NEWS · C1 Level - Part 1

Company Claims It's Recreated 'Game of Thrones' Dire Wolves

Did a biotech company just bring back the dire wolf? Dire wolves have been extinct for 10,000 years.

Level: C1 · 32 sentences

Transcript

  1. Did a biotech company just bring back the dire wolf?
  2. Dire wolves have been extinct for 10,000 years.
  3. You may know them from Game of Thrones.
  4. Now, a US-based firm called Colossal Biosciences
  5. claims it's extracted DNA from ancient dire wolf remains
  6. and used that to modify the genome of modern grey wolves.
  7. The result, the company says, is the birth of three dire wolf pups,
  8. two males and a female.
  9. But some experts are skeptical.
  10. Ecologist Corey Bradshaw told Reuters,
  11. "We don't have the technology to modify entire genomes."
  12. "We can modify components of genomes and we can certainly sequence genomes."
  13. So yes, they have slightly genetically modified wolves, maybe...
  14. and that's probably the best that you're going to get.
  15. And those slight modifications seem to have been derived from retrieved dire wolf material.
  16. Does that make it a dire wolf? No.
  17. Does it make a slightly modified grey wolf? Yes.
  18. And that's probably about it.
  19. Even if someone were able to make new dire wolves after all this time,
  20. it doesn't necessarily follow that there would be a viable population of the canines.
  21. It raises some big questions as Dr. Bradshaw notes:
  22. Where do you put them?
  23. I mean, this is one thing that seems to be completely lost on the de-extinction people is that...
  24. you manage to bring back a sufficient number of mammoths or dire wolves to create a viable population.
  25. This is important because you need thousands of completely genetically diverse individuals in a population for having any chance of surviving into the future.
  26. The whole Adam and Eve concept that we create two and they can just go on and do their own thing.
  27. Now, that's called inbreeding depression.
  28. And then things die very quickly.
  29. Most introductions of most species fail.
  30. Over 99%.
  31. Why? Because there's a few individuals that inbreed themselves out of existence.
  32. Still, those pups are pretty cute.