I made a concerted effort this past week to avoid watching any serious news, to the extent there actually is such a thing any more. Over the course of a week, my financial situation gyrated wildly. Like a train wreck, it was impossible not to look, but impossible to do anything about it.
So I looked elsewhere. “Gunsmoke” reruns were surprisingly soothing. If Marshal Dillon, Doc and Miss Kitty couldn’t solve a calamity in the space of an hour, it couldn’t be solved. They originally pulled it off, week after week, in a half hour in black-and-white. But once their problems started coming in color, it took them a hour.
That wasn’t enough distraction, so I tried skiing. But conditions are good for a very short time in the day before becoming treacherous. I stayed too long on the Northside lift, where the runs were empty and the snow was just perfect. On the way down Star Gazer, I hit a sticky spot and executed a perfect telemark face plant. Very hard, very fast, and right on the chin. So that led to a deep dive into the computer news feed.
The best story of the week was the news that the dire wolf is back. Yeah, baby, that’s what we’ve been missing all this time, a dire wolf. They are a different species from the modern wolves, being slightly larger and having bigger teeth to bring down a mastadon. What I know of them comes from “Game of Thrones” and the Grateful Dead, two impeccable sources for all scientific endeavors.
The dire wolf has been extinct for something like 12,000 years. The last known sighting occurred on Sen. Charles Grassley’s Iowa farm. But they are making a comeback.
A private company called Colossal Biosciences has been experimenting with gene editing. They took genetic material from a regular wolf, plugged in genetic material from a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone, stuffed the embryos into a Labrador retriever, and she gave birth to three dire wolf pups.
Other scientists took issue with that, and said they weren’t really dire wolves, just regular gray wolves that looked a bit like dire wolves. Neener-neener.
Then the Colossal Biosciences people said they were closer to anybody else’s dire wolf pups, and that for “de-extinction purposes,” that was probably close enough. Besides, they are pups and we need to see what they grow into. If you have a better version of a dire wolf, let’s see it.
I did some poking around, wondering how mad scientists at Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, Texas, funded their research on resurrecting the dire wolf. Seems like something Elon Musk’s pubescent wrecking crew would be interested in.
But the funding is apparently not a government grant run amok. It seems to be coming from private hedge funds and individual investors who have enough money that they wanted to get in on the ground floor of the dire wolf replication business. Google’s AI service generated a list of investors which included Paris Hilton. If that doesn’t lend some gravitas to the whole operation, I don’t know what would.
The real push here seems to be working on the gene-editing science, which might have uses beyond bringing back extinct apex predators. Fixing genetically caused diseases, for example, sounds like a worthy endeavor. I’m not sure that curing something like Parkinson’s disease by splicing some dire wolf genes into Uncle Bob would completely address the issue, but the technique might have other applications.
Colossal Biosciences is also working on bringing back the woolly mammoth, which has been sorely missed for around 10,000 years. So far, they have been able to splice genes from the mammoth fossil into a mouse, creating a “woolly mouse.”
If there’s anything we don’t need, it’s more varieties of rodents nibbling away at the wiring harnesses of the farm machinery in the shed for the winter. Woolly or not, the world seems to have plenty of mice. I don’t need to find a mammoth-sized mouse in the barn.
They are also making some progress on replicating the Tasmanian tiger. “What could possibly go wrong?” asks anybody who ever saw “Jurrasic Park.”
It’s unclear what the tariff on imported or exported dire wolves is, because it’s unclear what the tariff on anything is. You put the whole tariff in, you put the whole tariff out, you put the whole tariff in and you shake it all about. You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about, and that what it’s all about.
I’ve never seen anything quite like this last week, and can’t help wonder if our system is so completely whacked that one guy can, without any checks at all, single-handedly blow up $10 trillion in stock value. Then he says, “never mind,” and it comes back, all so we can do it again in 90 days.
Doesn’t Congress have something to say about major tax policies? Of course Congress seems to have nothing to say about anything, never, no-how. They are all under their desks watching “Gunsmoke” reruns.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.
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