Replay: How Ben Lamm (Colossal Biosciences) is Bringing Back Extinct Species

Ben Lamm explains how Colossal brought back the dire wolf

Colossal Biosciences is a bet that de-extinction is an engineering problem rather than a biology one. George Church convinced Lamm the tools already exist, and Lamm hired outside scientists with his own money to verify that before founding the company in 2021. The dire wolf pups are the proof of concept and the mammoth, targeted for 2028, is the flagship. No animal generates revenue, so the business sells the tools.

Takeaways

• Mammoth de-extinction is targeted for 2028. Colossal has built reference genomes for elephants and created elephant stem cells. It is editing about 25 of 85 target genes, and it has already tested cold-tolerance traits in woolly mice it named Chip and Dale.
• The dire wolf is 99.5% gray wolf. Colossal calls the pups de-extincted dire wolves, but about 20% of the paleo community disputes the label. Lamm argues speciation is a human construct and that most life is classified by where and when it lived because DNA is not available.
• The business is the technology Colossal builds. De-extinction earns no revenue. Money comes from government work and from carbon and biodiversity credits. Breaking, a spinout, uses a genetically engineered microbe to break plastic's chemical bonds, and TPG is raising an $8bn fund.
• Artificial wombs get a dedicated team of 17. The dire wolf pups were carried by a large domestic dog surrogate through somatic cell nuclear transfer. Lamm's ten-year aim is growing 100 northern white rhinos in artificial wombs, which he treats as the enabling technology for everything else.
• Splitting critics in two won them over. Lamm bifurcated critics into absolute and informed and calls that the number one thing Colossal did right. The informed ones leaned in after the company implemented their feedback. Colossal spent about three months on media training so nobody would mention Jurassic Park.
• Lamm says he admits what he does not know. He was fired by Jiffy Lube after about a day and by a pet store after a week. A high-school web mastery class led him to teach himself Flash, and at Genentech he negotiated pay for the whole summer if he finished three courses early.

How Colossal made the dire wolf

1. Ancient DNA came from a single tooth and from a skull found in a riverbed, including the petrous bone. Samples come from museum collections and from Colossal's own expeditions.
2. Two dire wolf samples were dated at 73,000 and 13,000 years old. The dire wolf is 99.5% gray wolf, its closest living relative.
3. Scientists compared the ancient DNA with the gray wolf genome and edited the differences into living cells. The edited nucleus went into a large domestic dog as a surrogate through somatic cell nuclear transfer.