002A-00 woolly mammoth
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As soon as Colossal Biosciences declared that it brought the dire wolf back from extinction, everyone felt a sense of wonder. George R.R. Martin himself, who popularized the dire wolf as Jon Snow’s Ghost in A Song of Ice and Fire, posed for a picture with the pups to be part of a historic scientific achievement. He wept at the sight of the snowy fur of the white wolves.
To me, along with Colossal Biosciences’ other work of making mice with the hair of wooly mammoths, the work was a reminder of what science can achieve when it’s supported with an amazing amount of talent and capital — Colossal Biosciences has raised $435 million at a valuation of $10.2 billion. It is the stuff of science fiction, as Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park based on the notion that genetic material could be recovered for dinosaurs and they could be brought back to life. Colossal’s chief aim is to bring back the wooly mammoth, the dodo and the thylacine.
The computing power and the genetic tools finally exist to make that science fiction into reality — which is one of my favorite topics in the world and why I’m straying from games to write about this. After all, the only thing better than the intersection of science fiction, tech and games is the intersection of science fiction, tech and Game of Thrones. The scientists extracted DNA from recovered fossils a tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, where the fossil was 13,000 years old, and an inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho, that was 72,000 years old.
Some critics felt like attacking the company for pulling some kind of scam for dressing up dogs as an extinct species because they used too little of the original dire wolf DNA. More seriously, some say that it was the creation of a brand new species by humans, not the bringing back of a vanished species.
Of course, some people had to rain on the parade. Colossal Biosciences saw the objections that some scientists had about how these were not really dire wolves and that they were more like dogs, and that the amount of DNA they had to work with was insufficient. I can’t say, but them wolves sure do look like Ghost, Jon Snow’s dire wolf in Game of Thrones. Kidding aside, we’ll see how their work will stand up to scientific scrutiny soon enough.
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