Latest news with #DireWolf
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Photo: Dire Wolf De-extinction
Dire wolves went extinct about 12,000 years ago. In April, biotech company Colossal Biosciences announced it had cloned three pups that resemble the long-dead creatures. Scientists used DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull to make 15 key edits to the gray wolf genome and recreate dire wolf traits. Expected to grow to twice the size of gray wolves, the pups have wider heads, larger jaws, and stronger shoulders. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation has expressed interest in providing them a habitat in which to roam freely once again. The post Photo: Dire Wolf De-extinction appeared first on
AU Financial Review
28-05-2025
- AU Financial Review
Bank details of lawyers, judges at risk in cyberattack
Sensitive personal and financial details of West Australian lawyers have been taken in a cyberattack on the state's legal regulator, with hackers threatening to publish 300 gigabytes of stolen data unless a ransom is paid. In an email to practitioners, the Legal Practice Board said correspondence containing bank account details for practices had been taken by the group, which was subsequently identified as the Dire Wolf ransomware gang.
Time of India
24-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
Has the Dire Wolf really returned? Colossal scientist finally tells the truth
Image credits: Instagram/ It seems filters are not just limited to social media anymore. They can be created in organisms in real life to make them resemble a more beautiful yet extinct version of them. Colossal Biosciences, an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company announced on April 7, 2025, the birth of "dire wolf" pups which went extinct over 10,000 years ago. The company explicitly announced the "rebirth of the once extinct dire wolf" a species that was mostly unknown, unheard of and unseen by humans, thus getting them excited about the possibility of seeing an animal from the past alive in the present. But has the dire wolf really returned? Read on to find out what the chief scientist at Colossal has to say. Who are Dire wolves? Dire Wolf, scientifically known as Aenocyon dirus are canines that existed during the Pleistocene Epoch, around 2.6 million to 11700 years ago. According to the species was spread throughout North America and parts of western South America. Its skeletal remains have been found in Florida, the Mississippi River valley, Valley of Mexico, Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela. These wolves that had gone extinct thousands of years ago were said to have been made 'de-extinct' by Colossal who announced the birth of three dire wolf pups named Romulus, Remulus and Khaleesi. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Buy Brass Idols - Handmade Brass Statues for Home & Gifting Luxeartisanship Buy Now Undo When the company announced the same, it was believed by people across the globe that a new success had been achieved in biotechnology and humans had once again been able to achieve a task that was thought to be impossible. However, there were many researchers who stated that the claim made by Colossal of reviving an extinct species was false and that they were just genetically modified gray wolves. Now, Colossal's chief science officer, Beth Shapiro has finally revealed the true identity of these pups. Has the Dire Wolf truly returned? Image credits: Instagram/kitharringtonig In a new interview with New Scientist, Shapiro confirmed that the "dire wolves" created by the company are indeed just gray wolves with 20 modified genes. "It's not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned," said Shapiro. "And we've said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they're calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry," she added. "In our press release, we stated we made 20 gene edits to grey wolf cells," a spokesperson for the company said to Live Sciences. "Grey wolves are the closest living relative to the dire wolves, as we showed in our paper. With those edits, we have brought back the dire wolf…" "We have also said that species are ultimately a human construct and that other scientists have a right to disagree and call them whatever they want to call them. Khaleesi, Romulus and Remus are the first dire wolves to walk the Earth in 12,000 years. They are doing amazingly well and are a testament to what we can achieve as we continue on our goal of bringing back the dodo, thylacine, and woolly mammoth, among other species. " The contention between Colossal and other scientists lies in different definitions of a species. Shapiro previously shared that Colossal is using the "morphological species concept" which defines a species on the basis of its morphology or appearance. However, most scientists follow the "biological species concept" which defines a species on their capability of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. How did Colossal create the new "dire wolf"? In order to create the new dire wolves, Colossal scientists found fossils of the real dire wolves, their teeth and skulls that had been buried for 13,000 to 72,000 years. These bones still had tiny fragments of DNA that they used to build the creatures. Next, they required a closest living relative of the dire wolves to use as a template. This is where the gray wolves entered the situation as their closest living cousins. They compared the DNA of both to figure out the differences which revealed that the dire wolves were larger, had a more massive skull, smaller brain and larger teeth than the modern day gray wolves. Then, the scientists embarked on the process of gene editing through the tool CRISPR which essentially helped them change certain parts of the gray wolf's DNA and insert in the place, aspects of the dire wolf DNA. In total, they made about 20 edits across 14 genes. This means that out of the 20,000 genes they just changed 14 to make the wolves morphologically look like dire wolves but the rest of them are still gray wolves. To produce the dire wolves, they took an empty egg cell from a big dog, removed its own DNA and inserted the edited gray wolf DNA. This egg was planted into a surrogate large domestic dog who carried them and gave them birth. Thus, while Colossal's dire wolves are truly a master of science and technology and have become a symbol of achieving the unimaginable, they are not really dire wolves but just modified gray wolves.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Yahoo
Inside the Long, Strange Trip of the World's Best LSD
On Dec. 21, 1967 — the winter solstice, when the sun's annual perambulations through the zodiac had reached their most southerly point — light was dimming on the Summer of an unassuming pad at 69 La Espiral St. in Orinda, California, just east of Berkeley, a half dozen hippies were finishing their breakfast. They polished off square portions of steak, eggs, and black coffee. No granola here. They required heartier sustenance to fuel the hard work at hand: mass-manufacturing LSD. A peaceful winter morning was spoiled, as one person who was there recalls, by a bark just outside: POLICE! OPEN THE DOOR! Before anyone had time to comply, cops crashed in. The front door was broken down with a heavy sledge, while another flank busted through the back. One overzealous officer crashed through a window. The hand-cranked pill press ground to a halt, leaving microscopic granules of hallucinogenic dust gleaming in the light of a cool, clear winter morning. More from Rolling Stone Inside Timothy Leary's Audacious Prison Escape We Found a Hidden Selection of Grateful Dead T-Shirts at Walmart - Almost Everything Is Under $35 Dire Wolves Are Back. One 'Dire Wolf' Never Went Away Court documents described the little Orinda home as housing 'a small factory for the manufacture of LSD.' It was actually a small tableting facility, where crystalline LSD, synthesized off-site, was pressed into tablets for distribution. The feds had been led there by a weak link in their crew, who had unwittingly sold a substantial wad of acid ($3,400 worth) to an undercover cop. And now, in sleepy Contra Costa County, the whole operation had come crashing down. The cops separated the close-knit crew, egging them into diming each other out. But their loyalties were strong. Nobody said a word. Six people were arrested, four men and two women — one woman wearing a Guatemalan tribal dress and the other a bear-fur vest. Reports at the time estimated the street value of the bust at almost $10 million. Chalk it up to some creative math: 217 grams producing some 2,170,000 hits dosed in standard units of 100 micrograms (µg), peddled at $3 to $5 a pop. These weren't 'standard units,' though. They were heroic doses, measured out at 270µg to 300µg. This was Owsley acid — the strongest, purest LSD ever produced in the underground. It was the namesake of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, as eccentric a figure as has ever proweled the American underground. Wiry, furry, and proudly carnivorous, he also answered to 'Bear.' He was ostensibly known for his work as an audio engineer, having designed sound systems for the Grateful Dead. (He also designed the band's iconic skull-bisected-by-a-lightning-bolt logo, and inspired the Dead's just-as-ionic 'dancing bear' mascots.) Equally crucial to the band's creative output was Owsley's work as a chemist, leading a piebald crew of flower children who cranked out some 5 million doses of LSD into the world, turning on everyone from Jimi Hendrix to John Lennon. Some speculate that Owsley acid, smuggled from the Bay Area to Britain in a telephoto lens case, suffused the Beatles' cartoonishly psychedelic Magical Mystery Tour movie. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe hailed him as 'the greatest LSD manufacturer in the world.' Newsweek compared him to Henry Ford. Even the reports of the Orinda bust doubled as both a coronation and premature abdication. 'Stanley is known throughout the west,' one paper reported, making him sound like some neurochemistry cowboy, 'as the King of Acid.' The bust was followed by months of prolonged legal rigmarole. By the fall of 1969, Stanley was convicted. Owsley acid was no more. Or so the story goes. In recent years, psychedelics have benefitted from some pretty positive PR, thanks to research carried out by respectable scholars at reputable schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and London's Imperial College. The legal landscape for drugs like MDMA and psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms) has opened up, thanks to a mix of legal ballot measures and Big Pharma investment. This renewed interest has seen the old-school, tie-dye-and-headband stripe of psychedelic sidelined for a more conspicuously serious culture of lab coats and lanyards. There has been a concerted effort, as Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling history of modern psychedelics How to Change Your Mind, previously told me, to 'rescue psychedelics from the '60s.' But the story of Owsley acid suggests that these histories are inextricable, and that many of the lessons (chemical and spiritual) of the freewheeling hippie-era counterculture still inform modern-day clinical trials and capital investment. There exists, to this day, a direct line between the LSD manufactured in inconspicuous, illegal clandestine chemistry operations and ongoing clinical trials, authorized amid the ongoing renaissance in psychedelic science. With slight tweaks and modifications, Owsley acid has passed from chemist to chemist, from underground to the pharmaceutical mainstream, like a grape-bearing vine safeguarded by generations of vintners. It has been synthesized, transmuted, and safeguarded for decades, by a family tree of gifted outlaw chemists using tried-and-true methods developed in home labs across the Bay Area since the mid-1960s. It has been shepherded across generations, binding an expansive, wiggly community of artists, chemists, criminals, rock stars, researchers, and good ol' fashioned heads. IF YOU'VE EVER SPENT AN IDLE Saturday binging The Antiques Roadshow on PBS, you're probably familiar with the idea of provenance. Basically, an item's value can increase if there's a recorded history of ownership and transfer, traceable back to its origin. Same goes with drugs. Vintners may pass specialized wine grapes or vines down through generations, preserving not merely a legacy, but a particularized body or complex. Cannabis cultivators talk about 'strains': marijuana hybrids engineered to accentuate (or discount) certain of the plant's psychoactive characteristics. With LSD, however, things are a bit trickier. Drug chemists on popular cable crime shows may talk about 'cooking' (Owsley once called himself 'a master of fine mental cuisine'). But drug synthesis is more like baking. It's not about panache but the boring stuff like precision, punctuality, and fastidious cleanliness. LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide, a semi-synthetic derivative of ergoline, an alkaloid first isolated from a range of gnarly plant and grain fungi. Alter a molecule here, add a propionyl group there, condense too much valeric acid, and a chemical becomes a whole new chemical. Whether in cannabis dispensaries, concert parking lots, caves à vin, or dark-web narcotics markets, a drug's pedigree is a link, drawing together users through history and binding them through a common experience, or headspace. But with Owsley acid, purity connotes something more than the molecular immaculacy of the compound. It's a philosophy, an ethos. And it's one that endures today, as the drug — or a version of it — is deployed in licensed medical trials as a psychopharmacological intervention. Tracing this LSD's trip from the counterculture to the clinic tells the story of psychedelic drugs themselves: how criminalized compounds have found a second life as part of a cultural and psychopharmacological renaissance, wielded against intractable maladies from addiction to end-of-life anxiety. It is the story of how attitudes and cultures shift — and of just how far people will go to preserve access to the absolute best LSD. Ever. 'OURS WAS 99.9 PERCENT pure!' Rhoney Gissen Stanley tells me. 'There was nothing better.' When she was around 20, Rhoney was one of the young women arrested in the Orinda raid — the one in the bear-fur vest. She was booked, but never indicted by the grand jury. She was Owsley's girlfriend, or one of them, anyway. She took Owsley's last name, despite the two never legally marrying. She has a son by him, Starfinder, who works as a large-animal veterinarian. Now 76, Rhoney is fiery and exploding with personality. She is also quite tiny. When she opens a spiral-bound diner menu, only her small black cowboy hat peeks above the laminated edge. 'I eat nutritiously,' she beams, sitting in a booth at the Boulevard Cafe and Grill in Petaluma, California. 'I follow Bear's diet: not meat-only, but not carbs. He was brilliant about so many things.' She orders a crab benedict. Before Rhoney knew Owsley the guy, she knew 'Owsley' the product. She was introduced to LSD in 1965, while an undergrad at UC Berkeley. As she remembers it in her 2012 memoir, an ex-boyfriend drove her out to the Mendocino coast, handed her a capsule from a pharmaceutical bottle, and told her it was 'Owsley acid, the best.' They sat watching the waves lap against the sand, and listened to Bob Dylan on the radio. It wasn't long before Owsley himself would swoop into her life, when he delivered a rare German microphone to that ex-boyfriend, an aspiring songwriter who was also moving a small amount of Bear's LSD at the time. Owsley, she remembers, was highly charismatic, and quick to dole out drips of his psychoactive potion from an old Murine bottle he squirreled away in his pocket. In those underground labs, Rhoney worked chiefly as an assistant: She'd monitor the column chromatography process, wash glassware, and — crucially — cue records on the turntable. A lifetime later, Rhoney is proud of serving as the handmaiden to Owsley acid. But, burned by busts and raids, she'd duck out of the drug game after her Orinda arrest. 'We were on constant alert,' she says. 'It was so difficult to have a life that was so underground, and so full of cops and robbers.' As much as their LSD juiced all kinds of massive cultural 'happenings,' Rhoney's own circle was tighter. It was a group bound by the necessary distinctions of criminal conspiracy, and a common cosmology of lysergic idealism. 'LSD,' she says, 'taught us how to be a tribe.' Another key figure in that tribe was Tim Scully, a Berkeley math whiz and electronics designer who, in time, would stake out his own LSD empire. Beyond a shared criminal enterprise, Bear, Rhoney, Scully, and the rest of their merry gang were united by what Scully calls 'purity of intentions.' A high idealist, in a few senses of the term, Scully believed that LSD could alter individual consciousness, and change the world for the better. The best way to express this high-minded idealism was by mass-producing extremely potent, extremely pure LSD, almost as if its non-dilution was an expression of their own virtue. 'Making a pure product,' Scully says, 'was part of expressing purity of intentions.' Scully first took LSD on April 15, 1965, with his childhood friend and soon-to-be outlaw associate Don Douglas, when they were in their early twenties. The trip produced what modern-day psychedelic clinicians call a 'quantum change': a shift in emotion and cognition that can radically alter one's outlook. As they came down, Scully turned to his friend and said, 'You know, Don, we could make this.' Scully, who now hunkers down in a remote cabin near Mendocino, is lanky and balding, with big round glasses and a trim gray beard that makes him look a bit like a wizard. He spends his days working on his memoir, and compiling a massive history project chronicling the history of underground drug chemistry. It consists, he says, of 'thousands of massively hyperlinked PDF files,' which he hopes to donate to a university library someday. He has self-diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, but on acid, he loosened up. 'For a while,' he recalls, 'I knew what it feels like to be a poet, an artist. Whole new universes of perception, thought, and feeling were revealed to me.' This formative trip was catalyzed by — what else? — Owsley acid. Scully tasked himself with meeting its maker. He didn't have to wait long. Serendipitously, Owsley would appear one day at the door, to chat up a female tenant who was renting a room from Scully. Scully immediately ingratiated himself to Stanley by volunteering to assist with his electronics work, rigging up PAs for early Dead concerts and Ken Kesey's freaky 'acid trip' parties. He calls it 'an extended job interview.' In the winter of 1966, Scully and Douglas trailed Owsley and the Dead to Los Angeles, where they set up shop in a stucco mansion dubbed 'the Pink House.' Scully worked on electronics and assisted in some light LSD tableting. 'I was paying dues so I could work in a real lab,' Scully says. Douglas mostly handled the driving; his greatest asset was his ability to competently pilot 16-foot box trucks on 600µgs of acid — a double dose of 'Owsley.' In L.A., Scully and Douglas studied under Bear, and another important figure in their merry company: Melissa Cargill. She was the other woman arrested in Orinda, cuffed and led out of the house in Mayan traje tipico. If Owsley is something of a psychedelic Zelig, who became a countercultural cult figure (inspiring books, articles, bumper stickers, collectable tie-dye couture) despite keeping a relatively low profile at the time, then Cargill is practically phantasmic. 'Melissa is a quiet person,' Scully says. 'She made a new life for herself and her new husband which involved teaching, and I'm pretty sure that she had no interest in jeopardizing her ability to teach in the school system by flaunting her past.' Indeed, our own repeated attempts to reach her were unreturned. Additionally, her daughter declined. Cargill met Owsley Stanley in 1964, when she was a student at UC Berkeley. According to Robert Greenfield's unauthorized 2016 biography Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, he chanced upon her while drifting through the chemistry labs at UC Berkeley's Latimer Hall, in search of an electronic scale, to precisely measure out some methamphetamine. The only other person in the lab was Cargill, whose studies in bacteriology were funded by student loans and part-time jobs. They chatted and hit it off. It wasn't long before the pair moved into a house on Virginia Street in Berkeley, dubbed 'the Green Factory,' for the fact of it being both green and a factory, of sorts. There, they began producing LSD in the bathroom. Writer Charles Perry, who lived near the Green Factory, remembered Cargill as 'a cute little honeybee with tender intellectual eyes.' UC Berkeley's records show that she never completed her degree. In the available biographies, histories, and news reports, Cargill is typically framed as something like a complement to Rhoney: a lab-assistant/girlfriend. Some other sources, however, afford her considerably more credit: not merely an accomplice to the best acid ever made, but, potentially, its prime creator. A newswire report detailing the Orinda bust claimed that 'Miss Cargill, Stanley's girlfriend and a chemistry major, reportedly provided the knowledge for the manufacture of LSD.' The extent of that knowledge is hotly debated. As is Cargill's operational role. It's well-documented that Owsley had lots of ideas about everything from electronics to LSD to the health benefits of a meat-only diet. But even such an eclectic intellect can't quite account for mastering the nuts and bolts of psychedelic chemistry. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938, proclaimed that 'there are probably only a few natural substances that are characterized by such a broad spectrum of activity of ergot alkaloids,' like lysergic acid. These are extremely complex, variegated compounds. And transmuting them into LSD is similarly intricate. It seems unlikely that anyone — even a highly-motivated autodidact like Owsley Stanley — could teach themselves how to synthesize the drug, absent some sort of hands-on instruction. Author Robert Greenfield, who wrote the unauthorized biography of Bear, refers to Owsley and Cargill as 'co-equal partners.' One other chemist is unequivocal about who actually catalyzed Owsley acid: 'She was the brains behind it.' 'I wasn't there when Owsley and Melissa worked out the process for making LSD to begin with,' Tim Scully says. 'I'm sure that she contributed significantly in a quiet way.' Scully's friend Don Douglas echoes this sentiment, stating that Cargill 'had an awful lot to do' with those early syntheses. Certainly, by the time that pair had been folded into the crew, Cargill seemed like Owsley's counterpart — an isomer, in chemical terms. She, too, would have a child by Bear: a daughter named Redbird. In a testament to their deep tribal bonds, Rhony says, Cargill once stepped in to breastfeed Rhoney and Bear's son. While Owsley stewed in a federal penitentiary, Cargill and Rhoney would take turns bringing the newborns to meet their dad. Rhoney remembers Cargill as primarily interested in the complicated chemistry, and less with the highfalutin mission to turn on the world. 'She had this lovely, charming quality,' she says. 'But she was not a revolutionary.' TIM SCULLY WAS, IF NOTHING else, lashed to the revolutionary potential of LSD. The Orinda bust, and Stanley's subsequent incarceration, left a gaping hole in the underground LSD market. Still possessed by his calling to 'scatter LSD to the four winds,' Scully was more than happy to fill the void. In the words of his friend Douglas, Scully embraced a role as Bear's 'chosen successor.' Scully teamed up with another clandestine chemist: Nick Sand, a gregarious Brooklyn transplant and alumnus of Timothy Leary's psychedelic-research-group-cum-drug-church, the League of Spiritual Discovery (note the acronym). Where Bear's LSD was primarily moved at the street level by biker gangs ('I did not approve of the Hells Angels,' Scully notes), Scully would team up with a criminal organization that possessed a mellower vibe. The 'Brotherhood of Eternal Love' were a sophisticated cartel, sometimes called (pejoratively, and mostly by law enforcement) 'the hippie mafia.' ('We were not the fucking mafia,' says former Brotherhood honcho Michael Randall, sitting on a patio bar in Fairfax, a cute little hippie town in Marin County, where he holds court like a local celebrity. 'We didn't endorse violence of any kind. I never wore a gun.') The Brotherhood's sway over 1970s drug culture cannot be overstated. They imported massive amounts of hash into the U.S. (stacked into imported VW buses and, later, hollowed-out surfboards), cultivated one of the most popular, and potent, cannabis strains of the era ('Maui Wowie'), and conspired, in 1970, with the outlaw Marxist militants in the Weather Underground to successfully bust Timothy Leary out of prison. Two years earlier, in 1968, they set up Scully and his new partner, Sand, in a Sonoma County farmhouse, where they'd batch their own legendary LSD, 'Orange Sunshine.' In Owsley's absence, Randall claims that LSD prices spiked as high as $100 a hit. Scully, Sand, and the Brotherhood were determined to flood the market, bringing the price of revolution back down to earth. 'Millions of dollars went through my hands,' says Randall, who is enormously tall, sporting a scruffy Pancho Villa mustache. 'But we never considered anything other than a way to continue our idea.' Beyond the acid-fueled warehouse happenings and tripping mobs shoring up audiences at massive outdoor concert festivals, LSD was long valued in the hippie underground in ways that were more measured and deliberate. This includes being deployed in the lay treatment of depression — or what would have been called, in those days, 'having a bad time.' For as much Orange Sunshine as the Brotherhood sold, they also gave plenty away. During a 1970 Christmas Day 'happening' in Laguna Beach, a plane piloted by Brotherhood associates dropped some 25,000 hits onto the crowd. In the 1960s, 'Owsley' acid was moved under a variety of colorful names, like White Lightning, Monterey Purple (the inspiration for Jimi Hendrix's wailing hit 'Purple Haze'), and Blue Cheer (from which the San Francisco hard-rock band took its name). Scully and Sand's Orange Sunshine, derived from Stanley's (and Cargill's) original formulation, carried that legacy into the next decade. The drug was, by Scully's own admission, produced in line with the same best practices established in Owsley's labs. 'I just followed in Bear Stanley's footsteps,' he says. 'The same dose and the same purity.' While Scully and Sand kept a relatively low profile, the drug's infamy would also be their undoing. In 1973, the Feds managed to turn one of the Brotherhood's big benefactors: Gulf Oil heir Billy Hitchcock. Hitchcock bankrolled the operation with money from a trust fund that a 1974 Village Voice article pegged at $160 million. Hitchcock had been derelict in his tax payments and was persuaded to rat on Scully, Sand, and other Brotherhood associates in order to save his own skin. News reports at the time stated that the chemists were 'charged with organizing a worldwide conspiracy to manufacture and sell LSD in huge amounts.' Prosecutor John Molina, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury that the pair 'produced millions of hits of LSD and were proud of it and laughed all the way to their safe deposit box.' They were convicted: Scully was sentenced to 20 years, and Sand to 15. The bookish Scully pursued years of appeals options, before resigning himself to serving prison time. Sand, the more skittish of the pair, absconded to Canada. The drug itself remained the stuff of legend. By Randall's estimation, the Brotherhood produced and distributed in excess of 150 million doses of Orange Sunshine. It saturated the psychedelic underground — in America, and across the world. THE AMERICAN COUNTERCULTURE CAME late to the Netherlands. By the early 1970s, as flower power withered across the U.S., Amsterdam became a micro-mecca for wayfaring hippies. It was here, in 1972, that a 20-year-old longhair named Peter van der Heyden first tripped on Orange Sunshine. The experience blew open a door in his mind. He wanted to really understand what produced such profound experience at such teeny-tiny, submicroscopic doses. 'I got really interested in these molecules,' he explains. 'It seemed like a miracle that somebody could make something that had that kind of effect.' Now, van der Heyden is in his early seventies with a stern, serious countenance that belies a life lived with tremendous joy and adventure. Decamping for North America, van der Heyden dreamed of meeting the men who synthesized this miracle. But he wouldn't get the opportunity until many years later, while working as lab tech in the University of British Columbia's geology department, where he'd settled into a fairly quiet life studying molecular composition of old rocks. One day, in the mid-1980s, van der Heyden was tasked with the disposal of a number of the geology lab's rare chemicals; working through an itemized manifest of compounds, he realized that some of the chemicals at hand could be combined to make 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. Gripped as much by curiosity as by boredom, he smuggled out some material and whipped up a homemade batch, and passed it among a few close friends. As he recalls, word soon spread throughout the Vancouver underground. It wasn't long before a stranger appeared on his doorstep: squat and a bit balding, with pouty lips and eyes ringed by deep laugh lines. It was Scully's old partner, Nick Sand, who was living and working on the lam in Vancouver. Van der Heyden's long-discarded dream of meeting Orange Sunshine's creators had finally, fatefully, been satisfied. 'My work up to that point was very small scale, making a few grams of this or that,' he recalls. 'Nick laughed and literally said, 'I'll teach you how to make drugs with wheelbarrows and shovels.'' They set up their own massive underground LSD operation, in a lab tucked away in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam. Van der Heyden's day job granted him access to large quantities of diethylamine, a colorless liquid that stinks of ammonia, used in seawater analysis. It is also, incidentally, a chemical precursor for diethylamide, which puts the 'D' in 'LSD.' In 1996, the duo was busted. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said it was 'the largest production capacity of any laboratory ever seized in Canada.' Authorities recovered 43 grams of synthesized LSD — enough to dose every person in Canada at least once — along with a stash of Ecstasy and other so-called designer drugs like 2C-B. Sand, still a wanted man in the U.S., was extradited and sentenced to 14 years. Van der Heyden faced a softer, five-year stint in Canadian prison. He'd end up serving just 10 months. Recent revolutions in the public understanding of drugs led van der Heyden back to psychedelic chemistry, albeit in a more official capacity. Witnessing the changes in clinical — and cultural — attitudes toward psychedelics over the past decade, he knew he had the opportunity, and the knowledge, to get in on the action. In 2019, he founded PsyGen, supplying legal psychedelic material for clinical trials. The company is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, an improbable place to find a warehouse-sized laboratory mass-producing psychedelic drugs. Still, this has always been the MO of the great psychedelic chemists: hiding in plain sight, whether in roadside barns and silos, or nondescript commercial spaces in snoozy Canadian office parks. (The Canadian government can provide exemptions — called 'dealer's licenses' — to practitioners, researchers, or in PsyGen's case, manufacturers working with substances otherwise banned by the nation's Controlled Substances Act.) The difference between van der Heyden and his predecessors is that his work is all aboveboard. But the philosophy of purity remains. According to a report in the San Mateo Times, on the occasion of his Orinda bust, Owsley Stanley bragged to arresting officers that his LSD was made to the most exacting FDA standards. Van der Heyden actually has the certifications to prove it. In the autumn of 2022, van der Heyden realized a dream he'd been nurturing for half a century: He made his first, legal, pure batch of LSD. In PsyGen's labs, van der Heyden has determined that some street LSD may only approach 50 percent purity. His 2022 batch achieved 99.96 percent purity. 'Very few people in the world have ever tried really pure LSD,' he says. 'But for those who have, and that of course includes chemists, we know that there's a qualitative difference in the experience.' The heroic strength of Owsley's LSD was seen by some as reflective of his own macho posturing — 'devastatingly strong in a heavy-handed way that recalled Owsley's own insistent manner,' as the writer Charles Perry put it. For Scully and the Brotherhood, purity mirrored the stated sincerity of their ambitions: their belief that they were not moving a drug, but something like a countercultural holy rite. And so it behooved them to distribute the best version of this sacrament, even if cutting corners and compromising purity would have been more profitable. For van der Heyden, purity provides a cleaner, profounder, 'more transparent' trip. If the landscape of LSD research keeps advancing, he hopes to one day analyze what he calls 'the fingerprint of pure LSD on the brain.' For the time being, however, his LSD is being wielded toward more modest — if altogether more practical — ends. WHEN IT WAS STILL LEGAL, in the 1950s and early 1960s, LSD was investigated in the treatment of neurosis, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. (Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder 'Bill W.' believed that LSD could stimulate a 'spiritual awakening' that could spur recovery.) But the countercultural explosion of 'acid' still makes the drug seem like a bit of a psychoactive 'problem child,' in the words of the father of LSD Albert Hofmann. Despite the newfound enthusiasm around drugs like psilocybin, MDMA, and even high-octane, super-psychedelic compounds like 5-MEO-DMT, LSD remains something of an outcast. Despite these hang-ups, some researchers are delving back into LSD-tweaked clinical investigations — albeit with requisite caution and circumspection. Dr. Suresh Muthukumaraswamy came to LSD by a fairly conventional route. After completing his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Muthukumaraswamy began a postdoc fellowship at the University of Cardiff in Wales. There, he met Robin Carhart-Harris, a researcher who had pioneered recent brain neuroimaging work, exploring how, exactly, psychedelics affect brain chemistry. He conducted clinical research on how a range of treatments — the dissociative ketamine, the anti-nausea medication scopolamine, even magnetic fields — can help treat clinical depression. Now, Muthukumaraswamy works in the School of Pharmacy at his alma mater, the University of Auckland. It's an important homecoming, in no small part because New Zealand's regulatory landscape is somewhat friendlier to researchers wanting to work with 'high-risk' class-A drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, and, yes, LSD. Muthukumaraswamy has secured government funding for a batch of pilot programs investigating the effects of LSD on focus, mood, cognition, and even the treatment of severe PMS symptoms. It's part of a broader, albeit rather cautious, reintroduction of acid back into clinical and medical settings, despite lingering cultural suspicions around the drug. 'There is absolutely a stigma,' he admits. 'With LSD, you take that to a regulatory board, and they'll say, 'Stay away from that.'' Nevertheless, Muthukumaraswamy has cleared the regulatory hurdles and investigated LSD's efficacy in treating major depressive disorder, with a recent study that supplies take-home 'microdoses' — about 10µg, not nearly enough to catalyze a full-blown psychedelic experience — to a group of clinically depressed volunteers. Early phases of the trial showed a significant, 60 percent remission in depressive symptoms after eight weeks. This marks a substantial improvement over the current state-of-the-pharmaceutical-art: Current rates of remission among users of prescription antidepressants hover around 43 percent. And the LSD used in this trial was supplied by none other than reformed clandestine chemist Peter van der Hyden, via PsyGen. 'The purity is high. And the stability is good,' Muthukumaraswamy says with a laugh. 'They make excellent LSD at PsyGen!' The formula van der Hyden had learned from Sand, who'd had it passed down from Bear himself, was to be used in the lab. After eight weeks, the top-line data revealed 'rapid and statistically significant improvements' in depressive symptoms. More precisely, there was a 60 percent reduction in depressive symptoms, with more than half of the participants exhibiting total remission. These benefits lasted for six months after the initial microdose treatment. This marks a notable increase over more conventional antidepressant therapy treatments, whose remission rates hover around 45 percent. Muthukumaraswamy notes, modestly, that the trial went 'pretty well.' He is now moving on to a study investigating the potential of microdosed LSD in mitigating severe premenstrual syndrome. Drugs dispensed in such trials tend to eschew the more colorful street names applied to the LSD over the decades. No Purple Haze, White Lightning, Blue Cheer, or Orange Sunshine here. Instead, patients are treated with 'MB22001,' a proprietary formulation developed by PsyGen and licensed to a Vancouver-based psychedelic medicine company that trades publicly on the Canadian securities exchange. 'It's wonderful,' says Rhoney Stanley of the revived interest in LSD. 'It makes me happy. We knew it was a useful tool. And now it's become put to use.' There are regrets, of course. Tim Scully laments his wild-eyed plans to megadose the world. Older, probably somewhat wiser, and almost certainly chastened by his own experiences scraping up against the drug war and the American carceral system, he seems a bit more moderate. 'I know that whenever I took LSD,' he says, 'I felt a very strong impulse to want to share this magical experience with everyone, immediately. If only we could have found a way to weave it into the social fabric so that society would provide a backdrop of appropriate expectations and rituals for the experience.' The weaving of such a powerful — and in the view of some true believers, actually magical — drug within the broader social fabric may affront some true-believing psychonauts' own purity tests. When a drug that once inspired a passionate, even fanatic, desire to turn the whole world on its head is being marshalled as a medicament to treat more down-to-earth maladies, it can seem like LSD's latent potential is being hemmed in. But for a great many others, these medical and clinical interventions are just new forms of the same psychedelic rituals, in which LSD has always served as a sacrament. Van der Heyden remembers sitting through a 2017 conference on psychedelic medicine — one of those glossy, businesslike contemporary confabs that occupy convention centers these days, where lanyard-wreathed pharma bros tune into researchers discussing drug development, and trial designs, and patent law, and the potential of LSD in treating everything from depression to cocaine addiction, chronic pain, Azlheimer's disease, and traumatic brain injury. Beside him was Michael Randall, the reformed LSD bandito. 'He turned to me,' van der Heyden recalls, 'shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'We knew all of this in the Sixties.'' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
Chicago Tribune
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
The ‘return' of an extinct wolf is not the answer to saving endangered species, experts warn
As the Trump administration slashes funding for health, energy and climate research, there's one science the administration is promoting: de-extinction. Earlier this month, a biotechnology company announced it had genetically engineered three gray wolf pups to have white hair, more muscular jaws and a larger build — characteristics of the dire wolf, a species that hasn't roamed the Earth for several millennia. Now, the Trump administration is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a proposed rule to rescind the definition of 'harm' under the act — which for decades has included actions like harassing, pursuing, hunting or killing endangered wildlife and plants, as well as habitat destruction. 'The status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation. It's time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation,' said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in an April 7 post on X, formerly Twitter. 'The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder, showcasing how the concept of 'de-extinction' can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.' But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research being pioneered by Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based company on a mission to bring back extinct animals. 'Unfortunately, as clever as this science is … it's can-do science and not should-do science,' said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S. The dire wolf also came up at an April 9 meeting of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources that considered amendments to a proposed law that would strip federal protections from western Great Lakes gray wolves — the latest in a decadeslong back-and-forth between conservationists, hunters and politicians that has shifted the species on and off the endangered list since its inclusion 50 years ago. At the congressional meeting, Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California suggested an amendment to allow a federal judge to reconsider the removal of federal protections if population numbers begin to decline significantly again. 'Well, didn't we just bring a wolf back that was here 10,000 years ago? I mean, if it really gets that bad, we can just bring woolly mammoths back,' responded Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a Republican and the bill's sponsor. 'That's a deeply unserious response to what should be a very serious issue,' Huffman replied. Gray wolves that live in the Great Lakes and West Coast regions are one of 1,662 species currently protected under the Endangered Species Act. Hunting and trapping almost drove them to extinction in the lower 48 states by the mid-20th century. Naomi Louchouarn, program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals and an expert on human-wildlife coexistence, had a gut reaction to the dire wolf news: 'This is going to be a problem for gray wolves,' she recalls thinking. 'It almost immediately undermined our ability to protect species.' In a Wednesday statement to the Tribune, Colossal's chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, said the company sees de-extinction as 'one of many tools' that can speed up the battle against biodiversity loss, which humans are 'not close to winning.' 'We don't see this as an 'either/or' question, but rather as a 'both and,'' she said. 'We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species.' Advancements in genetic technologies could revolutionize wildlife conservation, said J. Elizabeth Peace, senior public affairs specialist with the Interior Department, in a statement Wednesday. 'By preserving genetic materials today, we equip future generations with the tools necessary to restore and maintain biodiversity,' the statement said. 'This approach aligns with our commitment to stewarding natural resources responsibly, ensuring that our actions today support a sustainable and thriving ecosystem for the future.' However, critics say de-extinction sends a misleading message and is, overall, a flawed approach to conservation. 'It's important to realize that they did not bring the dire wolf back from extinction,' said Craig Klugman, a bioethicist and professor of health sciences at DePaul University. 'What they did was genetically tweak a gray wolf … so you have a gray wolf that has some characteristics of a dire wolf.' 'It's like one, but it isn't one,' he added. Shapiro said Colossal is working toward functional de-extinction. 'The goal of de-extinction has never been to create perfect genetic copies of an extinct species,' she said, 'but instead to bring back key traits that fill an ecological niche that is vacant because of extinction.' An inefficient science? As the executive branch targets federal agencies through mass firings, funding cuts and regulatory rollbacks in the name of efficiency, those skeptical of de-extinction argue that it's an inefficient science. 'It requires a lot of embryos that fail, a lot of pregnancies that don't take, to get one creature,' Klugman said. Those few dozen embryos were implanted in the wombs of two female domestic hound mixes, one embryo taking hold in each. A similar procedure was repeated a few months later with another surrogate who gave birth to a third puppy. 'This type of pioneering genetic research often requires multiple attempts to achieve success,' Shapiro said, 'and the knowledge gained from both successes and failures contributes to future improvements in efficiency.' Colossal announced in early March — around the same time Burgum met with company leaders to discuss their role in conservation efforts — that they had genetically edited 38 mice to have hair like the woolly mammoth, a significant step toward engineering Asian elephants with traits similar to those of the extinct species. To get to those few dozen mice, however, scientists produced 385 embryos, of which 291 were implanted in 16 surrogate females. 'It's mice. People don't really care about mice — but we care about mice. We care what's happening to them,' said Marshall, of Humane World. Colossal's facilities are certified by the American Humane Society and registered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to Shapiro. She said the company's research is overseen by a committee of scientists and nonscientists that is required by federal regulations. The committee reviews and evaluates the company's research protocols and ensures the ethical use of animals. Skeptics also argue that animals manipulated to mimic extinct ones likely have no future in the wild. 'They have to be taught how to live and hunt and take care of themselves,' Klugman said. 'How do they know how to survive? How can they thrive?' Leaders at Colossal have acknowledged this reality. According to an Associated Press report, Matt James, Colossal's chief animal care expert, said that despite the resemblance, 'what they will probably never learn is the finishing move of how to kill a giant elk or a big deer,' because they won't have opportunities to watch and learn from wild dire wolf parents Shapiro said the pups won't be released into the wild, where they would have to compete with gray wolves. Instead, they will live in an 'expansive ecological preserve' — the company has said it's a 2,000-acre site in an undisclosed location — where their health and needs will be continually evaluated under managed care. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a wild wolf pack's territory can be as large as 32,000 acres, extending up to 640,000 acres where prey is scarce. They can travel as far as 30 miles a day to hunt. 'If you think about (it), those pups aren't going to live much of a life trapped in an area that's a tiny percentage of what they should have,' Marshall said. 'They're not a self-sustaining population. They have nowhere to live. … We don't know if those animals are going to suffer as they get older.' Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist, said the news bothered him. 'This is not conservation, but people conflate it,' he said. 'The point is entertainment.' Nichole Keway Biber feels similarly unsettled. She is a tribal citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa and leads the wolf and wildlife preservation team at the Anishinaabek Caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party. She said it demonstrates that the natural world, to humans, is for consumption or entertainment — and that it ignores the inherent worth of voiceless animals beyond any commercial or amusement benefit they can provide. 'That has a danger,' she said, 'of setting a pattern of behavior: to be dismissive of the vulnerable, or take advantage of the vulnerable or be abusive toward the vulnerable.' Inability to coexist Louchouarn, the Humane World program director, has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves. 'The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don't know how to coexist with them,' she said. 'And this doesn't solve that problem at all.' Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with 'big, flashy silver bullets' and 'in this case, advanced, inefficient science,' she said, but the real solution is behavioral change. 'Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals,' Louchouarn said, 'which is so difficult and so crazy — that's a big if — I don't understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can't coexist with elephants.' In the United States, political discussions surrounding gray wolf conservation have been based on different interpretations of whether their populations have recovered enough to be sustainable without protections. 'But we define what well is, not the wolves,' Louchouarn said. 'The ecosystem can carry a lot more wolves than that. We just refuse to live with them.' Recent winter estimates count more than 750 wild gray wolves in Michigan, almost 3,000 in Minnesota and just over 1,000 in Wisconsin. Some of those wolves may occasionally travel to Illinois, where they were common until they were wiped out after the arrival of European settlers. The bill in the U.S. House aimed at removing protections from the species is called the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, and its supporters and sponsors argue it will allow ranchers and communities to manage conflict with wolves as they fear for the safety of their domesticated animals. In Wisconsin, wolf attacks on livestock have increased over the last three years, resulting in animal deaths or injuries: from 49 confirmed or probable cases in 2022 to 69 in 2023 and up to 85 in 2024. While wolf attacks on dogs in residential areas are rare, they have also increased in recent years, according to state reports. Conservation biologists who oppose hunting worry it will only exacerbate this type of conflict. When a wolf is killed, it can disrupt pack dynamics, which can in turn lead to lone wolves preying on livestock or pets outdoors — smaller and easier to kill than larger prey such as bison, elk, moose and deer. For other people, coexistence is a way of life. Biber said the Anishinaabe, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region, live by the principle of dabasendiziwin, or humility in regard to other living organisms. 'It's not self-denigration, but a realistic awareness of our dependence (on) the elements,' she said, 'but also plants and animals, and us. And all the other orders of being can exist apart from us. They're OK. They were here long before. We're the newcomers.' Anishinaabe people, like the Ojibwe and the Odawa, believe in a parallel history with the gray wolf or Ma'iingan, that their fates are intrinsically connected. 'What happens to one, will happen to the other,' Biber said. A question of stewardship Species don't exist in a vacuum, Heist often reminds his students at SIU. 'They are parts of their communities.' So when a species ceases to exist, it loses its place in the ecosystem. It's a void left to be filled by others over hundreds, thousands of years. Klugman wonders whether resurrecting animals unprepared for the modern world — 'which we clearly have not done yet' — would even be fair to them. 'Is that us being good stewards of this planet?' During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: 'If we're going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal. And instead of raising money to get animals on the endangered species (list), let's figure out a way to get them off.' Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it's a misguided approach. 'If that's the basis … for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature,' he said. 'Because we can't resurrect things.' Biber said humans should be focused on preventing further loss. 'It's a lot better use of effort, time, resources, mind power.' 'If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now,' she said. 'And that's the necessity immediately.' Angielczyk, who studies mammals that survived the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, said fossil records after such events show it takes a long time for real ecosystem recovery to occur: 1 to 10 million years — way longer than the human species has existed. 'So, changes that we can cause today quite easily, in some cases, have very, very long-term implications,' he said. 'Just another reason why conservation efforts really are important and something that we should be concerned about and actively involved in.' It's also crucial to preserve the ability of species to adapt to changing conditions, Heist said, which requires large populations and genetic diversity. Red wolves represent one such opportunity. The species — once common in most of the eastern and southern United States — still exists, but is critically endangered partly because in the wild, the wolves often mate with coyotes and produce hybrid offspring. That has led to low genetic diversity and weak evolutionary fitness. Just under 20 red wolves exist in their wild, native habitats today. Alongside the dire wolf news, Colossal announced it cloned four of these hybrids and removed most of the coyote DNA along the way. They say it's the first step to restoring genetic diversity in the captive breeding populations of red wolves, 241 of which live in 45 facilities across the country. Some conservationists feel more hopeful about this endeavor, though they still express reservations. 'There is a benefit to trying to bring back some of the genes that would diversify … red wolves, that would enhance their ability to survive,' Louchouarn said. 'But will that fix red wolf extinction, at the rate that they're going extinct? No, because the reason it's happening is they're being poached at extreme rates.' Heist said it might not be practical to spend so much money trying to create genetically diverse red wolves to significantly restore their populations. Bioethicists and conservationists argue that, at its core, the issue is whether humans can put aside self-interest to invest in the well-being of other creatures. 'This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous,' Marshall said, 'because then it stops us caring.'
