Meet Ben Lamm: The world's first de-extinction billionaire
Revive the woolly mammoth? It is an utterly mad idea. The furry pachyderm with the twisty tusks that went extinct 4,000 years ago. But it's also brilliant, with wide-ranging implications for climate change and health care
Colossal was started in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, a 43-year-old Texan, and the company describes itself as being in the “de-extinction” business. Image: John Davidson
At first glance, the pair of cute rodents look a little like hamsters who have shaken their golden-hued fur up, like a wet dog, into a puffy ball. But then you notice the distinctive ears and tail and realise that this isn’t an animal you’ve ever seen before. In fact, it’s not an animal anyone has ever seen before. These are woolly mice, genetically engineered creatures created in the Dallas labs of Colossal Biosciences that were designed to display some of the key characteristics of another animal no human in thousands of years has seen: The woolly mammoth.
Colossal was started in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, a 43-year-old Texan who has dabbled in a variety of industries including video games and e-learning, and the legendary Harvard geneticist George Church. The company describes itself as being in the “de-extinction” business. That means using ancient DNA and Crispr gene editing techniques to try to bring back extinct fauna like the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. But those efforts are mostly about exciting investors and grabbing headlines.
More immediate to Colossal’s business model is using similar techniques to save some of the thousands of species, many with potential environmental or conservation value, that could be wiped out by humanity. More than 46,000 species are currently listed as critically endangered.
Extinction extinguisher: “The problem we face is habitats around the planet are changing at a rate faster than evolution can keep up,” says Colossal chief science officer Beth Shapiro
In January, Colossal closed a $200 million fundraise at a $10.2 billion valuation. That brings its total raised to $435 million from bluechip investors including Breyer Capital, Draper Associates and TWG Global. While Colossal does not yet have revenue, it has already spun out two additional startups: Computational biology platform Form Bio (in 2022) and biological recycling company Breaking (2024). The most recent round makes Lamm, who is CEO, worth an estimated $3.7 billion. Church, 70, does not have an equity stake in Colossal. “The fact that I’m not a billionaire is almost as interesting as Ben being one,” says Church, adding, “If I had a billion dollars, I would just spend it on this.”
For Church, who is best known for developing the first genomic sequencing method in 1984 but who also has co-founded some 50 biotech companies, the woolly mouse is a proof of concept that has been a long time coming. He’s been working on sequencing the mammoth’s genome for nearly two decades, though his obsession started far earlier. “Like most kids I had an affection for big furry things,” he says. “I was part of the generation that read Jurassic Park.”
The work started with digging up the remains of woolly mammoths from the Arctic permafrost. Church and his researchers then compared their DNA with that of a close living relative, the Asian elephant, with the goal of bringing a mammoth-elephant hybrid to life. They’re hoping for a calf by 2028. The woolly mice were created to help Colossal’s scientists test the connections between certain DNA sequences and specific mammoth traits like size, shaggy fur and an accelerated metabolism good for very cold climates.
Lamm is filled with ideas for how the science the company is developing could underpin a thriving business, including income streams from governments that want either to reintroduce extinct species or prevent endangered ones from dying off. Governments have long paid for conservation efforts, but budgeting for this type of cutting-edge, controversial science is new.
“If you would have told me at the beginning of 2024 that governments would pay me to do these things, I would’ve said, ‘probably not.’ Now we are seeing that change,” he says.
Colossal is currently “deep in conversations” with two governments, one of them an island nation, about such biodiversity contracts, Lamm says. It does not have any signed agreements yet.
“For us, it’s pretty cool because the pursuit of de-extinction creates technology that we can monetise,” he adds. “The reintroduction of animals back into their habitats creates the potential for annuities in carbon credits, nature credits and tourism taxes.”
Biodiversity credits are novel financial instruments designed to incentivise the protection and restoration of natural environments, in similar fashion to how carbon credits are supposed to reduce pollution. Colossal could potentially make money off these nascent markets and perhaps even snag a cut of tourism taxes from the countries it works with.
One of the governments Colossal is talking with (which Lamm declined to identify because of the sensitive nature of the discussions) is focussed on saving a creature that’s on the brink of extinction, with the potential to throw an entire ecosystem out of whack. Lamm says a shortage of females and problems with the timing of the seasonal breeding cycle have created a bottleneck.
The government’s efforts to breed traditionally could take 25 years and cost $350 million, and the species might still die off.
Colossal is instead proposing to genetically engineer the females to induce them to breed continuously instead of seasonally, short-circuiting the process. “Even if we were to charge them $100 million for that, the results would be that they’re saving the species, guaranteed, and we’re shaving 20 years off their plan and saving them hundreds of millions of dollars,” Lamm says.
That’s an unconventional approach that raises ethical questions. “Releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment—what could go wrong?” says Karl Flessa, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona.
He’s deeply sceptical of Colossal’s mammoth moonshot, calling it “ill-advised, ill-thought-through and a stunt to attract investments in their company,” adding, “Releasing what is ostensibly a cold-adapted species in the face of climate change, where the habitat they are releasing it into is vanishing, there’s an ethical question there.”
Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, acknowledges the risks, but points out that enormous problems sometimes require radical solutions: “This is new money, new people and new ideas into a space that desperately needs it.”