Colossal Biosciences has put itself on the map with its ambitions to take on de-extinction, not only to bring back the woolly mammoth, but also to champion important strides in conservation. As a result, science has been making breakthroughs that have helped the masses. This is most evident with the de-extinction of the dire wolf, as well as helping bring back red wolves from the brink of extinction.
Recently, CBR sat down with Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm to discuss the new strides the company has made, the important role Colossal plays in conservation, and how some of his favorite shows (like Apple TV+’s Foundation) have actually helped inspire him.
CBR: Colossal has grown so much in such a rapid time, and you’ve always been on the move as a result. How has that affected you personally? Have you ever had a moment where you just sat down and thought, “We’re making this happen?”
Ben Lamm: I’m very mission-focused, and I have a high degree of conviction. And so I have a deep sense of urgency. So I’m not the best at taking a step back and looking at everything and saying, “Oh, this is all great,” right? Like, while you were coming in, I was talking to two scientists about another idea. For me, I would love to work on 50 species; I’d love to have bio-vaults all over the world. So, I feel like I’m kind of living in the future. We’re making incredible progress. I think objectively, if I took a step back, I’d be pretty proud of what we’ve done. But I’m thinking about 2028 right now.
I love the spirit of collaboration at Colossal between sub-labs, and how it fosters opportunities. Have there been any instances where someone on the avian team discovered or worked on something where the mammalian team was like, “Oh my god, I didn’t think of that!”?
Image via Colossal Biosciences
Yeah, that’s all the time! We have a weekly directors’ meeting, and then we have a monthly genome engineering meeting and a monthly embryology meeting. We bring all the teams together, and we try not to overmeet people. But we have a 45-minute directors’ meeting every single week where everyone has to submit what they’re working on. I’m a big believer in action items for meetings, and I’m also a big believer that everyone reads and submits a memo before the meeting. So, everyone goes in and each team knows what the other is doing, and then we can talk about those things specifically in the meetings.
Then they’re kind of forming action items by the end of the meeting. And so it’s been really, really good. For example, our mammoth team had their head in the memo, and we spent the entire time talking about it, how they had had a breakthrough on multiplex editing. Well, they made 95 edits at once. No one’s ever done anything like that. So immediately, some of our other species teams, including avian, asked a ton of questions, and they are already implementing those techniques. I think that while we have centralized cores running embryology and engineering, we have these individual species teams that are also innovating. And the cross-dissemination of techniques and breakthroughs works really, really fast.
Colossal was able to get a specimen from a 1.2-million-year-old mammoth fossil. What was that experience like?
We work with incredible collaborators all over the world. They actually discovered the tusk and the teeth of a 1.2 million-year-old mammoth. When you think about the genetic diversity, and also importantly, the fixed genes, people ask, “How do you know the mammoth’s hair color?” We have samples dating back 3,500 years and 1.2 million years. We got samples of 100,000. We have samples of 200,000. We have samples across a very wide breadth of time. So we have identified the core genes that drove those core phenotypes of physical attributes and that core loss of biodiversity that existed and persisted, which made that animal truly unique.
Colossal actually does more projects to preserve existing species than you do to de-extinct others, like your work to eradicate facial cancer in the Tasmanian Devil. Theoretically, this could be applied to human healthcare, right?
Dire wolves Romulus and Remus
Image via Colossal Biosciences
Anything that we can develop that saves critically endangered species, or anything that we do on the path of de-extinction that can save critically endangered species, or a critically endangered species-specific project, we just open source it to help the world. But a lot of those technologies can then be applied to industrial use cases or human healthcare.
So we do monetize those. We’ve announced two companies breaking our plastic degradation company, informed by our computational biology. It’s kind of like a drug discovery and manufacturing platform. Those are two of the four soft companies that we’ve spun out of the business. But as we make progress on artificial wombs, EEP for elephants, and on some of the work around our cancer research, I think those could lead to entire companies that could help solve human ailments, not just the biodiversity crisis.
What are some of your long-term goals in terms of exploring aquatic animals, given your focus on avian and mammalian species so far? Coral reefs, for instance, are a hugely important part of the ecosystem.
We’re working right now on just mammals and birds, but we will probably expand over time. I get asked, “How can we help the coral reefs?” And I’d love to. It’s just, we have to be somewhat focused, right? But then at the same time, like Socrates said, “wisdom comes from wonder.” If we can’t think about these things, maybe we become smarter about other things. I think for us, I’d love to do coral. Right now, most people in the world of trying to save coral are doing some bio banking of coral, but they’re also doing micro-fragmentation, where they figured out a way to break and grow coral, where it grows something like six to eight times faster than what normally grows in the ocean, and then doing transplants. But the problem is, you still have salinity, heat and acidification problems. So even if you can grow faster, it’s going to die.
I do think that we as humanity have to look at synthetic biology and engineering and resistance to some of these things. But coral kind of falls into that category for people like gene drives, meaning that if you release a genetically modified mosquito and you put it back in the wild, it’s not like releasing something like a mammoth in a contained area or releasing something like the thylacine on an island. So you have somewhat of a natural barrier to where things’ unintended consequences could go. When you engineer something, and then you put it in the ocean, you’re kind of like letting the genie out of the bottle and seeing what happens. Even if you do lots of experiments. So I am pro gene drives, as long as they’re done thoughtfully. And I am pro doing synthetic biology applications to save corals. We’re not currently working on it. I’d love to eventually work on it because I think it’d be awesome.
What lesson do you hope people will take away from Colossal’s approach to conservation?
Image via Colossal Biosciences
I’d say we’re trying to be thoughtfully disruptive. One of the things that we sometimes deal with is that people are like, “Well, you know, you should just publish scientific papers.” That peer review process takes two years. I can make a Dire Wolf faster than I can get a paper out on my Dire Wolf. So the system is definitely somewhat broken. And we have to all be mindful and be open to that. So I’m a big believer that I think that while conservation works, and people should keep doing conservation, it ain’t working at this rate.
If you go talk to all leading conservationists, they will tell you we, as humanity and conservationists, are fighting a losing battle. We are. It’s like, we’re slowing the bleeding, but we’re not fixing the patient. So I think we need to keep doing what we’re doing to buy us more time. We as humanity need more time. But I think at the same time, we need to be innovating and building new technologies that can rapidly change it. And I think that if we fast-forward the clock with Colossal, and we get to artificial wombs, and we get to robotics, and we get to our large bio-vaults that are deployed around the world, that research centers and governments can all work together on and deploy, well then, you almost have like a species production system.
So we try to be transparent. We try to educate people and get people excited about it, but there is some pushback from a percentage of the “old guard.” My view is we should celebrate anybody, any kid that wants to be a scientist, or any kid that wants to be a conservationist, or any new technologies that go to conservation, those should just be celebrated as a win.
When the dire wolf news dropped, there was one YouTube video in particular that had some criticisms of the dire wolf itself and its validation. Colossal actually dropped a response video, which I loved. What’s your approach to how you combat criticism?
We take a strong stance here that it is not our job to persuade. I don’t think that everyone who disagrees with us shares that. We view it as it’s our job to educate, not persuade. So I’m very comfortable going to a conversation and leaving the conversation, and both people not fully agreeing. I think that’s okay, because we’re all humans. There are people who are critics of ours who think that we all just have to agree, but it’s okay. We don’t have to agree, right? There’s a small percentage of people who want to argue whether our mammoths are mammoths or our dire wolves are dire wolves. Then don’t call them mammoths.
You’re not going to hurt my feelings; it doesn’t bother me. So I think what we take is an attitude that is somewhat playful, somewhat playfully directive at times, and joking, but I think the thing that sometimes drives some critics crazy is that we don’t take an attitude of, “we need to convince you that we are right.” We don’t believe that. This is how we’re doing it. And we have great conviction in the mission and the impact that we’re making for kids and education and for science and for conservation. So our job is just to educate and be transparent, and sometimes we do it in a funny way.
We’ve got people like Mike Dougherty and Peter Jackson and all these other people involved [with Colossal]. These are all really creative people, but they’re also really funny and just normal people. I just don’t think that you need to talk to normal people as if you’re this scientific elite. We’re all just humans. Everyone’s just trying to raise their kids, trying to provide a better life, trying to leave this planet a little bit better. At the very least, they should be doing those things. And it’s cool to just talk to people normally. That’s our attitude.
I’ve heard you love the show Foundation. Now, factoring in that show or any other equally impressive sci-fi shows, have their ideas inspired you in terms of implying ideas to Colossal?
Foundation series still
Image via Apple TV+
It’s Asimov’s best work. It’s a great show. It’s kind of like Breaking Bad in the sense that you have to get through Season 1 because it’s so deep, and it takes place over a thousand years. You’re really kind of committing to the entire story arc. I don’t think you can look at it as an episode or season. It wasn’t my favorite thing in Season 1, but I think I committed to it because I’m such a fan of the work. But a lot of the sci-fi does inspire me, like a world where we could produce endangered species, a world where we could use robotics, or a world where artificial wombs work. A lot of that stuff is in sci-fi. Like you had productionizing of embryo stuff in Gattaca, right?
I’m not saying you should go down that path, but there are some cool technologies there, some of the stuff around artificial wombs. One of the things that we’re not working on — and I don’t think Colossal will ever work on this, but I’m very interested in it — is sleep chambers. Not really cryogenics or cryonics, but suspended animation.
In Foundation, they have kind of hypersleep-type pods, right? So I think that sci-fi opens up our minds to what we think is possible. And now I think technology is catching up to the point where we can make some of those things possible. I think that one thing I’d love for someone to do — and maybe if not, I’ll work on it eventually — is this idea of suspended animation and then the applications for space travel and human healthcare.