Down the slippery slope of progress

If we are to believe the good people at Colossal Biosciences, dire wolves are walking the earth again after having gone extinct some 12,000 years ago.

- ZARRAR KHUHRO

Dire wolves roamed the North and South American savannah from anywhere up to 250,000 years ago and resembled modern wolves except for their much larger head and much stronger jaws, which aided in hunting large prey.

Their prey died out, due in part to loss of habitat and human intervention, and the dire wolf let out its last lonely howl around the time the city of Jericho was being built.

In what is being called biology's 'ChatGPT moment', Colossal Biosciences extracted the genome of a dire wolf from a 72,000-year-old ear bone and a 13,000-year-old tooth and then edited the genes of a grey wolf to resemble that genome using the gene-editing tool CRISPR.

They cultured cells into an embryo and transplanted that embryo into the wombs of two large dogs, and voilà! We have dire wolves!

Grey wolves were chosen because they share 99.5 per cent of their DNA with dire wolves; apparently that 0.5 per cent makes a lot of difference.

Bear in mind that humans and chimpanzees share 96 to 99 per cent of their DNA and humans and bananas share 60 per cent.

So somewhere in the future after we've wiped ourselves out, some enterprising alien species may try to bring us back by using a banana and whatever bits and pieces of us that are left to be displayed in some inter-galactic zoo of failed species.

In the here and now, we have three (quasi) dire wolf cubs named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi.