Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Did Colossal bring back the dire wolf?

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

Daniel and Kelly talk about de-extinction.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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According to some scientists, we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. While past extinctions with a result of things like giant asteroids, this one's probably on us. Species go extinct on their own in the wild, but scientists estimate the extinction rates are about 100 times greater. than baseline extinction rates due to human impacts, and this rate is increasing over time. When I was a kid, I remember hearing the phrase extinction is forever. But is it? With current and future technologies,

can we undo the damage we've done and bring back the species whose demise is our causing? Today, we're going to talk about the science of de-extinction. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think I've tasted eight different kinds of animals. Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study space and parasites. And I didn't expect you to start with that, so I don't know that I have a good count. Give me your list. What are the eight kinds of animals you've eaten? Let's see, of course, pork. I've eaten cows. I've eaten deer. I've eaten snake, I've eaten alligator, chicken, turkey, duck, goose.

All right, that's nine. Oh, is that nine? Oh, my gosh. I already beat my record. Yeah, it's a good job, Daniel. You're a winner. Let's see, I've done chickens and ducks and turkey and moose, deer. Pigs and cows.

Alligator, pigs and cows. We currently have deer in our freezer from our property. Probably sheep, right? Yeah, that's right. And you've had sheep too, right? Yeah, so that's 10 for me. And I've had goats. What's the weirdest thing you've eaten then? Moose hearts.

Ooh. Yeah. It was dried. Oh, Moose heart jerky. Yeah, it was like moose heart jerky. And it was in a paper bag. And the host that I was visiting pulled it out of the paper bag and there was still fat on top of it. And it looked, you know, like a heart and it got sliced and then put on a cracker with some butter.

And if I shut my eyes, it was delicious. But I kind of had to, like, not make eye contact with the food. Well, that's my question for you today is, which extinct animal do you think is the tastiest? Oh. What in the past did humans really savor that we will never experience? Gosh. I wonder how woolly mammoth tasted. Yeah, well, we might know soon.

According to colossal in five years, we might be able to find out. Do you think this is the real motivation for bringing back species? I don't know, but there's an interesting movement called invasive. War, I think is what it's called. And the idea is that if you have an invasive species, you try to kick up a market around eating it because then people will help you bring those numbers down. I can't think of any particularly delicious animal we drove to extinction. I always wondered about that with Australia, because don't they have a bunny infestation? And I thought, a lot of people eat rabbits. Why don't they just eat the rabbits?

I mean, at some point, there's a lot more rabbits than people. I know some people who can't eat bunnies because they're cute. And they have like a cute filter for what they'll eat. And so I think there are some people who just can't have bunnies for that reason. And maybe there's just not enough people. I don't know. I've eaten rabbit. There, there's another one. Have you eaten rabbit? I don't think I've knowingly eaten rabbit, but I've eaten at some French restaurants where I didn't understand the menu. And so there's always a question there. Oh, wait, snails. I've had snails. So boom, I'm up to 11, yeah. Snails get infected by lots of trematode species. And you can't get sick by eating the snail.

but that knowledge, I won't be able to ever eat a snail, I don't think. I also have a texture thing. I don't think snails are for me. Yeah, it's not a sort of second serving kind of a thing for me either. I'm also not an oyster person, and I know loads of people love oysters, yeah. Yeah. Oh, wait, we didn't even count the kinds of fish. Oh.

There's a whole other category of animals. Wow. We've been a lot more than we imagine. Yeah. We should, we should. I guess if you include plants and herbs and stuff, I'm sure we've consumed many, many species in our lives. Katrina tries to eat. eat 30 different kinds of plants every day.

Wow. Why? Why not? Okay. Yeah, sure. Sure. I think the diversity is good for your gut. You know, to eat all those little microbes. Yeah. Oh, wow. I would get on a Katrina diet if she were like a fitness instructor. You know, I think it would be science informed. You know, she's working on a recipe book, science informed recipes for your health. Sign me up. I want that book. You know, ever since we had her on the show, I do make sure that I have a cup of beans every day. There you go.

All right. To your health. Zach does not say thank you, but I feel better. All right. Well, we're not here to talk about what's coming out of Kelly. We're here to talk about what's coming out of a really interesting research project that's made the news recently. I love your transitions. Sometimes it's a big step to get us back on track.

But you always find the cleverest path between them. So today we're talking about a company called Colossil. And Colossil is all about de-extinct. So they're trying to bring back animals that have been driven to extinction in every case by humans. And they made the news recently because they are claiming to have brought back the dire wolf. And so we asked our listeners, did Colossal bring back the dire wolf? And here's what they had to say. I have no idea.

You got me on that one. No, they created something that will resemble the dire wolf, but is not actually a dire wolf. Did Colossal bring back the Dyer Wolf in the sense of that? A being is the product of using a specific DNA recipe in an Earth environment to recreate a member of the species? Yes. On the other hand, did they bring back the Dyer Wolf to be a stable resident of this planet? We're a far cry from that. Did Watt bring back the what?

A philosopher falling into a parallel universe. Those are the gene-initing thing? Probably not, clickbait. I'm not buying it. It's a genetically modified gray wolf that happens to have some traits of a dire wolf. So I did see the headlines on this, and I guess it depends on the quality of the sequence. If they didn't have a complete sequence and had to splice in like regular wolf genes, then maybe not. I saw a dire wolf skeleton at the Libreta Tar Pits and on Game of Thrones, but I don't know anything about colossal.

Seems to be like a rock band touring, but with only one of the original band members. They really only brought back certain traits of a dire wolf, but not necessarily every single trait. So it looks like a dire wolf, but we don't really know if it has all the other traits of a dire wolf. A colossal brought back the dire wolf like Jurassic Hark brought back the Velociraptor. I always thought dire wolves were fiction, so I didn't know they could come back. I thought they were just from like Game of Thrones and things. I'm going to say, I don't know. No, I don't think so.

Three individuals are not a population, let alone an species. That doesn't mean that it's not interesting. I'm sure they learn a lot about the phenotypical features that make a wolf and differentiate extinct wolves from current wolves. So I'm sure it's a very interesting work. I think that they brought it mostly back, but I think that because it had to be an animal from today and DNA from a dire wolf, then technically it's not actually the 100% complete dire wolf.

A lot of skepticism here. A lot of skepticism. The answers either fell into, I have no idea what you're talking about. Or, no, they did not. I don't think anybody was like, yes, they did. One person said it was interesting. Nonetheless, but they didn't completely bring back the dire wolf.

So give us some background. Tell us about this project. What is de-extinctification and why would somebody want to do it? Okay. So you've added a lot of unnecessary syllables. What do you mean? De-extinctification-izism. Let's see how long we can get it by the end of the show.

I'm digging it. I think the way that most people imagine de-extinction is that you are bringing back exactly the organism that we drove to extinction at some point in the past. And so it has the exact same genotype. You could plop it back in the environment and it would be exactly the same. It would behave the same, have the same genome, all the same. All right. But if we're going to be really technical and nerdy about what is and isn't de-extinctificationanism, then, you know, what does that even mean?

Because when you had an extent population, it's not like you had a single genome that defined the species, right? You had a variation. You had diversity. And so what does it mean to say I'm going to bring back the exact same? species in that context anyway. Yeah, so you're already starting to hone in on some of the problems here. So especially for long dead organisms, you probably don't even have one complete genome from that organism, let alone genomes from, I don't know, the 1,000 organisms that you would need to have a functioning population. In the more near term, we are sort of raising from the dead

genotypes for, for example, black ferret. So the black ferret population is in decline. This is happening right now. But every once in a while, some lab or zoo will find a black ferret frozen in their freezer and they'll extract genetic material from that black ferret and bring to life a black ferret with that genome. Is this something that happens to biologists? They just like find black ferrets in their freezer. Like, oh, what's this? There's a chocolate pie from last week. Oh, here's a black ferret. I mean, Katrina has never found bags of feces in your freezer that got lost. Yes, but never a ferret. Oh, okay. All right. Well, she's not the right kind of biologist. If you were the right kind of biologists. There'd be ferrets in there. Okay. So this is something you put in your

freezer. It's not just something you discover. Oh my gosh. Look, there's a ferret in my freezer. Yeah, that's right. Like, you know, maybe it was part of your zoo population. You thought maybe I could this for later because that's something biologists think. And so it ended up in a freezer. And then it got found and they're like, oh, that could help. So one problem is that it's very hard to get the genetic diversity that you need, especially when you're working with very long dead organisms. So I think you're saying that the population had diversity and it's not easy to pull back the whole population. But I'm wondering, even on a more technical level, like, which individual would you pull back? And would any of them qualify or would some sort of mixture of them qualify? Like,

when you say de-extinctification, you mean you've resurrected an individual that previously existed or a representative individual from that species? Like, I want to know exactly what it means and what qualifies. Yeah. All right. So let's get to that. So let's start with Colossol's definition of de-extinctificationization. And they are calling it functional de-extinction. And they say it's the process of generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar to an extinct species by resurrecting its lost lineage of core genes, engineering natural resistances and enhancing adaptability that will allow it to thrive in today's

environment of climate change, dwindling resources, disease, and human interference. Wow. I know. It's log. That's not a definition. It's an essay. They've got a lot of words on their website. But you can see already a couple of things popping up.

They're not saying that they are bringing back the entire genome or a diversity of different types of genomes. They are bringing back core genes. So they are picking which genes they think are critical to making a particular extinct species and comparing that to the nearest living relative. And they're bringing those genes back. Do you think that they're doing this way because this is all that's possible? Or do you think, as maybe implied by their little essay, they're doing it this way because they want to create a version which could actually survive in today's environment rather than something which died out and lived in a previous environment? It's probably both. I see.

But that limitation in what's possible is really important. So DNA degrades pretty quickly after an animal dies. So by the time you're looking at something like the dire wolf or mammoths, if you find a specimen, maybe that was frozen very soon after death, there's going to be a lot. of the genetic sequence that you can still read if you're lucky, but you're not going to have the entire genetic sequence. And with mammoths in particular, we're lucky because there have been more than one specimen where we can get some genetic material. But you can't put together an entire exact genome for the woolly mammoth. There's not enough intact genomes for organisms that are long dead. All right. So then before we dig into the dire wolf real project, I just want to

know from a philosophical perspective, Kelly, say if I gave you infinite resources, there were no technical limitations. You could create any organism you wanted. What would you consider de-extinctification ofism? Would it be like you create a whole population? You pull back the last time there was a thousand living entities and you created all of them or you just picked one or you like averaged them. Like if you could do anything, what would be the most pristine version of de-extinctification? My answer is also going to include my thoughts on motivations for de-extinction. I think that if you are bringing an animal back into a world that it never existed in and it can't fill its prior ecological

role. I think from a conservation standpoint, I'm not super interested in that. And so if the black-footed ferrets were to go extinct tomorrow and you were able to bring back enough individuals so that there wouldn't be inbreeding problems and that would depend on how many

and what kinds of genomes you could get, I don't know, say it's 500 individuals. And then you could put them back in their natural environment and somehow they'd be able to still have their wild behaviors, which sometimes is, you know, through learning from other individuals, so that could be hard to get back. But if you're able to get enough genetic diversity where they won't decline because of inbreeding and then they can go back into their wild habitat and survive, that to me would be successful de-extinction.

What do you think? Yeah, well, I think that's fascinating because it says something about what a species really is. It's more than one individual. It's a community and it's also their environment and how they interact. And as you say, like learned behaviors that are passed down. So it takes a lot to really recreate a lineage. I guess my motivation would be different. I'm not an ecologist.

I would just be wondering how many do you have to bring back so that I could have a tasty burger of each kind, you know, in a sustainable way, of course. Yeah, absolutely. Let's jump a little bit more than into motivation for de-extinction before we get into the method. So Colossil is pushing for de-extinction as a method to protect ecosystems that are in some form of decline. For example, like bees are going extinct and we need them as pollinators. So let's make sure we can bring them back, that kind of thing. Kind of, although I can hear a bunch of people saying, the honeybees that we use are not native. And so you've already created something artificial.

But the big example that they use are mammoths. Mammoths used to live in like tundras in Siberia, for example. And as they walked across the landscape, they would crush or knock over trees. And their impact on the environment resulted in a sustainable grassland. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And that grassland absorbed a lot of carbon dioxide. And I should say I'm parroting exactly what I saw on their website.

So this is all assuming that they are correct on their website because this is out of my area of knowledge. But these grasslands absorb a lot of carbon, which could help us in this period of global climate change. And having that grass there helps the permafrost not melt. And as the permafrost melts, that releases more greenhouse gases and is bad for a variety of other reasons. So they're arguing that if you de-extinct the woolly mammoth, you can put it back into this environment, which is maybe still in the process of change. And it can push the environment back to a more ancestral state. And actually, that more ancestral state is better for the ecosystems and the globe. Well, I'm even more skeptical after hearing that because this sounds to me not like we're going to resuscitate a species because we think it's cool or it's a tragedy, but instead as an element of ecological, planetary geoengineering.

Like, we think we bring this back. It can change the climate. Like, wow, is that a huge Rube Goldberg? machine that we do not understand. And you start banging on those levers, like, who knows what's going to happen? That seems very dangerous to me. To me, that's as bonkers as like the folks who want to put sulfur in the atmosphere to make it more reflective and see what happens. I think they would argue that putting sulfur in the atmosphere to see what happens is different than trying to revert back to a state that once did exist. I totally see your point. And I'm also skeptical that you're

going to be able to release woolly mammoths. I mean, there's some parts of the world where they'll survive, but there won't be a lot of people. And somebody in Russia has put aside land that they've called Pleistocene Park for these mammoths. But, you know, like in the U.S., farmers were not happy when wolves were reintroduced. Can you imagine suddenly needing to deal with woolly mammoths? I see a lot of human animal problems if you actually try to work this out. I can imagine all sorts of videos on Twitter and TikTok of a mammoth like crushing a playground or like walking through a soccer game. Or, you know, they kill people. Accidentally. Elephants do accidentally just because they're big lumbering giants. You know, people die.

To try to, you know, give the colossal argument here, the other reasons for why they do it are, one, along the way you learn things you didn't expect. And so I watched a video from the chief science officer. Her name is Beth Shapiro, arguing that along the way to studying elephants, they came up with a vaccine for this virus that's really bad for elephants today. So you have to understand elephants today in order to edit them into being something mammoth-like. And then they explicitly make this space argument that when we went to the moon, there were all of these side benefits along the way. And as we shoot for this, you know, crazy dream of ours, there's probably all sorts of cool stuff we're going to come up with along the way. I feel like you could also argue that if you really wanted to solve this virus problem for the elephants, you should have just invested in solving the virus problem for the elephants. But anyway, so these are the current arguments for de-extinction. You and I discussed a book called Venomous Lump Sucker. It's a fictional book, but it deals with some of the ethical problems. that might arise if people are like, oh, we don't have to worry about driving that animal

into extinction because we can just bring it back, but you're not bringing back the exact same thing. Any of the like learned behaviors get lost when that last individual dies and they don't come back when you bring the last one back. Yeah, I really did enjoy that book, Venomist Lump Sucker when it talks about like the corporatization of it and how it just gets folded into economic formulas. But it's fascinating to me that none of the arguments you've made so far about de-extinctification and the motivations of it touch the reason I think it's exciting. or the reason I would be enthusiastic about it, which is this feeling that every lost species

is like a lost bit of treasure. You know, each one has evolved over millions or billions of years. It's a solution to a really complex optimization problem. It's fascinating. It's inherently valuable. It may be potentially like creates some medicines, you know, like aspirin from the bark of a tree.

Who knows what solutions evolution has come up with that might be useful? You know, or just like the value of a species to exist. And it's so tragic that it seems so one-directional. You know, once a species, is extinct. It's gone, baby, gone. I remember having that drilled in my head as a kid. It just feels so tragic. It's like a black hole almost, right? Things fall in and they never come out. So the idea of being able to pull these things from beyond the biological event horizon, to me,

that's exciting because it opens up a whole world of species that we could maybe bring back. I don't know if that's a terrible idea and I don't actually really want to eat burgers made of these old animals. But to me, there's an appeal to just bringing things back from beyond the event horizon. I think we should revisit this question at the very end of the episode. You should decide if what it is that is being brought back actually checks that box that you're talking about. Like this thing that's been lost is back. So let's take a break. And when we get back, we'll talk about what exactly was done to bring back the dire wolf.

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with Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're back, and we were just talking about why you would bring an animal back from extinction. So now let's go into a little bit of detail about what colossal did with the dire wolf. So what exactly did they bring them? back. They had two dire wolves that had died in a way that preserved some of their genetic material. And when did dire wolves go extinct? They went extinct about 13,000 years ago, which is a lot of time for DNA to degrade. Even when it's frozen, it still degrades. Even when it's frozen, it can still

degrade, yeah. And, you know, often if you're in an area that's frozen, every once in a while, it will thaw out a little bit, and then it will freeze again. And so, you know, over time, you get these sort of fluctuations that break down the DNA. And so, what? What they did was first they figured out what the most closely related species alive today is. And they determined that that's the gray wolf. So they got the genome from the gray wolf and they used that as a reference. And so they put together the genome of the dire wolf as best they could from the sequences that they had. And they matched that up to the gray wolf so that they could try to figure out where the like chunks of DNA that they had collected.

Because a lot of time the DNA gets like broken into pieces. And then it's like a puzzle. You need to figure out where the pieces are supposed to go. And if you match it up with the gray wolf, that kind of helps you. All right. So we don't have a complete genome of the dire wolf. We have some snapshots and bits, some snippets here and there from a couple of dire wolves that were frozen 13,000 years ago, just from two individuals? Yep.

Wow. That's amazing. And so to fill it out, they compare with the gray wolf, which they think is similar. And it's sort of like sketching out the bits that we're missing and then also understanding the differences. Is that what's going on? Yes. And so to try to understand the differences, what they did is they look at air. areas where the genomes seemed to differ.

And they would say, okay, this genetic code in other species has been associated with, for example, white fur coats or with more muscular thighs. And so they'd look for areas where the genomes differed. And they found, why does that make you laugh? Because I'm imagining dire wolves with like really chunky thighs, like working out at the gym. Like, dire wolf says, don't skip leg day. That is a trait that they. honed in on. How do we know that just from the frozen dire wolves? We're like, wow, look at

those. I don't actually know if they were able to tell from the frozen dire wolves, but they looked at the genotypic sequences and they were like, okay, this looks a little different. And I think often they'd say, like, this looks a little different in ways that are consistent with more muscular legs. So that's probably what they had. So they ended up deciding that probably dire wolves differed from gray wolves by having increased size, broader skulls, a white coat, stronger shoulders and legs, and a thick and sort of condensed coat. They sound kind of awesome. Why did they go extinct? They do sound awesome. I don't know why they went extinct. Probably humans. That's my guess.

Too many dire wolf burgers, it sounds like. Yeah, well, animals can be delicious. It's not their fault. And so they found 20 genes that they thought, you know, it looks like these are important differences. So we're going to take the gray wolf genome and we're going to edit it in those 20 locations so that it looks like the dire wolf genome. But it's important to keep in mind that when an organism is expressing a trait, it's not just about the genes that it has. It's also about when those genes are turned on and how long they're turned on. So you might remember when we were talking about coat color, when we were answering a

listener questions episode, whether or not a person. particular hair cell makes black or white is all about whether or not this promoter for a gene is turned on or off, whether or not a gene is getting the message to make black or not. But none of that timing information is probably incorporated in this technique. But they did end up getting organisms that look like what we imagine dire wolves look like. They sort of look like the specimens we've collected. They look like what we all saw in Game of Thrones. And so the step that they took after they edited the genome is they put that genetic information into an egg from a gray wolf and then they got that gray wolf pregnant she carried it to term and she gave birth to a

dire wolf and they did that three times so this sort of answer is the deep philosophical question right what came first the dire wolf or the puppy I guess because here you implanted a dire wolf into another species and it was able to gestate and give birth to it yeah and these that require the species to be similar? Like you couldn't put that inside an elephant, for example, right? That's right. It requires the species to be similar, but this is another area where things could be different. So maternal effects refers to all of the different ways that a fetus is impacted by the mom's body. It could be the hormones that she's producing. Right. And, you know, subsequently it can be the bacteria that she passes on to her offspring or the things that you get from the milk, including bacteria. And so any of that

maternal effect stuff that was dire wolf specific, they are now getting gray wolf versions of. And give us a sense for like the distance between these two species. I mean, it's sort of amazing to me that you can have one species give birth to another. I mean, could you put a human baby inside a gorilla, for example? I'm not suggesting anybody do that. Yeah, yeah. Just as a thought experiment to like think about the difference. Like how far away from us could you get and still have a live birth? I don't think enough experiments have been done where we could have a good answer to that. It sounds like you're suggesting some human experimentation there. I'm not signing on to that.

I am absolutely not suggesting that kind of human experimentation. I think that's wildly unethical. To be clear, on the record, shouldn't do that. But you're saying that the only way to know is to do the experiment. Yeah, I think in a lot of cases, that would be the best way to know. I mean, I think close and related species probably have similar requirements. It wouldn't surprise me if a chimpanzee or a bonobo could. Well, but so, like, we're much bigger than them.

And so at some point you get to how big is the head that's coming through a tiny opening and like chimpanzees might not be able to survive that part, you know? Well, do we know how much experimentation colossal did? Like, is this their first attempt and their first success or did they have a bunch of failures first? You know, I don't know that they have publicly reported if there were gray wolves who had miscarriages or who died in childbirth or anything. I don't remember seeing anything like that. I think in general they've kept this project pretty close to the vest and haven't been really. releasing too many details. But we know that it worked at least three times. And is this like a scientific project? Whether they can be publishing papers and peer review journals, or is it a

commercial project like they're going to be selling dire wolf puppies? Both. I don't have any evidence that they're selling dire wolf puppies. They have been publishing scientific papers as they go. So for example, they have a paper in review right now showing that gray wolves are the closest living relatives to the dire wolf. Beth Shapiro does study ancient DNA and she works on these questions about relatedness between species. And so as they go, they're doing a lot of science and they're publishing it and sharing it as they go. And do you get the sense that this is cutting-edge science? I know that a lot of times in popular science, we hear about something and we're told it's amazing. And then people in the field are like, yeah, that's not very

impressive. And Bob over there at Georgia is already doing that. Is this cutting-edge science? I would say that in addition to doing solid science, they are doing pretty cutting-edge stuff. I do feel like bringing back these ancient genes is impressive. I'm not feeling completely satisfied at an emotional level that we have undone any damage our species might have done. I don't necessarily feel like this method does that. But I do feel like they've done some pretty interesting stuff. All right. So they've started from a gray wolf.

They've basically taken a big step towards dire wolf DNA. Not completely all the way there. Only 20 edits, but still in the sort of information space of DNA, they've gone full. from the gray wolf towards a dire wolf and then successfully given birth to this critter, which is like alive and running around and baying at the moon and stuff like that. So I guess the question then is like,

is this a dire wolf? What is this thing? Right. Yeah. So that is the big question. And I want to real quick say something that maybe I wish I had mentioned earlier, which is that we don't yet have the ability to print genomes. So even if you did have, for example, the entire dire wolf genome read out, we don't have a machine that can print an entire genome

at a reasonable cost, like I think it would be like a billion dollars or something. And so that's another reason why you take gray wolf genomes and edit them and then use that to make the next round of babies. So it's possible that in 10, 20 years or something, you could print everything you know about the dire wolf genome instead of picking these 20 genes to tinker with. And then you could fill in the spaces with whatever you know about the gray wolf genome and get a little closer. But these are the techniques we have right now.

And so when you say print, you mean like synthetically assemble from the, basic amino acids because in the end it is just chemistry right we're like let's bring these together click them together this is a molecule we know can exist but you're saying that's still really expensive exactly yeah it is very expensive and you know you've got billions of base pairs or something in a genome so even if the cost is fairly minor it adds up pretty quick it's a kind of thing that feels like in 10 years it's going to cost 17 cents yeah maybe it's somebody's PhD thesis and it costs millions of dollars but biology makes these leaps and bounds all the time where like things that used to be PhD thesis are now like a little machine that sits on the bench and it takes two minutes and you press the button.

And I imagine that's both frustrating and exhilarating if you're a student who's like, I spent five years on something that now takes 30 minutes. But, you know, you had to be part of the people who made the path to get there. Yeah. And that's why biology can do so many amazing things because things that used to be impossible are now trivial, which opens up the space of possibilities for like new whole emerging concepts that nobody even imagined before. So, yeah, I look forward to that. Yeah. So let's get back to the question. Yeah, is this thing that they made a dire wolf, Kelly? What's your ruling?

Well, so before I give you my opinion, I'm going to back up and say that, you know, when this announcement first came out, apparently, I think it's the New Yorker, broke the embargo. So when a research group has a finding that they want to share, they will send a report out to major news organizations. And they'll say, you can't mention this until we tell you, you can mention it. But if you want to start writing the story now, so that when we're going to start writing the story now, so that when we give the thumbs up, you're already ready to go. Then we'd be happy to talk to you now.

And apparently the New Yorker broke the embargo. And the way that I heard this story was that they have brought back the dire wolf. And, you know, Zach even sent it to me. And he was like, the dire wolf is back. How cool is that? And we both actually should have been a little bit more skeptical because we had interviewed Beth Shapiro, who's the chief science officer for Colossil, for our book Soonish, because we had a little section on de-extinction.

And she had made very clear in that interview what the process actually involves, which is not making an exact replica. But in the days after that article that Zach sent me from time that was like, we have the dire wolf now, there has been a lot of like anger heaped on colossal for being like, this isn't a dire wolf. And so Beth Shapiro, again, the chief science officer, has said, you know, there's something like 30 definitions of a species out there. And she's right. There's a big debate about what counts as a species. Yeah. And the dire wolf that colossal made fits some of those definitions, but doesn't fit others. Oh, I see.

And so the question is, you know, to what extent should you be excited about this? And I think from the standpoint of wonder, you know, like bringing back an organism that so many people want to see, like from Game of Thrones, for example, you know, I can imagine you put these dire wolves in a zoo and people get more excited about conservation. I can see some benefits in that regard. But I guess, again, my concern is that people are going to feel like the moral responsibility that should be on our shoulders for killing a species could go away if we're able to bring these species back. But again, we don't know if their behaviors are natural. Maybe there were very unique behaviors that were taught to them by their mothers that they'll never express now because there's no one there to teach them those things. And so, you know, to me, they differ in ways that matter because I don't think you could ever release them back out into the wild. they'll never fill their ecological role.

They won't be what we lost. It could be something else, though, right? Like if they escape into the wild, they could create some new niche from themselves. They could be invasive, right? We could be overrun with dire wolves or, you know, ancient guinea pigs with really strong legs or whatever we're going to bring back next. Yay. What do you think?

Did they bring back the dire wolf? Are you excited? I think it's really cool and an awesome demonstration of biological technology. It doesn't feel to me like they brought back the dire wolf. I mean, I imagine if humans. went extinct and then in the future AI brought back something kind of similar to humans and they're like, look, yay, we didn't kill them all. They're back. I wouldn't really feel like we're back. And so, yeah, it doesn't really feel like the dire wolf, but it doesn't have to be, right?

Like, this shows that you can do biological engineering in a really cool way. You can start from one animal. You can move through that information space towards another animal that you think is interesting or useful or cool or worth bringing back. And you could do that multiple times, right? You could go in the direwolf direction, and you could add a little bit of fox or something. I think this opens up a whole new avenue. I think that's the exciting thing about it, not like, oh, we have cleansed ourselves of this crime we committed. And I think that is a great point.

So if you're trying to understand what makes two species that are closely related different, this now does give us the tools to answer those questions. You know, is it this gene? Is it that gene? What happens if you tinker with this gene? And so we do now have this amazing ability to better understand how the genome results in differences in appearance and function for organisms. That's pretty cool.

And we could take chihuahuas and give them like really strong legs. That would be really amazing. I'd like to see that. Totally buffed chihuahuas. Yeah, my daughter would absolutely adopt one of those, but she would adopt any chihuahua, no matter how pitiful they look. You know, I used to be kind of anti-chihuahua because I thought about them as like little yappy dogs.

But the dog that we adopted, he's like 40% chihuahua. But he's really wonderful. He never barks. He's like German Shepherd and Chihuahua, which is, an interesting combination. How did that happen? Yeah, there was an interesting evening for somebody somewhere. Yeah. One night in Mexico. But he's got this wonderful German Shepherd plus Chihuahua face. It's like German Shepherd, but a little bit of sad eyes. I don't know. I love him. That sounds wonderful. Yeah, so I'm warming up the Chihuahua. All right, well, let's take a break. And then when we come back,

I'd like to talk a little bit more about their plans for bringing back the mammoth, which we talked about a little bit earlier. So start dreaming of mammoth steaks, and we'll be back to you soon. Hello, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

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I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community,

the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back from the commercial break, which seems like a fine time to many, that on Apple, if you subscribe to our podcast, you can get this podcast without ads. But thank you for listening to the ads because they allow us to do all of the research that we love doing for this show. If you love the show and don't like the ads, you can make the ads go extinct.

Check out Apple. And if Apple changes their mind, they'll de-extinct the ads. And you'll be forced to listen to them all retroactively. Oh no. That's not what we're doing today. We're talking about retroactive undeletion of animals called de-extinctificationism. Tell us about how we might bring back the woolly mammoth. Now, I've been joking about dire wolf steaks, but a lot of humans made it through the winter on the meat

of the woolly mammoth. Isn't that true? It's really something humans have eaten for a long time. I think that is true. Yeah, I think we did eat woolly mammoth. I mean, they give you a large quantity of food, whether it's delicious or not. Based on my research, mostly from reading Farside comics, I think a lot of humans hunted woolly mammoths. I mean, Gary Larson never got anything wrong ever, I think. So I'm on board with that. had the best science consultants for sure. He did. He did. So mammoths went extinct about 4,000 years ago. And so when you find a specimen preserved the right way, you can get more information out of it. And they tended to live in cold areas like tundra. So I think you've got a slightly better chance at getting their DNA in the first place. And so we found a lot of mammoths that are preserved in a way where you can get some DNA from them. So we have a lot more information to work with than we did with the dire wolf. And so in this,

case, but again, it's still difficult and I just want to highlight a couple reasons why it's difficult. We talked about the DNA degrading and that makes it hard and it breaks into little pieces, but you also have to be sure that you're not getting contamination. So for example, when that mammoth died, bacteria probably started to break it down before it completely froze through. So you have to make sure you're not getting any of those bacterial genomes in your genome or, you know, some clumsy scientist didn't have their gloves on the whole time. Now you've got human DNA in there. So not only do you have to try to find the ancient DNA and figure out what to do with it, you need to make sure that all of the DNA that's contaminating it has been removed.

This sounds like an awesome update of the fly. Human accidentally injects their DNA into the mammoth de-cinctification project. Weird mammoth baby comes out with like Jeff Goldblum's head on it. I'd feel so weird about that. Jeff Goldblum is so handsome. He'd make a great mammoth, I think. Okay, all right. Anyway, Netflix, call us if you want to turn that into a real project.

We've got lots of other ideas, too. Few more terrible than that, but yes, we do. All right, so you get this DNA from the specimen and then you need a similar living species, right, for reference, don't you? What are you using the case of the mammoth? So there are three living species of elephants. There are two African elephants. One lives in the forest and one lives in the grasslands or the savannas. And then there is an Asian elephant.

The Asian elephant, they think, is closer genetically to the woolly mammoths. And so they're using the Asian elephant as their reference genome. They are trying to essentially make a more cold adapted Asian elephant because, again, they are saying that they want to release the woolly mammoth into what would have been its native environment. So they're trying to create a woolly mammoth that can survive there. And so they're looking at things like shaggy hair, fat deposits. They also want to bring back the curved tusks. And I think maybe that's partly because those are just like iconic woolly mammoth things, but also. maybe they're important for knocking down trees.

And so they've identified 65 genes that they think could make the Asian elephant more cold tolerant. And so they're going to make these edits to the Asian elephant genome. And then they're not sure if they're going to impregnate an African elephant or an Asian elephant because the African elephant is bigger than the Asian elephant. And so they think it might have a better time giving birth to a woolly mammoth baby. And elephants are pregnant for some crazy amount of time, like a whole year or something. Maybe if it's even longer, is it like two years? Two years, I think, yeah. Yeah, I think it's something like 22 months.

Can you imagine carrying around a woolly mammoth baby for 22 months if they're bigger than Asian elephants? That sounds incredibly unpleasant. But anyway. And it's not even yours, right? And it's not even yours, right? But in some sense it is, right? You were saying earlier the maternal environment is an important factor. right? It's not like when you're the surrogate, you're just some sort of irrelevant host.

Like the maternal environment plays a role in the development of the baby. That's right. The things you eat might be playing a role. And then also after elephants are born, Beth Shapiro was telling me that they often consume some of the feces of family members to get their microbiome. Makes sense. Yeah. And so if the woolly mammoth had a woolly mammoth specific microbiome, they're going to be getting an Asian or African elephant specific microbiome. But anyway, so they're going to be growing up with an Asian or African elephant parent. And then the plan is to, yeah, release them into the wild at some point to try to recreate what the woolly mammoths were doing. That's a whole fascinating other angle.

I never even thought about the microbiome of these creatures, right? Which is usually passed down from the parents. If you bring a species back, its microbiome has gone extinct with it and obviously don't have the DNA for its microbiome unless he was like dug into its gut and found those bacteria and sequenced. Their DNA also, and could somehow replicate that, that's a whole other fascinating dimension. It is. Or maybe you're just going to end up with de-extinctified species members with, like, bad digestive problem. Die wolf with IBD. Could be.

I mean, maybe they were essentially the ecosystems that, like, cold-adapted bacteria were thriving in. And maybe you've lost those bacteria altogether. Maybe you can't bring them back. I don't know. Who knows? We could end up with, like, woolly mammoths with horrible diarrhea. Oh, man, IBD, woolly mammoths. That would be a bummits.

That would be a bummer. That would be quite a science achievement, though, wouldn't it? Yeah, I guess so. So where do we stand on this progress towards creating these diarrhea spraying elephants? So they are claiming that in five years, they will be able to bring a cold adapted Asian elephant into the world that you could call the colossal woolly mammoth. That's a pretty short time frame. How reliable are they with their predictions? Did they predict their ability to do the dire wolf?

sort of like Elon Musk-like projections. I don't know that we have the data to make those statements yet, because my sense was that the dire wolf surprised everybody. Like, they didn't really let folks know where they were. And then all of a sudden they were like, hey, we've done it. I don't know. This sounds like an incredible amount of work. And additionally, you know, I don't think they've gotten to the step yet

where you try to impregnate either of the elephants. And, you know, if you get halfway through that pregnancy and then it fails, you've got another year to wait. And so I think it's hard to figure out the timing. for that stage in particular. Like, maybe they have a good handle on how long the gene editing takes now, but if it's going to take in the elephants or not,

I don't think we know yet. Fascinating. One of the benefits that they're touting to this technique is that along the way they've done research on elephant endoheliotropic herpes viruses, which are a leading cause of death in wild elephants.

You'll note, I can't correctly say preons or prions, but I think I got endoheliotropic herpes viruses out okay. That sounded good. Yeah, great. Thank you. And so they've been working. to understand that. This is a leading cause of death in wild elephants and I think also in zoo populations. And so, you know, they're arguing that one of the benefits is all of this

science that comes along on the ride that they figure out. Our moonshot. They say they're about five years away and we're going to have to wait and see how they do. They also have a project in the works on the thylacine and another one on the dodo. What's the thylacine? That sounds like an amino acid. It does sound like an amino acid. Now you're making me wonder did I write the name wrong. It really sounds like an amino acid. No, that's actually an animal. Oh, it's a Tasmanian tiger. Yeah, and that only went extinct in 1936.

And so I think we have a fair number of specimens that were like stuck in freezers from animals that were held in zoos back when we were like, oh, wait, we should try to turn this all around. Oh, we waited too long. So, yeah, they're working on that. They're working on the dodo. And the dodo went extinct something like 300 years ago. And so, you know, both of those projects, the animals are thousands of years.

less dead than the others, but those projects are also in the works. And those feel like efforts to write some wrong, you know, to undo some crime that we committed by like lazily or sloppily or greedily or selfishly wiping out some species. And you know, I should be clear that Colossil's website isn't saying de-extinction writes past wrongs. I think what they are arguing is that the science is important. I'm sure a lot of people go to work every day because it sounds awesome to bring back the dire wolf. And it's important to be excited about your job. And they believe in this like replacing of ecosystem processes that were lost when the organisms went extinct. But I agree. That does feel to me also like a

get out of jail free card for the things that we've done in the past. Then let's revisit one of the solar system's greatest crimes, which is wiping out the dinosaur 65 million years ago. So Kelly is colossal going to open Jurassic Park at some point? So I asked Beth Shapiro this like a decade ago. And her answer was no. And I was like, but like maybe when the technology advances and she was like, no, never. Never? And I was like, never, why never?

And she's like, look, you almost certainly can't read DNA sequences that are over a million years old. And so we just don't have the DNA to work off of from fossils. And so what you could do is you could say, all right, I know that this gene controls feathers and this gene controls teeth and this gene controls mouth size and you could try using

what you knew and some dinosaur-like reference genome to like tinker with that and make something dinosauroid but she's like you're never going to bring back T-Rex as it was you could bring back some Frankenrex that was your best guess

you could bring back T-Rex with even stronger thighs and diarrhea like the woolly mammoth you're really on the thigh thing. I'm guessing you never skip thigh day, Daniel. Or leg day, leg day. I think that's too personal a question, Kelly. I'm not going to answer that on the pod. I'm so sorry, Daniel. No, I just want to cheat. I just want to borrow the dire wolf DNA so I don't have to do leg day. No, that'd be great. Just a little crisper in your thighs and so that it takes care of it for you. Sounds like a menu option now. Daniel's crisper thighs. Would you like it with barbecue sauce?

Daniel, that question's too personal. Let's return to this observation you made at the beginning of the show. It is awesome to bring back, you know, something beautiful that existed once and we lost it. And now we get a chance to interact with it again. And that's amazing. Yeah. Do you still have that sense of wonder with the version that we are able to bring back? It doesn't feel like traveling to the past or undoing something we've done.

It feels like a simulation of that or an approximation of that. It doesn't totally scratch that itch, but it definitely goes in that direction, yeah. I think I would go to see the Dio Wolf exhibit at a zoo. For sure. Or maybe I'd go to see a woolly mammoth exhibit at the zoo. Where you're in could. And bring your bleach wipes. There's part of me that feels a little sad thinking about, you know, like if only one

woolly mammoth is brought back, because it turns out it was really dangerous for the elephants. to go through that childbirthing process. And so we get one woolly mammoth and we decide that's all we're ever going to do. Oh, it's all alone. Something about that feels sad. Like we're observing an animal going extinct all over again. And maybe I'm just being like too sentimental.

But I don't know. What do you think? No, I think that's an important aspect. You're creating a creature. It has an experience. What have you created? And it's like in great pain because you've created some weird Franken creature and it doesn't really work or it's miserable for some other reason.

So I think that's definitely something we should consider, especially the more intelligent species. I mean, wolves are smart, right? They're pack animals. They have emotions. They have relationships. Philosophically and morally, there are a lot of questions there. Yeah. Zach asked me, what would I think if we could bring back Neanderthals and try to, you know, figure out what a close human relative was like? You know, are they as intelligent as we are? Were we just more aggressive? And so we managed to like knock them out of the species pool. I feel like that is quite clearly unethical. But what do you think? Where is the line?

Oh, wow, that is a thorny question. Yeah, I mean, even just like editing your own babies using CRISPR is pretty unethical. But I feel like philosophically, it's kind of fuzzy. I mean, you choose your mate also. That affects the DNA of your kids. You have some influence over it, but it's weird to edit it directly. I don't know exactly where that line is or why there's the line there. There's lots of things we do.

Like, I created children, brought them into this world. They didn't get to choose it at all. Maybe they're happy. Maybe they're miserable. You know, it's sort of on me. I feel like. Having intelligent babies is already a philosophical quandary. Yeah, fair enough.

Then bringing Neanderthals would be complicated too because they're like a scientific creation. To be clear, Colossal has no plans to bring back the Neanderthals. That they've made public. Daniel, don't start trouble. Don't start trouble. So let's say gigantic evil, the corporation, decides they're going to bring back Neanderthals. And they bring back two of them. And it turns out those two need a lot of stuff.

support and then big evil goes out of business what happens to those Neanderthals who would be responsible for them would they be happy in this world where they're the only two representatives of a different species sounds like a great black mirror episode you should write there you go well if somebody wants to pay me to write that I am ready I will always take your money all right Netflix write to us to questions at daniel and kelly dot org as you can see we have loads of ideas All right. Well, on that sort of dark note, that's all I have to say about de-extinction today. I think I'd just like to bottom line by saying, I am still excited about this. I think it's cool. I think they have made some interesting breakthroughs. I guess I just have complicated feelings about de-extinction in general.

What about you? I think it also tells us something about the science communication universe. This is an impressive step forward technologically and fascinating scientifically, but it was oversold in the press a little bit. And now there's like this back reaction against it. And I think, you know, the whole science communication ecosystem encourages people to oversell every tiny step forward as a revolutionary advance, which means that the folks out there don't really know what they're reading. Is this just overblown hype or not? And so there's a lot of sort of cynicism out there.

And you can see that in people's responses to the questions. And we got a lot of emails. And I get emails all the time about science headlines. People are like, is this real, Daniel? Did NASA really discover 37 extra dimensions? No. they didn't. So you've got to become like a critical thinker and an educated consumer of this science news. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, I think conveying exactly what was done

is a little bit more complicated and requires an attention span from the reader to like get through the entire description. But I think that if you fail in that goal, then you lose trust with your audience. And that has massive implications for any kind of science you're trying to communicating, like, you know, vaccines and stuff, for example. So I think you've got to be really careful about how you do this stuff. Big problem that we're not going to solve today on the pod. But thanks everybody for listening to our effort to communicate real science in a credible way to you because we know you're interested in learning more and digging deeper beyond what's covered in the pop-side articles. And that's what we try to bring you here on the pod.

Thanks, everyone for listening. Thank you so much. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at daniel and Kelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of us. of those platforms you can find us at D and K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy

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