Rebuilding Ghosts - Don't Panic
- Callum Welsh
- Apr 30
- 7 min read
Genetic Resurrection and the Myth of Control
“We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.”
Andrew Ryan,
The philosophical architect of a genetic utopia that cannibalized itself.
We have always been poor caretakers of the past. We burn, we bury, we forget... And then, somewhere down the line, we try to claw it back again. Not as it was, but as we remember wanting it to be.
Today Colossal Bio-Sciences promises to bring back the Mammoth, the Thylacine and the Dodo. Resurrected not from old bones but, from gaps between old genes. Not cloning. Not necromancy. Something more delicate and far more human. A selective reconstruction of the familiar, stitched together with modern threads.
It’s not marketed as nostalgia, of course. It’s a crusade for climate stabilization, ecosystem rebirth, redemption through innovation. A utopia built out of recovered DNA and recovered conscience.
And yet, somewhere beneath the frozen steppes of marketing material an older, quieter impulse stirs. We do not want to return the past to life. We want to make it behave.
We Have Always Been Authors of Our Environment
Before we lose ourselves in the dream of resurrection, it is worth remembering we have been reshaping life far longer than we have had the vocabulary for it.
Selective breeding of wheat, cattle, and dogs was humanity’s first slow-motion version of genetic engineering. Long before we understood DNA we were already filtering nature through our desires for bigger grains, gentler beasts, brighter flowers.
It wasn't just survival it was design, unconscious iterations of the world around us.
By the twentieth century, biology had become an industry. Crops were hybridized for yield. Livestock lines were selected for muscle mass or docility. Genetics was no longer an accident it was managed.
Then came precision as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gave us molecular scissors and cloning gave us templates. Suddenly, what had once taken millennia could potentially be rewritten in a generation.
In 1996, scientists in Scotland unveiled Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell using SCNT (Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer ).
She wasn’t the first clone in history but she was the first that felt close to us, a warm, breathing copy built from the memory of another.
Dolly wasn’t perfect, she developed arthritis and lung disease. She had short Telomeres likely inherited from her donor, with signs of premature aging.
To clarify Telomeres are a key component for DNA to duplicate in cell division. As we age those Tolemeres get shorter. Dolly was cloned from the somatic cell of a 6 year old sheep, which meant the cells had divided a lot already. Dolly's biological chemistry was already 6 years old the moment she was conceived.
She lived, yes. But the promise of perfect replication fractured under biological reality. Cloning was never resurrection. It was an imitation.
He Jiankui’s Experiment
In 2018, Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR to genetically modify twin girls before birth editing a gene that would make them resistant to HIV. It was the first known instance of human germline editing. It was also an ethical catastrophe.
The international scientific community responded with shock and condemnation. The edits were unnecessary, the oversight non-existent, the risks poorly understood. The girls had been rewritten without consent, their futures altered before they could speak a word.
He Jiankui’s crime wasn’t just scientific. It was narrative. He didn’t package his work in climate restoration or public good. He didn’t resurrect a lost animal or save a dying species. He simply did it, made the machinery visible and the world recoiled.
What Colossal has learned is simple, 'Never show the wires'. Build a story people want to believe in and the same technology becomes palatable, even beautiful.
Ecological Rewrites
Meanwhile, in Africa, genetically engineered mosquitoes have been released carrying something far more potent than venom - Gene Drives - a tool designed to spread genetic edits through an entire population, fast.
By altering inheritance patterns, scientists hope to collapse malaria-carrying mosquito populations, a noble goal, achieved by fundamentally rewriting the biology of a wild species. Once released, gene drives cannot be recalled. They spread. They persist. They reshape ecosystems and not just the target species.
These aren’t closed lab experiments, they are live edits on the open world.
There is no consent from the creatures changed. No rollback plan if something goes wrong. Only the human hope that the systems we've built will do what we tell them to do and not more.
So where does Colossal sit in all this?
At the surface, it’s a resurrection story. A warm, fuzzy fantasy of redemption, 'Let’s bring them back! Let’s fix the damage! Let’s pretend we never left the garden!'
But beneath the surface, Colossal’s work is simply a public-facing chapter of a longer, older movement, a movement not toward restoration, but towards authorship.
Cloning gives us templates, CRISPR edits the template and Gene drives spread the edit.
And as Organoid intelligence begins to mature, we may soon have systems that compute, adapt, and even remember, all built from living tissue...
Colossal
This isn’t science fiction, it’s a bio-industrial tech-stack quietly assembling the tools to write life from scratch or rewrite it according to myth.
CRISPR for all its sleek headlines, isn’t resurrection magic, it is a scalpel adapted from bacterial immune systems to edit, insert or delete genetic sequences with startling precision.
Imagine you're writing a story. You find a sentence you don’t like, you cut it, you paste in something better. Or sometimes, something older, or stranger.
But WE aren't re-writing a story. It’s a living memory. Every sentence cut changes the shape of what follows.
CRISPR lets us edit biology. It doesn’t let us edit history or predict the future
What we build with it; Mammoth, Thylacine or Dodo, will never truly be what it was. It will only ever be what we remember wanting it to be.
In 2016, the great 'Piltdown Man' hoax - the evolutionary fraud that misled anthropology for decades - was finally unmasked with modern forensic methods.
The culprit, Charles Dawson. Not a mistake, not a misunderstanding but a deliberate, careful construction of bone, plaster and ambition. The myth of the 'Piltdown Man' wasn’t an accident. It was a sculpture built to satisfy the story people wanted to believe about themselves. Even after all this time the fingerprints are there in the glue, the file marks, the careful selection of traits.
Today, we wield sharper tools. But the hand behind the scalpel remains human.
Every cut, every edit, every resurrection carries the same latent fingerprints of aspiration and myth.
The cultural architecture surrounding Colossal’s work is no accident either. Dire Wolves are being floated as candidates for revival not purely because of ecological necessity but because they now occupy a beloved corner of popular imagination, thanks to Game of Thrones. George R.R. Martin posing with over-sized wolf-dogs. Fans merging ancient beasts with personal mythologies. The Dire Wolves being engineered are not the real thing. They are reconstructions. Interpolations. The emotional echoes of creatures we want to believe we knew.
The same way dinosaurs despite decades of scientific revision are still imagined as the gray, roaring reptiles of Jurassic Park, even though they likely wore feathers, chirped, and danced.
When we talk about resurrection, we are not talking about accuracy. We are talking about recognition. This is not cynicism however, this is the honest recognition that myth outpaces data and that we prefer our myths sturdy and familiar.
The Mythos
In Brave New World, Huxley imagined a future where genetics would stratify society where biology itself would serve a caste system designed to be painless and permanent.
In Bioshock, Andrew Ryan’s utopia collapses beneath the weight of its own engineered ambitions as citizens splice and resplice themselves into grotesques chasing unattainable ideals.
And in Jurassic Park, the very act of resurrection isn’t merely hubris. It’s a consumer product launch.
We are not simply restoring nature, we are, consciously or not, rewriting it to flatter our own nostalgia. Selling ourselves a future shaped like a memory.
What Come's Next?
Colossal’s work is earnest, their hope is real and their science is legitimate.
But the myths they wrap around it, of redemption, resurrection and setting things right, these are not scientific by-products. They are deliberate artifacts, crafted to make the machinery palatable.
We are not reviving the dead but we are refining the living and pretending the difference is much smaller than it is.
Maybe we are making choices or maybe we are just rebuilding the past the way we wish it had been.
But here’s the part we often forget, this isn’t the first time we’ve rewritten the world's ecosystem it’s just the first time we’ve done it with proteins.
Most of the strange new future is already quietly happening around us however the technology is not the threat. The myths we wrap around it are.
So stay curious.
Stay skeptical.
But, seriously...
Don’t Panic...
Scientific and Technological References:
Campbell, K.H.S. et al. (1996). "Sheep cloned by nuclear transfer from a cultured cell line." Nature. [Dolly the Sheep cloning research]
Cyranoski, D. (2019). "The CRISPR-baby scandal: what’s next for human gene-editing." Nature News. [He Jiankui and CRISPR twins]
Esvelt, K.M. & Gemmell, N.J. (2017). "Conservation demands safe gene drive." PLOS Biology. [Gene drives in mosquito populations]
Colossal Biosciences. (2021–Present). [Company website and press releases about mammoth, thylacine, and dodo de-extinction projects]
National Human Genome Research Institute. (n.d.). "What are gene drives?" genome.gov
He Jiankui (2018). Public announcement (now retracted) of Lulu and Nana birth via CRISPR editing. [Archived reports and legal follow-up]
Pilbeam, D. & Stringer, C. (2016). "Revisiting Piltdown: modern forensic methods identify Charles Dawson as hoaxer." Royal Society Open Science. [Piltdown Man re-analysis]
Technological Concepts:
CRISPR-Cas9 genetic editing system (Doudna & Charpentier, 2012).
Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) cloning (used in Dolly).
Organoid Intelligence (OI) — Brain-on-chip systems (early-stage biotech, various ongoing studies).
Cultural & Fictional References:
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932.
Levine, Ken. BioShock (Video Game). 2K Games, 2007.
Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. 1990 (novel), 1993 (film by Steven Spielberg).
Game of Thrones (TV series). HBO, 2011–2019.
Martin, George R. R. A Song of Ice and Fire (Book Series). 1996–present.
BBC. News articles and science coverage of gene editing controversies and de-extinction.
National Geographic. "Inside the Mission to Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth."
Piltdown Man historical fraud (British Museum archives, Nature coverage).
Comments