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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mcmillan" data-source="post: 9630521" data-attributes="member: 6681949">I managed to track down the source to a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/the-dire-wolf-is-back" target="_blank">New Yorker article behind a paywall</a>, though <a href="https://archive.ph/QRrEv" target="_blank">this link will give access </a>without a subscription. It's actually a pretty nice article that I feel gives a reasonably balanced description of why they're taking the approach they are and other more reasonable, but less PR-friendly projects. It also made me come away with a better impression of Shapiro with more of her acknowledging the limitations of what they are doing than came in other articles I've read. On the other hand,  it seemed to support my impression of Lamm (the main source of money) as focused more on how to publicize things with quotes likeand Yep, that's the whole point of us saying that it's not really accurate to say that these are dire wolves, they are grey wolves with some changes.This is a good point that I've missed based on some of my biases. Generally if I'm thinking about a "difference" in a sequence I'm tending  to think in terms of single nucleotides (letters of the genetic code), or at most small insertions and deletions since that's the kinds of changes I usually make in my work. The  technology they're using for this (called CRISPR) is capable of making larger changes all at once, so if they're talking of 20 edits, each of those edits could involve blocks of several hundred letters in principle. But it can also be used to make the same kind of single nucleotide change I'm used to, but in a more reliable way, which is the case here is harder to say without the actual changes being described (which apparently is being considered a proprietary secret). And it does seem a technical success that they were able to make all those changes at once, but we're still a ways away of from fully replacing the genome with the dire wolf sequence. In the New Yorker article Lamm made a comparison of doing that to cold-fusion, which is probably more accurate than he realized, and not a point in his favor.</blockquote>

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