MAMMOTH MOGUL

IT'S AN UTTERLY MAD IDEA: REVIVE THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH, THE FURRY PACHYDERM WITH THE TWISTY TUSKS THAT WENT EXTINCT 4,000 YEARS AGO. BUT IT'S ALSO BRILLIANT, WITH WIDE-RANGING IMPLICATIONS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE AND HEALTH CARE-AND IT HAS ALREADY BROUGHT TO LIFE THE WORLD'S FIRST DE-EXTINCTION BILLIONAIRE, BEN LAMM.

- Amy Feldman

At first glance, the pair of cute rodents look a little like hamsters who have shaken their golden-hued fur up, like a wet dog, into a puffy ball. But then you notice the distinctive ears and tail and realize that this isn't an animal you've ever seen before. In fact, it's not an animal anyone has ever seen before. These are woolly mice, genetically engineered creatures created in the Dallas labs of Colossal Biosciences that were designed to display some of the key characteristics of another animal no human in thousands of years has seen: the woolly mammoth.

Colossal was started in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, a 43-year-old Texan who has dabbled in a variety of industries including video games and e-learning, and the legendary Harvard geneticist George Church. The company describes itself as being in the “de-extinction” business. That means using ancient DNA and Crispr gene editing techniques to try to bring back extinct fauna like the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. But those efforts are mostly about exciting investors and grabbing headlines. More immediate to Colossal’s business model is using similar techniques to save some of the thousands of species, many with potential environmental or conservation value, that could be wiped out by humanity. More than 46,000 species are currently listed as critically endangered.