Wooly Mammoths, Dodo Birds, and Thylacines - Oh my! Ben Lamm, CEO and Co-Founder of Colossal, talks De-extinction and his company's plan to "Re-wild" the world.
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00:00Welcome to Jurassic Park.
00:06We've made living biological attractions so astounding that they'll capture the imagination
00:12of the entire planet.
00:14The most phenomenal discovery of our time becomes the greatest adventure of all time.
00:23Is life imitating art?
00:26But of course, the original Jurassic Park trailer, now more than 30 years later, that
00:30very technology, very loosely speaking, is alive.
00:36Colossal Biosciences has been hard at work on de-extinction for years, and we're thrilled
00:42to welcome their co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamb, to Cheddar to discuss it.
00:46Ben, great to have you on the show.
00:48This is fascinating work you are doing.
00:51What is, though, de-extinction in layman's terms, and how does it work?
00:56Yeah, so de-extinction involves identifying old genes in extinct species.
01:03So what we have had to actually do is take a lot of ancient genomes, because DNA degrades
01:08very, very quickly, assemble them together, and then compare them to the closest living
01:12relative.
01:13So an example of that is the mammoth is actually 99.6% the same genetically as an Asian elephant.
01:20So you do a lot of computer work and comparative genomics work to understand the difference.
01:25And then we use CRISPR and all these other engineering tools to simply take the genes
01:31that are from the mammoth, that made a mammoth a mammoth, and engineer them into its closest
01:35living relative, being the Asian elephant.
01:37So we're really de-extincting those core genes that have been lost to time.
01:43You said that DNA degrades quickly.
01:46So how is any left?
01:48How old are the fossils you've been using?
01:51So different projects, there's different fossils that we're working on, and they don't really
01:55go into the fossilization, so they don't turn into rock.
01:58So on our thylacine project, we're working with thylacines or Tasmanian tigers that went
02:03extinct about 100 years ago, all the way back to about 500 years.
02:07But on our mammoth project, because we need a lot more DNA, because DNA degrades so quickly
02:12over time, some of our mammoths are 3,000 years old, and some of them are up to 700,000
02:16years old.
02:17What's great about it, the negative is obviously it's really degraded and painful to reassemble,
02:22but the great thing about it is it allows us to understand what genes really made a
02:26mammoth a mammoth, because there's so much genetic divergence over that 700,000 year
02:31gap.
02:32For many in our audience, Woolly Mammoth is Manny in the Ice Age series.
02:37What sent you down this road?
02:39Why?
02:40So I'm a technology entrepreneur.
02:42I like building teams of women and men that are much smarter than me, and I always love
02:46new challenges.
02:48I'm passionate about biodiversity.
02:49I'm passionate about climate change.
02:50And I met George Church.
02:51And if you don't know George, he's the head of genetics at Harvard.
02:54He's arguably the father of synthetic biology and genetic engineering.
02:59You mentioned Jurassic Park.
03:00In Jurassic Park, in Michael Crichton's book, there's actually a DNA sequence.
03:03That's actually George's work from the 70s.
03:07And so George has been fascinated with genome engineering for a long time, and he had this
03:10vision that we could bring back Woolly Mammoths, build technologies that could help conservation,
03:15and then rewild those mammoths back into the Arctic to help add biodiversity to that
03:19ecosystem and help it thrive once again.
03:21And I mean, that was a pretty compelling pitch to a technology entrepreneur that always envisioned
03:26trying to build something that could have a meaningful impact on the planet.
03:30What is the meaningful impact on the planet?
03:32Well, it's really kind of threefold.
03:35Number one, all of the technologies that we make that have an application for conservation,
03:39we give to the world for free.
03:41We've actually seen so much success in it.
03:42We actually launched the Colossal Foundation, and outside the $435 million we've raised
03:47for Colossal, we've raised $50 million for our foundation that's just allowing people
03:51and conservation groups around the world to use our technologies for free to help conservation.
03:56We're also building technologies that have an application to human health care.
03:59So a lot of times we'll license out or even spin out whole companies that can actually
04:03be used to treat different disease or even with things like drug discovery.
04:07And then the last is ecosystem restoration, right?
04:10So not only are we trying to bring back extinct species and save existing species, but we're
04:14also trying to look at how do we rewild these species back into locations where they can
04:19help the environment flourish even more, because we've done all these different ecological
04:24models that show that a more diverse ecosystem with large megafauna and even predators is
04:30a more healthy ecosystem that's much better at carbon sequestration and nitrogen oxygen
04:34cycling.
04:35How far along is the Woolly Mammoth Project?
04:37How far are we from experiencing this?
04:40So we set out a very big hairy goal, a mammoth goal of late 2028, and we are on track for
04:47that.
04:48So we do believe that we will get to our first mammoth calves by 2028.
04:52With that said, you know, there's a 22 month gestation with mammoths.
04:56So I don't believe it will be the first species that has returned to the earth from extinction.
05:02I think that we may have another one that comes first.
05:06Which one?
05:07We're not, we're not setting any bets yet.
05:09You know, we, we have, we've set one really hard expectation, but because of the gestational
05:13time of elephants, we do think that it's highly likely that another species could come before.
05:19Is it the dodo?
05:22We're not going to play the process of elimination.
05:24It is a fun game, but we're not going to play it.
05:28And I feel like I may have nailed it there.
05:31What other species are coming?
05:34So right now we're working on three flagship projects that we've announced, the mammoth,
05:37the dodo, and then the Tasmanian tiger, or also known as the thylacine, which was a carnivorous
05:42marsupial.
05:43It kind of looks like a mixture between a kangaroo, a zebra, and a wolf that was endemic
05:48to Southern Australia in Tasmania.
05:51Excellent.
05:52You mentioned your founder or your partner's work in actual Jurassic Park one being visible.
05:59I'm just curious, now that you've seen the sausage being made, how close was that film?
06:05Was there anything correct about the science in Jurassic Park?
06:08Well, I think one of the things that we have, we have the Jurassic Park question or some
06:12variant, including can you make dinosaurs every single day?
06:15It's probably the most common thing that we get.
06:18But what's interesting for us is that Jurassic Park did this amazing thing, which is educated
06:22people and kids about, there's this thing called DNA and there's this thing called genome
06:26engineering and it can do miraculous things.
06:28Obviously, the movie has lots of corruption and things go awry, but when you think about
06:33Colossal versus Jurassic Park in terms of what was possible, you need to think of it
06:37as exactly in reverse.
06:39In Jurassic Park, they were taking ancient DNA in amber, and by the way, there's no preserved
06:43DNA in amber.
06:44It's very porous.
06:45Not that we've tried, but there is no DNA in amber.
06:48They're taking these ancient genomes and then they were trying to fill in the gaps with
06:52that of frog DNA and everything else.
06:54In reality, we're doing it exactly in reverse.
06:57We're taking a Asian elephant genome, and we know it works because we took the samples
07:01from an Asian elephant that's alive.
07:03We're doing comparative genomics to identify what genes made a mammoth a mammoth, and then
07:07we're engineering those into the Asian elephant.
07:10There's a lot less gaps that you have to fill and you have a higher probability of success
07:15because you're working on an architecture that mammoths eventually evolved into.
07:20Sounds like you may be a scientist after all.
07:23From one film to another, I understand fame director of Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson,
07:29is an investor.
07:30How did he get involved?
07:31What does he bring to the table?
07:32Yes.
07:33We got introduced to Peter.
07:34Peter's a big thinker.
07:36Many people know him from Lord of the Rings and some of his other films, but he's actually
07:40a technologist.
07:41He's built numerous technology companies like Weta and others.
07:43He thinks on this grand scale that's way far beyond how you think about movies and technologies
07:50with his imagination.
07:51We flew down and we're doing a lot of work obviously in Australia and New Zealand.
07:55We spent some time with him in New Zealand.
07:57He was just passionate about not only bringing back species and inspiring the next generation,
08:03but also in the art of the possible.
08:05He likes to say that we were promised flying cars and we were promised all these things
08:09as kids when he was growing up reading books and comic books.
08:12Well, none of that came to fruition.
08:15He likes to say that Colossal is one of those projects that reminds him of the art of the
08:19possible that he thought of when he was a child.
08:23He got very excited about that and he's also majorly involved in conservation.
08:27He loves the fact that all of our technologies can be used for conservation.
08:31For him, it's a dual win.
08:33Very cool.
08:34My producer tells me you are the first decacorn in Texas.
08:39To me, I thought that was just another extinct species.
08:42I presume it is not.
08:43What is that?
08:45We learned that too recently.
08:47They call a billion dollar company, a unicorn, a $10 billion company, a decacorn.
08:54We learned recently that we were the first decacorn in Texas.
08:59I don't really look at the valuation of the company as a measure of success.
09:03This company isn't going to be graded on a curve.
09:05It's graded on did we succeed in de-extinction of our species and did we help conservation?
09:12Those are pretty binary outcomes for me and that's how I like to think about the world.
09:16De-extinction is just a way that we can leverage to raise capital to support the incredible
09:21women and men scientists that we have.
09:23No IPO on the horizon?
09:26We're not focused on that.
09:27We're in a great cash position.
09:28We have incredible partners, an insane group of investors like Peter and others that have
09:32supported us.
09:33TWG Global is our newest investor and partner and they've been fantastic and they've got
09:38a long term support horizon for us, assuming that we continue to hit our milestones.
09:45Right now, monetization and liquidity and IPO isn't the focus of the company.
09:50It's really just continuing to deliver on the science and the promise that we've made.
09:55Fascinating stuff.
09:56Colossal co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamb.
09:59Really appreciate you being here.