But not everyone is on board with that assertion.
The following responses may have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
No, it has not.
Romulus and Remus, seen here at one-month-old, are two of the three “dire wolf” siblings created by Colossal since last fall.© Colossal Biosciences
Colossal first sequenced the genomes of two dire wolves by extracting DNA from ancient bones.
Its important to have some sense for the scale of the genetic differences between the species.
Colossal made only 20 edits.
That is nowhere near enough to approach actual dire wolf biology.
20 edits, whatever they are, cannot even come close.
The simple answer is no.
And theyve engineered those traits into a gray wolf.
So you end up with a genetically engineered gray wolf, which is kind of a hybrid.
I think that the achievement we should be focused on are the techniques theyve developed to do this.
That is, to identify genetic sequences and to re-engineer them into the genome of an existing species.
While Im down on the terminology being used, like de-extinction and resurrecting things.
I am an enthusiast of the potential of the technology thats been developed by Colossal Biosciences.
Its a complicated answer to a simple question.
I would say no.
And B, I have looked into some of the technology that theyve used.
And its very tricky.
Its very degraded DNA.
You have to map that DNA back to a target species.
There are biases when you do that.
So is that a dire wolf?
Well never know for sure.
Is it more like a dire wolf than a gray wolf?
I think it is.
And I think they should be very proud of it.
Is it the dire wolf?
Does it have all the same ecological features as a dire wolf?
Does it have some of them?
And my guess is thats as much as they hoped to accomplish and theyve probably accomplished their goals.
Has the dire wolf been de-extincted or whatever the correct terminology is for that?
And I dont think that was their goal to create a perfect stock.
And so its probably a bit premature to just declare a huge success or exactly what that success comprises.
This debate misses the point.
The science: We and our academic partners collected DNA fragments from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull.
These key genetic variants havent been expressed for thousands of years.
Remember what de-extinction is actually about.
Its not about creating perfect genetic copies of individual animals.
Its not about populating de-extinction amusement parks.
Its about restoring lost ecological functions and enhancing biodiversity.
Its about developing technology capable of adding robustness and resilience to our ecosystems.
Its aboutdoing somethingpowerful and precise in the face of our current extinction crisis.
The implications for conservation are profound.
The same technologies that brought back the dire wolf have already yielded dividends for endangered species conservation.
Beyond the technical achievement, theres something more profound happening here.
It is within the realm of human endeavor to reverse species decline.
Has the dire wolf been resurrected?
Dire wolf DNA is specifying uniquely dire wolf phenotypes in living canids for the first time in 12,000 years.
Functional de-extinction, partial genetic resurrection, call it what you will.
I call it hope.
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