Since it launched with a blitz of media coverage in September 2021, de-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences has been stalked by comparisons to Jurassic Park. This in itself is not surprising. For a startup trying to bring back the woolly mammoth—or at least something like it—a fable about the dangers of foolhardy scientists messing around with the genetics of long-dead creatures is an obvious reference point.
What is surprising—given the amount of time that Colossal CEO Ben Lamm spends patiently shrugging off comparisons to Jurassic Park—is his latest hire. On February 1, Colossal announced its new chief marketing officer would be Emily Castel, a former Hollywood executive who worked on monster movies including Pacific Rim, Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island, and, uh, Jurassic World.
It turns out that Colossal, which also has plans to bring back the dodo and extinct marsupial the thylacine, really is getting involved in the entertainment business. But, Lamm says, that doesn’t mean monster flicks so much as educational content and documentaries. Colossal is working with My Octopus Teacher director James Reed on a five-year-long documentary series that will follow the startup’s efforts to use gene editing to bring back extinct species—or, more precisely, tweak existing species to more closely resemble their long-dead relatives.
WIRED sat down with Ben Lamm and James Reed to find out how and why they’re planning to bring de-extinction to the small screen. Lamm and Reed were interviewed separately, and the interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: When I saw the news that Colossal had hired Emily Castel, my mind immediately went to films like Godzilla, Jurassic World. Should we expect Colossal to come out with blockbuster movies featuring dodos and thylacines?
Ben Lamm: You know, Jurassic World and Godzilla were fake. We do have to remind people of that quite often, you’d be surprised. Right now, it’s all about educational content and docuseries. I do see a world where Colossal will have educational content and experiences. Have you been lucky enough to play with the Apple Vision Pro?
I haven’t.
Lamm: I think it’s going to change the world. It felt like the moment in the movie [2001: A Space Odyssey] where the apes touch the monolith. I felt like that was me this weekend.
I think as new mediums come online, there will be more and more educational content that we can make for parents and kids. And hopefully it’s more inspirational and brings loss of biodiversity, and climate change, and new tools like Crispr more to light than some of the other content that’s on the market.
Entertainment isn’t an obvious move for a biotech company. Especially when you’re working on projects that might take many years to come to fruition, if they succeed at all. How does entertainment fit in with the core science Colossal is working on?
Lamm: Our initial reasoning for going down this path was all about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than letting film crews sit in your office and labs right?
It’s not our job to persuade people on de-extinction. You’ve got ecological benefits, you’ve got human health care benefits, you’ve got conservation benefits. But you’re going to have people that just don’t like it—for whatever reason they have. We try to do the best we can with Nobel laureate scientists, bioethicists, and conservationists. We try to listen to critics and run towards critics.
But fundamentally for Colossal, I think it’s our job to educate, not try and persuade. It’s just our job to be transparent and educate.
How did you get started on this docuseries project?
Lamm: When we launched the company we got billions of media impressions; we had stories all over the world. We got literally hundreds of inbound requests, saying they’d love to film or produce this. We put them all in a database and said, “We’re really focused on the science. We do think this is important, but it’s not a priority right now.”
We did that for a year and a half, and during that period James Reed reached out to me. I had recently seen his documentary My Octopus Teacher, and I was blown away by the storytelling.
James Reed: Me and my partner at [production company] Underdog Films started reading up about Colossal and thought there was something interesting. You could tell they were doing something that felt that it was a bit more serious, or a bit more imminent, than previous cloning or resurrection projects sounded.
We had a Zoom early on [with Lamm], and he explained more about what they were doing. We were immediately intrigued by it, and that triggered numerous conversations that got us a bit deeper. We got a bit more understanding of the schedule they were working to and exactly how they were doing it.
And you had to think how the story would work practically, as a piece of filmmaking?
Reed: We went out to visit the labs in Dallas and hung out with them for a couple of days and met some of the technicians, and we started to see how this might feel from a filming point of view, the characters we could follow in this journey. We came away from this trip thinking, “We definitely want to do it.” It’s not only fascinating scientifically, but there are also some very interesting human stories to follow.
Lamm: We both agreed that this was not a documentary, it wasn’t a miniseries. It’s like a five-plus-year-long initiative. We started filming in September, and [Reed] gets full access, he goes into the field with our teams. We’re doing shoots at Harvard, in Australia. We’ve had numerous projects we’ve been working on in the field where they’ve captured all of it.
There’s no guarantee that Colossal will be successful at bringing back a functional mammoth or dodo. Lots of things can go wrong. The science might not pan out, the business might run out of money. And five years is a pretty tight timeline. What if there’s no payoff after all that filming?
Reed: We have talked about that. There are risks to anything that you’re pursuing in a documentary form. You can never guarantee things.
That’s a risk we were prepared to take. And the rewards for being there for these events, and this type of scientific achievement, are so great, and so interesting, that we’re prepared to take the uncertainty. It remains to be seen how much uncertainty we will have to deal with.
Lamm: It’s not like at the end of five years we’ll have a mammoth, a thylacine, and a dodo. I assume there will be some sequential ordering to that based on the complexities of gestation and so on.
The ending of the Colossal journey is not a mammoth. It’s our biggest project but it’s also our hardest, with 22 months of gestation. But it’s important to note that the birth of the first litter of animals is not the end. It’s really the beginning, because that’s where it starts—you’ve got to think about rewilding and so on.
James, do you have an animal you’d want to bring back first?
Reed: They’re all interesting and fascinating in their own ways, but I think the dodo is one that I’m particularly excited about.
Why the dodo?
Reed: There’s a bit of a childlike fascination with it. It’s also because of how it became extinct. It was a very clear human-caused extinction. They existed on an island where humans arrived, and then so many years later there were no more dodos. They were gone forever. There’s something quite compelling about an argument to try and bring that back.
The idea that humans caused this extinction, but human ingenuity can put things right again?
Reed: That is one of the big questions that we should be exploring in the documentary series. That is at the heart of whether you support what Colossal are doing, whether you want de-extinction or whether you think it’s not the right thing to do.
If the prospect of de-extinction inches closer to reality, it’s easy to imagine that it might inspire some backlash. Whether that’s from legislators or environmental groups, the road to public acceptance might not be totally smooth. I’ve certainly thought about that.
From a narrative point of view, some resistance to de-extinction might be quite exciting.
Reed: If you say so. We have to think in the here and now, but it’s our job to try and imagine what the reactions are going to be. It’s a difficult one to call. It will depend on whether certain forms of opposition can gather momentum, whether there are certain agendas that may be served by opposition. I think that we will just have to wait and see. But that’s part of the story.
With works like My Octopus Teacher or Chimp Empire, you’re taking viewers into the animals’ world. This docuseries must feel different, because labs are human spaces—it’s not a traditional setting for a nature documentary.
Reed: It doesn’t feel like an odd choice for us. It’s a bit disruptive and, in trust, that’s the sort of thing we’re interested in, and I think that’s the sort of thing people need and the industry needs.
People need something more from nature documentaries?
Reed: I think so. We’re in a period where you could keep looking at the natural world in the same way, or we can look at something in a completely different way. And even if it’s not for everybody, it just makes us look at something in a different way, and that can only be good.
I suppose any documentary on de-extinction is about the natural world, but it’s also one where human intervention is totally central. It’s a different way of relating to nature.
Reed: Exactly. It’s intervention, isn’t it? It’s assuming a different role. It’s an active way of addressing arguably some of the same challenges. Whether it’s right or wrong, or whether people get behind it or they don’t is going to be really interesting, but I think for us, it’s that alternative way of doing things that is going to be the exciting thing to document.
If Colossal is successful at gene-editing Asian elephants to create a mammoth-like creature, then there’s a good chance you might be present at a pretty remarkable moment in the history of conservation.
Reed: Absolutely. There are lots of practical things to think about, like how to make a TV program out of this. But I think all of us on the team, however open-minded and objective we are about what it means, there is of course some personal excitement that something that’s never happened before is going to happen. And that we have the privilege of being there and being able to document it.
Ben, if everything goes to plan, you’ll need somewhere to put those animals. In the past, the startup spoke about Pleistocene Park in Siberia as a potential rewilding location. Has the situation changed there, given Russia’s war in Ukraine?
Lamm: So we love [Pleistocene Park scientists] Sergey and Nikita [Zimov]. They’re great, and I think the world owes them a debt of gratitude for bringing awareness to the melting permafrost issue. We are not actively working with them because of the conflict right now.
But elephants take around 13 years to get to sexual maturity, so even if we had mammoths today, we wouldn’t just open the gates and say, “Good luck out in the Arctic.” It’s a very gated, thoughtful process, so I am hopeful that we will get past a lot of the geopolitics that the world’s still in. And I’m hoping that Russia, as well as the rest of the Arctic Circle, will be great locations. But you know, that’s one of the many things we don’t have control over.
Have you had any interest in the docuseries from distributors?
Lamm: We have a production partner in Teton Ridge. Out of full transparency, one of our investors [Thomas Tull] is the founder of Teton Ridge. But they will not be our distributor.
In addition to production partners, there’s also been a lot of interest from all the big media companies. You know who all of the big streamers are. All of them have been very excited about partnering. Right now we’ve just let James and his team run his creative process, and at some point we’ll go out and have a third-party independent partner on it.
Reed: I’m confident there will be interest. It’s an obviously interesting story, and I think we’re an interesting team to make it.
