Ben Lamm — Tech entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, the world's first de-extinction and species-preservation company. A self-described non-scientist who builds teams around geneticists like George Church and Beth Shapiro to engineer extinct and endangered species.
The gist
Ben Lamm explains how Colossal Biosciences uses ancient DNA, comparative genomics, CRISPR, multiplex gene editing, and cloning to recreate lost traits of extinct animals. He details the actual creation of three dire wolves (Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi) and four cloned red wolves, plus the viral woolly mice proof-of-concept, all kept on secure preserves rather than rewilded. The conversation covers the philosophy of what counts as a 'species,' clashes with academic critics, conservation partnerships, and spin-out technologies like blood-based cloning, artificial wombs, and a plastic-eating microbe (Breaking). It widens into rewilding ethics (Yellowstone vs. Colorado wolves), human gene editing in China, longevity science, and a long final stretch on ancient mysteries, the Younger Dryas impact theory, and UFOs.
Big reveals
- Colossal has created three living dire wolves (Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi) on a secure 2,000-acre preserve.
- They have cloned four red wolves, including 'Hope,' the world's first cloned red wolf, with more genetic diversity than the wild population.
- The woolly mice were made with 36 healthy mice and claimed 100% multiplex editing efficiency as a proof of concept.
- A prior federal administration allegedly wanted 5-6 years and $22M to study whether cloning wolves was even possible, after Colossal offered to do it free.
- Colossal is open-sourcing a method to clone animals from a simple blood draw, a potential game-changer for bio-banking.
- Ben says the technology to gene-edit a fully-grown, already-born human is foreseeable, not just embryo-stage editing.
- He confirms Colossal works closely with the DoD and intelligence community and is funded in part by In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture arm).
- Colossal spun out a company, Breaking, around an Amazon enzyme that breaks plastic's chemical bonds into biomass.
Things worth remembering
- Asian elephants are ~99.6% genetically identical to mammoths and are more closely related to mammoths than to African elephants.
- The last woolly mammoths went extinct only ~4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, while humans were building the pyramids.
- Colossal found from the genome that dire wolves were white, not red as some earlier papers assumed.
- A single letter change among ~3.5 billion base pairs conferred roughly 5,000x resistance to cane-toad neurotoxin in their model marsupial.
- Elephants and blue whales get cancer at a fraction of expected rates ('Peto's paradox'), tied to over-expression of the p53 gene.
- A cited study suggests eating at least two eggs a week may lower Alzheimer's risk by ~47%, with Alzheimer's framed as 'type 3 diabetes.'
- Camera-trap tests in Tasmania show native animals freeze in fear at thylacine cutouts after ~100 years of absence, suggesting inherited generational memory.
- Pronghorn antelope run ~55 mph because they evolved to outrun the now-extinct American cheetah.
- After working with Gary Brecka, Ben's biological age dropped to 35 versus his actual age of 43.
- Tasmanian devils carry the only known transmissible cancer (devil facial tumor disease), spread by biting during fights.