Beth Shapiro says her lab has already engineered and birthed living direwolves

The direwolves are real, and they are currently about two years old. Dr. Beth Shapiro tells Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab that her team at Colossal Biosciences has successfully engineered modern wolves to resurrect the extinct, oversized predator. They did not need a mosquito trapped in amber to pull it off.

The 20-edit resurrection

Shapiro explains that her team mapped the genome from fossilized direwolves to isolate exactly which genetic triggers made the animals larger, more muscular, and lighter in coat color than modern canines. They narrowed the blueprint down to 20 specific edits.

So our direwolves, they have 20 edits that we picked and we sequenced genomes from fossil direwolves. We learned from those genomes what genetic changes made those animals bigger, more robust, light colored in coat and then we engineered those changes into a greywolf genome to recreate the direwolf.

The resulting animals are massive. The two males, Romulus and Remus, weigh north of 120 pounds. They live in a private enclosure, and Shapiro notes they behave entirely like wild animals. But is a grey wolf with 20 tweaked genes actually a direwolf? Huberman presses her on the taxonomic gatekeeping. Evolutionary purists argue that a species is strictly defined by deep, branching genetic history, not an engineered shortcut. Shapiro has zero time for the semantics.

If it looks like a direwolf and it’s able to fill the niche of a direwolf, I’m happy to call it a direwolf.

Not just a vanity project

Building giant wolves with a passing resemblance to pop culture beasts sounds like a billionaire vanity project. Shapiro readily admits they timed their initial DNA sequencing efforts to capitalize on the peak popularity of a certain HBO fantasy show. But the actual science serves a more urgent purpose in conservation.

The tools required to bring back a mammoth, a dodo, or a direwolf are the exact same tools needed to save animals currently teetering on the edge of extinction. Shapiro points to the northern quoll, a tiny Australian marsupial being wiped out by toxic, invasive cane toads. By using synthetic biology to alter a single amino acid in the quoll’s genome, scientists can make the animal immune to the toad’s toxin. The direwolves are essentially a high-profile proof of concept for this kind of genetic rescue.

And when we excite people with the idea of mammoths and dodos and thyloines, we get more engagement and enthusiasm and investment in developing the technology that we can use to stop living species from becoming extinct.

If Shapiro’s vision holds, the era of passive conservation is over. Environmentalists have historically defined success as leaving nature alone. But doing nothing to a destabilized ecosystem is itself a choice, one that currently guarantees less biodiversity tomorrow than we have today. The next generation of conservation will require humans to act as active genetic editors, deciding not just what survives, but what comes back.