How bringing back dire wolves and woolly mammoths may extend human life

Colossal Biosciences’ efforts to bring back extinct animals like the woolly mammoth and dire wolves have drawn comparisons to Jurassic Park. 

CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at the CNBC AI Forum last week that he understands those comparisons. 

“I think anyone that saw Jurassic Park in the 90s and didn’t say it was cool, like I don’t think they’re probably very fun at parties,” Lamm joked. “But yes, I saw the movies. I love them. They entertained us. They scared us.” 

However, Lamm said, “I constantly have to remind people on X that, you know, they were movies,” he said. “I don’t think Jurassic Park had any conservation or general human benefit models to it, so we’ve tried to take a slightly different perspective.” 

Since viable dinosaur DNA is no longer available, bringing back dinosaurs is, in fact, impossible. But what is underway at Colossal, besides the dire wolf and woolly mammoth projects, is work to genetically engineer the dodo bird, the Tasmanian tiger, and a giant bird called a moa, among others.  

“It’s highly likely in the next coming year or two, people will continue to see us deliver extinct species back to Earth, and we could even have more dire wolves, too,” Lamm told Boorstin.  

The process of creating the wolf pups involved taking genetic material from a skull and a tooth that were tens of hundreds of years old. Using AI models, Colossal used the ancient DNA to reconstruct the dire wolf genome and map it to its closest living relative, the gray wolf. The team then created embryos by editing the cells of modern gray wolves.  

Three pups, named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, have been born to domestic dogs used as surrogate mothers.  

Skeptics, Boorstin pointed out, say that they didn’t really de-extinct a dire wolf, rather, they created a genetically modified gray wolf.  

Lamm called this a “semantic argument” that “misses the forest for the trees.”  

“Gray wolves are just genetically modified dire wolves. They were just done by nature or God or however you want to classify it,” he said.  

Colossal is undertaking a similar process in their woolly mammoth project  –  that involves genetically modifying an Asian elephant. Lamm told Time in August that the company is aiming to have a woolly mammoth birth in the 2030s. 

“We call it a woolly mammoth,” he said. “Because if it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it serves ecological functions of a duck, it’s a duck, in our perspective.” 

Lamm became interested in this work after a 2019 meeting with renowned Harvard geneticist George Church, who Lamm called…