Jesus. Look at the cover of Time magazine.

They’re not even close. Look! They’ve resurrected unicorns!

It’s ridiculous. They made a few genetic tweaks to a grey wolf, almost entirely cosmetic, to make puppies that kind of look like how they imagine a dire wolf would look like, and now the hype industry has gone insane. And now the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, is using this as an excuse to not worry about protecting species, because we can just call up Colossal to resurrect them.

Many scientists expressed skepticism that the pups could be classified as part of a canine species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago. But Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the achievement demonstrates that it is not government regulations but innovation that will save species.

“It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation,” Burgum wrote in a post on X. “Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list — not additions.”

He has already met with the company about using its animals in federal conservation efforts, as well as for potential species restoration.

“If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back,” he told Interior Department employees during a live-streamed town hall Wednesday. “Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.”

No one has ever celebrated additions to the endangered list, you ignorant buffoon. Colossal has never brought an extinct species back from the dead. And even if they could, if you’ve strip-mined the land and cut down the forests and polluted the streams, you’re not going to restore a species with a few artificially cultivated individuals. It makes me sick that this man who is supposed to be in charge of conserving our natural resources now imagines that he has carte blanche to take a chainsaw to every small animal because Colossal will bring them back.

Burgum posted these claims on Twitter, where he could expect to get agreeable comments from the usual fawning twits. For example:

You clown. Do you think if we overfish salmon into extinction, followed by the death of orcas and sea lions, that we can then “fix” the problem by having Colossal restore them fish by fish, and mammal by mammal?

No, MrsKinder, you’re an outrageously stupid cultist, and wind farms aren’t causing extinctions. Stop trusting the crap pouring out of Trump’s mouth.

Elon Musk has requested the ‘de-extinction’ company Colossal Biosciences to resurrect another animal after a successful dire wolf cloning feat.
Billionaire Elon Musk may be on the outs with President Donald Trump now but he’s still very much active on social media. With dire wolves seemingly back from dead now that the “de-extinction company” Colossal Biosciences has genetically engineered three wolves that resemble the extinct real-life predators, the Tesla boss has shared his new pet wish
…
In a follow-up post, Elon Musk finally put forth his wish. He requested Colossal to “Please make a miniature pet wooly mammoth.” Notably, Ben Lamm and George Church’s Texas-based biotech company’s founding agenda was to bring back the woolly mammoth and “rapidly advance the field of species de-extinction.” Although the woolly mammoth’s cloned resurrection has yet to make it to the de-extinction success map, the company revealed last month that they’d made significant progress on that front, having bred woolly mice.

Holy fuck. No, making an existing mouse genetic variant does not mean that you’ve made significant progress. You have not. I thought that was a stupid exaggeration, but now they’ve topped it with a species de-extinction claim.

But if you want to see genuine idiocy, look at Musk’s request for a miniature pet wooly mammoth. If it’s miniature and a pet, it is not a wooly mammoth. It is a toy for rich people.

Who does he think he is, that creepy JF Sebastian dude from Bladerunner?

Yeah, Musk probably thought that guy was awesome.

Colossal Biosciences is a tech company. You know what that means: hype, exaggeration, and lies, all to accompany developments that nobody needs or wants. In order to keep the stock prices up, they have to constantly pretend to have breakthroughs that get promoted on various media.

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

There are a few problems with those claims.

• We already have woolly mice. We have all kinds of interesting variants of lab mice with diverse mutations, and one of them is the woolly mouse:
  

  Showing off a mutation to a single gene in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.

• The woolly mouse, either the existing mutant or whatever new mutation they’ve inserted into this breed, does not represent a “new species”. It can still be bred with lab mice. It’s also exclusively a small lab population.

• They claim that they are going to produce the first Asian elephant calf “with woolly mammoth traits…by the end of 2028.” The first part of that prediction is absurdly vague — if they make an elephant hairier, they’re going to trumpet it as a triumph. It will not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a woolly mammoth, any more than that woolly mouse is a throwback to the Pleistocene. But also, the “end of 2028” is about three years away. The Asian elephant gestation time is 18-22 months, almost two years. They’d have to have an extensively gene-modified elephant fetus in a petri dish in about a year, or they’re going to miss their imaginary deadline, and they’ve left themselves no room for error.

So they make stuff up for their press releases. The bigger problem is that the whole company is a lie.

EXTINCTION IS A COLOSSAL PROBLEM FACING THE WORLD.
And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.

Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.

They’re not going to fix shit. Bringing back one individual with some of the traits that made a whole population successful 500,000 years ago does not resurrect the species, especially since their ancient environment is gone. The entire network of species that coexisted with it no longer exists. At best, they might generate a sad hybrid animal that isn’t adapted to any place on the planet that will be shown off to wealthy VCs to justify more investment, but they’ll fail, the animals will be abandoned, and they’ll die off, probably more quickly than slowly.

As Adam Rutherford explains, it will be a moral debacle doomed to failure, and every competent geneticist, molecular biologist, and zoologist knows it.

And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.

The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.

If the ghouls at Colossal actually cared about extinction, they’d be working to stop habitat destruction and save existing species. But they don’t. What they care about is the gullibility of rich tech bros and convincing them to give them more money.

We all knew, way back in 2020, that the paper that launched the myth of hydroxychloroquine was total crap. In 2020!

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

It was all about selective deletion of negative data to get a positive effect. Now, here in 2024, people are still saying exactly the same thing…well, not exactly, because they’ve also uncovered further problems in the study. Science says what everyone said all along!

The paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), led by Philippe Gautret of the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), claimed that treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, reduced virus levels in samples from COVID-19 patients, and that the drug was even more effective if used alongside the antibiotic azithromycin. Then–IHU Director Didier Raoult, the paper’s senior author, enthused about the promise of the drug on social media and TV, leading to a wave of hype, including from then–U.S. President Donald Trump.

But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.

Critics of Raoult’s paper have pointed out more damning problems since. In an August 2023 letter published in Therapies, Bik and colleagues noted the cutoff for classifying a polymerase chain reaction test as positive was different in the treatment and control groups. The letter also raised questions about whether the study had received proper ethical approval, and noted an editorial conflict of interest: IJAA’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also one of the authors. (A statement saying he had not been involved in peer review was later added to the paper.) The letter called for the paper to be retracted.

A bad study with weak statistics and manipulated data that led to millions of people doping themselves with a medication that was worse than useless against COVID — and people are still taking it — but it was the simplistic, magic pill that they wanted. The doctors might have rejected it, but Joe Rogan and Dr Oz endorsed it.

There is good news. The paper has finally been retracted, well after it has already done harm.

The corresponding author, Didier Raoult, dissents. He disagrees with all the scientists all around the world who looked at his sloppy work four years ago and said that this should have been rejected from the get-go. This is not surprising: he looks like a terrible hack.

According to the notice, the three authors who raised concerns about the paper “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article.” Gautret and several other authors told the investigators they disagreed with the retraction, and the investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern.

28 garbage papers? I don’t know how many papers this guy has published, the only notable metric is his significant contributions to bad science.