The Company Engineering Life Itself, From Mammoths to Microbes

Ben Lamm asked Harvard geneticist George Church what he'd do with unlimited resources and unlimited time. Church didn't hesitate: bring back woolly mammoths, rewild ecosystems, build technologies that could save living species and help humans. Most people would've nodded politely and moved on. Lamm built a company worth $10 billion in four years.

Colossal Biosciences, the company Lamm leads, isn't actually about woolly mammoths—not really. The mammoth is the proof of concept for something stranger and potentially more consequential: a platform for designing and manufacturing living things the way we currently design software. Mammoths just happen to be a really good stress test for whether that platform works.

"We thought that if we're going to build this end-to-end pipeline for synthetic biology, we would have to develop technologies across computational biology, cellular engineering, genetic engineering, cloning, somatic cellular transfer and eventually artificial wombs," Lamm explained at the 2026 Abundance360 Summit. "If we're going to do that, what's the best way to do it? We thought, well, if you start with de-extinction—because we are facing a massive extinction crisis right now—we are going to have to solve some of the hardest problems in biology."

The logic is almost perverse in its pragmatism. Bringing back extinct species requires solving genotype-to-phenotype relationships, ancestral shape reconstructions, comparative genomics—essentially a greatest-hits compilation of the hardest problems in biology. Solve those, and you've built infrastructure that can do almost anything with DNA.

Which is exactly what's happening. Colossal now employs 260 scientists and operates as a parent company spinning out subsidiaries, each tackling a different application of the same core technology. The first spinout, Breaking, addresses plastic pollution—not by filtering microplastics or breaking them into smaller pieces, but by actually severing the chemical bonds that make plastic plastic.

The Microplastic Problem You're Carrying Around

You currently have about five grams of plastic in your body—roughly the weight of a credit card. Most of it entered through your gut; some through your skin. It's in your reproductive tissues, across your blood-brain barrier, accumulating in ways we're only beginning to measure.

Breaking's approach stems from a discovery at the Weizmann Institute: not a single enzyme that degrades plastic, but a consortium of microbes working together. Colossal took that discovery, mapped the enzymatic concert, then used directed evolution to "supercharge" it. The result: microbes that break down a broader range of plastics, faster, without the harsh chemical pre-treatment most plastic degradation requires.

Lamm's already thinking about supplements. Imagine a pill that breaks down microplastics in your gut before they enter your bloodstream—the same technology that handles plastic waste streams, miniaturized for human consumption. It's either brilliant or unsettling, possibly both.

Countries as Customers

Meanwhile, the de-extinction work that started everything is becoming its own business model. Ernst & Young estimated the de-extinction market at $1.7 trillion annually—a figure that initially sounds insane until you realize they're counting educational content, STEM curriculum changes, tourism, and what Lamm calls "ancillary effects." Turns out 12.5% of global consumers buy something related to extinct species every year. Dinosaur toys alone are a multi-billion dollar industry.

But the more interesting revenue stream is governments. Last month, Colossal announced the world's first BioVault in partnership with the UAE—a nine-figure initiative on both sides. The vault will house genetic material from endangered regional species, sequence their genomes, and share the data globally while maintaining national stakeholdership.

"When I naively started this business, I came from software," Lamm said. "So I thought, oh, we'll just plug into the GCP of species, which doesn't exist." There's no Google Cloud Platform for biodiversity. So Colossal is building it, one country at a time, with governments paying to preserve their own endangered fauna.

The model is clever: countries get biodiversity preservation wrapped in national pride and educational infrastructure; Colossal gets funding and access to genetic material; the scientific community gets open-source genomic data. Everyone wins, assuming you trust a for-profit company to maintain open access once the incentives shift.

Productionizing Species

Colossal also acquired ViaGen, one of the world's top cloning companies, which operates at 78% cloning efficiency compared to the industry standard of 2%. ViaGen has cloned 15 of the 18 species ever successfully cloned, including every endangered species that's been cloned on the planet. (They also cloned Tom Brady's dog, because of course they did.)

The real endgame is artificial wombs—three separate moonshot projects currently underway for different animal categories. The northern white rhino offers a case study: two females left, functionally extinct, 18 related embryos, genetic bottleneck, $25 million spent annually keeping two animals alive. Lamm's pitch: engineer in genetic diversity from preserved specimens, productionize reproduction through artificial wombs, redirect most of that $25 million to water, education, other infrastructure.

"Our vision is using biobanking, synthetic biology, automation, robotic process automation with assistance from AI and computer vision, and artificial wombs, we could productionize species development," Lamm said. Productionize. He's talking about endangered species the way someone else might talk about manufacturing widgets.

It's the kind of language that makes conservationists uneasy, and for understandable reasons. But Lamm's not wrong that evolution can't keep pace with anthropogenic change. We're terraforming the planet whether we mean to or not. The question isn't whether we intervene—we're already intervening—but how.

The AI Nobody's Talking About

Here's what got lost in the mammoth headlines: none of this works without AI. "Without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we're doing," Lamm said flatly. The company doesn't always lead with that because synthetic biology sounds more tangible than machine learning models, but the AI is doing the hard work—predicting which genetic changes produce which physical traits, designing organisms to specification, optimizing cloning protocols.

Diamandis mentioned a conversation with one of Colossal's scientists about a tusk conference. "I was like, what?" The scientist was discussing how to use AI to adjust snout length, tooth size, hair density—engineering phenotypes by predicting genotypes. Someone asked Lamm if they could create Pikachu. His answer, essentially: yeah, probably.

That should disturb you more than the mammoth. The mammoth is a resurrection project, constrained by evolutionary history and ecological function. Pikachu is pure design fiction. The gap between those two applications is narrower than most people realize, and the same platform serves both.

What Actually Matters Here

Colossal is building something genuinely new: an end-to-end pipeline for designing and manufacturing living organisms at scale. The implications sprawl in every direction—conservation, agriculture, medicine, materials science, possibly weapons systems if the wrong people get interested.

Lamm seems aware of the responsibility, at least in how he talks about disease-resistant crops, vaccines for elephants, and chytrid fungus (the leading extinction driver for amphibians, which nobody's heard of because frogs aren't fluffy). But awareness isn't the same as adequate guardrails, and there's no regulatory framework that contemplates productionized extinction recovery or supplements that digest plastic.

The optimistic read: we're developing tools that could genuinely address biodiversity collapse and ecosystem degradation at a moment when we desperately need them. The skeptical read: we're handing massive power over biological systems to a for-profit company operating in a regulatory void, and nobody's entirely sure where this goes.

Both reads can be true. The technology isn't good or bad—it's capability. What matters is who controls it, how it's deployed, and whether we build the institutional capacity to manage consequences we can't yet imagine. Lamm's track record suggests competence and good intentions. History suggests that's never enough.

— Marcus Chen-Ramirez