\n\t\u201cThe idea that we could do something that could have a really awesome impact and then also build a lot of value in the tech [space] and create the leading genome and engineering company, while also inspiring the next generation, for me it was the perfect combination,\u201d Lamm tells The Hollywood Reporter of his reason for launching Colossal. \u201cIt was one of those true opportunities that if we were successful, the world would never be the same again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWith the support of some Hollywood investors \u2014 including filmmaker Peter Jackson, author George R.R. Martin, actress Sophie Turner and former NFL star Tom Brady, to name a few \u2014 the 43-year-old billionaire entrepreneur has brought the development of genetic engineering and reproductive technology to the public stage, sparking interest across the globe.<\/p>\n
\n\tBelow, Lamm opens up about his de-extinction initiative, how Colossal chose their first group of species, how several Hollywood notables got involved with his company, if he\u2019s open to bringing people behind the scenes of Colossal\u2019s work in a documentary and more.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat do you make of everything Colossal has been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, since launching only a few years ago in 2021?<\/p>\n
\n\tThe fact that in less than four years, we\u2019ve taken\u00a073,000-year-old skulls and made puppies, and we brought the world\u2019s first woolly mouse \u2014 not that the world even needed it, but it\u2019s kind of cool and interesting, right? I had no idea it was going to be such a viral impact on kids and parents. We get at least four or five emails a day about the woolly mouse, which is just insane. And given the fact that we get all these crazy, supportive governments around the world, indigenous people groups around the world, crazy amounts of celebrity [support], like we don\u2019t pay celebrity endorsements, they\u2019re investors in us. And it\u2019s been this weird worldwide movement. So I would say, I thought people would be really excited about the mission. I was hopeful because obviously, the inspiration and impact side. I had no idea we\u2019d have this level of excitement and support around the business. So I am in awe every day of the incredible women and men of what they\u2019ve achieved scientifically in an insane amount of time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThere are unfortunately so many extinct animals, so what made you want to start with the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, dodo, dire wolf and moa?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSo a couple of reasons, right? As we build out a robust, like de-extinction tool kit, ranging from\u00a0ancient DNA assembly to comparative genomics to genome engineering to even eventually things like artificial wombs, we wanted to pick different animals from different animal clades, so it was representative of large family groups. So hopefully the technologies are easily adaptable from a conservation perspective. And\u00a0it\u2019s not like we have a five-step checklist. But we do think about things like, one, is it possible? Does this DNA exist? Is there a surrogate until we have artificial wombs existing? And then, should we do it? Is there a conservation benefit to it? Is there an indigenous input? It was crazy to think that we\u2019d ever work on one of those species that has this cultural impact to these people without consulting them. So that has to be a layer to it. And then there\u2019s certain pop culture elements like the dire wolf, right? It has a conservation aspect, as an indigenous aspect. It can help ecosystems. There\u2019s a lot to it. But then we\u2019re like, most people think the dire wolf was just in Game of Thrones or Magic: The Gathering. It had this\u00a0fantasy and nerd culture component that was like, oh my gosh, we could bring all those people into science and show people what\u2019s possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tDire wolves Romulus and Remus.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Colossal<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat other extinct species are on your list to revive in the future?<\/p>\n
\n\tThere\u2019s a couple that are really awesome. There\u2019s one called the freat auk, which was basically a North American penguin species that\u2019s like penguin meets puffins. A really cool animal that Vikings and others hunted to extinction. We\u2019re not working on it yet, but as we get further with our avian genomics group on the moa and dodo, I think it\u2019d be a great project to add. Another project that we\u2019re not working on, but I\u2019d love to is a Steller\u2019s sea cow. It\u2019s like a whale-sized manatee. It\u2019s a terrible tragedy \u2014 30 or 40 years after humans discovered it was extinct.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tDire wolves Romulus and Remus just had their first birthday earlier this month, but when it was announced earlier this year that they had been brought back from extinction, it went viral. What goes through your mind when you reflect on that excitement from people at that time?<\/p>\n
\n\tI was sitting on stage at [South by Southwest] doing an\u00a0interview\u00a0and we had just showed the world woolly mouse and we\u2019re showing the videos and people were just losing their minds. We thought they\u2019re cute and we thought it\u2019s a major technological advancement showing that we could engineer the genes around hair from a mammoth into mice to prove that we\u2019re on the right track and whatnot. But at the same time, I had no idea that Chip and Dale were gonna go a stupid level of viral, and they\u2019re on Jimmy Kimmel and on Saturday Night Live and they\u2019re on everything. So I remember thinking at [South by Southwest], if people lost their minds and are this excited about the woolly mice, what is about to happen? And we had people come to our labs looking for the mice and we had to ramp up security \u2018cause we\u2019re not like open to the public. So it got a little insane and then we\u2019re like, oh my gosh, how crazy is the dire wolf, and we were right, the dire wolf was insane. It was a crazy week.\u00a0\u2026 The 10 days around launch felt like 40 years in themselves. But at the end of the day, everyone was just stupid levels of excited and and it just went so crazy and so viral.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tWoolly mice.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Colossal<\/p>\n
\n\tYou also have quite the roster of Hollywood nobles supporting Colossal\u2019s initiative, including Peter Jackson, George R.R. Martin, Sophie Turner, Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods and the Hemsworth brothers, among others. How did you go about bringing these high-profile folks on board?<\/p>\n
\n\tSome of them I had existing relationships with and then so much of it was just organic. I was in London launching the foundation and a friend of mine pinged me like, \u201cHey, Joe Manganiello is just super excited about what you\u2019re doing. Can we do a Zoom while you\u2019re there?\u201d And I was like, \u201cYeah!\u201d \u2026 And then we would not be able to even work on the moa without the support of the Ng\u0101i Tahu and the M\u0101ori people, and that introduction wouldn\u2019t have happened without Peter Jackson. \u2026 But it\u2019s been like that. I know it sounds weird, but sitting on Peter Jackson\u2019s couch, while people are in his kitchen dissecting his moa bones and doing samples of his moa bones, and he\u2019s like, \u201cWe should call George R.R. Martin.\u201d Like that has been the journey.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhy is it so important for you to have these high-profile names interested and advocating for Colossal\u2019s mission and to help raise awareness? And how would you like Hollywood and Colossal to intersect more?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAs we roll out education, we\u2019ve talked about things like colossal kids and about more ideas around how we can put science on display. People always ask us about things like zoos, and we\u2019re not really interested in that because we\u2019re putting the animals back into the wild. So there\u2019s all these different content ways\u00a0that I think we can build out, you know, we\u2019ve had some of the biggest YouTubers and whatnot reach out to us that we\u2019re now talking to. So it\u2019s like, how do you build those channels so you can create content that\u2019s not disruptive to the animals and bring people in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat\u2019s great is that Hollywood and entertainment really knows how to create captivating stories and find captivating stories and share them, right? So I think more and more engagement with folks like that are helpful. We have a couple of people like Bob Weis, who\u2019s the former CEO of Disney Imagineering. He\u2019s like, \u201cHow do you create physical experiences around some of these concepts that get people excited?\u201d We\u2019ve got investors like Ari Emanuel, who\u2019s the top in the world in this category. So hopefully in the next few years, as we make additional progress on the science, given the public excitement, we\u2019ll find ways to blend de-extinction, sci-fi-level science, conservation, storytelling and entertainment in more interesting, bigger ways. But we just want to be really thoughtful about that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tSophie Turner and Ben Lamm.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJack Taylor\/Getty Images for SXSW London<\/p>\n
\n\tBased on the attention the dire wolf received, would you be open to a documentary or behind-the-scenes series, giving people a look at what Colossal is doing?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tYes! We\u2019ve been doing some stuff with James Reed, and I think we\u2019re gonna expand the portfolio things that we\u2019re working on. But I would say, yeah. We had a lot of behind-the-scenes on the dire wolf stuff captured. We\u2019re trying to capture more stuff and put it on social. The problem with some of the big docuseries stuff, it just takes so long to get out and we can get social out immediately. So I think there\u2019s lots of optionality in terms of how to pursue it, but we\u2019re open to everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn addition to de-extinction science, Colossal is also advocating for endangered species and restoring ecosystems. Can you talk about your goals on that side?<\/p>\n
\n\tYou don\u2019t need to separate them. In a world where we\u2019re forecasted to lose up to 50 percent of biodiversity in the next 25 years, which is terrifying, we need to preserve what we have in ecosystems, but also on a cellular level in cold storage. You need to have a biobank of\u00a0every single species, kind of like a 2025 and beyond Noah\u2019s Ark, right? We need that on a cellular level, while also protecting existing species. And then we need the ability to have a de-extinction tool kit in the event that there\u2019s keystone species or critically endangered species that we need to bring back. It\u2019s always going to be cheaper and easier and more efficient to protect the species than bring it back. But at the same time, I think all these technologies go together. And one of the things that we\u2019re very passionate about with Colossal is I think we\u2019ve done two things really well: we\u2019ve open-sourced all of our technologies for conservation, which is awesome. We have about 65 global partners leveraging our technologies worldwide for saving species from the northern white rhino to the vaquita\u00a0to many others. But at the same time, we also have started the colossal foundation, which we raised $150 million and we\u2019ll raise additional capital so that we can go out and fund conservation initiatives as long as they\u2019re open source for the world, around partners and universities and others.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tLooking ahead, what are your overall goals with de-extinction as you continue to make such large strides?<\/p>\n
\n\tI just sat with the Crown Prince of Dubai last week, and he turned to me and he goes, \u201cI think this is all just going to get faster.\u201d And I agree with him. I had never thought of it like that or said that, but I think AI, access to things like Quantum, are just going to make everything that we\u2019re working on go faster. And I think that will just get better and better over time. And I think this world of leveraging synthetic biology to be able to engineer life, shape life to direct evolution of life, powered with deep computational biology and AI and modeling, will allow us as humans to build everything from how do you bring back mammoths to how do you clean up the oceans with plastic and everything. So I really think synthetic biology in the next 5 to 10 years is going to change everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Lamm is making the impossible possible, working to bring animals back from extinction. Though it was a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,150733,128,338],"class_list":{"0":"post-255248","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-person-of-interest","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}