Ben Lamm is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, a company dedicated to genetic engineering and de-extinction projects. Colossal’s mission includes bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and advancing conservation efforts through cutting-edge biotechnology. www.colossal.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Colossal Biosciences and its mission?
So I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called Colossal Biosciences. We're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.
Yeah, and that is a wild thing. I mean, this is essentially, literally wild. This is essentially real-life Jurassic Park.
Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally. Believe it or not, we get that.
Of course.
I got to drop my hydrogen tablet in here.
Oh, you do those? The Gary Brecker ones, right? Oh, yeah. I'm all in.
Those are great. Yeah, I love those. I just didn't want you to think we were going a different direction.
How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this?
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Chapter 2: How does the de-extinction process work?
So I kind of fell into it. I didn't wake up and say, I saw Jurassic Park. I'm super stoked. I love animals. I want to go work on this. I'm just a weirdly curious person. So there's this guy named George Church. If you don't know George, you should look him up. He's the father of synthetic biologies at Harvard University. He's six foot seven with narcolepsy. He's just the best, right?
So if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's the absolute best. He's a genius. And I thought my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right? And so I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better.
How do we do directed evolution and how that can apply to life? crops and animals and all kinds of stuff. So I get on the phone with George and I ask him my questions. He answers them in like six seconds because he's a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab.
In that process, he's like, you know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things. I was like, wait, wait, what? And I was like, if you had one project, is it this mammoth project?
And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce them in the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human health care. And I kind of thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that like the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with. It was a joke.
Well, then I stayed up all night just Googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line, whether it was in 60 Minutes or Stephen Colbert, whatever he's in, there was this weird mammoth through line where he was just obsessed with these mammoths, and everyone kind of wanted him to do this. So I called him back the next day.
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Chapter 3: Why are woolly mammoths a focus of de-extinction?
Seven days later, I'm in his lab, and we were off to the races on, okay, we're going to try to go build a company to bring back extinct species. So how do you decide what to start with? So we started with the mammoth first, right, because George had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies. We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation.
There was some ecological modeling that had been done to show that the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem. And so that was an easy place to start.
After we launched the company, it went crazy viral and all these other folks from de-extinction research started calling us, like folks from like the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, which looks like a mythical creature. It's awesome. The best appear with the dodo. Everyone just started calling us and then we just started expanding our entire set.
So how does one do this? Before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing, before that, how does one do this? From what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth.
Yeah, let me walk through the whole process. So first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. So the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate. So we definitely need to find a lot of samples. So we actually have about 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1.2 million years old, which is awesome.
Wow. But it's also fragmented. It's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is, and someone's stolen part of the puzzle. And then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there. So there's all kinds of problems with that. So this is really an AI and compute problem. It's not as much a human problem. So you have to get a lot of samples first.
And then you have to start mapping them to their closest living relative. And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right? So Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as mammoths. They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants. Really? Yeah, which always blows people's mind.
That and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids or aliens or whoever was building the pyramids. Like literally like humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed. And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this like weird, like prehistoric, like 65 million years old dinosaur.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges in preserving ancient DNA?
When did they go extinct?
So the last one went extinct about 4,000 years ago.
Really?
On Wrangell Island. Yeah.
Wow.
So they've been around for a long time.
4,000 years ago? I know.
They weren't, I mean, now they appeared about two and a half million years ago as far as we understand. And they were mostly a Pleistocene species. But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed. They existed all the way up until they had this like small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.
Wow.
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Chapter 5: How does genetic engineering create 'Woolly Mice'?
Which is insane. So there's like there's no back. There's no like Noah's Ark bio vault for life, like kind of like the seed vaults that doesn't exist. And so we're actually petitioning the U.S. government to help put a massive project together to help biobank. It's starting with just American megafauna and keystone species. So that doesn't exist at all.
And so then Colossal had to go out and go build reference genomes for all the species, like the closest living relatives for all the species that we're working on.
So this is the question. If you have, say, let's go to woolly mammoth. So if you have woolly mammoth and you have 99%, how do you bridge that gap?
How do you create? That's synthetic biology. So you never have to get to 100%, right? You need to get to probably. Synthetic biology. Synthetic biology. Synthetic biology. That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools. Probably you've heard of CRISPR, all these other things, genetics, you know, which is, it knocks out, it breaks the DNA. It's not always the best tool.
We can now actually make individual edits to, when you think of the DNA double, you know, helix, right, in those rungs of the ladder, those individuals are called nucleotides. We can change the letters. Like, that's how precise we can be. We can say at spot, you know, 4,000,008, I need to change that letter. Right. And so you change that letter.
And then other times you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA. So when you notice that in the mammoth and in the Asian elephant, there's a difference. And if it's in these certain like protein coding regions in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes or physical like attributes, like, you know.
curved tusk, dome cranium, small ears, the subcutaneous fat layer, and, and then hair and coat color, you can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right? Because you're only looking, you're only really looking at that point 4% difference, right? It's a lot of numbers, but you're only looking at that.
And so the better you can be at software, and the better you can be using AI and the computer models, the less edits you have to make, right? Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.
Right. Are there specific genes that regulate size? Because they're larger.
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Chapter 6: What ethical considerations exist in de-extinction?
Is there any plans to sell those?
No, everyone keeps asking us that. But you know what? Museums actually are now calling us saying, and zoos are calling us saying, can we display the woolly mice? They're like, it'll drive so much value. It'll teach people about genetics and whatnot. So it's not our business model to sell our animals or to sell woolly mice, but it's kind of gone crazy.
Is it dangerous, though, to leave these mice in the hands of someone, even at a zoo, who decides, I want more of these?
Yeah, if we ever put them, I think more likely we'd put them in a museum that needs to be free, like the Smithsonian or something like that, from an education perspective versus something that's more attraction-based. I think we'd do it more in the case of a museum.
Do you plan on keeping this batch alive?
Yeah, they're going to live out their normal lives.
But you're not going to make new ones, right?
We may make new ones with new. These won't. They're all separated. They're all separated by sex. So we're not going to like a Jurassic Park moment where they change. They're all separated by sex. But if you if Jamie finds a picture of their habitats, they actually live.
They live a couple of years, but they don't live like traditional lab mice that live in like a small little cage and all on top of each other. They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them. We spared no expense. Cool little house. Yeah. And they're big and we put fun stuff in them to play with like this. And what's been crazy is we only named two of them.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of rewilding and conservation?
Chapter 8: What future projects is Colossal Biosciences exploring?
And so I do that test. And after working with Gary for a while, you know, now my my biological age or my actual age is 43. My my biological age is 35.
That's amazing.
And it's just been working for a year with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients. You know, I buy – and you can actually taste a difference, right? Like if you go to a store and get a steak or chicken, even if it's like free range and all that shit – It tastes great. It tastes better than something that you buy that's terrible at a store.
But when you order from some of these true Amish places and places that have actually grown the food completely natural, that doesn't have just a fake... pre-purchased certified organic, you can taste the difference in the nutrient density. It's insane.
And you only want to eat it. Have you had a lot of wild game?
Yeah. So that's what I order now. So I order a bunch. So I do elk steaks. I do a lot of steaks from this farm that Gary recommended to me. It's just great.
Is it bison? Do they have bison as well?
They do have bison, too. Yeah, it's Parker Pastures. They're just, like, when I have a steak from these guys, like, it's been, like, you can taste it. And I've had, like, my brother-in-law and my father-in-law had friends. I was like, no, no, we're going to try these steaks out of the freezer. I was like, we're not just going to buy something.
Well, it looks different.
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