IF we are to believe the good people at Colossal Biosciences, dire wolves are walking the earth again after having gone extinct some 12,000 years ago. Dire wolves roamed the North and South American savannah from anywhere up to 250,000 years ago and resembled modern wolves except for their much larger head and much stronger jaws, which aided in hunting large prey. Their prey died out, due in part to loss of habitat and human intervention, and the dire wolf let out its last lonely howl around the time the city of Jericho was being built.

In what is being called biology`s `ChatGPT moment`, Colossal Biosciences extracted the genome of a dire wolf from a 72,000-year-old ear bone and a 13,000-yearold tooth and then edited the genes of a grey wolf to resemble that genome using the gene-editing tool CRISPR. They cultured cells into an embryo and transplanted that embryo into the wombs of two large dogs, and voilà! We have dire wolves! Grey wolves were chosen because they share 99.5 per cent of their DNA with dire wolves; apparently that 0.5pc makes a lot of difference. Bear in mind that humans and chimpanzees share 96pc to 99pc of their DNA and humans and bananas share 60pc.

So somewhere in the future after we`ve wiped ourselves out, some enterprising alien species may try to bring us back by using a banana and whatever bits and pieces of us that are left to be displayed in some intergalactic zoo of failed species.

In the here and now, we have three (quasi) dire wolf cubs named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. While the first two are named after the mythical brothers, raised by a she-wolf and associated with the founding of Rome, Khaleesi is the Dragon Queen from the TV series Game of Thrones.

Being a massive nerd, I have an issue with this because as we all (should) know, the dire wolf is the sigil of House Stark and not of the incestuous House Targaryen.

Beyond pop culture foibles, there is a lot of criticism from the scientific community, but Colossal Biosciences is continuing with their de-extinction project and plantobringback the dodo,the Tasmanian tiger and my personal favourite the woolly mammoth. The first step in that latter direction has already been taken, with Colossal Biosciences editing `woolly` genes into mice creating some incredibly cute furry little specimens.

The obvious question being asked is why we should try and bring back extinct species when we have so many existing species on the brink of extinction? I put this question to biologist Dr Faisal Khan, who countered by saying that it is impor-tant to have the tools and techniques in place so that, if needed, the same can be used to revive or revitalise dying species.

For its part, Colossal Biosciences argues that engineering elephants to contain `mammoth-like` traits could actually help mitigate existential threats like climate change by revitalising Arctic ecosystems.

While the debate rages on, there is no doubt that we have entered the era of synthetic biology, with all the promise and peril that it entails.

First, the promise. We know that different ethnic and racial groups metabolise medicine differently. Think in terms of how the dosage of cough medicine differs for children and adults due to the difference in weight and metabolism. Well, the same applies to humans with different genetic traits. For example, did you know that redheads need 20pc more anaesthesia than the rest of us? Or that some studies claim that black people exhibit different heart attack symptoms from white people? Then we know that some people have ge-netic anomalies that cause them to have different percentages of liver enzymes, and since many medicines are metabolised in the liver, it means that such people may react differently to medication. The future promises us medicines and treatments that aretailored to specific phenotypes or even, eventually, to our individual genetic profile.

On the flip side, this will also almost certainly spur research into bioweapons that target specific ethnicities. In 1998, the Sunday Times cited Israeli and Western intelligence sources saying Israel was working on an `ethno-bomb` that `would harm Arabs but not Jews` by `targeting victims by ethnic origin`.

Crops could be designed with in-built resistance to climate vagaries and disease, but could also be designed to fail, with the seeds being infiltrated into the target country`s supply chain. Then there`s insects, which could be gene-edited to reduce their ability to spread disease (mosquitos and malaria) or even, as Japanese scientists did in 2010, to deliver vaccines. But they could also be easily engineered to spread disease and create pandemics. All that stands in the way of the coming bioweapon arms race is a vague adherence to moral and ethical codes, and we know how well those have worked in the past. • The wnter is a joumalist.

X: @zarrarkhuhro