Ben Lamm (left) and George Church (right) pose in front of a woolly mammoth.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

When Colossal Biosciences launched in 2021, one of the first things Ben Lamm did was sit down with his team and map out all the software they would need to actually do the work. The list came to 55 different applications and algorithms. Fifty-five separate tools, each handling a different piece of the research pipeline, none of them talking to each other particularly well, none of them designed for the kind of work Colossal was trying to do.

There was no single platform that could take a scientist from a raw idea all the way through data analysis, workflow management, result visualization, and collaboration with researchers at other institutions. Not for this kind of biology. Not at this scale. Not with the complexity that de-extinction research demands.

So they built one.

And then — almost by accident — they realized they’d built something the entire life sciences industry had been waiting for.

The Problem Nobody Had Solved

Here’s what biological research actually looks like inside a modern lab, away from the glamour of the headlines. A scientist has a dataset — maybe a genome sequence, maybe the results of a CRISPR editing experiment, maybe microarray analysis from a gene therapy trial. That dataset is enormous. It connects to other datasets. It needs to be analyzed using computational models, cross-referenced with other results, validated through additional experiments, and eventually shared with collaborators at other universities or companies who are using completely different software systems.

In most labs today, that process is held together with institutional knowledge, personal preference, and a lot of custom code that one specific researcher wrote and that no one else fully understands. When that researcher leaves, a piece of the lab’s institutional memory walks out the door with them.

The situation at Harvard, where Colossal’s co-founder George Church runs one of the world’s most advanced genetics labs, was typical. Fifty-five different data systems in active use. Researchers from Colossal and Harvard trying to collaborate, but with no common infrastructure for sharing experiments, workflows, or results in a way that was consistent and reproducible.

“There was no cohesive solution,” said Kent Wakeford, who became co-CEO of Form Bio when it spun out. “So we developed one.”

What Form Bio Actually Does

The simplest way to describe Form Bio is this: it’s what happens when you apply software product thinking to the workflow of science.

Scientists aren’t typically software engineers. The tools they use were mostly built by other scientists or small academic teams, optimized for specific tasks, and never designed to work together as a system. Form Bio replaces that patchwork with a single integrated platform — one place where a researcher can design an experiment, run computational analysis using AI and machine learning models, visualize the results, and share everything with collaborators anywhere in the world, with proper permissions and data security built in.

George Church, who has spent decades running one of the most productive genetics labs on the planet, put it plainly: the platform is “critical to pave the way” for the kind of science that’s now becoming possible. When one of the architects of modern genomics says your software is necessary infrastructure, that’s not a testimonial. That’s a signal.

The use cases stretch well beyond de-extinction. Drug discovery. Gene therapy development — specifically the design of AAV vectors, which are the delivery vehicles used to get gene-editing tools into human cells. Biomanufacturing. Agricultural biotech. Academic research across every field that generates large biological datasets, which is most of them now. The CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, invested in Colossal specifically — by their own admission — not because of the mammoths, but because of the underlying capability. The computational biology infrastructure is what interested them.

The Pattern Behind the Spinout

Form Bio was spun out of Colossal in September 2022 with a $30 million Series A that was oversubscribed — meaning investors wanted in faster than the round could close. It launched as an independent company with its own leadership team, its own staff, and its own capital structure, while maintaining a close relationship with Colossal as both a customer and a co-development partner.

This is a pattern worth paying attention to, because it’s not an accident. Lamm has been explicit that Colossal’s long-term strategy involves spinning out the technologies built in the process of doing the research — letting each tool become its own company, raise its own capital, and pursue its own market, rather than trying to run everything under one roof.

It’s the same instinct that made NASA’s technology transfer program one of the most productive sources of commercial innovation in American history. When you’re solving genuinely hard problems at the frontier of what’s possible, you generate tools that have value far beyond the original problem. The question is whether you’re organized to capture that value. Lamm is organized to capture it.

Form Bio is the first example. Breaking — the plastic degradation company built on Colossal’s synthetic biology infrastructure — is the second. Astromech, the predictive biology AI that surfaced publicly just last week, is the third. Each one started as internal tooling built to solve a specific problem inside Colossal. Each one turned out to be a product.

Why This Matters Beyond Biology

There’s a larger story here about what happens when software thinking meets science.

Academic research has always moved slowly, and part of the reason is structural. Scientists work in relative isolation, each lab developing its own methods, its own tools, its own ways of doing things. Reproducibility — the ability for another lab to run the same experiment and get the same result — is one of the most persistent problems in modern science, and a lot of it comes down to the fact that the computational infrastructure for sharing and standardizing workflows simply hasn’t existed.

Form Bio is building that infrastructure. The comparison its co-CEO reached for was GitHub — the platform that transformed software development by giving programmers a shared environment for building, testing, and collaborating on code. What GitHub did for software, Form Bio wants to do for biology. Create a common layer. Make the workflows reproducible. Let researchers spend their time on science instead of on data wrangling.

That’s not a small ambition. Biology is becoming the defining technology of this century in the same way that computing defined the last one. The platform that becomes the operating system for biological research — the place where scientists from Cambridge to Tokyo to Dallas all run their experiments and share their discoveries — will be one of the most consequential pieces of software infrastructure ever built.

Up Next: Breaking — how Colossal’s synthetic biology toolbox turned into a potential solution for 5,000 million tons of plastic.

Related Reading

When the CIA Invests in De-Extinction, Read the Fine Print

In-Q-Tel — The intelligence community’s venture arm explains why it backed Colossal — and makes clear the investment was about computational biology capability, not the animals

The Data Deluge Threatening to Drown Modern Science

Nature — A foundational look at why biological research generates more data than scientists can currently process, and why the tools to manage that data have become as important as the science itself

GitHub for Science? The Race to Build Research Infrastructure

MIT Technology Review — How a new generation of platforms is trying to do for biological research what GitHub did for software development — and why the stakes are higher than most people realize

Ben Lamm (right) co-founded Colossal Biosciences with Harvard geneticist George Church (center) in 2021

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In April 2025, three wolf pups were born that shouldn’t exist.

Their names were Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. They were healthy, they were photographed, and they made the cover of Time magazine. They were also, genetically speaking, something the world hadn’t seen in 13,000 years. The dire wolf — the apex predator of the Ice Age, the creature that once ruled North America alongside the woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed cat — had been gone since before recorded human history.

Then Ben Lamm brought it back.

Peter Diamandis, who has spent his career finding the most audacious things happening in science and technology, called it the scientific miracle of the decade. He’s not given to overstatement.

But here’s the thing most people missed in all the excitement: the wolf wasn’t the goal. It was the proof.

What They’re Actually Building

Ben Lamm co-founded Colossal Biosciences with Harvard geneticist George Church in 2021. When he announced that the company intended to bring back the woolly mammoth, most people assumed it was a publicity stunt — a flashy headline wrapped around a research project that would never really get anywhere.

They were wrong about that.

What Lamm understood from the beginning is that you don’t build a company around an animal. You build it around the tools you need to get to the animal. And those tools — new ways to read ancient DNA, new methods for editing genes with surgical precision, new technology for growing embryos outside a living body — those turn out to be useful for a lot more than bringing back one extinct species.

Think of it this way. When NASA developed materials that could survive the heat of reentry from space, those materials didn’t stay in rockets. They ended up in everything from firefighting gear to running shoes. The technology built for one extreme purpose found its way into everyday life because the underlying science was genuinely new and genuinely powerful.

That’s what Colossal is doing with biology. The de-extinction projects are the extreme purpose. The tools being built to achieve them are the real product.

The Numbers Tell the Story

By January 2025, Colossal had raised $435 million in total funding. A $200 million Series C round valued the company at $10.2 billion, making it Texas’s first decacorn — a startup worth more than ten billion dollars. The investor list includes venture capitalists, institutional funds, and more than a few celebrities whose names you’d recognize. That’s not an accident. Lamm has always understood that a company trying to do something this large needs cultural momentum, not just scientific credibility.

But the science is what earns the valuation. To bring back the dire wolf, Colossal’s team extracted usable DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old ear bone. They reconstructed the genome, identified the 20 key traits that made a dire wolf a dire wolf, and rewrote 14 genes in 45 engineered eggs. Those eggs became embryos. Those embryos were carried by surrogate hound mixes. Those surrogates gave birth to three healthy pups.

It worked. On the first attempt at this scale. That is not a small thing.

The mammoth program has already produced what the team calls “woolly mice” — ordinary lab mice gene-edited with mammoth DNA traits, including the distinctive shaggy tawny fur — as a proof that the genetic approach works before they try it on something the size of a bus. The Tasmanian tiger program has reconstructed a 99.9% accurate genome from a 110-year-old skull. A partnership with filmmaker Peter Jackson and the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand is underway to attempt to bring back the moa, a giant flightless bird that disappeared after human settlement of the islands.

Each project is different. Each one pushes the tools further. And each time the tools get pushed further, they get more useful for everything else.

The Part Nobody’s Talking About

There’s a piece of the Colossal story that gets almost no attention in the mainstream coverage, but that may turn out to matter more than the animals themselves. It’s the artificial womb program.

Here’s the problem it solves. To bring back an extinct species, you usually need a living relative that’s close enough in biology to carry the embryo. For the woolly mammoth, that relative is the Asian elephant. But the Asian elephant is itself endangered — and Lamm has been consistent and clear that Colossal will not put endangered animals through invasive reproductive procedures to serve the mammoth project. So they’re building a womb instead. An artificial one. A device that can take a fertilized single-cell embryo and bring it all the way to a live birth without a living surrogate.

Lamm has said publicly that he expects this to work — with a small mammal first, then scaling up — by the end of 2026. If it does, the implications go well beyond anything Colossal is currently working on. A technology that can grow a living mammal from a single cell to birth in an artificial environment is not a tool that stays in one laboratory. What it means for the survival of critically endangered species, for the future of reproductive medicine, for conservation biology across the board — that conversation is only just beginning.

Lamm has drawn a clear line: Colossal won’t apply this technology to humans or non-human primates. But drawing a line around your own use of a tool doesn’t make the tool disappear. It just means someone else will eventually have to decide where to draw theirs.

A Tech Company Wearing a Lab Coat

What makes Lamm’s approach genuinely different from how science normally works is that he’s running Colossal the way he ran his software companies. Fast. Capital-intensive. Outcome-focused. Willing to hire the best people from academia and pay them what the private sector pays, which is not what universities pay. Willing to fail publicly and talk about it openly, which scientists are not traditionally trained to do. And obsessively focused on the question of how the technology gets commercialized — because without a business model, there is no mission.

The result is a company that has moved faster in four years than the academic de-extinction community moved in twenty. That’s not a criticism of the scientists who came before. It’s a description of what happens when you apply startup discipline to a problem that used to live entirely inside universities.

The dire wolf is alive. The woolly mouse exists. The Tasmanian tiger’s genome is reconstructed and waiting. These are not predictions about the future. They are things that have already happened.

The mammoth is next. And after that, if Ben Lamm has his way, extinction itself becomes optional.

Next week: Form Bio — the AI scientific software platform that Colossal built for itself, then realized the entire life sciences industry needed.

Related Reading

Dire Wolf De-Extinction: The Science Behind Colossal’s Breakthrough

Science — A rigorous look at the genomic methodology behind the dire wolf project, what the science actually claims, and where skeptics draw the line between restoration and approximation

Colossal Biosciences’ $10.2 Billion Bet on De-Extinction

MIT Technology Review — How a genomics startup became a decacorn, what the capital structure reveals about where biotech investment is heading, and why the mammoth is the last thing on investors’ minds

Pleistocene Park and the Climate Case for De-Extinction

The Atlantic — The ecological argument for restoring megafauna to Arctic grasslands, and whether the return of large herbivores could meaningfully slow permafrost melt — the climate rationale beneath Colossal’s flagship project