“He did this because others were too afraid to do it.”

Ben Lamm
Co-founder and CEO
Colossal Biosciences
.…on how he’d want his obituary to read, via TechStuff podcast.

Ben Lamm knows the work he and the team at Colossal Bioscience are doing pushes boundaries—and not everyone is cheering from the sidelines. 

“I think that making change is hard, and I think it requires determination. It requires thick skin,” he said. “Some of the biggest and boldest things have had a perspective of abundance, and it’s also a not-zero-sum game.

“Sometimes when you work on new things, it’s scary and it’s hard, and I’ve been criticized a lot… I’ve been a long-term supporter of developing technologies for climate change. Yet I have a lot of people that have been very kind to me for quite some time that aren’t as kind to me today as they used to be.”

Still, he’s not backing off the mission. 

In a recent interview on TechStuff—the podcast from Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts hosted by Oz Woloshyn—Lamm offered one of his first in-depth conversations since making April headlines about de-extincting the dire wolf. He discusses the science behind de-extinction, the ethical questions it raises, and the public criticism that followed Colossal’s announcement.

As Woloshyn puts it, Lamm is driven to create “arguably the most engaging, live scientific experiment ongoing in the world.”

Lamm’s Dallas-based genetic engineering company made global news—including here at Dallas Innovates—when it released video of the pups howling. It was touted as the sound of a species that hadn’t been heard in over 12,000 years. And it sparked big questions: Were the pups really dire wolves? What is de-extinction, anyway?

On the podcast, Lamm also reveals that Colossal’s woolly mammoth project is further along than most people realize. The company has already made mammoth-equivalent genetic edits in Asian elephant cells, using the same traits first tested in its woolly mouse model.

“We just haven’t taken them to term,” he said.

The company is also working to validate its edits using organoids—growing mammoth hair in petri dishes using stem cells to model outcomes before full implantation.

Alongside that progress came public pushback. Critics have accused Lamm of “playing God.” He answers:

“I think that we play God every day. Taking cholesterol medication is a form of playing God on a personal level. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it,” he said. “Cutting down rainforests or overfishing the ocean is playing God. So if you define playing God as interfering with the natural order—we do that all day long. So why not do it in a way that helps us develop technologies for human health care, inspires kids, and can help with conservation?”

He also called out what he sees as a pop culture double standard.

“What’s interesting to me is all the people that saw Jurassic Park and say it’s a movie about dinosaurs, but then don’t want to call my dire wolf dire wolves. … Because those are either genetically modified frogs and birds with dino DNA in it, or they’re dinosaurs, right? So this is a semantic question. It is not a scientific question.”

Talking about the dire wolf pups, with all the technical complexity, the emotional reality still hit home. “When I saw them the first time, I got chill bumps. I teared up,” he said.

That moment didn’t just stay in the lab. He also showed the now-viral dire wolf video to Colossal investor and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson—on an HDMI cable, in Jackson’s living room. “He was overwhelmed,” Lamm said. “It’s a very, very surreal experience.”

The company’s woolly mice—a genetically modified species that doesn’t exist in nature—were created in just one month as a proof-of-process. “They were objectively cute,” Lamm joked.

But, “we thought it proved our end-to-end process works really well.”

He says the company’s process now operates at over 90% efficiency while avoiding off-target effects—key to creating healthy animals without unintended consequences.

The deeper motivation, though, remains the driver.

The threat of extinction powers Colossal’s work, he says. In the next 25 years, half of species will either be extinct or be at least threatened with extinction. So I thought maybe there was an opportunity to build a company that we could develop tools to help conservation. Hopefully inspire kids and give people excited about science through something that was like truly a moonshot and like the Apollo Days.”

And in the end, that’s the reason he says he keeps going.

“At the end of the day, I am convicted in what I’m doing and I’m not afraid to do it,” he said. “Because I truly believe that we need these technologies for conservation, and I think we need to also do big, bold things that will inspire the next generation so that we have more scientists and astronauts and fewer influencers.”

You can listen to the full TechStuff interview here.

For more of who said what about all things North Texas, check out Every Last Word.

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