“We are living in a weird time,” Ben Lamm told the podcaster Joe Rogan recently. “The ability to engineer drought-resistant crops or a vaccine or regrow our hair or, you know, make mammoths — that’s today. We can’t even think about what’s tomorrow.”
Lamm is the Sam Altman of synthetic biology: an enthusiast, a hype-machine, a man intent on owning the future. His company, Colossal Biosciences, wants to imitate extinct species such as the mammoth, the thylacine and the dodo. It has been valued at $10.2bn.
Last month, it announced it had bred “woolly mice” — editing mice genes to create long-haired pups. Now it says it has bred three animals that resemble dire wolves, a species that diverged from grey wolves at least 2.5mn years ago and became extinct about 12,000 years ago.