How bringing back dire wolves and woolly mammoths may extend human life

Colossal Biosciences’ efforts to bring back extinct animals like the woolly mammoth and dire wolves have drawn comparisons to Jurassic Park. 

CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at the CNBC AI Forum last week that he understands those comparisons. 

“I think anyone that saw Jurassic Park in the 90s and didn’t say it was cool, like I don’t think they’re probably very fun at parties,” Lamm joked. “But yes, I saw the movies. I love them. They entertained us. They scared us.” 

However, Lamm said, “I constantly have to remind people on X that, you know, they were movies,” he said. “I don’t think Jurassic Park had any conservation or general human benefit models to it, so we’ve tried to take a slightly different perspective.” 

Since viable dinosaur DNA is no longer available, bringing back dinosaurs is, in fact, impossible. But what is underway at Colossal, besides the dire wolf and woolly mammoth projects, is work to genetically engineer the dodo bird, the Tasmanian tiger, and a giant bird called a moa, among others.  

“It’s highly likely in the next coming year or two, people will continue to see us deliver extinct species back to Earth, and we could even have more dire wolves, too,” Lamm told Boorstin.  

The process of creating the wolf pups involved taking genetic material from a skull and a tooth that were tens of hundreds of years old. Using AI models, Colossal used the ancient DNA to reconstruct the dire wolf genome and map it to its closest living relative, the gray wolf. The team then created embryos by editing the cells of modern gray wolves.  

Three pups, named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, have been born to domestic dogs used as surrogate mothers.  

Skeptics, Boorstin pointed out, say that they didn’t really de-extinct a dire wolf, rather, they created a genetically modified gray wolf.  

Lamm called this a “semantic argument” that “misses the forest for the trees.”  

“Gray wolves are just genetically modified dire wolves. They were just done by nature or God or however you want to classify it,” he said.  

Colossal is undertaking a similar process in their woolly mammoth project  –  that involves genetically modifying an Asian elephant. Lamm told Time in August that the company is aiming to have a woolly mammoth birth in the 2030s. 

“We call it a woolly mammoth,” he said. “Because if it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it serves ecological functions of a duck, it’s a duck, in our perspective.” 

Lamm became interested in this work after a 2019 meeting with renowned Harvard geneticist George Church, who Lamm called “arguably the father of synthetic biology.” 

Church, who initiated the Personal Genome Project, had been dreaming about bringing back the woolly mammoth for decades, he told CNBC in 2021. 

However, the vision to revive animals like the woolly mammoth goes far beyond creating a real-life Jurassic Park with previously extinct creatures. 

“[Church] had this vision that we could leverage CRISPR and all these tools and technologies to bring back extinct species, use some of those technologies for human healthcare, and then build this programmable life model that we could apply to so many different use cases on Earth,” Lamm said.   

Those use cases include those aforementioned conservation-focused benefits that de-extinction promises. For example, the engineered woolly mammoths could help fight climate change by stomping down snow cover in high-altitude arctic regions, which keeps soil frozen, and knocking down trees, thereby converting heat-absorbing forests into grasslands.   

But the processes around de-extinction are also opening new doors in genome engineering and developmental biology, Lamm said. 

That could have implications on “everything from microbes to plastic in the oceans to gene therapies and targeted delivery for humans to eradicating genetic diseases,” he said. Lamm theorized that these efforts around DNA synthesis could even lead to developing crops or trees that grow faster. 

“We’re pushing the bounds of DNA synthesis to synthesize the largest cargos of DNA,” he said. “That will be massively transformative for how we think about programmable life.” 

A company spun off from Colossal, called Astromech, is pushing into what Lamm called “convergent evolution,” studying what causes species that are similar in nearly every way to have different immunities or other health issues, such as why elephants get cancer at a fraction of the rate humans do. That research could be leveraged to solve human healthcare challengers or pandemic responses, Lamm said. Astromech was valued at $2 billion in March, according to D Magazine. 

“We are in a biodiversity crisis, so we need these tools because we’re going to lose about half of biodiversity in the next 25 years. So, we do need cryopreservation, we need biobanks, we need genetic rescue and these types of tools,” Lamm said. “It opens the gate for us to say, if we take these models and we take these evolutionary trends, what can we learn from it, and how can that apply to other uses cases, and how can we use directed evolution on everything from crops to human healthcare and beyond?” 

These efforts to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems have made Colossal Biosciences attractive to investors. In July, the company announced a $200 million Series C round led by TWG Global, bringing its valuation to $10.2 billion. In total, the company has raised more than $435 million since its founding. 

But it’s not lost on Lamm that many people are inspired by the idea of bringing animals back from extinction, especially young people. Lamm said that 30% of the company’s investors “come to us from their kids.” 

“If we can inspire the next generation and get them excited about science and education and conservation, and then build out a synthetic biology platform that can be leveraged for so many different use cases, that’s the real mission here,” he said. “Our kids, they’re going to inherit our problems, and the decisions on how we solve those.”