A Deeper Dive Into the Colossal Furor
Gray wolf by Jessica Eirich via Unsplash
“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy”
– Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, The New Yorker, 4/14/25
Even the most casual consumers of news will have seen the run of recent headlines featuring the company Colossal Biosciences. On March 4, they announced with great fanfare the world’s first-ever woolly mice, as a first step toward creating a woolly mammoth. Then they topped that on April 7 by unveiling one of the great hypes of all time:
Colossal Announces World’s First De-Extinction:
Birth of Dire Wolves
Oh no they didn’t, came the response from a chorus of scientists and experienced science journalists. “Colossal baloney,” wrote Professor Paul Knoepfler. Soon, geneticist Adam Rutherford; Emily Mullin and Matt Reynolds at Wired; Michael Le Page at New Scientist; Christina Larson at AP; Marina Bolotnikova on X and much more completely at Vox (paywalled); Rebecca Roberts at The Scientist and many more chimed in.
Ricki Lewis, at DNA Science, ridicules the idea that Colossal has “officially resurrected a prehistoric predator”:
“De-extincted” Dire Wolf Pups Have a Few Genetic Tweaks – That’s It
Lewis also notes that her daughter once lived with a wolf, recalls the Grateful Dead song ‘Dire Wolf’ (“I beg of you, don’t murder me”), and puts the genetic modification into perspective:
- A dire wolf’s genome is 2.5 million DNA base pairs, encoding about 19,000 genes.
- The researchers made 20 genome edits encompassing 14 genes.
So they didn’t really resurrect a dire wolf. But even if they had, what would be the point? This blog discussed “de-extinction” in 2013, reporting on a one-day conference at Stanford, where Ronald Sanders concluded presciently that:
The justification for de-extinction is human-oriented. It’s really about the amazing thing we want to do and the cool species we want to see back.
What is being promoted here?
Colossal is not selling ersatz dire wolves. The company is selling the idea of re-creating extinct species and reviving endangered species, a goal that a few eccentrics such as those at the Revive and Restore project have pursued for many years. Mammoths used to be the coolest target for de-extinction, and may be again, along with the dodo and the passenger pigeon.
Colossal named its first two “dire wolves” Romulus and Remus, after the mythological twins who were suckled by a wolf and became founders of Rome. At least Romulus did – after he murdered his brother, a part of the story Colossal avoids. The third pup is named Khaleesi after a major character in Game of Thrones, which seems to have motivated Colossal’s project. The show’s creator George RR Martin, described in the company’s press release as a “Colossal Investor and Cultural Advisor,” enthused:
“I get the luxury to write about magic, but Ben and Colossal have created magic by bringing these majestic beasts back to our world.”
Colossal’s announcement was accompanied by a 5,000-word puff piece in Time Magazine, a 300-word tweet by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, and a three-hour conversation with Colossal CEO Ben Lamm on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Colossal the company
All this hoopla takes time and money, but the company can afford to make this kind of splash. According to Forbes:
Colossal has raised a total of $435 million, including a recent $200 million funding round led by TWG Global at an eye-popping $10.2 billion valuation.
The company was co-founded by Lamm and George Church, of Harvard and an estimated 50 other companies (including Arc, a previous attempt with similar goals).
According to The Intercept, seed money came from Peter Thiel, and early investors included Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, and the CIA. What? Yes, via In-Q-Tel. “Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability.” Other investors include what Newsweek called “a who’s who of sport and entertainment,” including filmmakers, media executives, actors, and athletes.
Again, what exactly is the product?
The Colossal press release had “World’s First De-Extinction: Birth of Dire Wolves” as its main headline, and “the successful birth of four critically endangered red wolves through novel non-invasive cloning technology” (a separate but related project) as the subhead. Secretary Burgum tied the two projects together:
Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list — not additions. The only thing we’d like to see go extinct is the need for an endangered species list to exist. We need to continue improving recovery efforts to make that a reality, and the marvel of “de-extinction” technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk. …
The Daily Beast was blunter:
Team Trump Offers Dire Wolf Excuse to Abandon Endangered Species
The Conservation section of the Colossal website is huge and proclaims enormous ambition to save species from extinction — or recreate them. The dire wolves got most of the attention last week but the cloned red wolves may actually be more significant in terms of both conservation policy and developments in cloning technology. Red wolves are an almost-extinct species, down to about 20 in the wild. But is cloning the way to save them? According to Environmental Action, one-fifth of red wolves are killed by vehicles, and wildlife crossings would avoid most of these tragedies, protect other species, and make the road safer for drivers.
The Science and Technology section of the Colossal website promises both innovation and commercialization:
Much like the Apollo mission led to modern day mobile phones, our de-extinction discoveries will lead to a commercial evolution.
This seems to be an article of faith.
Becoming a Billionaire
Everyone claims to favor conservation (as long as it doesn’t get in the way too much) but how do you monetize it?
Investors like to see a financial return. Certainly Lamm does. He has a history of co-founding, running, and selling companies: In 2010, still in his 20s, he co-founded Chaotic Moon, a “creative technology studio” that was bought by Accenture in 2015. Team Chaos, which he also co-founded, created “immersive and mind-blowing digital adventures” and was acquired by Zynga in 2016. He founded HyperGiant in 2017 (backed by Tony Robbins) to focus on “emerging tech and A.I. at the intersection of defense, space and critical infrastructure” and sold that in 2023, a couple of years after he co-founded Colossal Biosciences with George Church.
Lamm himself is now said to be worth $3.7 billion, mostly it seems from Colossal, based on the most recent funding round. That’s about 1% of Elon Musk’s wealth but Lamm is ten years younger.
What next?
Some of the technologies developed at Colossal certainly might have other applications.
“By using artificial wombs, it will be possible to breed endangered animals quickly, efficiently and without the limitations associated with traditional breeding programs. Utilizing artificial processes can expedite the revival of endangered populations, inherently preventing their extinction.”
Their de-extinction wish list includes not just the woolly mammoth (which they hope to patent) but the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Meanwhile, Colossal is “incubating” new tech companies such as Form Bio, which Lamm co-founded in 2022 to develop AI for Cell & Gene Therapy.
Lamm may also be interested in human applications. Just over two hours and ten minutes into his conversation with Joe Rogan, the two discussed heritable gene editing in humans. This thread on X by The Vigilant Fox includes the most relevant three minutes of video. They focus on the 2018 scandal of He Jiankui, who claimed to have altered embryos’ genes to give them protection against HIV. (There still has been no full examination of his claims.) According to Lamm, there’s a growing debate over whether those same embryos were also edited for enhanced intelligence. The science is still inconclusive, but the intent, he claims, is very real.
Is Lamm edging toward efforts to develop gene-editing technologies for “improving” humans? As Henry Mance notes in the Financial Times:
[D]e-extinction may not be the end of the story, but part of a biological revolution that could lead to the engineering of humans. What’s arresting is how this technology is funded by billionaires, with the argument that the genie is out of the bottle and China is doing this stuff anyway.
