It’s a timely comparison to the basic idea of the de-extinction project, and one which we raised with Colossal head Lamm the first time we interviewed him at SXSW when discussing their breakthrough with woolly mice. To be clear, Colossal is not filling in gaps of genetic code with modern animals like the dinosaurs in Crichton’s Jurassic Park. With their dire wolves they manipulated a modern genetic code that was similar to the dire wolf to be what it claims is a full-on or near-enough match. (Additionally, Lamm has assured us that there is no way to bring back a dinosaur, despite what imaginative authors say about amber and mosquitos.)
Yet while discussing the company’s stated goal to functionally de-extinct the woolly mammoth by 2028 through the use of Asian elephant DNA, Lamm made an argument to us that seems prescient to the current one over Colossal’s dire wolves.
“I think it’s important that people understand the difference between what’s possible and what’s not,” Lamm said at the time regarding the woolly mammoth project and the difference between functional de-extinction and cloning a living cell. But he went on to compare the debate to a person who learned on 23andMe that they have Neanderthal DNA in their ancestry. Indeed, non-African humans can have anywhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA in their genetics (it is closer to zero percent among African populations).
“Would you say that you’re a hybrid or do you say you’re a Neanderthal-hybrid with Homo sapien, or do you say that you’re an evolved Neanderthal, because they did come first, or do you say that you’re a Homo sapien?” Lamm argued. The biotech entrepreneur also pointed out that humans love classifying, quantifying, and compartmentalizing data with clear lines, but compares de-extinction technology to the evolutionary process of speciation, which in nature can occur over tens of thousands of years.
“Speciation is more like a river,” Lamm said. “All of these species evolve from each other, and we’re all hybrids of a hybrid of a hybrid. So I wouldn’t say it’s correct to classify our mammoth as an Asian elephant or hybrid… It isn’t a cold-adapted or allele-adapted Asian elephant, which is what some people love to say about our work. We think that if it solves the functional aspects of a mammoth, if it has ancient DNA from a mammoth, and if it has the lost genes to a mammoth, we just call that a mammoth. If people want to call it ‘mammoth 2.0,’ they can. Or if people want to say 40 words to describe it, they can too.”
Lamm would likely make the same argument about the three snow-white wolves his company created, two of which are already the same size or bigger than modern gray wolves despite not even being halfway grown to adulthood. Whether that counts as a dire wolf really seems to come down to what your definition of a dire wolf might be, and folks far more learned, and with the PhDs to prove it, will assuredly argue that point for many years to come as we step further into a future where the possibilities of biotechnology are only beginning to be unlocked.
