WE SAT DOWN with the world’s only de-extinction company CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm. Based in Dallas, TX to talk all about de-extinction, conservation and the launch of the new Colossal Australia hub.

Science, magic, and the impossible

“I think science is magic,” said the billionaire CEO of Colossal. “Instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, we are pulling life from a petri dish. We are helping to restore the planet in a way that was previously thought impossible.”

In an interview, Lamm argues that this arc is how science has always advanced—and that it’s science’s own form of magic. Alchemy gave way to chemistry, which achieved far more than mysticism ever could. Medicine shed superstition as germ theory replaced spirits, unlocking outcomes once thought impossible. New fields have always challenged existing limits until their methods are proven, codified, and absorbed into the scientific canon—often surpassing what came before. Lamm is now pushing de-extinction to make that same leap, turning its so-called “magic” into measurable, repeatable science.

Since launching Colossal four years ago, Lamm has promised to de-extinct species like the woolly mammoth, Tassie tiger (thylacine), dodo and the dire wolf. It might sound like magic but, in a shockingly fast timeline, he has come through on at least one of those promises.

From theory to proof

Last winter, Colossal birthed three dire wolf pups which are being raised in a secret facility in the United States. Dire wolves are not a fictitious animal from Game of Thrones–which has made them famous recently–but a real creature that has not existed on the planet for the past ten thousand years.

“Dire wolves have been extinct for over 12,000 years,” shared Lamm. “But now we are able to once again bring them back. It’s truly a modern miracle and a demonstration of the rapid acceleration of this branch of science.”

Colossal is establishing a new field of science in Australia through partnerships with leading conservation organisations and academic institutions, including the University of Melbourne. With the launch of Colossal Australia six months ago, the company is advancing de-extinction efforts – beginning with the thylacine – while applying genetic technologies to protect critically endangered native species such as the northern quoll. By leveraging de-extinction science to address urgent biodiversity challenges, Australia has become a central hub for Colossal’s expanding global conservation efforts.

Australia, technology and a planet in crisis

Lamm explains that the cornerstone of the field is the idea of a “de-extinction toolkit” which can help not only de-extinct the suite of animals he has mentioned but in time create the tools to help with any de-extinction of any animals. This is a necessity, he urges, in the face of potential loss of biodiversity catastrophe.

“According to the UN, by 2050, half of all species could be extinct. That would be a big problem for humanity, all animal species and the planet,” shares Lamm. “Someone needed to step in and in essence, we are creating the tools for modern day planetary preservation like the way people created the tools for modern day human surgery. We’re just doing it in a more focused and holistic way when the timeline of extinction is a ticking time bomb.”

Colossal is already translating frontier science into real-world conservation wins—from developing the first-ever EEHV vaccine for a deadly elephant virus to engineering frogs that can survive the world’s most destructive wildlife disease. The company is also advancing efforts to protect Australia’s northern quoll from invasive cane toads, investing more than $100 million in global conservation, and pushing the boundaries of genetics and reproductive science.

“It all seemed impossible until we did it,” said Andrew Pask, Ph.D who also runs Colossal Australia and serves as Colossal’s Chief Biology Officer. He is renowned for his expertise in de-extinction science, developmental genetics, and conservation technologies. “The impact that we can have on the planet is something previously only considered magical-thinking: we could save the planet from human-caused destruction.”

The ethics of intervention

Critics disagree. They claim Colossal is “playing god, violating a long held history of conservation or simply incapable of the science they are focused on delivering.” This includes critics in Australia but others throughout the world.

“Critics who describe de-extinction as “playing God,” do so from a position where non-intervention is the neutral baseline, as if a pristine, untouched nature still exists. It doesn’t. We already intervene through agriculture, urbanisation, climate change, selective breeding, and now genetic engineering. The planet is no longer a pre-human world interrupted by us; it’s a hybrid system where human influence is one of the fastest and most consequential forces,” Lamm said.

“From that reality, refusing responsibility is morally indefensible. You clean up after your child. After yourself. After your home. This is the same—on a planetary scale. It’s simply good human-ing.”

Beyond conservation: a fight for the future

For those who argue that traditional conservation alone is sufficient, Lamm offers a more philosophical counterpoint. Conservation, he argues, is inherently reactive – responding to habitat loss, overhunting, invasive species, and disease within existing ecological and political constraints. When conditions allow, it can stabilise populations and preserve biodiversity with remarkable effectiveness.

But conservation also inherits the limits of the world it operates in. It assumes ecosystems remain largely intact, that extinction is the exception rather than the norm, and that environmental change unfolds slowly enough for protection, regulation, and gradual recovery to succeed.

“Those assumptions no longer hold,” shares Lamm. “We now live in a world where extinctions are not isolated events but structural features of the system humans have co-created. Climate change, land fragmentation, industrial agriculture, global trade, and human population density have altered ecological dynamics at a planetary scale. Species are no longer disappearing because of local mismanagement or outsized global environmental events (asteroids cratering into the planet); they are vanishing because the underlying conditions that once sustained them no longer exist and because humans have fundamentally changed our planetary system.”

If that’s true, conservation faces a fundamental paradox—one that helps explain why some conservationists resist Colossal’s work. By challenging conservation’s core assumptions, Colossal exposes its limits: conservation can stabilise ecosystems locally, Lamm argues, but it cannot restore them at a global scale. De-extinction addresses a different problem altogether—not preservation, but system-level recovery and long-term stability.

“We are already controlling nature, but we are doing so crudely, often unintentionally, and almost always without sufficient feedback,” said Lamm. “De-extinction science is about recognising that and reversing the structural absences on a planetary level. Conservation slows the decline. But de-extinction can change the course. That is the magic of what we are doing here. We are righting the errors of the past while building fail safes for the future.”

“I didn’t set the 2050 deadline for half the world’s extinction,” he says. “But, I’m certainly going to work as hard as possible to get the science necessary to make sure that the planet, and humanity have a fighting chance.”

In this quest, Lamm, Colossal and the field of de-extinction science are supported by a bevy of high-profile scientists, investors and even celebrities who have come to believe in Lamm’s efforts and the necessary role of the science. In recent years, he’s appeared on stage with the Hemsworths at Australia’s SXSW and the family has invested in the work of the company. The Hemsworths appear alongside American celebrity figures like Paris Hilton and Tom Brady, and New Zealand’s Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh as investors and champions of the work.

Peter Jackson shared, “As a child, I believed the scientific wonders of the future would include seeing extinct animals like the mammoth and the dodo walk the Earth again. Decades later, many of those dreams never came to pass, and the world feels far less wondrous than I once imagined. Discovering Colossal Biosciences changed that. Learning about the extraordinary work of this team has rekindled my hope for the future. De-extinction is no longer speculative science fiction – it’s on the verge of becoming an awe-inspiring reality.”