No doubt you will all have seen the news stories that announce that the dire wolf has been brought back from extinction. And it raises a very interesting conversation that I think has been touched on before (anyone else getting Jurassic Park vibes?) but has never been given any serious thought because it seems like such a huge scientific step and therefore unlikely to ever actually happen. Well…here we are. A biotechnology company called Colossal Biosciences revealed that they have created a trio of white wolf hybrids who were created by making 20 edits on 14 grey wolf genes. These genetic edits were placed in donor eggs to fertilise and create embryos, and then these embryos were carried to term by domestic dogs.
I will admit, I only know about dire wolves due to Game of Thrones. I had no idea that they had once been real. Upon further research, the dire wolf is a species of canine which was native to the Americas around 125,000 years ago. They are reported to have been about the same size as the largest modern forms of grey wolf, such as the Yukon wolf and the northwestern wolf, and their fossils have been found across a wide range of territories, including grassland plains and mountains.
Now I have also seen the debate currently ongoing with this situation that the puppies that have been bred are not, actually, dire wolves. The company calls these creatures dire wolves, claiming to have brought the species back from extinction, however this appears very much up to debate at the moment. The company has not published a scientific, peer-reviewed paper that explains their entire process in detail yet, however this is reportedly due to come in the coming weeks. But in any event it does raise that interesting question about whether or not this is something that should be done.
On the one hand, this is an incredible break through in science, and I don’t think that is necessarily being denied at this stage. I have seen many articles that seem to believe that this step in science means that we can help bring extinct species back into being, and also means we can help breed critically endangered animals to help currently struggling species. This is clearly a very noble and just cause to get behind, and it is an interesting development to see how modern science can help endangered species and even potentially stop extinctions from happening.
On the other hand though, this raises a lot of questions, with my main question being (a slightly paraphrased version from Dr Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park) just because we can, does that mean we should? I love Jurassic Park, but I also appreciate that it is not a good idea to bring them back from extinction and allow them to exist in modern life. Aside from the moral and ethical questions that this sort of science raises, we literally have 3 Jurassic Park, 3 Jurassic World movies, and countless spin off tv shows of both that show how badly this sort of situation can go, which very clearly suggests that this is not a smart idea. Yes, science has proved that we can, but that doesn’t mean that we should.
From an ethical perspective, whilst this scientific breakthrough is potentially great news for science, is it really that helpful for struggling animal species in general? It has been reported that the three dire wolf cubs now run around a private facility in the United States where they are being continuously monitored and it therefore suggests that these wolves will never know life outside some kind of confinement. Which raises the issue of whether this is good for the animals at all? I can appreciate that they can’t be released into the wild due to unknown impact that this species may have on the already existing populations of wolves in the surrounding areas, but then why do this experiment in the first place? If the animals can never be released back into the wild, why bother breeding them just to keep them in captivity?
I don’t think a dire wolf was the best species to start with, but I also appreciate that scientists are likely following whatever science they have access to. Dire wolves went extinct over 10,000 years ago – the leading theory behind why they went extinct was due to their main source of prey going extinct and they essentially all starved, although there is also a theory that the species began to breed with closely related species and overtime the full dire wolf genealogy slowly died out as their genes mixed with other species of wolves. In any event, their extinction seems natural – it was not hastened by human activity the way so many extinctions have been in modern times, either due to the impact of climate change or hunting activities. If nature took the dire wolf out, who are we to bring them back? I am not a religious person, but it does give ‘playing god’ vibes where we are essentially trying to reverse what nature has naturally caused. Simply because we can.
But could this potentially be good news for species that have only recently gone extinct, especially for those species that are deemed to have only gone extinct due to the actions of humans and climate change? Would the conversation be different if science had brought back the dodo? Or the Guam fruit bat? It has been widely accepted that human caused habitat degradation is the main cause of species extinctions in the modern era including agriculture, urban sprawl, logging, mining and some fishing practices being the main culprits for species extinction. It is obviously still very early days in this situation, with more information needed on exactly what scientific methods were used to create these dire wolf cubs, but it is interesting to see whether this science will be used to potentially help speed up conservation and de-extinction programmes.
Taylor Talks Vegan 