De-Extinction: Should We Resurrect the Dead?

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

In the winter of 2024, three extraordinary wolves were born on a 2000-acre wildlife preserve in an undisclosed location. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are the poster children for Colossal Biosciences, advertised as the first direwolves to walk the earth since the species’ extinction tens of thousands of years ago. Their snowy coats, formidable size, and distinctive vocalizations are absent in the gray wolves who provided their base genomes. This striking phenotype results from only 20 edits in 14 genes, informed by ancient DNA. The wolves brought Colossal into the spotlight, but they’re just the tip of a vast iceberg.

We are living in a mass extinction—the World Animal Foundation predicts that half of all species could disappear by 2050. Hence Colossal’s mission to rescue endangered species from the brink, resurrect long-lost creatures, and create a genetic repository representing a menagerie of species, a modern-day Noah’s Ark called the BioVault. It’s unclear how they’ll preserve DNA considering its limited half-life, or maintain the identity of cell lines as they divide and mutate. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are proof that edited cells can be grown into animals, but they are neither gray wolves nor the true direwolves of the past, more like an homage to the latter based on the former.

Among Colossal’s ambitious endeavors is the quest to resurrect the woolly mammoth. So far, they’ve given mice thicker fur and accelerated fat metabolism by editing just a few of the 85 genes they plan to modify in the Asian elephant genome. They aim to have a calf by 2028, after nearly two years of gestation. The ethics of forcibly impregnating animals are thorny, but it’s so commonplace in conservation and animal agriculture that most hardly question it; Colossal is even American Humane Society certified. Further, elephants with mammoth characteristics would be born into an environment unsuited to their needs. Elephants and wolves are gregarious, with complex social dynamics. Their territorial ranges are far larger than the Colossal preserve, and most of their native environments have been hopelessly altered or reduced. Creating the animals before securing healthy, robust habitats seems like putting the cart before the horse. They were never meant to live in captivity, or in solitude.

On a population level, resurrecting a species from a single sample or severely limited pool of individuals has dire evolutionary consequences. Subsequent generations have only a fraction of their ancestors’ genetic diversity, leaving them vulnerable to recessive diseases, birth defects, and weakened immunity. Ironically, de-extinct species may be more extinction-prone than those who came before them.

Colossal claims that its objectives fit together to create a more sustainable future for humans and animals alike. Indeed, intersections between the company’s different projects have yielded surprising discoveries. Research into resurrecting the thylacine uncovered a single base-pair change in the genome of a related marsupial, the Northern quoll, that would make them resistant to a deadly bufotoxin, allowing them to eat invasive cane toads with impunity. The edit has been implemented in cell lines, but not live organisms. In the process of researching mammoths, Colossal also developed a novel mRNA vaccine for a herpes virus that was decimating Asian elephant populations, which has been tested and proven effective in two individuals.

Despite exponential advances in the last decade, gene editing remains risky and expensive. Colossal targets only a few genes to modify in each organism in the hope that beneficial traits will spread rapidly through their populations. They’re using this approach with American red wolves, the world’s most endangered canid, incorporating ancestral DNA discovered in coyote-wolf hybrids from coastal regions of Louisiana and Texas. These “ghost wolves” have red wolf alleles that were presumed lost from the species’ severely bottlenecked genepool, making them a vital source of genetic diversity.

Colossal considers it imperative for humanity to reverse the damage we’ve wrought on the biosphere. Their approach is to out-innovate the problem, bombard it with every available technology, grasp for the reins of “runaway evolution.” But perhaps our desire for hegemony and control is the culprit behind this mass extinction.

Humans are the most successful invasive species of all time. The megafauna that used to roam the earth are extinct because we became their apex predators. We got here by outcompeting, destroying habitats, and hunting to extinction. If we truly wish to be better stewards of the earth, something must give.

We will never achieve sustainability by building water-guzzling AI data centers and labs that require hundreds of watts of power a day. If de-extinction efforts require colossal amounts of resources and labor, only to create animals too fragile and unpredictable to release from captivity, perhaps we should re-evaluate our priorities. We can still work toward ecological health, but we must reimagine this objective through a less interventionist lens. If we want endangered species to thrive without us, we have to restore their habitats and then we have to leave.

True rewilding means giving back lands we’ve overtaken, allowing animals to reclaim their ecological niches or carve out new ones, and abandoning the pursuit of complete dominion over nature. Trying to manipulate ecosystems, to reshape them into utopic visions of their past, to meddle in evolution rather than letting natural selection take its course – this is a losing game.

Just as the birth of new species is central to the history of life, so is extinction. Extinct species line the halls of our museums, alive in our imaginations and the stories we tell. Their bones fill the earth; their remains provide the fuel that has allowed us to change the face of the planet. And the world changes us back. Old gives way to new, and mass extinctions pave the way for explosions of diversity in their wake. The tree of life widens and narrows, shedding old branches and growing new ones. Instead of trying to force it to hold on to dying twigs, we should let them fall.

Opinion by Louisa Miller-Out