Many readers will have learned by now that a company called Colossal Bioscience has bio-engineered a creature that resembles the extinct dire wolf. The last true dire wolf died more than 10,000 years ago. Fossils recovered from Los Angeles's La Brea tar pits show that they had a more powerful bite than modern wolves, and they probably subsisted on wild horses and other large quadrupeds of their time.
Exactly how much the cute white-haired puppies in Colossal Bioscience's publicity photos resemble the extinct species is a matter of some controversy. The more technical statements from Colossal Bioscience admit that the creatures' DNA is closer to being inspired by ancient samples of DNA of true dire wolves obtained from museums around the world, than it is a direct copy. That is rather like a movie that is "inspired by" true events—you can trust that the idea wasn't original, but don't look for exact correspondence in every detail either.
If this was just an expensive exercise in dog-breeding, why bother? That and many other questions are investigated in an article by D. T. Max in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Max interviewed the company's founder, a Dallas billionaire named Ben Lamm; George Church, a professor of genetics whose dream of resurrecting extinct species caught Lamm's fancy; and Beth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA who was hired away from her U. C. Santa Cruz lab to become Colossal Bioscience's chief science officer.
The 1990 Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park and the movie franchise that followed imagined what would happen if we were able to recreate million-year-old dinosaurs. Shapiro admits that is impossible, because DNA deteriorates with time and we're lucky even to have enough DNA from dire wolves to make an educated guess at the complete genome of a species that went extinct less than 100,000 years ago. The firm's most publicized goal is to re-engineer (probably the best term) the woolly mammoth. One reason for that is that its DNA is abundant, as entire frozen carcasses have been discovered in Siberia and North America. But even a billionaire's resources are limited, so why has Lamm spent a large fraction of his fortune so far on efforts that have gained him nothing more than publicity?
Among the reasons Lamm gives are altruistic motives, such as the restoration of ecologies that would be improved by the return of woolly mammoths. It seems that they suppressed the proliferation of small shrubs, which would be stamped into oblivion by herds of mammoths. It may be too late for the extinct dodo bird, but there are also species of endangered birds that could be assisted by genetic technology that Colossal develops.
But bird species can't pay for such services, so is this nothing more than a rich man's hobby? After all, the puppies receiving Kardashian-level publicity have DNA that started out from a living species, the gray wolf, and was modified with CRISPR technology to have traits that resemble what the scientists think the dire wolf had: fluffy white hair, for instance. And some genes from ancient dire-wolf DNA were inserted. But no one has claimed that their DNA is identical to that of the dire wolf, because it isn't.
Even the piece's author Max can't come up with answers to questions such as whether these stunts will definitely lead to any sustained ecological changes. There are no plans to breed the imitation dire-wolf puppies, for instance, and the longer-term goal of "resurrecting" the woolly mammoth is still in the future by a good bit. The word "resurrect" appears in Colossal's PR material, but isn't used much by Shapiro, who is still trying to act like a scientist, although her company forbids her from publicizing intellectual property which in an open university lab would be the subject of many scientific publications.
And that may really be the main issue ethically with what Colossal Bioscience is doing. Ever since the era of big-science projects began after World War II, and especially after biological science turned out to be massively profitable for drug companies, much research in the area has taken place under proprietary conditions. This means that discoveries potentially beneficial to humanity are controlled by private organizations, and general knowledge of them is either delayed (in the case of trade secrets) or available only under license (in the case of patents).
Making money from a thing is a good way for the thing to become generally available, so this situation is not necessarily unethical. It looks like Lamm is counting on his hundred or more scientists to develop methods and techniques that will turn out to be profitable, and that probably means human medical applications. Letting one's imagination go leads to the so-far-forbidden area of human cloning, or the cloning of deceased individuals, which has rightly been banned outright in many countries, and highly regulated in others.
But cloning is only part of what Colossal is doing—the ancient-DNA techniques they are developing are irrelevant to cloning recently deceased individuals. Perhaps Lamm really means what he says, and he simply wants to bring back extinct species as a way of atoning for the massive species destruction that humanity has been visiting on the rest of the biosphere since we developed minds that could plan attacks on other creatures, or simply plan new suburbs that wipe out whole ecologies.
The efforts to re-create extinct species are still in their early stages, and we will just have to wait to see what Lamm and his stable of scientists come up with next. Maybe they will be able to take intact DNA samples from mammoths and do total-DNA cloning as they originally hoped. But if Lamm is expecting to recoup his investments by selling live woolly mammoths to zoos, he's got another think coming. Sometimes a hobby is just a hobby, even if it benefits the ecosphere as a byproduct.
Sources: The article "Life After Death" by D. T. Max appeared in the Apr. 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker on pp. 30-41. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on human cloning, the dire wolf, and the woolly mammoth.
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