The Free Press
It’s a quarter past one in the afternoon in Dallas when I meet bearded billionaire Ben Lamm, the 43-year-old denim-jacketed CEO of Colossal Biosciences, who claims to have reintroduced dire wolves into the world after more than 10,000 years of extinction. The three animals, it turns out, are currently living, Truman Show–like, in a 2,000-acre enclosure in an undisclosed location, under round-the-clock surveillance. The six-month-old males are named Romulus and Remus after the mythical human brothers who were nursed by a “she-wolf” and founded the city of Rome; their two-month-old sister is called Khaleesi, after the vengeful queen from Game of Thrones.
Despite this monumental achievement, Lamm admitted he is feeling a bit less than overjoyed.
“It’s been a little crazy here,” he said, via Zoom, from his perch in front of an artfully curated bookcase that features tiny mastodon replicas and books like The Secrets of Dinosaurs. Also in the picture: a Barbasol can of shaving cream, perhaps a winking reference to the movie Jurassic Park, in which such a can, albeit a jerry-rigged one, was used to smuggle dinosaur embryos off an island.
Despite the fact that Colossal, which is Lamm’s sixth start-up, is introducing a whole new host of ethical issues into our increasingly less biodiverse world, what matters most to Lamm, at least right now, is that the rollout of his own Spielbergian-style blockbuster is not going exactly to plan.
According to Lamm, all the news organizations that he had been speaking to about the dire wolves had agreed not to publish their stories until this past Tuesday, April 8. But then, he said, The New Yorker published on Monday, which caught him and his colleagues off guard.
“Our website wasn’t live,” Lamm said. “Our YouTube stuff wasn’t live. None of our tweets and social media stuff were ready to get pushed out. . . and now, you’ve got 70 percent of the world saying they’re dire wolves, and you got 30 percent of the world saying they’re not. We weren’t really able to tell the scientific story,” he laments. “I don’t know if you watch Seinfeld, but remember the episode ‘Yada Yada Yada’? They,” he said—meaning the media and online critics—“yada yada-ed over the science.”
But a New Yorker spokesperson told The Free Press, “The New Yorker did not agree to such an embargo. As has been the case for decades, and as Colossal’s representatives were aware, The New Yorker publishes on Mondays.”
Time magazine wound up releasing its online version of the story on Monday as well. Its cover featured an arresting image of one of the genetically engineered dire wolves: large and regal, with a thick white coat, a long lupine snout, and beautiful, pale yellow-green eyes peering into the low middle distance as if searching for prey. Above this marvel was printed one word: Extinct, crossed out with a red line. In other words, the dire wolf is extinct no more.
The Time cover is dated May 12, 2025, and the issue can only be preordered, with shipping slated to begin in three weeks. But the memes it inspired have already begun:
This is an apolitical Portland hipster. The first to exist since the ’90s.
This is Alex. She’s a tomboy. The first to exist since the ’90s.
This is Cooper. He’s a white cornerback. The first to exist in over 10,000 years. Endangered species could be changed forever.
Right now, on X, commenters aren’t so much celebrating Lamm’s achievement as debating it, with many declaring it invalid, or at least an overstatement at best. Lamm has spent the week insisting his creation is real, posting to the world, “WOLVES DON’T LOSE SLEEP OVER THE OPINIONS OF SHEEP” and #itsadirewolf.
And yet the central question could not be hashtagged away: Are his three newly minted pups actual dire wolves? Or just a lookalike simulacrum?
Absolutely the former, insists the somewhat frenetic Lamm: “There’s never been an animal with this number of edits. There’s never been an animal with ancient DNA in it. The fact that we took a 72,000-year-old skull and a 13,000-year-old tooth and engineered puppies?”
But when I pressed him to answer his own question, he said, “Matt, do you want to go?” and turned to the also bearded Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, who was with the dire wolves when they were born.
“It’s a dire wolf,” said James. “It is a dire wolf. It looks like a dire wolf. It has dire wolf DNA. There’s nobody in the world that has studied dire wolf genetics more than the people that you’re on this call with. And we have more data than anybody’s ever published on the dire wolf. And what we’ve done is taken the key core phenotypes and the associated genotypes of the dire wolf and then used that to edit a dire wolf. So, this animal looks and acts, and is a dire wolf. And it fills the same ecological niche.”
But do the new pups, in fact, have 100 percent the same DNA as the dire wolves of yore, I asked. “Ninety-nine point five percent,” Lamm told me. And, as of now, the dire wolf is the “most precision, multiplex germline-edited animal on the planet.” And yet, if humans and chimpanzees share 98.8 percent of the same DNA, I point out, is sharing 99.5 percent of it as significant as it would seem?
“There’s never been an animal with this number of edits. There’s never been an animal with ancient DNA in it. The fact that we took a 72,000-year-old skull and a 13,000-year-old tooth and engineered puppies?” —Ben Lamm on de-extincting the dire wolf
For the answer to this Lamm connects me to Colossal’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, a renowned evolutionary biologist and 2009 MacArthur Fellow who specializes in the genetics of Ice Age animals and plants. “All of these percentages are not particularly precise,” she told me. “In the old days, when people were first estimating chimpanzee relatedness to humans, they used several different approaches that resulted in numbers being published that ranged from 95 percent identical to 99 percent identical and unfortunately all of these are correct because it depends on what we’re measuring.”
What’s more, she explained, when it comes to the dire wolves, “it’s tough to know what is in the remaining 0.5 percent of similarity. But keep in mind that most of the differences between two individuals are not differences that are important to making the species that species. You and I do not have genomes that are 100 percent identical, but anything that is in that long list of differences between us or between our two dire wolves is probably not important to making a human a human—or a dire wolf a dire wolf.”
What Colossal has created, she said, are “animals that are 99.5 percent similar to dire wolves because of the shared evolutionary history. They also have 20 additional edits that we have seen bring back dire wolf traits. It’s correct to call them a dire wolf according to some species definitions. But it’s also not correct, according to other definitions.”
What will never be possible, she said, is to “bring something back that is 100 percent identical in every way—genetically, physiologically, behaviorally, ecologically—to an extinct species. Especially because a species is more than just the sequence of its DNA. But that wasn’t the intention of this project and it’s not the intention of any de-extinction project.”
On Monday, in response to the news of Colossal’s recreation of the dire wolf, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum posted on X, “It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation. Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list”—which he compared to the Hotel California, from the Eagles song, in that “once a species enters, they never leave.”
This led to a Thursday Washington Post article headlined “Trump Team Cites Wolf ‘De-extinction’ as It Seeks to Cut Endangered Species List.” When I asked James about this story, he told me, “I think Secretary Burgum’s quote has been unfortunately politicized and the spirit of his message has been lost. In our meetings with the secretary, my takeaway has been that he sees immense value in the use of innovation and technology in the recovery of endangered species. . . . It is our belief that in conjunction with conventional conservation, our tools can be used to accelerate the recovery of listed species.”
De-extinction, said Shapiro, is not about “creating perfect genetic copies of individual animals. It’s about restoring lost ecological functions and enhancing biodiversity.”
According to James, who worked in nonprofit zoo-based conservation organizations on captive animal management before joining Colossal, the whole de-extinction project began with a company brainstorm with some of their advisers, specialists in ancient DNA. It was then that they put the dire wolf on a list of extinct species they were interested in reviving.
But about 18 months ago, he and Lamm, whose other start-ups focused on software, video gaming, and AI, rather than animals, were out visiting the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation in North Dakota, which is focused on conservation, and which Colossal considers to be one of their official “indigenous partners.”
“Chairman [Mark N.] Fox was walking us around the cultural center and started sharing how he thought we should start investing more into American heritage species like bison and wolves,” James recalled. “And then he started telling us MHA’s origin story, their ancestral story of the great wolf,” which was, said James, “actually a dire wolf, based on oral traditions of his tribe.”
Fox suggested James and Lamm pursue bringing back the dire wolf, and “then we started seeing the stars align,” said James. Colossal started doing comparative genomics to determine which animal was the closest living relative to the dire wolf—as it turned out, it was the gray wolf—and then the design, as it were, began. Or, as James explained it, the question that he and his scientist colleagues at Colossal all began to pursue was this: “How do you reengineer the dire wolf?”
“Does Colossal pay these indigenous partners?” I asked; the answer is no. “How much does de-extincting an animal cost?” I asked. James said he doesn’t even know. “We haven’t tried to account for an exact number of what the cost would be,” he said. But, said Lamm, “we raise so much capital.” The company’s financial backers include celebrities—Paris Hilton, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Brady, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson—and also, the venture capital arm of the CIA. Yes, that CIA.
At the same time as they were working on the dire wolf, Colossal cloned a different kind of wolf, the red wolf, which is not extinct, using cells isolated from red wolf blood, which seems pretty remarkable too, even if it’s the same standard cloning technique that, back in July of 1996, resulted in the cloning of Dolly the Sheep. But according to Shapiro, the significance of this project is not to be underestimated.
These new red wolves, she said, are “members of the population of ‘ghost wolves’ that live along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.” Now, “their DNA both persists in the wild population and is brought into a research setting where they have the potential to contribute new red wolf ancestry to the captive population.”
But what ultimately makes this project as well as all of these other de-extinction projects significant, she said, is “how much we will discover along the way that we can use to help protect living species.”
She continued: “Habitats around the planet are changing at a pace that is faster than evolution can keep up with. Gene editing could be used to help species become resistant to disease, to restore missing genetic variation, or to correct gene sequences that lead to genetic disease.”
As important as all this work is, Lamm and the company have their hearts, minds, and dollars set most on “de-extincting” none other than the woolly mammoth, well-preserved frozen carcasses of which have been found in places like Siberia.
To do this, they are trying to figure out how elephants can carry and gestate woolly mammoth embryos in their wombs. “That’s late-stage,” said Lamm. All of Colossal’s dire wolves, as well as all of their other candidate species, will be grown inside surrogates, “but then, outside of the surrogates,” he adds. “We do have a 17-person team working on artificial wombs.”
Artificial wombs?
“It’s great from an animal welfare perspective,” Lamm explained. “But it also allows for production scale. So imagine a world where you actually produce 200 northern white rhinos”—currently there are just two left in the world and they are both female, a mother and daughter—“that have engineered genetic diversity into them. And you do it in a lab and you grow them in a lab, and then you work with rewilding experts. It’ll change conservation forever.”
But when it comes to conservation, the woolly mammoth may play the most significant role out of all the animals Colossal is working on, he said.
“When you remove a keystone species,” said Lamm, “whether it’s a mammoth or a wolf, or whatever, you’re starting to degrade that ecosystem. That ecosystem that when it functions at its top rate with the right level of biodiversity—and which includes a predator/prey dynamic—it’s actually a more functioning ecosystem.” And so, the grand theory is this: If woolly mammoths can be restored to sparsely inhabited lands, like the tundra, they could function as ecosystem engineers—and help rebuild at least some of what was lost when the Pleistocene era ecosystem degraded.
The woolly mammoth ecosystem of the Pleistocene era, Lamm told me, was “one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world. It was as biodiverse as the African savanna is today. So if you can go to an area that’s currently sort of barren of life, and you can create an African savanna type of place, you’re increasing biodiversity.”
The de-extincted woolly mammoth on track for a late 2028 first birth.
And so, the world may have called BS on their dire wolf pups. But Lamm, ever the serial entrepreneur optimist, is unbowed. “I don’t think we got that much flak this week,” he told me at close of business on Friday. “I believe everyone is entitled to an opinion and when you do something new and big and bold, it can be confusing and scary. It’s important to have the dialogue and it’s okay that not everyone agrees.
“That’s human nature.”
Johanna Berkman is a journalist living in New York City. She won the 2023 Deadline Club Award for arts reporting for her story about a complicated plagiarism scandal.