{"id":27282,"date":"2025-05-07T09:00:52","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T09:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=27282"},"modified":"2025-05-07T09:28:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T09:28:51","slug":"theres-no-undo-button-for-extinct-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=27282","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s No \u2018Undo\u2019 Button for Extinct Species"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When one company proclaimed it had brought back the dire wolf, the response was joyous. But de-extinction remains a dangerous fantasy.<\/p>\n

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\u201cOver 10,000 years ago, a howl was lost to time.\u201d<\/p>\n

So begins a recent promotional video by Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company, whose narrator speaks in a voice that sounds as if it, too, was resurrected from the past: a 1950s newsreel or biology-class explainer. Quick cuts of scientific B-roll \u2014 frozen blood in vials, a microscope, a white-coated hand jiggling a computer joystick \u2014 eventually give way to a lingering close-up of a wolf opening a bright, golden eye. \u201cToday,\u201d the voice intones, \u201cit returns.\u201d<\/p>\n

The video introduces viewers to Romulus and Remus, \u201cthe first two dire wolves since the Pleistocene era.\u201d In under three minutes, the very cute pups mature from tiny fluff balls, stumbling through their first steps, to regal youngsters romping in drifts of snow that accentuate their own (luxurious) white coats. \u201cRoughhousing may look like play,\u201d the narrator tells us, \u201cbut it\u2019s serious practice for life in the pack.\u201d The voice then shows a third, younger pup, Khaleesi \u2014 \u201cthe first female dire wolf brought back from extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colossal brands itself \u201cthe de-extinction company\u201d and has announced plans to bring back woolly mammoths and dodos and Tasmanian tigers, some of the biggest stars in the species extermination hall of fame. On a planet with as many as one million species at risk of disappearing, many within decades, the company is promising an undo button.<\/p>\n

Many media outlets, including People and CNN, breathlessly promoted Colossal\u2019s story; Time featured a cover portrait of Remus with a big red line through the word \u201cextinct.\u201d On my Facebook feed, clickbait link aggregators trumpeted \u201cthe world\u2019s first de-extinction\u201d in posts that were awe-struck and joyful. Any commenter who questioned the company\u2019s narrative was shouted down as a hater. Amid the relentlessly grim news about the state of our planet, here was a tale of pure inspiration, of futuristic science triumphing over the tragic losses of a mythic past.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it\u2019s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf \u2014 an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as a fantasy. Colossal\u2019s advisers include the \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d author George R.R. Martin and two stars of the HBO adaptation, and a press photo showed the animals sitting on the show\u2019s Iron Throne. Many commenters were shocked not by the advancing science of genetic engineering but rather by the revelation that dire wolves were once real animals.<\/p>\n

Dire wolves thrived in the Americas for more than 200,000 years, adeptly filling so many ecological niches that their remains have been found from Alaska to Peru. More than 4,000 wolves were pulled from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles alone. They are understood to have been hunters of the many large mammals that populated the Americas before the arrival of humans dramatically changed the continents\u2019 ecology. They then disappeared alongside their prey, among the earliest victims of what would become an ongoing crisis of human-driven extinction.<\/p>\n

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When one company proclaimed it had brought back the dire wolf, the response was joyous. But de-extinction remains a dangerous fantasy.\u201cOver 10,000 years ago, a howl was lost to time.\u201dSo begins a recent promotional video by Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company, whose narrator speaks in a voice that sounds as if it, too, was resurrected from the past: a 1950s newsreel or biology-class explainer. Quick cuts of scientific B-roll \u2014 frozen blood in vials, a microscope, a white-coated hand jiggling a computer joystick \u2014 eventually give way to a lingering close-up of a wolf opening a bright, golden eye. \u201cToday,\u201d the voice intones, \u201cit returns.\u201dThe video introduces viewers to Romulus and Remus, \u201cthe first two dire wolves since the Pleistocene era.\u201d In under three minutes, the very cute pups mature from tiny fluff balls, stumbling through their first steps, to regal youngsters romping in drifts of snow that accentuate their own (luxurious) white coats. \u201cRoughhousing may look like play,\u201d the narrator tells us, \u201cbut it\u2019s serious practice for life in the pack.\u201d The voice then shows a third, younger pup, Khaleesi \u2014 \u201cthe first female dire wolf brought back from extinction.\u201dColossal brands itself \u201cthe de-extinction company\u201d and has announced plans to bring back woolly mammoths and dodos and Tasmanian tigers, some of the biggest stars in the species extermination hall of fame. On a planet with as many as one million species at risk of disappearing, many within decades, the company is promising an undo button.Many media outlets, including People and CNN, breathlessly promoted Colossal\u2019s story; Time featured a cover portrait of Remus with a big red line through the word \u201cextinct.\u201d On my Facebook feed, clickbait link aggregators trumpeted \u201cthe world\u2019s first de-extinction\u201d in posts that were awe-struck and joyful. Any commenter who questioned the company\u2019s narrative was shouted down as a hater. Amid the relentlessly grim news about the state of our planet, here was a tale of pure inspiration, of futuristic science triumphing over the tragic losses of a mythic past.De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it\u2019s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf \u2014 an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as a fantasy. Colossal\u2019s advisers include the \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d author George R.R. Martin and two stars of the HBO adaptation, and a press photo showed the animals sitting on the show\u2019s Iron Throne. Many commenters were shocked not by the advancing science of genetic engineering but rather by the revelation that dire wolves were once real animals.Dire wolves thrived in the Americas for more than 200,000 years, adeptly filling so many ecological niches that their remains have been found from Alaska to Peru. More than 4,000 wolves were pulled from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles alone. They are understood to have been hunters of the many large mammals that populated the Americas before the arrival of humans dramatically changed the continents\u2019 ecology. They then disappeared alongside their prey, among the earliest victims of what would become an ongoing crisis of human-driven extinction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27284,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27282"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27285,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27282\/revisions\/27285"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}