Hiltzik: Will the extinct New Zealand moa walk again?

My inbox started filling up with the supposedly groundbreaking news early Tuesday, breathless news articles about a biological breakthrough that will allow a long-extinct giant bird to walk the Earth in modern times.

My reaction was this: “Not this same old yarn again.”

The company promoting its supposed breakthrough is Colossal Biosciences. That’s the Dallas business that created a PR-fueled frenzy last year with an announcement that it had brought the dire wolf back from extinction.

Its announcement caught fire because the dire wolf was a species depicted in the TV series “Game of Thrones” — indeed, part of the company’s publicity campaign featured a shot of George R.R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones books, cradling a fluffy wolf-like pup in his arms.

Colossal’s latest announcement was that it has hatched 26 chickens in an “artificial egg” — a “foundational step,” it said, “toward resurrecting extinct bird species” such as the New Zealand giant moa and the dodo.

The announcement resembled Colossal’s rollout of the “dire wolf” pups: Publications that had received guided tours of its lab produced breathless articles taking Colossal’s claims at face value, generally lacking skeptical commentary by unaffiliated biologists.

The company’s latest announcement is connected with its larger campaign to “de-extinct” long-disappeared animals and restore them to their ancient habitats.

Its “landmark” project in this respect is “the resurrection of the woolly mammoth … It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction.” (Colossal specifies that it’s talking about “a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth.”

Colossal says it’s considering Asian or African elephants as surrogate parents for its mammoths. Thus far, however, this effort has yielded only a few dozen genetically modified long-haired mice, which evokes the Aesopian adage about the mountain that labored and brought forth a mouse.

To unaffiliated scientists, Colossal’s talk of de-extincting long-gone species is hyperbole: hopelessly premature and consistently oversold. The focus of its latest announcement is not so much an egg as an artificial eggshell — though the company defends its labeling the technology as an “artificial egg” as legitimate. The 26 hatched chicks were grown from fertilized tissue transferred from hen’s eggs into the new container, which functioned essentially as an incubator.

To be fair, the company appears to have successfully developed a membrane that can provide oxygen to the growing embryos better than existing technologies that have allowed chicks to grow outside the shell. But outside scientists suggest it’s a stretch to see that as a major step toward resurrecting the moa, a giant flightless bird that disappeared from its New Zealand habitat in the 1400s.

Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm acknowledged that a long road will have to be traversed to move from hatching baby chickens to resurrecting the moa by email. He conceded that “gestation is just one step of many steps in the process.”

Lamm portrayed Colossal’s de-extinction efforts as something of a public service. “Bringing back extinct species allows us to design a long-term system model for endangered species production while also developing novel technologies applicable to conservation today … and in some cases undo the sins humanity has committed,” he said.

Many scientists express concerns about the “de-extinction” idea itself. One is that it’s impossible to resurrect a species that has been gone for so long that no biological material that could provide original DNA exists any longer.

Even if it could be done, whether it should be done is doubtful.

“The environment in which they lived has been evolving since their absence,” says evolutionary biologist Vincent J. Lynch of the University at Buffalo. “To put them back into that environment is introducing an invasive species into an environment in which it hasn’t lived before.” That could produce difficulties for the cloned animals and for modern life, including the possible revival of prehistoric pathogens for which humankind has no defense.

“The de-extinction breathlessness,” says biologist Paul Knoepfler of UC Davis, “potentially endangers real animals for the sake of hypothetical future de-extincted ones.” Colossal boasts about conservation programs it has helped to fund; those “could do some good,” Knoepfler says, “but it would be far better if more of the capital they raised just went directly to helping protect living but endangered animals rather than trying to bring back extinct ones.”

(Knoepfler gave Colossal his annual science hype award last year for its dire wolf claim. “I’m not convinced that a single animal that they ever ‘de-extinct’ will be the real deal,” he told me.)

Colossal’s de-extinction palaver has been exploited by conservatives to justify attacks on the federal Endangered Species Act and other conservation initiatives. That was the subtext of a tweet Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted after the dire wolf announcement, proclaiming that “the revival of the Dire Wolf” would allow the Trump administration to “fundamentally change how we think about species conservation.”

None of this is to dispute that the company has been successful in seizing the attention of people with capital to spare. Privately held Colossal raised $200 million early last year on terms that gave it a putative valuation of $10.2 billion. Its “cultural advisory board” boasts influencers such as Martin, Tom Brady and filmmaker Peter Jackson.

The company defends its PR-heavy campaigning as a necessity in the modern world. “We’re competing with the Kardashians,” co-founder Ben Lamm told Rolling Stone. “We are in the attention economy. … If we want people to care about things like genome engineering and CRISPR and conservation, it has to be as thoughtful, as interesting, as what they’re going to see on MTV or Bravo.”

Lamm told me he was hoping for even more press coverage than the 26 hatchlings received: “I don’t think everyone understood and articulated the incredible challenges overcome in this achievement. I am disappointed more people didn’t cover the news and the significance for developmental biology, science overall and conservation.”

What’s alarming about the credulous coverage that Colossal receives from the press is that it points to a decline in responsible reporting on science. This is what keeps experienced pseudoscience debunkers on their toes.

It’s what has enabled political partisans to sully news columns and the airwaves with unsupported claims that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Chinese lab and that anti-pandemic measures — including the COVID vaccines — were worse than letting the infection spread.

In recent weeks, the press has been filled with what the veteran debunker David Gorski labeled a “credulous take” on acupuncture, ostensibly explaining how acupuncture works — never mind that there is no solid evidence that acupuncture does work.

Once misinformation or disinformation takes root in the public sphere, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. A couple of examples related to Colossal should suffice. One comes from Rolling Stone, which headlined its article about the chicken hatchlings thusly: “First They Brought Back Dire Wolves. Next Up? Artificial Wombs.”

The problem here is that Colossal did not “bring back dire wolves.” The company’s chief scientist, Beth Shapiro, acknowledged as much a few weeks after its initial announcement, telling New Scientist, “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned.”

The Rolling Stone article, which posted Tuesday, was based in part on a tour of its Dallas lab the company granted a reporter in February.

“To enter Colossal’s 55,000-square-foot Dallas headquarters is to find one’s senses fairly assaulted by the Power of Tech,” the publication wrote, describing it as a place where “many wondrous things are happening.”

Discover Magazine’s article about the hatchlings was similarly uncritical, starting with the headline: “Colossal Hatches Healthy Chicks From an Artificial Egg, Setting the Stage for Giant Moa De-Extinction.”

Not everybody has swallowed the Kool-Aid. Standout reporting on Colossal has been done by Michael Le Page of the British journal New Scientist, whose most recent article bristled with skeptical takes about the hatchling announcement from established scientists.

Colossal’s approach to communicating its work with what I termed last year “unsparing razzmatazz” is playing with fire. That’s because the public that has bought into its inflated spiel may end up being let down with a jolt.

“Eventually it’s going to come out that they didn’t de-extinct the dire wolf or the moa,” Lynch says. “When people realize that, it’s going to negatively impact their understanding of science and their belief in scientific claims, at a time when people are already skeptical about what we do.”