Why Celebrities Are Backing Billionaire CEO Ben Lamm’s Synthetic Biology Company

Heartbroken after the deaths of their beloved pets, celebs like Barbra Streisand and Paris Hilton turned to Viagen Pets & Equine to clone the animals. Late last year, after the company was acquired by Colossal Biosciences, NFL GOAT and Colossal investor Tom Brady revealed he’d used the company to create his dog, Junie, a genetic clone of Lua, a pit bull mix he owned who died in 2023. “[They] gave my family a second chance,” said the 48-year-old.

Pets are just part of the picture for Colossal. The company’s billionaire CEO Ben Lamm has a vision for the future — and unlike the apocalyptic ones touted by people who are claiming the end of humanity, his is hopeful. The serial entrepreneur, 44, cofounded Colossal with Harvard University geneticist George Church, and with 130 scientists has made incredible headway in improving planetary well-being by developing cryopreservation tools to back up life as well as de-extinction tools to bring back once lost life. As the former QB says, he’s “excited how Colossal and Viagen’s tech together can help both families losing their beloved pets while helping to save endangered species.”

The Proof

Lamm believes genetic cloning will be an invaluable tool in the efforts to bring back species in the future. “We can’t bring back one of anything; we need to bring back enough of an animal — about 50 — that a species has a chance of surviving,” he explained. “Cloning will be critical for that.” The company has numerous projects underway, including de-extinction projects related to the Tasmanian tiger; the dodo and the moa (both flightless birds) and the woolly mammoth. Colossal has also raised over $100 million for its nonprofit arm, the Colossal Foundation, to work on conservation and preservation efforts around the world. “We are in the sixth mass extinction that is 100 percent caused by us,” said Lamm of mankind. “But our story isn’t fully written, and we have the tools to not only stop the extinction crisis but reverse it while building safeguards for it to never happen again.”

Colossal has already had success in de-extincting the dire wolf — a canine that has been extinct for over 10,000 years. “Many people view dire wolves as mythical creatures,” said author George R.R. Martin, who brought dire wolves to the forefront of most people’s knowledge in his series Game of Thrones. “But Ben and Colossal have created magic by bringing these majestic beasts back to our world.” Earlier last year, the company used advanced genetic engineering to create three dire wolf pups, the first to roam the planet in over 10,000 years. “Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” Lamm revealed. “It was once said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’ and I know investors and collaborators see it as magic too. But part of the magic is also about the power of human ingenuity to shape a world that supports human life and species’ well-being.”

The Bigger Picture

Dire wolves are just the beginning for Colossal. Lamm shared that the celeb investors he works with, including Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson, are often concerned about research from the UN that suggests that by 2050, nearly half of the species in the world could be extinct. He notes that Colossal is developing the tools to conserve species. “Thinking of Colossal as just a de-extinction company is failing to understand their full potential,” noted the director, 64. “These scientific breakthroughs will also be used to rescue multiple endangered species.”