Genetics

Introduction:

For the past week, the world has been going wild about an announcement by Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences. On April 8th, they announced that by using gene-editing and cloning, they have created three new dire wolves. The thing is though, dire wolves went extinct between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago. According to Colossal, they currently have three pups. Two of these pups, named Romulus and Remus, are six months old. There is also a female pup named Khaleesi who is just two months old. 

This could be a huge step in genetics, helping endangered species, and much more. However, it does raise ethical questions, questions about the future, and, with such a fantastical headline, one has to wonder just how faithful it is to reality. 

How is this possible?

Ben Lamm, the CEO of Colossal, refers to what they did as “indistinguishable from magic.” Of course, they didn’t wave magical wands and just create once-extinct wolves out of thin air. In order to achieve this “magical” task, they extracted DNA from ancient dire wolf fossils: a skull that is 72,000 years old and a tooth that is 13,000 years old.

One of the main things they used was cloning technology. Cloning has been happening for the past 29 years, starting with the cloning of sheep and moving on to the cloning of gray wolves, horses, and more. To do this, scientists use a tissue sample from the animal they want to clone to obtain just one cell. 

The next step is one that many animal rights groups question because it is very invasive. In this step, a single cell’s nucleus is taken out and put into an ovum of an animal of the same species. This animal also has had its nucleus removed. This ovum then grows into an embryo. After this, the embryo is moved into a surrogate’s womb. Finally, from this womb, a duplicate of the original animal the cell was extracted from is born. 

This is just the typical cloning technique though. For the dire wolves, they had to change it up a bit. To start their process, scientists studied the dire wolves’ genome in the skull and tooth. Then, they looked at the genetics of their closest living relative, the gray wolf, and compared the two. They claimed to have found 20 differences located in 14 genes. These few differences were the causes of dire wolves’ most prominent characteristics, such as how large they are and their different vocalizations. After the scientists identified these differences, they took some of the cells that line gray wolves’ blood vessels (endothelial progenitor cells, also called EPCs), and changed the fourteen genes. 

This editing had its issues because each gene usually does several things. For example, dire wolves have three different genes that serve the purpose of giving them their well-known light coat. However, in gray wolves, these genes can cause blindness and deafness. To solve this problem, the scientists had to make two new genes that stopped red and black pigmentation. This was able to give the wolves their signature light coat without hurting them. 

After they had done all of this, they took the edited nuclei from the cells and put them in a gray wolf’s ova that had already had its nucleus taken out. In total, this made 45 embryos that were moved into two domesticated hounds’ wombs. 65 days later, they gave birth to Remus and Romulus.

Ethical Conundrums and a Potential Hoax for Fame

Despite the fact that Colossal says that no animals were injured in this whole process, there are a lot of debates about the ethics of this development. There are also fierce debates about if the dire wolf actually has been brought back from extinction or not. 

For the ethics debate, there are a lot of factors. For example, there is the question of location. All humans know is that before dire wolves went extinct, they lived somewhere in the plains and mountains of North and South America. Currently, the pups are living on a 2,000-acre preserve that is secure and in a secret location. While this may sound like a lot of land, usually wolves live in much larger areas which lets them migrate to follow their food. It is also unknown where the wolves will live for the rest of their lives. While a lot of people are against them becoming a tourist attraction, it could be harmful to ecosystems if they were put into the wild since the environment is very different from when the wolves had gone extinct. In addition to all of this, the newly created wolves had no clue how to survive on their own and, because they went extinct so long ago, scientists don’t know much about their behaviors or even their past diets. 

Another side of the ethics debate has to do with human behavior. People are scared because this technology gives humans a chance to think that we can let any animal go extinct because we assume we can just bring them back in the future. These concerns have been furthered because, after Colossal’s announcement, the Trump administration suggested taking away endangered species’ legal protections. This whole situation has created a fear that this could give people the feeling that we can “play God” in a way. This all leads into the question of if humans actually have the ability now to de-extinct animals. 

In this debate, a lot of professors say that, while impressive, these pups are not truly dire wolves. Duke University professor Stuart Pimm called them a “designer dog” and said that the “dire wolf is not really closely related to a regular wolf.” While some people agree with him that they aren’t related, others claim that, even though they’re related, they are not closely related enough that changing 20 genes would create dire wolves. To that end, paleontologist Ric Rawlence says, “the gray wolf genome is 2,447,000,000 individual bases (DNA letters) long. Colossal has said that the gray wolf and dire wolf genomes are 99.5% identical, but that is still 12,235,000 individual differences.” He goes on to say that only making 20 edits still makes this species “very much a gray wolf.” With this, people are wondering if this is just a wild headline to make money or if it is a legitimate thing done to improve science. 

The Future of Colossal Gene-Editing

A lot of experts also question why scientists are spending so much time bringing animals back to life when they could be focusing on saving endangered species instead. According to Vox, the reasoning behind Colossal’s decision could be because de-extinction is a very difficult challenge and beating this challenge could lead to developments in technologies that could help future breakthroughs, like creating an artificial womb. Now that they have cloned the dire wolves, they have been working more on conservation. 

Colossal works to save endangered species from extinction by editing genes to maximize the genetic diversity of the remaining population. They have partnered with a lot of conservation organizations to make these breakthroughs possible. These organizations include the American Wolf Foundation, Save the Elephants, the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, and more. They are also working with the native MHA Nation tribes, which are the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. These tribes have said that they want the dire wolves to be moved to their lands in North Dakota, where they will live in the wild. Colossal also says that it could be possible for them to use their cloning techniques to put species’ blood samples into a biobank to prevent any species in the future from becoming endangered.

While they do plan to do this conservation work, they also plan on using their cloning technology to bring back even more animals from extinction. In March, they announced their most recent development in bringing woolly mammoths back. They showed that they created woolly mice, which are mice that they modified to have woolly mammoths’ traits. After this achievement, they say that they plan to edit Asian elephants’ nuclei to create baby woolly mammoths in 2028. In addition to this, Colossal also wants to bring back Tasmanian tigers and dodo birds.

Conclusion

Whether or not those 20 edits brought back dire wolves from extinction may be up for debate, but this announcement most assuredly could change the future of conservation and gene-editing. Even if they’re mostly gray wolves, this technologically impressive feat is a milestone in history. We now get the chance to shape history and try to navigate this challenge ethically.

As it currently stands, it is putting endangered species at risk of having their protection taken away. Maybe, in this new Jurassic Park-esque world, it’s not the new animals that kill us, but us that kill them and take down whole species because we feel like we can play God. We could do this, or we could use this technology to protect species while respecting animals’ rights by doing our part to protect their ecosystems and help them thrive. 

Figuring out the path forward will be complicated, but, with these dire wolves, we have accepted this responsibility. There may be no truly correct answer on what to do next. We just have to go step by step, always keeping our eyes on doing the next right thing. Then, instead of a sign of a potentially scary future, these unmistakably adorable wolf pups could be a sign that humans can reverse a few of our environmental wrong-doings. 

There is one question that only time and people’s decisions will answer: will we use this technology to redeem or to destroy?

References

Bolotnikova, M. (2025, April 10). The new dire wolves explain everything wrong with “de-extinction”. Vox. Retrieved April 16, 2025, from https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/407781/dire-wolves-deextinction-colossal-biosciences

Kekatos, M. (2025, April 11). Should we be bringing back extinct species? Ethical concerns raised after dire wolf allegedly resurrected. ABC News. Retrieved April 16, 2025, from https://abcnews.go.com/US/bringing-back-extinct-species-ethical-concerns-raised-after/story?id=120674068

Kluger, J. (2025, April 7). The Science Behind the Return of the Dire Wolf. Time. Retrieved April 16, 2025, from https://time.com/7275439/science-behind-dire-wolf-return/