Did scientists genetically engineer the long-extinct dire wolf, or give gray wolf offspring its features?
Ronald Sandler, a professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, says Colossal Biosciences genetically modified the gray wolf with some “amazing” features of the dire wolf.
The reported “de-extinction” of the long-extinct dire wolf is a significant scientific achievement, but the animal at the center of the development should be thought of as a genetically altered gray wolf and not the species that existed thousands of years ago, a Northeastern expert says.
“There is real technological innovation here,” says Ronald Sandler, a professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University.
Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company, claimed to have essentially brought the dire wolf out of extinction — literally resurrecting a species of canine most famous for having been featured in the popular television series “Game of Thrones.”
Images of three snow-white pups have been circulating online as proof of a groundbreaking experiment in gene-editing. The company credits breakthroughs in the fields of “computational biology, genome engineering, embryology and stem cell reprogramming” as helping its purported mission of preserving the world’s biodiversity.
But are they dire wolves?
For Sandler, the question is a red herring.
“It’s a genetically modified gray wolf that has some amazing genetic and morphological features because they’ve not been instantiated for thousands of years,” he says.
“The important question to ask is not whether these are dire wolves, but rather how these biotechnology innovations advance ongoing conservation efforts for existing species,” Sandler says.
The dire wolf, which once roamed the Earth some 13,000 years ago, is known for, among other features, its large stature, dark coat and “specialized bone-cracking back teeth.” The company used a combination of gene-editing techniques and ancient DNA found in fossils to engineer the newborn pups.
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The company’s de-extinction claims aside, Diaa Alabed, an associate teaching professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern, says the experiment demonstrated some novel science.
In many ways, that was the point.
“From a scientific point of view, the objective here is to better understand how we can implement the advances of biotechnology and its applications,” he says.
Behind the scenes, he adds, it’s hard to know what the company’s real objectives are. When compared to public sector research, private innovation is often tangled up in a web of incentives. Profit, publicity and investment, he says, sometimes overshadow the science.
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But Alabed says that Colossal’s technological feats are nevertheless impressive.
“The ability to obtain genetic material from ancient organisms, such as from fossils, has been advancing,” Alabed says.
Colossal scientists used CRISPR technology, a gene-editing tool, to modify the genetic material of the gray wolf and replace them with dire wolf traits found in the ancient DNA. Alabed says that, depending on the integrity of the dire wolf DNA, recent advances in sequencing, such as so-called next-generation sequencing, allows scientists to identify and isolate genetic differences between the two wolf species.
“They compared the genetic materials and found that there are a number of genes that are different,” he says. “Then they probably hypothesized or asked what might happen if they extracted the genes from the ancient wolf and put them in the gray wolf.”
Alabed continues: “What they do is they isolate the nucleus, which contains the genetic material in animals and many other living organisms, because it has the chromosomes; and once they isolate the nucleus, they will use genome editing to directly cut into the gray wolf DNA and insert the genes from the dire wolf.”
For Sandler, the issue comes back to conservation.
“The crucial issues here are keeping existing grey wolf populations robust through ongoing conservation efforts and legal protections, as well as exploring how these biotechnology advancements can contribute to endangered red wolf recovery — that’s more important than trying to figure out what to do with individuals that approximate a wolf species that’s been extinct for over 10,000 years,” he says.
