- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
People have been sad about driving animals into oblivion for nearly as long as we have been eradicating them. And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.
Since the nineteen-eighties, various attempts have been made to see if it might be possible, somehow, to reverse the process. In theory, at least, the technological know-how that helped us extirpate so much wildlife could be deployed to bring back a few of our victims. Humans who are pursuing this goal are essentially asking for something that nature has never provided: a do-over.
Ben Lamm is a forty-three-year-old serial entrepreneur who has already had five “exits”—acquisitions of startups by other companies. He lives in Dallas; his estimated net worth is $3.7 billion. Lamm is dyslexic, and when he was younger he found reading difficult. He tended toward graphic novels and video games, but over time he taught himself, he says, to “read for concepts.” Among the interesting figures he has run across is George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Church has endorsed using gene therapy to improve human resistance to radiation, thus facilitating interplanetary travel; he has also written about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals back into existence.
In 2020, Lamm and Church agreed to create a for-profit company, called Colossal Biosciences, whose showcase product would be the deëxtinction of animals.
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@UlyssesT
They made the dogs from gambo real xD
the fat man actually promoted the project
I’m waiting for the inevitable news report when one of the rich billionaire asshole gets one of these boutique GMO-DNA direwolf as a pet and gets mauled
One less rich asshole in the world, courtesy of based doggo
Theyre not direwolves though. They contain what the researchers think is direwolf genes sampled from bones, but they just spliced these genes into grey wolf DNA and stuffed it into some surrogate dogs. It’s effectively a new species, but it’s no different to selective breeding but more expensive.
Not to mention these animals can’t exist in the wild. They’d effectively be inbred to fuck immediately and wolves are already struggling to survive due to human predation (especially of prey species) and habitat loss. A bigger, slower, more inbred wolf is going to immediately eat shit.
This is a Theranos meme stock waiting to explode. The premise is nothing but a ponzi scheme designed to fund some unethical animal testing for some shitty zoo exhibits. The scientists behind this would rightfully be fed to their own subjects in a rational world.
in the context of lab mice i vaguely remember something about inbreeding so much that you can cull all the hapsburg shit. i’m sure that automatically works with a much larger animal and has no other consequences.
Hell yeah. All you naysayers go on and keep saying nay, but 20 years from now, on those orange sky days where the wildfire smoke makes the heat bearable, and you leave your climate bunker to scavenge for scrap, the dire wolves stalking you are really going to add to the ambiance.
Dire wolves aren’t wolves. They diverged from the common ancestor of actual wolves around the same time as the common ancestor of the tiger and the lion diverged from the common ancestor of the cat and the cheetah.
And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.
I hate really hate the media.
The founders of Colossal aren’t interested all in the natural world. They’re interested in bringing back what they surely think of as a badass animal for their own tech bro cred and even more importantly for money. If they succeed in creating gigantic wolves - those creatures aren’t going to be reintroduced into the natural world. They’re going to be bought by the super-rich and then stuck in cages to be shown off to the much poorer masses.
Look what we have. And you can never have.
A silver lining will be at least one super-rich person (hopefully a billionaire) won’t be able to resist trying to pet one of his creatures and he’ll get his throat ripped out.
deëxtinction
The New Yorker is going to keep using and keep creating umlaut words that nobody else uses until its last day in business. They must think of themselves as oh so sophisticated. But what comes to mind for me is heavy metal umlauts - Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, and Hüsker Dü.
Why? Fuck let’s stop the extinctions that are happening now! Fuck I hate this goddamn species.
I hope one day we can do genuine de-extinction but it’s about a thousand steps down the line of the ecological restoration we have to do
We’re headed for a nasty collapse where a lot more extinctions are gonna take place unfortunately. Hell the rate of extinction as we speak right now is terrifying.
This is why need to establish de-extinction techniques. Bringing back 10,000 year gone megafauna is cool (and good for funding) but we’re gonna need to spend more time bringing back 500 species of frog that went extinct in our lifetime.
Is de-extinction useful? From what I know, species will naturally deviate and diversify themselves with time, given enough distance and differences in habitat one species can become many, and exploit the homogeneity of their environment through new niches.
I’m totally for rewilding but the idea that we need X amounts of Y species seems like a fools errand. We didn’t need to manually invent species before, and any ecological system that necessitates we do so in the future is surely prone to collapse.
if you make a mess should you clean it up?
It’d be so much easier to just keep the frogs alive in the first place than it would be to splice together a memory of the thing with five individual genomes and a barely-related extant relative.
But we aren’t keeping them alive. Many of them are already gone. And I mean genuine de-extinction - cloning an animal that is no longer alive, not this fucked up genetic manipulation to create a half-assed copy.
tasmanian tigers when?
Yeah the problem is the fucked up genetic manipulation is typically all you can do with the data at your disposal. Genetic diversity is needed to maintain a population, which is why functional extinction typically hits when a population is down to 50-100 individuals. There just isn’t enough information in the gene pool for adaptation to continue successfully. So we’d need to have a bunch of sequenced genomes, then either stitch those together from scratch or modify an existing relative (which requires the relative to exist and knowledge of which differences are salient), then hope there’s nothing important happening epigenetically. It’s an extremely tall order.
Just imagine the creatures we haven’t discovered that have gone extinct as well.
The first step is de-extinction
The second step is maintaining it that way
There was a movie where they did this and it turned out to be a really good idea
So, what did y’all think of the Torment Nexus? Pretty snazzy, huh?
Steve Spielberg: in my motion picture, I brought back to life ancient monstrous creatures as a cautionary tale against playing God with science
Colossal: At long last, we have brought back to life monstrous ancient creatures, similar to the blockbuster hit movie…
Kinda funny in a “wtf” way that the USA is doing jurassic park shit before universal healthcare
literally
I just choked and the coughing fit scared the shit out of my cat. The implied delivery on that line is fucking hilarious.
“Hey… how about a compromise? Why not do both? Can I be a cancer proof ankylosaurus?”sauron is so real for that
Being chased by a horse sized wolf inside a themepark.
If it makes you feel any better, I have very strong doubts that any of their methods are going to be viable
The wolves chasing you in the park will just be regular timber wolves that they say have dire world DNA
have dire world DNA
Jurassic park but the velociraptors are AI generated apparitions with 3 dewclaws that corkscrew and the T Rex is an NFT
Non-fungible Tyrannosaurus
but what if a horse-sized dog you could ride?
That’s called a great Dane, if you’re small enough, and they’re awesome.
You’re not supposed to ride them even if you’re small, because their back can’t support your weight the way a horse’s can.
That said, a dog-pulled chariot is very doable.
That said, a dog-pulled chariot is very doable.
for all your rural alaskan medicine delivery needs
call me when they escape to wreak havoc and punish man’s hubris
Colossal says its dire wolf work had key differences. Scientists first analyzed the genome of the dire wolves contained in the ancient tooth and skull. Comparing those genomes to that of the gray wolf—the dire wolf’s closest living relative—they identified 20 differences in 14 genes that account for the dire wolf’s distinguishing characteristics, including its greater size, white coat, wider head, larger teeth, more powerful shoulders, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.
Next, they harvested endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of bloodvessels, from the bloodstreams of living gray wolves—a less invasive procedure than taking a tissue sample—and edited the 14 genes in their nuclei to express those 20 dire wolf traits. This is trickier than it seems, since genes often have multiple effects, not all of them good. For example, as the company explains in its press release, the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in gray wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without causing any harm in the edited gray wolf genome.
Hay guys we messed with like a minuscule fraction of the genome of a living relative of an extinct creature whose full genome we definitely understand and now we have a new species!
God I hate de-extinction. I hate the science, I hate the term, I hate the credulous reporting. NO REALLY 14 SNPs FROM A SINGLE SAMPLE IS ALL IT’S GONNA TAKE TO BRING BACK AN EXTINCT SPECIES, BELIEVE ME AND GIVE ME ALL YOUR VC FUNDING.
Exactly. None of these “de-extinction” ventures are at all legitimate because de-extinction of these old species is a fiction, and the ecological conditions they would need to survive aren’t here anyway.
This stuff is also highly unethical. Pointlessly breeding animals and making them suffer all to launder VC money.
I mean hell, even the social/behavioral conditions aren’t there - Michael Crichton points out in the The Lost World that behavior in complex animals is partially learned, and we have no idea what sort of collective knowledge about how to be a dire wolf went away when the species died out. But I imagine these folks didn’t even read Jurassic Park and stopped paying attention to the movie after that scene with the talking DNA molecule.
