Today, Explained - The startup that cried dire wolf

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Colossal says it's brought the dire wolf back from extinction — but the accuracy of that claim and the ethics of de-extinction are in question. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Further reading: The Dire Wolf Is Back. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Colossal’s Dire Wolves, Romulus and Remus, at one month old. Photo credit Business Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dire Wolves! Not just a thing from Game of Thrones, not just Jon Snow's best friend. Dire Wolves 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. A startup called Colossal says they've brought these pups back from extinction. They say they've got three of them but are these dire wolves they brought back actually?

Dire wolves? And whether they are or aren't, should we be trying to bring dire wolves back? Like why? We are going to ask on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Sophos. With Sophos, no matter your business's size, you get enterprise-grade cybersecurity technology and real-world expertise, always in sync, always in your corner. Sophos' native AI technologies evolve with every threat, and their experts are ready 24x7, 365, with their

managed detection and response services to stop threats before they strike. And you can manage all your security alerts, configurations, and other security products through the Sophos Central Platform. Don't sacrifice your peace of mind to grow your business. Learn more at sophos.com. From early morning workouts that need a boost to late night drives that need vibes, a good playlist can help you make the most out of your everyday.

And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC optimum points everywhere you shop. With the best playlists, you never miss a good song. With this card, you never miss out on getting the most points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard. The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits.

Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. This 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 like, I don't know, we could do anything like... How about Diet Direwolves?

Yes, exactly. These so-called dire wolves were created by extracting DNA from a 72,000 year old dire wolf inner ear bone and a 13,000 year old dire wolf tooth. They determined its closest living relative is the gray wolf. So then they made 20 edits to gray wolf DNA to include those dire wolf specific genes. That animal looks like a dire wolf. It will behave like a dire wolf and it is a dire wolf specific genes. That animal looks like a dire wolf.

It will behave like a dire wolf. And it is a dire wolf. 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'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. But 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 a perfect setup. And then there are these two bright white teenage wolves. So 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, but they do look different. And again, I'm not an animal morphologist. So 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, they're in this enclosure, they're doing little things wolves do and dogs sometimes do, one pees, the other rolls in it, but they're majestic. They are going about their quasi-meta direwolf existence, blissful disregard for any controversy about what you want to call them, or 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 Lam. Who is he? What is he trying to do here? So, I mean, Ben Lam is kind of amazing. I am pretty much in awe of Ben Lam.

He'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. And 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 Neanderthal? And then the press goes, ah!

And then George Church goes, I was just considering it. I had to think about it. You guys calm down. So George Church and Ben get together and they, basically what Ben says is, if you had all the money in the world, George, what would you bring back? What would you wanna do with your time? And George says, I'd bring back the wooly 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 my, 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 gonna learn an awful lot of interesting biomedical tech that we could sell. That'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. 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 what is Disney World charge now or Disneyland hundreds hundreds? All right, so maybe I take that back Maybe maybe the better business is displaying them How much money have they raised to do this and and how much is this company that they're running colossal worth at this point All right, so they they now raised over $400 million and 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 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. The dire wolf 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 in an embryo and then implant it in a womb, you're going to have an animal that has those genes being acted on. That 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 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, okay, 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. Soterios Johnson You 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 in 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 Lovadalen, who's a Swedish woolly mammoth guy, and 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 a hundred million dollars 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 Colossus was 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 moviemaking. Imaking. I mean, I give Colossus a lot of credit, and Ben Lamb in particular, a lot of credit for

meeting people where they actually are. I mean, I, 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. What happens to them? You love that. I do. I'm going to stick with it. What happens to them? Where do they go? 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 be, 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 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 dire wolves are going to get. But they're not planning to breed them, which I don't entirely understand. Colossal 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, 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 because 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 it 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 animal you know kind of because we now have this this technology that can reopen the door that we see we thought that we had absolutely and and you know uh

we thought that we had absolutely and, and you know, incontrovertibly closed before. So the whole thing leaves you a little bit blue. DT Max read his profile of the dire wolves over at newyorker.com. The ethics of de-extinction when today explained is back. The ethics of de-extinction, when today explained is back. 35 pounds on Noom. It's a psychological thing too. They're definitely teaching how to live a better, healthier lifestyle. Noom is teaching me the habits so I do not have to be on weight loss meds forever. Don't believe it? Take it from Lauren, who lost 22 pounds on Noom.

If I come off of the GLP One, it's not gonna automatically make my weight yo-yo back. I'm gonna have good skills and know what to do to take care of myself. $149 GLP Ones? Now that's Noom Smart. Noom, the smart way to lose weight. Get started with Noom GLP-1 at Noom.com. Real Noom users compensated to provide their story.

Individual results may vary. Not all customers will medically qualify for prescription medication. Compounded medications are not reviewed by the FDA for safety, efficacy, or quality. Compounded medications are not reviewed by the FDA for safety, efficacy, or quality. The all-new, all-electric Can-Am Origin motorcycle takes you everywhere. Sleek power for the streets and deep adventure routes for the trails. Discover your origin today. Learn more at CanAmMotorcycles.com. Motorcycles.com.

Rider, wave, step, look out. Riding a bike in the Ride to Conquer Cancer is like being part of humanity's greatest. The money you raise, the time you spend, the energy that you give is helping people live, is giving people hope. And that's just so beautiful. Care of the fire for cancer research. Join the ride at ridetoconquer.ca. You'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 dire wolves in the northern United States somewhere by designing babies, how technology is changing the ways we create children.

And when we look at these diet dire wolves 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, and 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 direwol wolves have come to be. Obviously, let's just think about whatever animal it was that birthed these dire wolves, not a dire wolf, 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 and nest the size them. You'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, it could be changed, they've changed 15. And when we're mucking around with nature and changing genes, mistakes get made. Genes 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. About five years ago, Dr. Hei Zhangkui 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 gonna 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 the 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. These 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. we're keeping them at a very constricted space,

their risk of other diseases. So I'm concerned about their welfare. Matthew 1 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 gotta 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. Where is the regulation when it comes to this process of the extinction?

Well, 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, the Trump's, President Trump's secretary of the interior, Doug Borgorgum 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. If 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 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, it increases 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, given that we are losing, as Colossal says, we're losing a lot of animals every year and we will be losing more, particularly 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 wanna 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 and endangered pink pigeons, vaccinating elephants against herpes, sharpening our tools for fighting diseases. There's apparently some potential there. So unfortunately, 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 and 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. The woolly mammoth too, which is their 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'd eat 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. So 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. Klitzman, 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. 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 as we as a society could spend it where it's going to lead to the most bang for the buck. Where 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.

Dr. Robert Klitzman, Columbia University. Dr. Devin Schwartz made our show today. He was edited by Jolie Meyers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Andrea Kristensdottir and Patrick Boyd. My name is Sean Ramosforum, the show is Today Explained.