The Dire Wolf Is Back
Extinction is a part of nature. Of the five billion species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 per cent have vanished. The Late Devonian extinction, nearly four hundred million years ago, annihilated the jawless fish. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction, two hundred million years ago, finished off the crocodile-like phytosaur. Sixty-six million years ago, the end-Cretaceous extinction eliminated the Tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptor; rapid climate change from an asteroid impact was the likely cause. The Neanderthals disappeared some forty thousand years ago. One day—whether from climate change, another asteroid, nuclear war, or something we can’t yet imagine—humans will probably be wiped out, too.
The difference with humans is that we’ve been taking a huge number of species down with us. Starting about three hundred thousand years ago, we learned to hunt with spears and in groups. That gave us significant agency in deciding which animals would disappear first—we chose them either because they wanted to eat us or because we wanted to eat them. The animals’ demise, though, helped doom large predators that hunted our preferred prey. Among the casualties were sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves. Along the way, various other species also breathed their last: woolly mammoths, Irish elk, dodos, carrier pigeons, Steller’s sea cows, great auks, thylacines (Tasmanian tigers). The carnage continues. Last year, the slender-billed curlew, a bird that once ranged over much of Europe and Asia, was declared gone. And there are only two northern white rhinos left—both females.
People have been sad about driving animals into oblivion for nearly as long as we have been eradicating them. And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem. In 1886, British authorities in South Africa were shocked by the speed with which Boer farmers had decimated the quagga, a half-striped relative of the zebra, and tried to save the species from extinction with the Better Preservation of Game Act. (The measure came too late.) In 1973, the U.S. Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, in response to the decline of many iconic American animals, including the bald eagle and the grizzly bear. Despite such laws and other conservation efforts, the current rate of extinction is, by some measures, a thousand times what it would be without humans.
Since the nineteen-eighties, various attempts have been made to see if it might be possible, somehow, to reverse the process. In theory, at least, the technological know-how that helped us extirpate so much wildlife could be deployed to bring back a few of our victims. Humans who are pursuing this goal are essentially asking for something that nature has never provided: a do-over.
Most of these investigations have been made by academic scientists or environmentalists. But what if the person trying to reverse an extinction was a man with an enormous amount of money, a mistrust of institutions, and a love of pop culture? The kind of guy who wants to move fast and fix things—but also increase his net worth. What animal would such a person choose to revive first? I saw the answer in late February, when someone turned on his computer and showed me a photograph of two cute white dire-wolf pups sitting on an asymmetrical throne made of iron swords. At first glance, it looked like an A.I.-generated image, but I was told that these were actual living animals. They were growing up at an undisclosed location, but in a few weeks he would let me go visit them.
Ben Lamm is a forty-three-year-old serial entrepreneur who has already had five “exits”—acquisitions of startups by other companies. He lives in Dallas; his estimated net worth is $3.7 billion. Lamm is dyslexic, and when he was younger he found reading difficult. He tended toward graphic novels and video games, but over time he taught himself, he says, to “read for concepts.” Today, he listens to a lot of podcasts devoted to bold new ideas. Among the interesting figures he has run across is George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. Church has endorsed using gene therapy to improve human resistance to radiation, thus facilitating interplanetary travel; he has also written about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals back into existence. A seventy-year-old with a long white beard and twinkling, wouldn’t-it-be-fun-to-try-that eyes, he is particularly admired among those who esteem speculative, gee-whiz thinkers; he has given half a dozen TED or TEDx talks. He likes to emphasize that he values the ways science can improve our lives. Church is also an accomplished lab scientist. He has more than a hundred and sixty approved or pending patent; among other things, he developed a process that allows crispr, the gene-editing technology, to be used to tinker with the human genome.
Soon after the pandemic hit, Lamm, who travels constantly, got covid, which led to a moment of introspection. He’d been founding companies since he was in college, and he’d made a lot of money, but had he made meaningful change? “Startups either grow and fail or grow and succeed,” he told me. Lamm had become interested in the way that various algae can capture carbon by absorbing it through photosynthesis before sinking to the bottom of the sea. Church had been part of a team that used Crispr to modify a blue-green algae’s genome so that it could sequester carbon twenty per cent more efficiently. Lamm called him and was excited by Church’s wide-ranging mind. “I’m really from the future, and I’m trying to let everyone catch up,” Lamm remembers Church joking. Lamm flew to Boston to visit him. Church talked about his myriad projects—he was using Crispr to help make pig organs suitable for transplants in humans, and to develop treatments for inherited diseases. Lamm found it all “pretty cool.” At some point, he asked Church which projects he would focus on if he had unlimited resources. Church said that one of the things he most wanted to do was bring back the woolly mammoth. Lamm was thrilled by the answer.
The woolly mammoth, which was native to the Arctic tundra, became extinct relatively recently, in evolutionary terms—about four thousand years ago. “The Egyptians were already building the Pyramids then,” Lamm told me. In 2012, Church explained, he had begun working with a nonprofit called Revive & Restore, in part to try to bring the giant creatures back to life. But it soon became apparent that the necessary technology was not sufficiently advanced. Lamm asked Church what kind of money he had access to for the project. Lamm remembers Church telling him that the tech investor Peter Thiel had donated to his lab, providing “a budget of a hundred.” Lamm was used to big money—“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy,” he told me—but he was daunted. Fuck, I guess I could raise a hundred million dollars for this, too, he recalls thinking. Church then clarified that Thiel had spent only a hundred thousand dollars on the project. In startup terms, this was a pittance. Church hadn’t had the money to get the mammoth effort going for real, Lamm felt. Now he would.
In 2020, Lamm and Church agreed to create a for-profit company, called Colossal Biosciences, whose showcase product would be the deëxtinction of animals. “We are currently the apex predator,” Lamm told himself. “Why not use our technology for good?” (Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of Crispr, doesn’t see it this way. She believes that the editing technology should be reserved for essential matters, such as helping people with severe congenital disorders. As she wrote in the book “A Crack in Creation,” published in 2017, “If we can avoid altering nature more than we already have, shouldn’t we try to do so?”)
Lamm, who pitches as naturally as he talks, quickly raised sixteen million dollars from investors, promising them that Colossal would “spin the tech out” for a profit by, say, repurposing any advances that it achieved in genetic engineering for the benefit of human health. He rented space in Dallas and brought in about five million dollars’ worth of incubators and cell sorters. For embryology work, he installed a positive-pressure room, which prevents the inflow of possibly contaminated air from other areas. He assembled a team of computational biologists, cellular engineers, genetic engineers, and embryologists. Lamm would run the operation while Church did the deep thinking, the advising, and some of the lab work, along with lending the company his scientific prestige.
They made a shortlist of animals that Colossal would try to revive. The company would focus on what are known as “charismatic megafauna”—animals cute or scary or striking enough that their absence has left a significant mark on human consciousness. Lamm wouldn’t have been interested in starting on some tiny lizard or unloved beetle. The woolly mammoth was first on Colossal’s list. The next two were the dodo, whose extinction was facilitated by the arrival of Dutch sailors, who brought various invasive species on their ships, and the thylacine, a marsupial with the face of a fox and the stripes of a zebra. (Tasmanian farmers did not like the thylacine’s appetite for their animals, so the government paid for its slaughter; the last one died in a zoo in Hobart in 1936.)
Reviving an extinct mammal, Lamm told me, is essentially a high-tech challenge: you have to hack the problem with advanced tools. You need to collect DNA-fragment samples, typically from bones, and then synthesize the information from those samples in an effort to reconstruct the animal’s genome, at least partly. After that, he said, “we need to create the right media to grow the cells. We need to do immortalization of the cells”—modifying them to overcome their natural limit on division, thus allowing them to replicate indefinitely. Lamm became even more technical: “We need to create induced pluripotent stem cells and see if we can use a process called gametogenesis to create eggs and sperm of those cells. And then, if we are successful in that, we’d need also to consider how to optimize genetic diversity.” The ultimate goal, he emphasized, was not to create a one-off specimen but to have the species reoccupy its former habitat.
I asked Lamm whether Tom Chi, one of Colossal’s first investors and a venture capitalist known for his environmental awareness, was putting his money in to help save the planet. “He did not invest in us for fun,” Lamm said. “He invested in us because he thinks this company could be dual purpose—where it has a positive ecological benefit but it makes a fuck ton of money.”
In 1984, researchers detected traces of mitochondrial DNA in the skin of a taxidermied quagga in a museum. It suddenly seemed possible to bring back species that had died out. At the least, the road map was becoming clearer. Even reviving dinosaurs appeared to be within reach when, a few years later, papers reported the presence of DNA fragments in the remains of ancient reptiles that had gone extinct eighty million years ago. These fossils all turned out to be contaminated with modern DNA—in some cases, the researchers had sampled traces of their own genetic material. DNA degrades over time, and scientists now believe that a usable sample probably can’t be obtained from fossils much older than a million years. These constraints weren’t yet known, though, when Michael Crichton published his 1990 science-fiction novel, “Jurassic Park.” Lamm told me that, even now, one of the most frequent questions he gets is “Are you going to bring back the dinosaurs?”
In the nineties and two-thousands, researchers became better and better at extracting DNA, including from extremely small samples. In 2003, the human genome was sequenced—Church’s own DNA was the first to be publicly released. Numerous animal genomes followed. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier developed Crispr, which relies on molecular machinery borrowed from bacteria to slice out genetic material from the nucleus of a cell and replace it with different genetic code. In 2014, the Times published its first article on the technology, declaring, “A genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors.”
Some scientists realized that Crispr could be used to insert a replica of an ancient DNA fragment into the cells of a closely related modern organism. The resulting hybrid creature might not be an exact copy of an extinct animal, but it could look very similar to the ancestor and thrive in the same ecosystem. Scientists soon found, however, that playing around with ancient DNA was harder than they expected. The samples they recovered were often damaged or impure; removing DNA from a fossilized bone sometimes damaged it further. Trying to accurately re-create an ancient genome involved looking at a modern cousin and estimating, by reverse engineering, which gene went where. Beth Shapiro, a noted ancient-DNA researcher who is now the chief science officer at Colossal, said, “We have to figure out how to build a trillion-piece puzzle while working with pieces that were left outside during a hurricane, using the picture of a slightly different puzzle on the top of the box, and the contents of more than a hundred and fifty thousand different puzzles inside”—that is, the DNA of all the microbes and fungi that got into the animal’s bone after it died.
In 2003, a group of European scientists tried to clone a recently extinct mammal called the bucardo, a mountain goat from the Pyrenees. The group used DNA that had been taken from the last living bucardo and then cryogenically frozen. They inserted the nuclei of bucardo cells into the eggs of fifty-seven goats, and then implanted them. Seven goats became pregnant; six had miscarriages, but one kid was born—with a malformed lung. Ten minutes later, that kid died, making the bucardo the only species to have gone extinct twice.
While struggling with the science, researchers were also contending with ethical objections to such projects. What if an extinct species’ original habitat was gone? Would you just be creating zoo animals? Was it immoral to alter an animal’s genome? Might concocted creatures suffer in unforeseen ways from the genetic changes? As with the bucardo, would you be allowing the same tragedy to occur a second time? In 2018, Shapiro, who was then running a lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made a striking remark to the Wall Street Journal: “There is no point in bringing the dodo back. Their eggs will be eaten the same way that made them go extinct the first time.”
