Colossal says it's brought the dire wolf back from extinction — but the accuracy of that claim and the ethics of de-extinction are in question. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Further reading: The Dire Wolf Is Back. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Colossal’s Dire Wolves, Romulus and Remus, at one month old. Photo credit Business Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What were direwolves and when did they go extinct?
Direwolves, not just a thing from Game of Thrones, not just Jon Snow's best friend. Direwolves walked the Americas for millennia, up until about 14,000 years ago when maybe their primary food source dried up or humans hunted them to extinction, no one was taking notes. But we know they were a bit bigger than gray wolves, they ate a lot of meat, and their bite could crush bones.
Chapter 2: Has the startup Colossal really brought direwolves back from extinction?
And now we know that apparently direwolves are back A startup called Colossal says they've brought these pups back from extinction. They say they've got three of them, but are these direwolves they brought back actually direwolves? And whether they are or aren't, should we be trying to bring direwolves back? Like, why? We are going to ask on Today Explained.
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This is Today Explained.
Not a lot of people have seen these direwolves that have come back from extinction up close and personal. Like DT Maxx from The New Yorker is one of the few who has.
Okay, so first of all, we just got to get this out there. We either have to put direwolves in quotes or we have to give them a name. Like, I don't know, we could do anything like... How about Diet Direwolves? Yes, exactly. These so-called direwolves were created by extracting DNA from a 72,000-year-old direwolf inner ear bone and a 13,000-year-old direwolf tooth.
They determined its closest living relative is the gray wolf, so then they made 20 edits to gray wolf DNA to include those direwolf-specific genes.
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Chapter 3: Who are the key people behind Colossal and the de-extinction effort?
Yeah, I do hold bigger secrets as a journalist, but I'm not supposed to tell you where. But so what happens, okay, so first of all, I see a couple of people I know from the reporting on the piece. I see George Church, who looks as much like Gandalf as any human being on this planet who holds tenure.
And I also see Ben Lamb, the guy who founded the project, looks a lot like, it's Johnny Snow, right? Yeah. The point is, like, it's the perfect setup. And then there are these two bright white teenage wolves. So, you know, even any wolf is impressive. So it's not... I mean, I have actually seen wolves before for another article, strangely enough.
Chapter 4: How did Colossal genetically engineer the so-called direwolves?
So a wolf carries its own weird kind of authority with it. But these, they do look different. And again, I'm not an animal morphologist. So, you know, I've been told pale, but they're white. And they're... They're like celebrities.
I mean, there's no other way, you know, there's no other way to describe it that they're delightfully, blissfully heedless of how much like money and effort has gone into the creation of them. They're basically, you know, they're in this enclosure. They're doing little things wolves do and dogs sometimes do. One pees, the other rolls in it. But, you know, they're majestic.
Chapter 5: What is the scientific and ethical debate about calling these animals direwolves?
They are going about their quasi-meta-direwolf existence. Blissful disregard for any controversy about what you want to call them. Or blissful disregard of whether they should have been brought back in the first place.
Tell us more about this company that brought back the diet direwolf version that you saw. We could do this all day. Yeah. It's called Colossal. It's run by a dude named Ben Lamb. Who is he? What is he trying to do here?
So, I mean, Ben Lamb is kind of amazing. I am pretty much in awe of Ben Lamb. Here's a guy who's maybe 40-something. He's already had like four or five successes by which he started up four or five companies and they were bought out by larger companies, which is kind of what you want to do when you're a startup guy.
And then, you know, one day he meets a guy named George Church, Church being the Gandalf of our earlier narrative, if that survives. And Church is a Harvard professor, a guy who's gotten a million patents and loves to do deep thinking. He's a big kind of what-if guy, like, what if we were to bring back the Neanderthals? Yeah. And then the press goes, ah!
And then George Church goes, I was just considering it. I was just thinking about it. You guys calm down. So George Church and Ben get together, and basically what Ben says is, if you had all the money in the world, George, what would you bring back? What would you want to do with your time? And George says, I'd bring back the woolly mammoth. Sick.
I mean, I don't know if it's responsible, but it sounds cool. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, they get together. It's like, let's put on a show, right? And, you know, this being Ben Lamb, super talented, perfectly adapted modern entrepreneur, and he raises money. Basically, I don't know the details. I think he raises money with a phone call because he's got a great second idea.
And his second idea is while we learn how to de-extinct these animals, we're going to learn an awful lot of interesting biomedical tech and that we could sell. That's where we make our money. We're not going to make our money. He's very, very firm on this. There will be no Jurassic Park. We will not display these animals. Let's check back in in five years, but we will spin off the biotech.
And the biotech is honestly probably worth even more than, what is Disney World charged now or Disneyland?
Hundreds, hundreds.
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Chapter 6: How much funding has Colossal raised and what is their business model?
You mentioned someone named Beth Shapiro, who's now, I think, one of the leading scientists over at Colossal. And someone like Beth Shapiro comes from, I believe, UC Santa Cruz out in California, where she was doing versions of this kind of work, if not trying to, you know, revive the woolly mammoth. Can Colossal work faster than your, I don't know, typical elite university lab?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can get that much money going at a university lab without a fair amount of grant writing. I mean, grant writing is slow, and getting funded is slow. There's a guy named Lova Dahlin, who's a Swedish mathematician. Woolly Mammoth guy. And I think he made a really good point in my piece that nobody's really picked up on.
And I think it's about the money, which he said, like, the people who invested in this company weren't going to give, you know, I'm paraphrasing him, $100 million to the World Wildlife Fund. Like, you know, they're tech people. They probably would have bought Bitcoin with it otherwise. Like this, you know, Peter Jackson said that owning, being a part of Colossal was as much fun as movie making.
You know, I think that kind of tells you something. I don't think if they'd been doing this in Bess Shapiro's old lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he'd have thought it was as much fun, you know, as movie making. I mean, I give Colossus a lot of credit And Ben Lamb, in particular, a lot of credit for meeting people where they actually are.
Chapter 7: How difficult is it to resurrect extinct species like the direwolf?
I mean, all I can say is a journalist, someone who writes about people, and I have written about conservation other times, other places. I am not opposed to the idea that if you're ever actually going to turn around this massive environmental disaster that is the present, you really got to meet people where they are.
To bring this back to where we started, DT, with Romulus and Remus, these two diet direwolves. What happens to them? I do. I'm going to stick with it. What happens to them? Where do they go?
You know, never say never, but I think they're expected to live out their lives. I think a wolf gets the same 15 years, I think, that a smaller dog gets. Live out their lives. You know, they will not hunt. They will be given, like, I don't know if you've ever been to a zoo and seen what they feed the lions and tigers. They feed them, like, something they would have hunted, but they didn't hunt it.
Like, just oozing, bleeding food. massive amounts of meat. And I think that's what the dire wolves are going to get. But they're not planning to breed them, which I don't entirely understand. Colossal talks a lot about like reintroducing some of their animals into the ecosystem to do environmental good. I don't think the dire wolf was conceived by them with that as a possibility.
First of all, I mean, people don't want dire wolves in their backyard.
When you realized that these diet wolves would just die out, did that bum you out? What did you make of that?
Yes. Yes, I did. It was absolutely, you know, there were a number of sad moments in reporting this piece. I mean, first of all, you have to kind of come to grips with the immensity of the damage that humans have done. and for how long we've been doing it, because the dire wolf is essentially driven extinct mostly by human activity, you know, 14,000 years ago.
But I don't know, when you realize that this whole thing is kind of to show we can, Yeah, it becomes sad because isn't one of the reasons that we used to drive animals extinct because we could? Because there was money in it? And isn't it kind of weird that we're now de-extincting an animal, you know, kind of because we now have this...
this technology that can reopen the door that we thought that we had absolutely and, you know, incontrovertibly closed before. So the whole thing leaves you a little bit blue.
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Chapter 8: What will happen to the revived direwolves and can they be reintroduced into the wild?
And when we look at these diet direwolves in the northern United States somewhere by way of colossal, do we feel more good or bad?
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.
Well, let's talk about, to start with, what do you think of the ethics of the process by which these direwolves have come to be? Obviously, let's just think about whatever animal it was that birthed these direwolves, not a direwolf, I assume.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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