Issue 01: De-extinction

The Wild Type is a weekly look at the most interesting thing happening in biotech, written for the curious rather than the credentialed. I am Riya, a biology student, and each issue is one idea, explained properly, in about five minutes. No background required.

This week: the company trying to bring back extinct animals, and what it is really doing with all that attention.

In April 2025 I, like a large fraction of the internet, lost my mind over a wolf.

A company called Colossal Biosciences announced it had produced three of them and called them dire wolves, the predator that disappeared more than 12,000 years ago and that you probably know from Game of Thrones. They named the pups Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. Scientists had recovered DNA from a 72,000 year old skull found in Idaho and a 13,000 year old tooth from Ohio, read it, and used it to make a living animal. I read everything I could find. Then I started reading how they actually did it, and the real story is stranger and better than the headline.

It turns out they had not brought back a dire wolf, at least not in the way the word suggests. A literal resurrection is impossible, because ancient DNA survives only in tiny broken fragments, and you cannot rebuild an entire genome from them. What Colossal did was read those fragments, find the handful of genes that gave the dire wolf its size and pale coat, edit them into the cells of an ordinary grey wolf, and raise the pups in surrogate dogs. The company's own chief scientist later described the animals as grey wolves with about 20 edits, and called the name dire wolf a colloquialism. The headline, in other words, was mostly theater.

Once I understood that, the question that actually held my attention was not whether the wolf was real. It was why a company valued at ten billion dollars is spending its money building one at all.

The official answer is the mammoth. Colossal's flagship project was never really about owning a mammoth. The argument is that large grazing animals once kept the Arctic frozen by trampling the snow and clearing away shrubs, and that losing them let the tundra thaw and release the vast stores of carbon locked in the permafrost. Bring back something mammoth-like, the reasoning goes, and you might help keep that ground frozen. Whether it would work is far from settled, and any real answer is decades away.

But the mammoth is not really the product either. To build one, Colossal has had to get very good at a set of genuinely hard techniques: reading badly degraded DNA, editing many genes at once, cloning, and growing embryos outside a body. The company was founded by the Harvard geneticist George Church and the entrepreneur Ben Lamm, it is valued at around ten billion dollars, and its backers range from serious venture funds to Paris Hilton. Those techniques are worth far more than any single animal, which is why Colossal has already spun off one business that uses engineered microbes to break down plastic and another that sells its lab software to other scientists.

So the dire wolf starts to look less like a scientific endpoint and more like a very effective advertisement. Which leaves the obvious, slightly cynical question. An advertisement for what?

Here is the backdrop the wolf headlines left out. We are living through what biologists call the sixth mass extinction, the first one driven by a single species, which is us. By some estimates close to ten thousand species disappear every year, at a rate far above the natural baseline, and the international Red List already counts more than forty thousand species as threatened. Traditional conservation, the parks and breeding programs and protected land, is real and it matters, but it is losing the race. Colossal's CEO said it plainly in an interview: conservation works, just not fast enough to keep pace with how quickly we are erasing species.

That gap, between how fast biodiversity is vanishing and how slowly we can protect it, is what the company's technology is actually pointed at. The same tools that can approximate a dire wolf can be turned on animals that are still alive but quietly running out of the genetic diversity they need to survive. And this is the part that surprised me, because Colossal is already doing it, mostly out of view.

The Colossal Foundation.

Alongside the headline-grabbing company sits a nonprofit almost no one has heard of. Colossal launched it in 2024 and has since put a hundred million dollars into it, aimed entirely at species that are still here. The projects are far less glamorous than a dire wolf, and far more convincing.

They cloned a lineage of "ghost wolves" from the Gulf Coast that still carry the genes of the critically endangered American red wolf, and built the first complete red wolf genome to guide the rescue. They helped fund the first mRNA vaccine for a herpesvirus that is the leading killer of young elephants, and when two vaccinated calves at the Cincinnati Zoo were exposed to it naturally last year, both survived, which almost never happens. They are backing work to engineer frogs that can resist the fungal disease steadily wiping amphibians off the planet. And they built an AI that can recognize the nearly lost tooth-billed pigeon from its call, trained on just a few minutes of recordings from the 1980s, then gave the tool away to conservationists for free. Using it to hunt for a bird almost no one has spotted since 2013 is, to me, the most hopeful thing in this whole story.

The Colossal BioVault. A distributed "Noah's Ark" the company is building to freeze cell samples from ten thousand species. Its CEO compares it directly to the Svalbard Seed Vault, which stores the world's crop seeds in case of catastrophe.

BioRescue. The consortium fighting to save the northern white rhino, now down to its last two living females, which Colossal supports with genetic tools.

Revive and Restore. The nonprofit that pioneered this idea of genetic rescue, including cloning the black-footed ferret from cells that had been frozen since the 1980s.

So is the dire wolf just bait? Honestly, yes. It is a 12,000-year-old predator with a Game of Thrones name, engineered in part to make people pay attention, and it worked, because here I am writing about it and here you are reading. After sitting with this story for a while, though, I have stopped seeing that as the criticism it first felt like. The extinction crisis is enormous and almost invisible, and almost nobody writes a check for a fungus-resistant frog or a genome for a wolf they have never heard of. A viral dire wolf gets that check written. If the spectacle is what pays for the vaccine that saved those two elephants, then the spectacle is earning its keep. The wolf is the billboard. The quiet work behind it is the building.

Next week: a truck mechanic let snakes bite him 200 times to help build a universal antivenom. The real story is why his blood was needed at all.