Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back dire wolves and woolly mammoths. CEO Ben Lamm says this will somehow extend human life. He also claims it helps conservation and developmental biology. The company raised money from people who apparently never watched Jurassic Park.
The pitch works like this: resurrect extinct megafauna, study their biology, unlock secrets to human longevity. Because nothing says "healthcare breakthrough" like recreating an animal that went extinct because it couldn't adapt to climate change. Lamm believes the genetic engineering required to de-extinct a species will yield medical advances. He's betting investors that Ice Age mammals hold the key to keeping your portfolio manager alive until 120.
Dire wolves died out 13,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths followed about 4,000 years later. Both species failed at the one thing evolution actually tests: not going extinct. Now a biotech firm wants to reverse-engineer their DNA to improve human health outcomes. The scientific method has really streamlined since peer review.
The developmental biology angle makes slightly more sense until you remember we already have living elephants and wolves. Studying those costs less and doesn't require building Pleistocene Park in someone's backyard. But living animals don't generate TechCrunch headlines or Series B funding rounds.
Retail traders will hear "de-extinction" and "longevity" in the same sentence and immediately check if Colossal went public via SPAC. They'll ignore that the company's timeline for actually producing a living mammoth stretches into the 2030s. By then half of them will have blown up their accounts on leveraged ETFs and won't be around to see if this works anyway.
Lamm sounds confident. Every biotech CEO does right up until the clinical trials. The difference is most of them are working with mice and petri dishes, not trying to gestate a 12-foot-tall herbivore that requires tundra to survive. At least when this fails we'll know exactly which extinction event to blame.
Photo by Kristin O Karlsen on Unsplash
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