Let’s start with what should be obvious: The wolf pups are not dire wolves, and they haven’t been “de-extincted.”

The fluffy white canines — Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi — unveiled this week by Colossal Biosciences are closer to something like designer dogs. More precisely, they are genetically modified, hybridized modern wolves, gestated in the womb of a domestic dog. But that wouldn’t sound as impressive on a magazine cover.

Thousands of years before we had the slightest idea of how genetics worked, humans were altering the genes of wolves and their dog descendants through breeding and domestication, making them particularly fitting candidates for Colossal’s bid for scientific spectacle. By editing the DNA of existing gray wolf cells to include some traits from long-extinct dire wolves (like their white hair and large size) and using them to create viable embryos with cloning technology, Colossal claims it has created “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal,” one “made famous from the HBO hit series Game of Thrones.” The fantasy TV reference is a bit too on the nose.

Whatever species they are, what is true is that Colossal has created novel animals for whom humans are now morally accountable — a responsibility that the nascent field of de-extinction, which insists it is an ally of conservation, has not shown itself prepared to fulfill.

While many people might imagine that de-extincting animals risks a Jurassic Park-style meltdown that puts humans in danger, the real threat is the other way around: It’s the harm that we do to the animals. As writer Dayton Martindale put it in a 2023 Vox piece that’s worth reading in full, de-extinction’s “technical challenges are enormous, [and] the ethical ones are even more so…both the surrogate parents and newborn clones face a risk of suffering and trauma, used as mere instruments in a research project of unclear benefit.”

What even is de-extinction, and what is the point of it?

Colossal, the leading company in the de-extinction industry, seeks to bring back long-gone species, such as woolly mammoths, dodos, and Tasmanian tigers. To do that, it pieces together the genomes of these animals — an especially arduous task for ancient species like the mammoth and the dire wolf, whose DNA has become fragmented in their remains over many years — and compares them to the genomes of closely related species, such as modern elephants and modern wolves. Researchers then identify genes that are unique to the extinct species, edit some of them into cells taken from one of those closely related living species, and use the edited cell to create embryos that will, if all goes well, grow into de-extincted hybrid creatures.

In the case of Colossal’s “dire wolves,” cells were extracted from the blood of living gray wolves, and their DNA was modified with 20 edits that the company says are responsible for the dire wolf’s most distinctive........

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