chapotraphouse

13765 readers

972 users here now

Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.

No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer

Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

The Dire Wolf Is Back - NewYorker "Colossal, a genetics startup, has birthed three pups that contain ancient DNA retrieved from the remains of the animal’s extinct ancestors" (www.newyorker.com)

submitted 16 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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.

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.” 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.

In 2020, Lamm and Church agreed to create a for-profit company, called Colossal Biosciences, whose showcase product would be the deëxtinction of animals.

Full Article

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 14 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Colossal says its dire wolf work had key differences. Scientists first analyzed the genome of the dire wolves contained in the ancient tooth and skull. Comparing those genomes to that of the gray wolf—the dire wolf’s closest living relative—they identified 20 differences in 14 genes that account for the dire wolf’s distinguishing characteristics, including its greater size, white coat, wider head, larger teeth, more powerful shoulders, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.

Next, they harvested endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of bloodvessels, from the bloodstreams of living gray wolves—a less invasive procedure than taking a tissue sample—and edited the 14 genes in their nuclei to express those 20 dire wolf traits. This is trickier than it seems, since genes often have multiple effects, not all of them good. For example, as the company explains in its press release, the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in gray wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without causing any harm in the edited gray wolf genome.

Hay guys we messed with like a minuscule fraction of the genome of a living relative of an extinct creature whose full genome we definitely understand and now we have a new species!

God I hate de-extinction. I hate the science, I hate the term, I hate the credulous reporting. NO REALLY 14 SNPs FROM A SINGLE SAMPLE IS ALL IT'S GONNA TAKE TO BRING BACK AN EXTINCT SPECIES, BELIEVE ME AND GIVE ME ALL YOUR VC FUNDING.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Exactly. None of these "de-extinction" ventures are at all legitimate because de-extinction of these old species is a fiction, and the ecological conditions they would need to survive aren't here anyway.

This stuff is also highly unethical. Pointlessly breeding animals and making them suffer all to launder VC money.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago

I mean hell, even the social/behavioral conditions aren't there - Michael Crichton points out in the The Lost World that behavior in complex animals is partially learned, and we have no idea what sort of collective knowledge about how to be a dire wolf went away when the species died out. But I imagine these folks didn't even read Jurassic Park and stopped paying attention to the movie after that scene with the talking DNA molecule.