“Within eighteen months of our putting the name ‘dire wolf’ down on a whiteboard, we birthed dire wolves!” A genetics startup has created three pups that contain ancient DNA retrieved from the remains of the animal’s extinct ancestors. The first journalist to meet the wolves describes his trip to the front lines of deëxtinction. And then:
D. T. Max
Max has been writing for The New Yorker since 1997.
I love writing articles about people who try to fix something broken, but only maybe succeed—because it means the story continues. Where I stop, you begin. This week’s case study? The cutest transgenic animal in history: the dire wolf.
My reporting for this story happened fast, and, in a sense, I’d been waiting my whole life for it. It’s late January, and Colossal Biosciences—a billionaire-backed biotechnology company that has been dominating the “deëxtinction space”—gets in touch to say it is coming close on a project they don’t yet want to talk about but will soon want the world to know all about. Very showbiz-y, for science. With a setup like that it was an easy decision to buy a plane ticket. They were just one time zone away, after all, in Dallas. And I was only walking my dog.
Now, I don’t know when I first felt sad about things that are gone. Probably it involved what was then called a brontosaurus, which in its small, plastic form—tiny paradox coming—I liked to shoot with my water gun in the bathtub. But the realization really hit home for me in 2005, when I went to South Africa and wrote about efforts to breed back into existence the quagga, a half-striped zebra-like creature that humans had eradicated in a fit of absent-mindedness.
Fast forward to the space-age setup at Colossal. It was like a James Bond movie, with groups of people moving through huge spaces as if to launch a rocket in T minus 5. A multimillion-dollar lab manufactured in just months, in which teams are working on bringing back four long-extinct animals the way another company might make cookies, chips, dips, and crackers: the dodo, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dire wolf. The last of these creatures, I learned, has already been made deëxtinct. And I am invited to go see two of them!
So I do—very hush hush, though. I go … I can’t say where. A black car sidles up to take me on the final leg. And then there they are—two big pups, seeming a little zonked to be back in the world, and shockingly white, like pure things in an impure world. But is this really a dire wolf? A sort-of dire wolf? A gray wolf tricked out by Hollywood-style gene substitutions to look just enough like a dire wolf for his closeup? I’m there to write the article, so the world can know. But it’s for the reader to decide. As I say, the story continues.
P.S. At a loss for what to watch after “The White Lotus”? Inkoo Kang offers three recommendations. 📺
