Ecologists Martín Boer-Cueva, Dieter Hochuli, Marco Salvatori, and Peter Banks, writing for The Conversation about “de-extinction” of the dire wolf:
First, it is important to recognise that Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, the three “dire wolf” pups created, are not actually dire wolves.
Colossal carried out 20 edits in 14 genes of the grey wolf genome to create their “dire wolves” using a genetic technique called CRISPR-Cas9.
The grey wolf’s genome is 2,447,000,000 individual bases long. Would we consider a chimpanzee, with which we share 98.8% of our genome, to be human after 20 edits?
The reality is that these are three slightly modified grey wolves.
In another The Conversation article, Rich Grenyer, an Associate Professor in Biogeography and Biodiversity, talked about the moral hazard of such irresponsible claims:
There won’t be a dire wolf, and even if there were to be one, we’d have no idea what it was for (and neither would it). We’ll all pay for the mistaken belief that extinction is a solved problem, and that the business-as-usual global economy that has caused the sixth mass extinction is no big deal, because its casualties aren’t actually dead – just temporarily inconvenienced by an extinction that is no longer forever.
Unsurprisingly, the totally unserious people of the Trump administration have started using “de-extinction” as PR cover for weakening conservation laws.
An Inconvenient Thought 