“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”: Why this Toronto Zoo wildlife scientist isn’t celebrating “de-extinct” dire wolves

Last week, a Texas biotech company announced that an animal species that had died out more than 13,000 years ago was suddenly “back” walking among us (albeit in a secret top-security location). The dire wolf was the first species that had ever been “de-extincted,” or so Colossal Biosciences claimed.

The last time dire wolves—made semi-mythical by the Game of Thrones franchise—actually roamed the earth, humans were Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. But modern-day fandom for GOT, along with some crafty media strategies and cute photos of the fluffy white baby wolves, helped spur a wave of unquestioning international excitement. According to the $10.2-billion biotech company, next up for resurrection are the woolly mammoth and the dodo.

Most scientists, however, weren’t shedding tears of joy. Here, Gabriela Mastromonaco, a reproductive scientist at the Toronto Zoo, explains why experts in her field were skeptical—even outraged—and why the so-called dire wolves aren’t really dire wolves after all.

Maybe you saw that the author of A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, said he cried when he first met the wolves. What was your reaction when you learned about them? My reaction when I saw the news was dismay. The fact that a new species had been made was not as exciting for me. I purely was looking at it through the eyes of a scientist and considering the ramifications it would have. If people think there’s an easy way out of extinction, they won’t work hard to save the animals we’ve got.

When you say a new species, you don’t mean a resurrected species—you mean a brand-new species, right? Correct. Because we can’t really resurrect or “de-extinct” anything. That is not possible. Even if we were to find a perfectly preserved cell with full DNA intact—which didn’t happen in this case—it still requires a vehicle to take that cell to become an embryo and an offspring. It’s never going to be a 100 per cent genetic clone. Any time you hear claims of bringing back a woolly mammoth, dodo or dire wolf, they would need to be a new species. So that, for me, meant something totally different than it did for people who were just looking at the animal as an animal. Of course, they looked very beautiful in the photos.

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So they’re adorable but they’re definitely not dire wolves? How would you explain the science to a five-year-old? Well, the researchers learned about the dire wolf’s DNA code from fossils: a skull fragment and a tooth. They took the code that makes a grey wolf, and they changed 20 spots in that code and ended up making an animal that has a light-coloured coat and more muscling, so they’re larger and they’re blond. There are a lot of other DNA markers that make up a dire wolf. They chose not to change all of those. They changed the look of the grey wolf to make it look like a dire wolf. But it doesn’t necessarily have the other changes, like metabolism or behaviour markers.

Is it even possible to look at a DNA code like that and identify behavioural attributes and other characteristics that aren’t physical? Things like eye colour, hair colour—those are simple things to look for. But, when you start looking at behaviour, like the fact that these are pack animals, that they’re social animals, that’s somewhere on the code but much more complex to try to tease out because they will be multi-gene factors. They’re determined in a complex way through several genes, not just one. And the DNA code in our cells is modified, is changed. This happens in utero, and this happens as we grow in our environment. That cannot be seen in the DNA code. That coding happens in our living cells. It makes us who we are. These dire wolves won’t have that lived experience, and their DNA won’t be shaped by it.

So there’s more than one problem here. There are some amazing technological advancements being made, and I celebrate the science. But what are we going to do with these animals? Really, they’re just modified grey wolves, so if they’re released, what could they do to our natural grey wolf population? And what does it mean to have genetically modified organisms that are not used for medicine or food security—you know, livestock—but that are being marketed as conservation saviours? Are we really trying to gene-edit animals in order to reverse biodiversity loss? I can’t see that working.

It seems like experts at universities and public institutions are unanimously unenthused about this. Is this tech company an outlier? Yes. It’s absolutely this very different behaviour than that of a scientist. It makes me think of the Jurassic Park line: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Is the whole “de-extinction” movement being regulated at all? Or do tech bros with deep pockets have free rein here? No—with what they’re calling “de-extincted species,” I don’t think there are any regulations anywhere right now. There hasn’t been the time to pull the ethicists and lawmakers together to understand what it means.

Are you concerned about how this could play out in Canada? Well, the priority species for de-extinction historically had a footprint in Canada: the woolly mammoth, of course, in our north, and the dire wolf. So yes, I am concerned for Canada. I’m concerned about us being caught asleep at the wheel. The danger is that they’re ultimately released into the wild—either sold privately or involved with some type of wildlife release or reintroduction program. I think the Canadian government needs to be at the table with US counterparts, making sure that we protect the animals that are already out there.

Did you see that the Trump administration recently said this could be the end of the endangered species list? Is this just part of the larger attack on science? The response we’re seeing from the Trump administration proves the danger of de-extinction being marketed as a solution. In a nutshell, a president who thinks we can take all the species off the endangered species list is a problem. It’s illogical. It’s unacceptable.

If you controlled the world’s budget for threatened species, what projects would you invest in? The way biodiversity loss is happening, I think the most important area is what we call bio-banking, trying to preserve the living genetics of what is left today. It would be good to try to capture the caribou, the wood bison, the frogs and the lizards that are here today, so that we can stabilize their populations—we just need to preserve the genetic diversity so they can continue on their own, naturally.

How is that done? Bio-banking, as we see it in conservation, is a more natural assisted-reproduction tool, which we have the techniques to carry out in a lot of species—insemination, in vitro fertilization, freezing embryos for the future. These are natural genetic resources. It’s like how we want to protect our fresh water and our clean air.

In Canada, is there a particular threatened species you would focus on? There are so many. I’d try to pick one that’s super valuable. In the west: the sage grouse. The numbers are dwindling, and because they’re a bird, they’re kind of forgotten. It’s an important grassland species.

And if it were actually possible to bring back an extinct species, which would you choose? I would look for an ecosystem that is collapsing because it has lost something important. So I wouldn’t bring back something from the ice age. I would perhaps choose something from the past 50 years that was an ecosystem driver and whose ecosystem is now collapsing. Part of my struggle to think of examples is that my brain can’t accept the idea that we could ever de-extinct anything.

You’re a top expert in the field. Could you go see the dire wolves, if you wanted, at their secret location? We have these amazing animals at the Toronto Zoo called Arctic wolves, and I went out to see them yesterday, so I’ve fulfilled my desire to see blond wolves.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.