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Death and taxes are supposed to be the things we can depend on in this life. But in 2025, the American entrepreneur Ben Lamm sold much of the world on the idea that death did not, after all, need to be for ever.
This was the year the billionaire’s genetics startup, Colossal Biosciences, claimed it had resurrected the dire wolf, an animal that disappeared at the end of the last ice age, by tweaking the DNA of grey wolves. According to the company, it had also edged closer to bringing the woolly mammoth back from the dead, with the creation of genetically engineered “woolly mice”.
In a flurry of high-profile announcements and press releases, it launched projects to revive the Tasmanian tiger (also known as the thylacine), the dodo and the moa, a 3-metre tall bird that has been extinct for 600 years.
“We’ve made a lot of big promises to the world,” Lamm tells the Guardian. “I think that we started to deliver.”
Lamm, a 44-year-old veteran of gaming and AI startups, has brought a brash Silicon Valley showmanship and entrepreneurial drive to the genetic conservation sector – and his approach so far has been extremely lucrative.
He quickly realised that de-extinction announcements were a recipe for excitement and publicity. When the company announced its “woolly mouse”, he recalls, “people were losing their minds”.
Watching the response, Lamm says: “I thought: oh my gosh, they’re going to go crazy about the dire wolf stuff.”
He was right. When Colossal unveiled its interpretation of the dire wolf in April, the news made international headlines. Enthusiastic profiles in Time magazine and the New Yorker declared “the dire wolf is back”.
Colossal invited the public to listen to “the first dire wolf howls in over 10,000 years” on YouTube. “Obviously the dire wolves were a massive hit and fan favourite,” Lamm says.
Money poured into Colossal from Hollywood and venture capital firms. The Texas-based start up, co-founded by Lamm and a Harvard geneticist, George Church, was valued at more than $10bn (£7.5bn) at its most recent fundraising round. American socialite and media figure Paris Hilton, filmmaker Peter Jackson, and former American footballer Tom Brady are among the investors, and the company now funds more than 100 scientists working to bring back extinct species from the dead.
Colossal’s approach has also caught the attention of the powerful: the Trump administration cited the “resurrection” of the dire wolf as it made efforts to cut the endangered species list in the US.
“It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation,” said the US interior secretary, Doug Burgum. “We need to continue improving recovery efforts to make that a reality, and the marvel of ‘de-extinction’ technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.”
In the future, he said, “‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”
But the announcements have been met by far less excitement among scientists. Shortly after the dire wolf announcement, and to much less fanfare, a group of the world’s leading experts on canids concluded that the company had not really resurrected the species.
Rather, they had made 20 edits to the DNA of grey wolves, and the resulting animals did not substantially differ from those that now roamed North America, the group said.
Amid the scientific reaction, Colossal’s chief scientist, Beth Shapiro, a leading expert on ancient DNA, acknowledged to New Scientist that: “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned.”
Many researchers in the sector who are not employed by Colossal have been far stronger in their criticism of the company’s claims. Nic Rawlence, director of the palaeogenetics laboratory at the University of Otago in New Zealand, is an expert on the moa, which the company is trying to resurrect. Bringing it back from the dead is not possible, Rawlence says.
“Extinction is still for ever. Charles Darwin nicely summed it up when he said, ‘when a group has once wholly disappeared, it does not reappear; for the link of generation has been broken.’
“Rather than true de-extinction, Colossal’s attempts are genetically engineered poor copies at best, passed off as the real deal,” he says. “Colossal are preying on people’s desire to undo the sins of the past. However, to achieve this, Colossal is spreading misinformation and undermining trust in science by attacking critics.”
In a number of academic journals and scientists’ commentaries, the company’s announcements were met with deep scepticism. The geneticist Adam Rutherford called the mammoth announcements “elephantine fantasies” that would only be possible with the invention of time travel.
Others argue that overhyped claims of bringing back lost species weaken trust in science and scientists. “I don’t think they de-extincted anything,” Jeanne Loring, a stem-cell biologist, told Nature.
Those concerns have not slowed the company’s push forward. In the next few years, Colossal’s team of scientists will unveil its interpretation of the woolly mammoth. It will be a genetically modified Asian elephant adapted to live at -40C (-40F), with long hair, small ears and other mammoth characteristics interpreted from frozen DNA, says Lamm, who bristles at the suggestion this creature may not constitute a mammoth.
“We believe in free speech so if people want to call our mammoth a mammoth, or a genetically modified, cold-tolerant Asian elephant with lost mammoth alleles [variants of genes] inserted through genetic engineering, we’re cool with that. Whatever,” he says.
“If a child cares more about biodiversity loss and the climate because they saw a Colossal mammoth, who gives a shit?” Lamm adds. “That’s our view.”
For a number of scientists, making public criticisms of the company has come at a cost. In July, New Scientist revealed that several scientists who had been critical of Colossal had been the subject of seemingly AI-generated articles in a mystery smear campaign, attacking their credentials and academic records.
Lamm says the company has nothing to do with the stories. “We have a lot of support from different communities publicly, ranging from scientists all the way to crypto; it’s a big spectrum. People argue about things all the time. So, if you are going to be a critic, you should be comfortable that you may also be criticised,” he says.
The criticism has irritated Lamm. He points to Colossal’s efforts to conserve elephants and in trying to save the northern white rhino as evidence that his company can change the way the sector works. The company’s website frames its work as part of efforts to counteract the collapse of biodiversity, which some scientists have called the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth.
“The worst part of conservation is conservationists ,” he says. “A lot of models out there are not working and we need new models. The reality is, modern conservation – while it works – doesn’t work at the speed at which we are eradicating species and changing the planet.
“We’ve got to get more of these incredible scientists off the couch and in the field saving animals. They must communicate it in a way that isn’t behind some paywalled scientific paper but in a way that gets a kid, like, ‘Oh, I want to go to Africa and save elephants. Oh my gosh, I have to save the dugong. What do you mean drug cartels are killing the vaquita? How can I help that?’”
Even Colossal’s harshest critics recognise the potential of gene editing to save species caught in genetic bottlenecks. Many wildlife populations have become dangerously inbred as their numbers dwindle, and Colossal is working to reintroduce genetic diversity back into populations, such as the critically endangered red wolf in North America, by reintroducing lost genes from museum specimens.
Despite the excitement and money around Colossal, however, conservationists say its work can never be a substitute for traditional efforts to save species from extinction: the time-consuming work of controlling predators, protecting ecosystems and restoring habitats.
“De-extinction technology could be a useful conservation tool for living species,” says Rawlence, “but it won’t replace unsexy grunt work.”
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
