De-extinction
Sci-fi's Jurassic Park pre-dated what's possible now for the planet
ASPEN, Colorado—Even now, one of the most frequent questions de-extinction entrepreneur Ben Lamm says he gets asked is: “Are you going to bring back the dinosaurs?”
With the latest sequel to Jurassic Park opening this week in theaters across the country, it’s no wonder that many attending the annual Aspen Ideas Festival here this past weekend kept hitting Lamm up with that same question.
“De-extinction” is science’s new endeavor to bring back extinct species [or create close facsimiles of them] using modern biotechnology. Lamm and his Dallas-based company, Colossal Biosciences, shocked the scientific community and the world in April by announcing it had brought back the Dire Wolf, an animal that has been extinct for some 12,000 years.
Lamm—appearing here this past week—caused a new round of jaw-dropping by announcing Colossal also plans to bring back even more animals lost to history, including the Dodo bird, the Tasmanian Tiger and next? Maybe even the Woolly Mammoth.
“We’re working on mammoth DNA now,” Lamm told Aspen festival-goers.
Did Jurassic Park get it right?
Yes and no, Lamm says. The original movie, which hit theaters for the first time in 1993, told the fictional story of a mad scientist who extracted dinosaur DNA from ancient mosquitoes preserved in amber to bring dangerous velociraptors and deadly carnivores, like the T-Rex, back to life on a remote island.
“Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg didn’t have it all wrong,” Lamm said in a quick interview with us over the weekend. [We met Lamm earlier, at the SXSW conference in March and caught up with him again in Aspen.] “We do have to find ancient DNA, but we get it from a combination of ancient teeth and bone, not mosquitos. We can go back 1.5 million years, but not 65 million years (the time of the dinosaurs). But we’ve also got people who travel the world to bring stuff back to us, like ancient bones, ears and teeth from thawing permafrost sites in Alaska, Siberia, northern Canada, Greenland and New Zealand, so it can sometimes feel a bit more like something out of Indiana Jones than Jurassic Park.”
Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by Lamm and award-winning Harvard geneticist George Church, employs 130 bioscientists, and is the first company to use CRISPR gene-editing technology successfully to create a process for de-extinction of a variety of lost species.
The technology and a vast global network gives scientists new and better ways to compare the DNA from extinct animals with the DNA of their closest living relatives. “Today we use genetic engineering and ancient DNA and modern computer models to reassemble DNA—and then use AI to help us compare it to that of an animal’s closest living relative—and then use CRISPR and new cloning technologies to bring lost animals new life.”
For the Dire Wolf, Colossal was able to take DNA from museum samples of a 13,000-year-old tooth found in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old ear bone discovered in American Falls, Idaho, to analyze the Dire Wolf genome and identify positive genetic differences between Dire Wolves and modern gray wolves, which have 99.5% of their DNA in common.
Why bother?
And why now? Lamm says more animal species are becoming extinct, and faster than ever—largely driven by humans. The World Wildlife Fund says there has been an average 73% decline in wildlife populations since 1970, and “nature is disappearing at an alarming rate.” Colossal’s mission, Lamm says, is to use genetic engineering and de-extinction methods to help reverse the decline in the Earth’s biodiversity and solve some of the challenges of a warming world.
“What we are learning is that there are all kinds of special, unique factors in life and that if we eradicate this life before studying it, we miss the opportunity to see how it can it help the other parts of the planet, including us.”
The planet has experienced five previous “mass extinction” events, the last one occurring 65.5 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs from existence. Today, experts believe, we’re in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, but this one is made by humans—not nature.
The National Museum of Natural History says the rate of modern-day animal extinctions first began skyrocketing with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and then spiked further after World War II, when exponential growth in the world’s population spiked again, growing to what is estimated to be over 8.2 billion people today. Humans are now using some 40% of all land on the planet to produce food, the museum reports, and that “land grab” is now responsible for 90% of the Earth’s de-forestation. Humans also now use an estimated 70% of the planet’s fresh water, and are elbowing out thousands more species each year. “All over the world,” says the WWF’s 2024 Life of the Planet report, “we are cutting down forests, using too much water from rivers, choking our oceans with plastic and pushing many animals to extinction.”
“Modern conservation isn’t working. The speed at which we’re eradicating species…we’re going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050.” - Ben Lamm
Learning resilience
Working on de-extinction, says Colossal’s Chief Science Officer, Beth Shapiro, “is helping us keep more existing species alive.” Lessons from the company’s work with the Dire Wolves, she says, are now being used to expand the population of red wolves, an existing species now just 20 animals shy of total extinction. Teams working on de-extincting the Woolly Mammoth, Lamm says, are learning how to help today’s elephants, and ourselves, to become better able to survive the warming climate.
Being able to bring animals back, or even to create hybrids of extinct animals from both our recent past and the Ice Age, Lamm adds, could also help to restore damaged ecosystems and “fix the Arctic tundra.”
Fear and skepticism
Not everyone is supportive of Colossal’s work and experimentation.
Some critics say that de-extincting could negatively disrupt today’s animal communities. Others worry that some “de-extincted” species would behave differently from their existing descendants and become more dangerously invasive than helpful. “And there are some concerns that scientists using the process ‘are trying to play God,’” Lamm says—and disputes.
Paul Ehrlich, for years a leading bioscience scholar at Stanford University and author of a 2014 essay in the Yale 360 Review—entitled The Case Against De-Extinction: It’s a Fascinating but Dumb Idea—wrote that “spending millions of dollars trying to de-extinct a few species will not compensate for the thousands of populations and species which have already been lost due to human activities.”
Ehrlich, like some other critics, instead advocates “putting all limited resources for science and conservation into preventing extinctions, by first tackling the causes of demise: habitat destruction, climate disruption, pollution, over-harvesting and so on.”
Good idea, Lamm agrees, but says that in today’s politically polarized society, “it’s not happening” and there needs to be other ways to achieve those same goals. More work to save endangered species is critical, he says, but new ways are also needed to slow the pace and demise of increasing numbers of species—if for no other reason than to keep the planet safely and more richly biodiverse for future generations by applying new breakthroughs in technology and science to hurry things along.
Says Colossal’s Science Chief, Beth Shapiro: “If we want a future both biodiverse and filled with people, we should be giving ourselves—now— the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things we’ve done to the world already.
“I can’t wait to see what other species lost to time can teach us next.”
For a deeper dive into de-extinction, check out Colossal’s step-by-step description of the process it followed for the Dire Wolf. Also see the recent cover story, “Extinct” in TIME magazine about the Dire Wolf experiment and explore The Hastings Center for Bioethics and its take on de-extinction here. See also WWF’s Living Planet Report 2024 on the rapid rise of animal extinctions over the past 50 years.
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Fascinating! Thank you for this.