To my knowledge, The Niche’s The Screamers award is the only science hype award out there.
There were many candidates this year, but one stood above the rest for extraordinary hype in science.
Colossal Biosciences wins 2025 The Screamers science hype award
Colossal Biosciences gets the nod because of their remarkable hype about supposedly de-extincting dire wolves. The company faced major pushback on this inaccurate de-extinction claim and not just from me. What they actually achieved was a suite of relatively few dire-wolf-related gene edits made into gray wolves. The resulting animals were still gray wolves, just gene-edited.
It was far from de-extinction. Even so, I still think it was a notable achievement even if I’m skeptical that de-extinction efforts makes sense. Colossal has gone further than anyone else toward making a living creature more like an extinct one. So why was it necessary to be so inaccurate and over the top? Why the hypeful claim? Corporate marketing?
Looking ahead
It seems Colossal will keep on trucking, probably making more over-the-top claims about de-extinction of other past animals. What’s the next claim? Something to do with dodos or mammoths? Woolly elephants? The firm made some woolly mice.
Note that I wrote over at STAT recently about how Colossal bought cloning firm Viagen. This could help Colossal churn out more cloned animals with gene edits, but that’s not de-extinction. True de-extinction, as Colossal CSO Beth Shapiro suggested before, just isn’t possible with current technologies and maybe never will be.
It’s also notable that Shapiro used to be skeptical about de-extinction efforts. What changed?
Bioethical challenges
There are also potential ethical issues with de-extinction.
Further, animal cloning, even apart from de-extinction efforts, faces numerous ethical challenges. See Deja ewe or eww: expansive animal cloning raises some difficult questions.
Other candidates for The Screamers Award included some in the longevity space. One of them could potentially win The Screamers in 2026 given the trajectory of longevity hype.
Some past award winners
- 2024. Winner of The Screamers Award: local TV stations pushing stem cell clinics.
- 2022 The Screamers Award goes to The BBC for baby “probably saved” by stem cells.
- 2020 The Screamers Award goes to Stephen Hahn. This one was remarkable because Hahn was FDA commissioner.