The startup that cried dire wolf

0:03Direwolves. 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. And now we know that apparently dire wolves are back.

0:35A 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.

1:08This 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. 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 grey wolf, so then they made 20 edits to grey wolf DNA to include those direwolf-specific genes.

1:53That animal looks like a direwolf, it will behave like a direwolf, and it is a direwolf. This is insane, actually. These are not dire wolves by any definition. But the other point is it doesn't really matter when you're seeing them because, you know, you're seeing something, you know, that's absolutely amazing. I mean, you're seeing something that, so there's two bright white wolves. I did not see them where they live. I saw them where they were brought to be seen, which was far, far away. And you can't tell us where that was, but it's somewhere in the northern United States I've read. Yeah, look, I do hold bigger secrets as a journalist, but I'm not supposed to tell you where.

2:35But 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? 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. So a wolf carries its own weird kind of authority with it.

3:13But 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 like celebrities. I mean, there's no other way to describe it, that they're delightfully, blissfully heedless of how much 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. They are going about their quasi-meta-direwolf existence. Blitz will disregard for any controversy about what you want to call them.

3:56Or 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. 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 Lange. 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.

4:39And 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? 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?

5:19And 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 that we could sell.

5:56That'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. You know, 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 charge now or Disneyland? Hundreds, hundreds. All right. So maybe I take that back. Maybe the better business is displaying them. How much money have they raised to do this? And how much is this company that they're running colossal worth at this point? All right. So they've now raised over$400 million.

6:35and their valuation, which is a kind of complicated metric involving what shares are worth, is over$10 billion, which puts it at the size level of Moderna. They've had an insane, insane first, you know, first few years. And I ask you this not because like Paris Hilton or Peter Jackson, I'm planning on investing in this company, but because I wanted to establish that people are taking these people seriously. And now that we've established that, do us a favor and tell us just how hard it is to do what this company says it wants to do. The direwolf, you know, is not, let me just get this out there for everybody.

7:18The direwolf is not, there's a difference between being extinct for 40 million years and being extinct for 14 ,000 years. They both sound like a long time to us, but, you know, it's just not comparable. So you can get, you can get, I can't get, you can't get, but Beth Shapiro could get viable ancient DNA. Now, what you do with that DNA is you read the genetic sequences and then you recreate them, right? And you're going to put that DNA in the cells and the cells are going to replicate and you're going to have an animal. Ultimately, once you put it in embryo and then implant it in a womb, you're going to have an animal that has those genes being acted on.

7:59that makes it sound like you or I could probably do it with just a little bit of help. But it's not that easy because there are problems, you know, at every step of the way. And it's a little bit like if I described to you how to hit a home run, you'd be like, yeah, OK, there's the force and there's the counter force and there's the angle of the swing. But most people don't hit home runs.

8:25you 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 Dahlen, who's a Swedish woolly mammoth guy.

9:13And 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 is as much fun as moviemaking. I, I could do that. You know, I think that kind of tells you something. I don't think if they'd been doing this in Beth 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.

9:53I mean, I give Colossal a lot of credit, and Ben Lamb in particular, a lot of credit for meeting people where they actually are. I mean, all I can say is a journalist, someone who writes about people. 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 dire wolves. What happens to them? You love that. I do. I'm going to stick with it.

10:34What happens to them? Where do they go? So, 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, massive amounts of meat. And I think that's what the direwolves are going to get. But they're not planning to breed them, which I don't entirely understand.

11:14Colossal talks a lot about reintroducing some of their animals into the ecosystem to do environmental good. I don't think the direwolf was conceived by them with that as a possibility. First of all, I mean, people don't want direwolves 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.

11:55Because the direwolf 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 wasn't, 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 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.

12:43D.T. Maxx, read his profile of the direwolves over at newyorker.com. The Ethics of De-Extinction, When Today Explained, is back.

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15:44You'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. 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.

16:30And 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. 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.

17:21You'd have to stick probes up their vagina to extract eggs. You'd have to then get many elephants pregnant. 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 gray wolves that have had about 15 of their genes change. 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.

18:07Genes 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.

18:36About five years ago, Dr. Hei Zhang-Kui 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 a 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.

19:12These are big animals. They're 150 pounds. 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 at a very constricted space. They're at risk of other diseases. So I'm concerned about their welfare. So it sounds like you have a host of concerns. And throughout listening to you describe many of them, I hear the potential for death lurking at every corner, which is, I guess, an irony of this process known as de-extinction, is that it sounds like you sure got to kill a lot of animals to get to the point of bringing back an animal that, as we heard from DT earlier, might end up simply just dying off again, which I guess gets to the point of cruelty.

20:03Where is the regulation when it comes to this process of de-extinction?

20:12Well, there are no regulations, and that could create problems. So there had 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 don't really have any government. We have no government regulations on this. And in fact, President Trump's Secretary of the Interior, Doug Borgham, 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.

20:52If we're going to be in anguish about losing a species, then now we have an opportunity to bring them back. I mean, pick your favorite species and call up Colossal. And instead of raising money to get animals on the endangered species, let's figure out a way to get them off. And this is one tool in creating biodiversity, what it can do for everybody. 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.

21:30given that we are losing, as Colossal says, we're losing a lot of animals every year 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. We've talked about a lot of the risks here, a lot of the drawbacks. I want to talk about some of the potential benefits. Do you see some good there if we do indeed get some medical or scientific breakthroughs out of this company's work? I mean, there's been talk of rebalancing habitats, fixing mutations in endangered pink pigeons, vaccinating elephants against herpes, sharpening our tools for fighting diseases.

22:12There's apparently some potential there. 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 for, in the public domain, research is published, which this company hasn't published many of its key findings. 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 nature, help endangered species, or to make money, right?

22:58And 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, 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.

23:33The woolly mammoth, too, which is a 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. 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 is going to melt further because of climate change.

24:16So you're not getting at the source of climate change. So I'm not sure how much the end result is going to be actually helping animals versus making money. Dr. Klitsman, I thought of one silver lining in all of this. If what you're saying is true, someone still cares about being on the cover of Time magazine. You mean that we still have magazines? Yes. Yes, yes. 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 if we as a society could spend it where it's going to lead to the most bang for the buck.

25:01We'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.