Life After Extinction: Bringing Woolly Mammoths Back Via Artificial Wombs

**Ben Lamm** (0:00)
We have to back up all life. You know, it's forecasted that we're going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050 So, like, current conservation works, it just doesn't work at the speed at which we are eradicating things. So we have to back up all life.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:28)
Well, per usual, we're gonna get a little weird on this episode, maybe extra weird. I am gonna be joined by Ben Lamm, who is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. You may have heard of them in the press. They wanna do nothing less than bring the woolly mammoth, the dodo and a bunch of other animals back from extinction. No small feat and full of controversy as you can imagine. The company was co-founded by George Church, who is the world famous scientist doing all kinds of weird genetic things. We're gonna get into that and I promise you, you shall be entertained.
Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

**Ben Lamm** (1:18)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:21)
It's a pleasure, Ben. I've talked to George Church over the years who you co-founded this company with, but I never had the chance to talk to you. So this is exciting.

**Ben Lamm** (1:34)
Yeah, George is the best. If you've talked to George, you probably know that he's actually just as funny as he is smart. So he's great.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:42)
Yeah, that man, he's a wild man of science.
For people who have never heard of Colossal, it feels like a very good place to start. It's about as ambitious and I'd say weird, but in a good and interesting way as you can get. Can you explain the basics of what you guys are trying to do?

**Ben Lamm** (2:07)
Yeah. So Colossal is the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company. So our goal is to use genetics and genetic rescue, advanced embryology, lasers, all these crazy things to essentially bring back extinct species or proxies for those species, put them back into the wild in collaboration with governments, indigenous people, groups and others, and then build those technologies, take some of those technologies that we build and apply some of them to human health care, but then make the others available for free to conservation. So we have this idea of like, we can do these cool moonshot projects, inspire the next generation, help the ecosystems, and then hopefully help existing animals as well. And so it's a complicated problem that we're trying to solve, but you know, it's a pretty big one.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:50)
It's very big, and there's a lot, a lot to get into. I know, trying to give, trying to bring people to down to earth on this a bit. You know, the three animals in particular that you guys have called out so far that you want to focus on first are the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the Tasmanian tiger, and as a half Australian, I'm all for the Tasmanian tiger effort.
People are going to have the very most obvious question. Why would we want to bring, say, the woolly mammoth back?

**Ben Lamm** (3:26)
So all these species that we're working on, we do it through the lens of a systems model, right? So kind of like when humanity went to the moon, a lot of innovations went, came from that, and inventions came from that that have helped humanity. Like some of the core tech that was invented on humanity's pursuit of the stars allows us to have this conversation right now, which is amazing. And so when you can work on these big, hard problems, you have to innovate across genetic engineering, computational biology, and all these different areas, and it creates an opportunity just to develop new tools and technologies that could be radically applied to conservation much, much faster. In all these species, there were anthropologic or human effects that caused these species to go extinct, right? And so we thought this is an opportunity to build tech, undo the sins of the past. But then we also thought, well, we can have these species, if we do enough ecological modeling, if we can rewild these species, maybe they can also help the ecosystem as well. And so for us, these three species kind of made sense to start with, and then hopefully over time with these successes, we'll even branch into even weirder species.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:36)
Well, okay. Something like the Tasmanian tiger, I can get Australia has this issue where, well, so it's a natural predator, and Australia is this crazy case where it's an island, and so every time someone brings a rabbit or a camel, they're crazy things.