Some years ago, en route from JFK Airport to Manhattan, I had a conversation with a cab driver that has remained with me ever since. I say a conversation, but it was mostly a monologue on his part. He was an old guy with a strong New York accent, and the cab was a so-called gypsy cab – one of those unregulated and unlicensed taxis that can’t be hailed on the street, and which have presumably mostly been driven from the market by ride-sharing apps.
I remember these things, perhaps, because the monologue itself had to do with extinction, and because much about the situation, including the old white New York native driving the cab, seemed a throwback. (Even the introduction of a subject by means of a reported exchange with a cab driver seems, as a broadsheet newspaper columnist gambit, in itself somewhat anachronistic, although I would hope charmingly – not to mention post-modernistly and self-awarely – so.)
For much of the journey, as we sat in traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway, he delivered a meandering and often confusing soliloquy on the subject of de-extinction. Scientists, he said, had cloned a woolly mammoth, or were on the verge of doing so (he wasn’t that clear on the details). He’d read about it just the other day, he said, in the New York Post. When I expressed polite scepticism about the idea, he became yet more insistent. Not only had they cloned the woolly mammoth, he said, but they were planning – and I remember his words quite clearly here – to parade it up and down Fifth Avenue.
Parade it? I asked. On Fifth Avenue? Yeah, he said, up and down. I remember asking whether it was going to be part of a pre-existing parade – like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or, God forbid, St Patrick’s Day – or if the woolly mammoth would be given its own stand-alone parade. He was (not unfairly) impatient with my line of questioning. What the hell did it matter what kind of parade it was; the point, he said, was they had brought the woolly mammoth back to life after thousands of years, and now they were going to parade the bastard up and down Fifth Avenue.
Naturally, I suspected this man was in some way deranged. Naturally, I believed he was metabolising some deep and unspeakable discomfort with the modern world into a hysterical sci-fi scenario, cobbled together out of fragments of Jurassic Park, King Kong, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and half-glimpsed tabloid headlines. Naturally, I was wrong. Or I am now, at any rate. Sort of.
[ Life on Earth is entering its sixth mass extinction, report saysOpens in new window ]
Last week, the Texas biotechnology firm Colossal Biosciences announced that it had “de-extincted” the dire wolf, a species of wolf native to the Americas which disappeared during the mass extinctions of the Late Pleistocene era. The company claims that by using cloning and gene-editing technology it has created three dire wolf pups, and that this constitutes the first ever successful “de-extinction” of a once-extinct animal.
The cover of last week’s issue of Time magazine featured a striking photograph of one of the animals, a beautiful white-coated wolf with pale yellow eyes, staring directly at the viewer like a revenant at once of the deep past and the near future. Over the wolf the word “Extinct” is crossed out, followed by a bold cover line: “This is Remus. He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years. Endangered species could be changed forever.”
But this, as many scientists have been keen to point out, is not really the case. What Colossal Biosciences have achieved is in fact more a combination of publicity stunt, dog-breeding and Game of Thrones live-action role play. (The choice of the dire wolf for de-extinction was, unquestionably, guided by the prominence of those animals in George RR Martin’s novels, and the HBO show based on them; a less pop-culturally legible species would surely have caused nowhere near the same kind of stir.)
As with climate change, so with mass extinction. Who cares about the many, many species that are currently endangered, when we can just pick and choose the coolest ones to bring back from prehistory?
The company’s scientists made a small number of relatively minor adjustments to the genome of the existing grey wolf, and then implanted these edited embryos in large dogs, extracting them after gestation by Caesarean section. These aren’t really dire wolves at all; they’re an entirely new species of wolf that were bred, or “edited”, to look like what people think dire wolves probably looked like.
There is something unsettling about the whole idea, and it has to do with more than just the distinctly Frankensteinian queasiness around messing with the source-code of nature. It has to do, too, with the spurious idea of “de-extinction”, and the way in which it offers us the illusion of undoing one of the great catastrophes of our own era: the mass extinctions that are being caused by our ongoing destruction of the environment.
What does it matter, that is, if we have in recent years seen the disappearance from the Earth of, among others, the western black rhino, the Spix’s macaw, the Pyrenean ibex, and the Pinta giant tortoise if we can just bring them back? Habitat destruction, climate change and so on: these things are, in this view, less of a concern now that we can science our way out of it, or at least fool ourselves into thinking we can.
Here, for instance, is Doug Burgum, who was recently appointed by Donald Trump as US secretary of the interior: “It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation. Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list – not additions. The only thing we’d like to see go extinct is the need for an endangered species list to exist.”
This is, of course, profoundly stupid, not least because no one was celebrating additions to the endangered species list to begin with. It’s not as though the Trump administration needed an excuse not to bother with species conservation, but they’re happy to take one when it falls into their laps.
It’s hard to think of a more lurid example of the prevailing ideology around the vast and intractable problems that we face in our time: that government regulation and collective action are not to be countenanced, and are in any case unnecessary, because it is the market, with its ingenious innovations, that will provide the solutions we seek. As with climate change, so with mass extinction. Who cares about the many, many species that are currently endangered, when we can just pick and choose the coolest ones to bring back from prehistory?
Colossal Biosciences, flushed with the success of its first so-called de-extinction, is ready for ever-more spectacular and headline-grabbing tasks. According to CEO Brian Lamming, it is aiming to have woolly mammoths back up and running by 2028. As absurd as the idea of these megafauna – or some hirsute new breed of elephant genetically tweaked to be passed off as such – parading up and down Fifth Avenue might well still be, it does seem slightly less implausible than it once did.
