The erratic tariff war unleashed by Donald Trump increasingly resembles an extortion measure to force the whole world to accept a new planetary order that includes commercial, industrial, monetary, military, ideological and ethical aspects. The outcome of this conflict is not yet clear, but one thing is certain: the world will never be the same as before.
In recent analyses, the verb “resurrect” has been used a lot to recall the policies that “Trumpism” seeks to imitate: the expansionism of the ill-fated President William McKinley (1897-1901) who wrested the islands of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain; the terrible recession of the 30s of the twentieth century; the Bretton Woods agreements; traditional U.S. protectionism, among other subtleties. Curiously, all of this happens close to the commemoration of the central event of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which transformed humanity like no other event in history.
As if that were not enough, business science has just announced another genetic feat: the “resurrection” of an animal species extinct more than twelve thousand years ago, the American “dire wolf” (“Aenocynion dirus“). Let’s see what it is, beyond the grandiloquent and provocative headlines of the media.
It all started in 2021, when an entrepreneur and a genetics researcher founded “Colossal Biosciences Inc.” with the aim of “de-extinction” (reverse from extinction) the mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger, a project that turned out to be more complicated than imagined.
Now, however, Colossal has announced its first goal: the de-extinction of the dire wolf, through a technique that consists of modifying (exactly 14 genes) the genetic code of a gray wolf – the closest living relative of the dire wolf- using DNA extracted from a fossil tooth of an animal extinct more than thirteen thousand years ago and using a domestic dog as a surrogate mother of the cloned embryo.
The result was the birth of three dire wolf cubs, which for various reasons are confined to a ranch in Montana, with the permission of the institutions that regulate animal life, without the possibility that the de-extinct cubs are integrated into their natural environment which, by the way, no longer exists.
This is with regard to the information provided by the company Colossal Biosciences. On this basis, I would like to share a couple of observations with my readers.
First, the word “resurrection” is misapplied: it is not an individual that has come back to life, but an extinct species that has been “aesthetically” recovered. In fact, the cubs (two males and a female) are not 100% dire wolves, but only “look” like those extinct animals, so we cannot say anything about their behavior that perhaps comes closer to a gray wolf than to their dire ancestors. If so, it would only be a genetic modification of gray wolves.
Therefore, it is incorrect to use the word “resurrection” and it is questionable to call an aesthetic mutation by genetic means “de-extinction”. It is interesting to note that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is exactly the opposite: the Risen One does not outwardly resemble the Jesus whom his disciples knew in life: they are able to recognize him only after he has revealed himself to them.
Secondly, the announced result is only the beginning of something that in the not-too-distant future will amaze us even more. However, it is legitimate to ask: does it make sense to recover species that natural selection has extinct along with their habitat? Wouldn’t it be preferable to recover species that have only recently been extinct by humans, if the habitat is preserved?