live.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
So unfortunately at the moment, President Trump has been cutting back hugely on research at NIH and the National Institutes of Health. has funded immense amounts of research that have led to immense human benefit, partly because it's been available in the public domain. Research is published, which this company hasn't published many of its key findings.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
So you could argue that there is a greater need to, A, focus public dollars on this, on research, which are now being drastically cut back. And secondly, a question is whether or not the prime aim here is to help
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
nature help endangered species or to make money right and if i think as dt wrote in his piece the company only plans to create maybe three or five dire wolves what's the point is it to develop science that they can then sell or is it to create these animals which create huge publicity And this has been the front cover of Time magazine. It's been on every major news network.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
It's been on every major newspaper. They're trying, as I understand, to raise more money. So this gives them great profile. We're going to bring back these five animals. But is it to help nature? or is it to raise more money, and this is sort of the poster child for them?
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
The woolly mammoth, too, which is their long-range goal, they say, well, it could lead to meat and fur and tusks, and they may decrease global warming by tamping down permafrost. Well, there's decreasing amounts of tundra, icy tundra for them to live, to have... an industry of mammoth fur and meat. You need a lot of these animals, and we don't have the space for them.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Maybe Russian Siberia somewhere does. Good luck with that. The Russians aren't exactly our best buddies at the moment. And even if these animals do, wherever they walk, press down snow, the snow's going to melt further because of climate change. So you're not getting at the source of climate change. So I'm not sure how much
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
the end result is going to be actually helping animals versus making money.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And I should say, I realize I'm coming across as very negative. I don't mean to come across as negative. I think that science is very important. I think given decreasing amounts of money for science, it would be great as we as a society could spend it where it's going to lead to the most bang for the buck.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
We're at the cusp of, for instance, new vaccines, all kinds of new vaccine research that NIH was about to start is now ending. I think that near term or low hanging fruit is there that we can invest in that will be able to help millions of people.