This second week of April began with news that shook the international scientific community. The company Colossal Biosciences reported that they had successfully cloned three specimens of the dire wolf, also known as dire wolf, a species that had been extinct for 13,000 years.
The information and images of the three wolves, in their puppy state, went around the world. Seeing this achievement as a milestone in science and technology advancement generated mixed opinions on social media.
What do scientists say about the reappearance of the three dire wolves?
On one hand, there were those who celebrated this type of progress, which can be compared to similar achievements by the same company that a few months ago managed to grow the fur of the also extinct woolly mammoth on laboratory mice.
Cloning an animal helps humanity to prevent the extinction of races that are essential for our ecosystems.
However, there were also those who criticized the action, as it could be dangerous for the current biodiversity of the world, since this animal lived 13,000 years ago.
“It’s not a de-extinction”
Different international media outlets consulted geneticists and researchers in general, who explained that what the company Colossal Biosciences did is not de-extinction: what they did was create a hybrid animal of gray wolf, an animal that currently lives on Earth.
"We cannot talk about de-extinction, but about genetically modified wolves. Since the genome of the giant wolf has not been published, we do not know how many genes differentiate it from the gray wolf, but considering the divergence time of both species (about 4 or 5 million years), there will be several thousand genes," said Carles Lalueza-Fox, researcher and paleogeneticist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), according to Cooperativa.CL.
“If we compare ourselves to the Neanderthals, whose lineages diverged only a tenth of the time of the two wolf species, we share 2% of their genes, but no one would say we are Neanderthals. Even less so in the case of the dire wolves,” he added.
National Geographic, on the other hand, spoke with Miguel Pita, a doctor in Genetics and Cellular Biology from the Autonomous University of Madrid. The scientist bluntly stated that de-extinction does not exist.
“In reality, de-extinction, strictly speaking, is not possible. What has disappeared cannot be recovered as it was. What can be done is a genetic approximation: a mixture between extinct species and living species. That is why scientists prefer to say that de-extinction, as such, is impossible,” explained the geneticist.