Why do scientists want to bring back extinct animals?
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Let's start this episode with a little challenge. I'm going to play a clip, and I want you to guess who or what is making the sound. So those are not the cries of baby monkeys, or the whistles of dolphins, or even the squeaky sounds of a plush toy your dog might chew on. They are, according to some scientists, the early whimpers and growls and howls of the dire wolf, an animal that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago.

Colossal Biosciences, a company based in Texas in the US, claims to have used genetic engineering and ancient preserved DNA to bring back or de-extinct, in their words, the dire wolf. You may remember that a version of this rather large and intelligent wolf was portrayed in the fictional series Game of Thrones.

But Colossal says its three pups are very real. The baby wolves, named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, are now being kept on a 2,000-acre ecological preserve at an undisclosed location in the northern U.S. And in the past week, they've become megastars and even landed on the cover of Time, the American news magazine.

So on today's episode, we're going to look at whether these genetically engineered wolves are actually dire wolves. And we're going to ask why some scientists want to bring animals back from extinction. I'm William Lee Adams, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service. Here to tell us more is Victoria Gill. She is the BBC's science correspondent. Victoria, hi. Hi, how are you doing? Really well. Thank you for joining us.

So the dire wolf hasn't roamed the earth for more than 10,000 years. And yet there's this company that claims to have brought them back from extinction. I want to start by playing this clip of Beth Shapiro. She is the chief scientist at Colossal. So a gray wolf is the closest living relative of a dire wolf. They're genetically really similar, 99.5% similar. And phenotypic

their morphology is also similar, only dire wolves are larger, more muscular, and have these light-colored coats and other things that we can see from the fossils. And so we targeted DNA sequence variants that we believe lead to those traits. And then we edited gray wolf cells to contain those dire wolf DNA variants.

and then we cloned those cells and created our direwolves. Now, Victoria, that's really complicated. Sounds like a bit of globity gloop to a lot of us. Could you break it down? What do they claim to have done and how? The direwolf, as you say, hasn't roamed the Earth for about 12,000 years. But we do have some fossilized remains of direwolves from which DNA can be extracted. So essentially the code that sort of

programs a body to be a dire wolf or to be a human or to be a gray wolf but that DNA is really damaged really incomplete one scientist described how DNA of this age it's sort of like putting fresh DNA into a 500 degree oven overnight it comes out frazzled and fragmented and shattered and as dust what they've managed to do is kind of read that code read that genetic blueprint and kind of fill in the gaps which is really impressive within itself

What they've then done is compare that code, that sort of biological blueprint with the blueprint of a living wolf. So in this case, they've taken a gray wolf and they say that that's the closest living relative of a dire wolf.

That's kind of up for debate. Those two animals diverge. They're what we call a different genus, kind of a different biological group. Then they've kind of identified key bits of the code that are different in a gray wolf from a dire wolf. So key bits of code that say, this gives a dire wolf a big, thick, white coat rather than a kind of mottled coat that a gray wolf has. This is what gives a dire wolf its much larger size than a gray wolf. These are the key bits of code. They

They've managed to then edit those dire wolf specific bits of code into that genetic blueprint into a gray wolf embryo. So they've sort of filled in these gaps and kind of copied and pasted this genetic material into this gray wolf embryo.

And then basically said, okay, that's now a dire wolf. They then take that embryo, implant it in a domestic dog. And that's the mother that has these puppies. They've cloned these kind of genetically edited embryos. Out of that, they got three...

So we're talking about all this after Time magazine in the US published a cover story and in the pages there were adorable images of those three wolves you mentioned. And I think that's a really impressive scientific feat.

They were looking snow white, cuddly. But it does raise the question, this great debate that you've just pointed to, are they actually dire wolves? No, they're not. I've spoken to a lot of geneticists, of evolutionary biologists, kind of looking into this story. And everyone agrees what Colossal have achieved is really impressive. You know, being able to kind of take and cut and edit this genetic sequence and actually make...

a healthy embryo and then produce these three puppies. This is absolute cutting edge stuff. It's very impressive, but those are not dire wolves. This is something that was raised by Corey Bradshaw from Flinders University. Yes, they have slightly genetically modified wolves, maybe.

And that's probably the best that you're going to get. And those slight modifications seem to have been derived from retrieved dire wolf material. Does that make it a dire wolf? No. Does it make a slightly modified grey wolf? Yes. And that's probably about it. We can kind of get into that. Like, do they look like dire wolves? We don't actually know what dire wolves would have looked like because, you know, you can imagine like 10,000 year old

remains, you don't get a clear picture of that sort of physical living body. You get these kind of fossilized remains.

I think they've made about 19 genetic additions out of thousands and thousands of genes. So most of the blueprint of these animals is grey wolf. If you let these animals out into the wild, which colossal probably won't, by the way, I haven't asked them that question, but they're being kept in a secure secret facility. But if you let these animals out into the wild, they would be able to breed with wild grey wolves and produce these kind of genetic variant grey wolf puppies. These are grey wolves.

When we talk about extinction and when Colossal talk about de-extinction, you know, they call themselves a de-extinction company. What they're basically saying is we can bring these animals back from the dead. You know, they are not forever disappeared. We can use the technology we have to bring them back.

And what a lot of scientists have pointed out is that that isn't true. That's not what they've done. These animals are not, you know, biologically, genetically dire wolves. And that's important because, you know, extinction is forever, right? We, you know, as humans, we're doing a lot, making a lot of changes to the planet, affecting a lot of habitats and species. And I think to sort of say that, oh, it's fine if we wipe out species, we can just use this genetic tinkering and we can, you know, we can...

we can bring them back. We can't. We just can't do that. And as you say, Colossal wants to bring back or de-extinct other animals too. Which ones? Their sort of poster species is the woolly mammoth.

And they've done, you know, they've done quite a lot of work on the journey towards bringing back the woolly mammoth. There was a paper published recently where they identified the gene that gave the, or the bit of genetic code that gave the woolly mammoth its woolly coat and they produced these woolly mice,

the impressive feat of being able to edit their biological blueprint, their genome, and actually produce these healthy mice with these amazing woolly coats. But what Colossal want to do is actually use the closest living relative of a woolly mammoth to kind of do the same piece of what they call de-extinction genetic technology with an elephant, right? So you take an elephant, which is the closest living relative of a woolly mammoth,

You identify key bits of that elephant biological blueprint that are specific, that, you know, make the difference, the kind of difference in code between a woolly mammoth and a living elephant. And you kind of fill in those gaps. You make those edits and you edit an elephant into a woolly mammoth.

artificial insemination or artificial implantation in an elephant, it's actually quite risky. So, you know, when it comes to kind of the animal welfare journey and the kind of ethical journey there, and still at the end of it, you know, once theoretically you would get your woolly mammoth or woolly elephant, is that really a woolly mammoth? No, it's kind of an elephant woolly mammoth hybrid.

And then there's this question of like, well, what is the purpose of that? Like, where does that animal go? It hasn't been around for a long time. The environment it existed in and the habitat it existed in no longer exists. It's the same with dire wolves, right? They roamed around during the last ice age and they ate these large herbivores, you know, they roamed and hunted and

And what they ate doesn't exist anymore. The environment and the climate that they lived in doesn't exist anymore. So, you know, one scientist put it to me that Colossal now has these three wolves

who is going to teach them to be a dire wolf right there are no kind of dire wolf packs roaming that and dire wolf habitat in existence that they can just live in and sort of fill in this gap in the in the kind of in the planet that they left behind when they went extinct so there's a whole question of like why do this what would we actually gain from bringing these animals back

What they're saying is that they are carrying out technology that means they will be able to reverse the destruction of other species on the planet. And that sounds like quite a noble cause, right?

But within that, you've kind of got, you know, it's what we were talking about before. You've sort of got this suggestion that, oh, that's fine. We can do whatever we want to the planet and we can damage habitats to the point where we wipe out species. And then we can kind of just fix it, fix it with this technology. That isn't conservation. That's not species protection. It's not biodiversity protection. It's not, you know, learning to share the planet with all the rest of these species. It's biology.

doing something biological, it's doing something impressively scientific to be able to make something new. It's a big question and it will go on because, you know, colossal

are really keen to push this technology and continue this journey. And we will be hearing a lot more from them, I think, in the future. And at the moment, they're just two brothers and a sister. It's a pretty small gene pool. Does that present any problems to actually propagating the species or whatever they've created? You'd need a certain number of animals with a certain amount of genetic variation to be able to say, OK, you know, that species can sort of

handle itself it can go off and reproduce and propagate and it will be fine that's obviously not the case with with these animals so at the moment it's just sort of a demonstration of what you can do with this technology and it's you know it's brought up this it's

produced these incredibly cute puppies, these beautiful wolves. But there is no possibility that that's, you know, that three related animals are now a population that means the dire wolf can kind of take care of itself. I mean, the key thing is they're not dire wolves. But even if they were three of them closely related, you know, that is not a sustainable population. Victoria, thank you so much for explaining that. Thank you.

That's all for today. Thanks for listening to another episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. If this got you howling for more animal content, do check out our feed wherever you're listening right now. We've got several other episodes covering the natural world and topics like should zoos exist and how to rescue whales from a war zone. I'm William Lee Adams. We'll see you again soon.