In order to explore science and review the limits of genetics, the company Colossal Biosciences attempted to recreate the dire wolf, creating two males initially and one female later on.
The dire wolf is an extinct species of wolf that died out 13,000 years ago. Dire wolves are known for their larger size and more aggressive nature when compared to modern wolves.
According to science teacher Karen Wolfe, many claim the dire wolf has been brought back, but that claim is not fully true.
“They really haven’t been brought back. According to the International Union for Conservation, what they did is that they took a fossil from a dire wolf and they got some genes from it,” Wolfe said. “They put some of those genes into the egg of a gray wolf. Then they put that egg back into the gray wolf.”
Dire wolves may not be truly back from extinction, but they have changed the DNA of gray wolves.
“They use a thing called CRISPR,” Wolfe said. “It’s a gene editing kind of program. They pull out a gene from a DNA, and they can put back in a gene and they can splice it in various places.”
They may not be dire wolves, but they have one trait that looks different from regular gray wolves.
According to Wolfe, the only real difference is the new wolves’ whiter fur.
Many people have strong opinions about the ethics of the dire wolves no longer being extinct.
”There are two schools of thought. In my class, we talk all about the pros and cons of everything. It is all about trade-offs. Do the pros outweigh the cons?” science teacher Ian Burley said. “The drawbacks are that this dire wolf, or the woolly mammoth, for that matter, went extinct for a reason. In the case of the woolly mammoth, it was hunted into extinction by humans who needed the bones and the meat.”
Bringing back extinct creatures comes with the added cost of maintaining extinct creatures.
“The dire wolf went extinct for a reason. It might have been hunted. It might have lost its habitat. There is a reason why it went extinct,” Burley said. “Should we bring it back? Are we going to waste funding… just for this thing to go extinct again?”
This being the first time a species has come back from extinction, many people have strong opinions about environments in which we should bring species back.
According to freshman Nora Jalboot, bringing species back is only ethical “to an extent,” but after that, it becomes unethical.
This is one of many schools of thought for bringing back extinct species.
“I do not think it is ethical to bring back an extinct species. I think it is unnecessary and could be dangerous,” freshman Remy Devlin said.
Many have also called into question whether dire wolves should be brought back. “We do not need to bring back dire wolves. They could be harmful to other species of wolves and change ecosystems or ruin them entirely,” Devlin said.
The news of the supposed dire wolves shook the world of genetics, but the dire wolves were leaked to the public.
Wolfe feels that some people may not have been ready for this information.