Aug 20, 2026 · 59m · sourcery
Race to Save Humanity: Inside $12B Colossal Biosciences & $3.8B Astromech
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Host Molly O'Shea tours Colossal Biosciences with CEO Ben Lamm to examine how the deep tech pioneer combines multiplex gene editing, robotics, and artificial intelligence to revive extinct species, safeguard biodiversity, and commercialize civilization-scale technologies.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Molly holds 15.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Molly as informed peer 1.4 Guest teaching 3.2 Guest disagreement 0.9 Molly pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is Molly, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 33:00 Blasting critics on Blue Sky over screwworm permits
Lamm dismisses online critics on Blue Sky who pointed out Colossal lacks permits, arguing their technology can eradicate screwworms in months while the government plan wastes billions.
Hardest push from Molly ▶ 27:38 Pressing on open-source biotech proliferationMolly challenges Lamm's pledge to open-source Colossal's genetic technologies, immediately pressing him on the risk of bad actors weaponizing the tools.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 3:36 Debunking the frozen mammoth cloning tropeLamm directly corrects the popular Jurassic Park misconception that extinct animals can be cloned from frozen mammoth core samples, emphasizing that dead cells cannot be cloned.
Molly holds their own ▶ 13:30 Pressing on commercial monetization beyond petsMolly immediately sharpens the inquiry, pointing out that if selling pet animals or museum specimens is off the table, the actual commercial viability of de-extinction must be articulated.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Molly as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Molly pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title Sequence: Sourcery Presented by Brex | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Molly O'Shea takes a tour of Colossal's facilities, reacting enthusiastically to the animatronic dire wolf and labs. Ben Lamm explains the design, Weta models, and why they can't clone from frozen dead tissue. The exchange is light, curious, and welcoming. | |
| Ben Lamm's Hot Take: A Digital Twin of Nature | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Lamm delivers his 'hot take' on AI building a digital twin of nature to forecast ecological consequences. Molly prompts him to explain why it matters and asks about upcoming milestones without challenging his views. | |
| Revealing the Gen Two Woolly Mice | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Lamm unveils the generation two woolly mice, detailing the rapid 30-day multiplex editing turnaround. Molly makes cheerful observations about their cuteness and fan reactions, while Lamm corrects assumptions about public visits and selling animals. | |
| The Business Model: Civilization Tech and Commercial Applications | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Molly asks how Colossal makes money if selling animals is ruled out and questions their huge funding rounds. Lamm outlines the concept of 'civilization tech', gene drives for invasive species, and lab-grown materials. | |
| Biotech AI Convergence, Astromech, and Vertical Integration | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Molly notes how AI and biotech are converging, prompting Lamm to discuss Astromech and p53 comparative oncology in elephants. He explains their strategy of vertical integration across animal cloning and DNA pipelines. | |
| Sponsor Break: Brex and Turing | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Following midroll sponsor reads, Molly asks about extinction statistics and pushes on the risk of bad actors using open-sourced tools. Lamm responds that tech can always be abused but insists on optimism, countering traditional conservation pessimism. | |
| Rewilding Logistics, Gene Drives, and Screwworm Eradication | 1 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Molly asks about actual field rewilding and regulatory barriers. Lamm describes working with government agencies on screwworm eradication and fires back against critics on social media complaining about missing permits. | |
| Systems Architecture, Organizational Design, and Youth Inspiration | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Molly asks how Lamm structured the company coming from software. Lamm explains framing de-extinction as a systems problem and justifies their youth advisory board by dismissing direct air carbon capture systems as 'dumb'. | |
| Sponsor Break: VCX, Public, and Deel | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | After ad reads, Molly asks about investor dynamics and how Colossal proved skeptics wrong. Lamm explains why he avoided SoftBank style blitzscaling in favor of patient capital and jokes that every oversubscribed round means they were underpriced. | |
| Automated Embryology and AI Enterprise Workflows | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Molly asks about automated lab embryology with lasers and how models learn from the data. Lamm explains applying computer vision to cloning pipelines and getting scientists to adopt standard enterprise software like Jira. | |
| The 'Harvard Meets MTV' Aesthetic and Workplace Culture | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Molly asks about the office aesthetic and brand identity. Lamm shares the guiding thesis of 'Harvard meets MTV', contrasting their energized setup with gloomy, underfunded academic labs propped up by pizza boxes. | |
| The No-Go Species List, Conspiracies, and Synthetic Biology | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Molly asks about the no-go list of species, megalodons, and alien conspiracy theories. Lamm explains the hard line against human or hominid editing, dismisses megalodon and alien rumors, and articulates the vast future of synthetic biology. |
Statements from this episode (28)
Ben Lamm: Extinct animals cannot be cloned from dead permafrost cells
“But those tissues are dead. You cannot clone from dead cells.”
Ben Lamm: AI will enable a real-time digital twin of nature
“My hottest take right now is that I think AI is gonna converge, and, ah, we are going to build a digital twin of nature, and just like we have prediction models for, like, everything from, like, missile defense to, ah, tsunamis and earthquakes, we're gonna hav…”
Lamm: Colossal could birth an extinct species within 12 months
“The next 12 months, I'm looking forward to Colossal potentially having the next birthed extinct species.”
Lamm: Woolly mice are second most genetically modified organisms behind dire wolves
“These are the second most genetically modified
Multicellular organisms on the planet after our direwolves.”
Lamm: Colossal achieved world-record multiplex gene editing in healthy woolly mice
“We had a hundred percent healthy mice born with exactly the predicted phenotypes with the most multiplex edited delivered at one time ever.”
Lamm: Selling animals is not on Colossal Biosciences' product roadmap
“We're not in the selling animal business. So therefore, it's not currently a part of our roadmap.”
Lamm: Colossal raised $635M total after $400M round oversubscribed
“Yeah, 6:35 total. The last round was supposed to be 200, and it got overscribed to 400.”
Lamm: Invasive species represent a half-trillion-dollar global problem
“So invasive species is like half a trillion dollar problem globally.”
Lamm: Colossal grew mammoth hair follicles from elephant stem cells
“We actually have a hair follicles growing in, in where we've taken elephant stem cells and created follicles so that we can grow mammoth hair.”
Lamm: Colossal owns the world's largest elephant dataset
“Well, we have the largest data set on elephants in the entire world.”
Lamm: ViaGen cloning efficiency reached 80% versus 2% industry norm
“Well, Viagen had like cloning efficiencies at 80%, or most people are at two percent, right?”
Lamm: Earth is forecasted to lose 50% of biodiversity within 25 years
“It's currently forecasted that we're going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity in the next 25 years.”
Lamm: Colossal open-sources all of its technology for free for conservation
“And then lastly, we open source all of our technologies for conservation. So anybody can use any of our technologies for free for conservation.”
Lamm: 20% of baby elephants die from EEHV
“Most people don't know that 20% of baby elephants die because of EEHV.”
Lamm: Colossal is educating USDA and defense agencies on genetic tech
“Like right now we are educating USDA, the intelligence community, the Department of War and others on these technologies and how they can combat these issues domestically and abroad.”
Lamm: Colossal could eradicate the screwworm problem in six to seven months
“Our solution, which is already made could eradicate the entire problem in every model that we've done in six to seven months.”
Lamm: Colossal intends to release extinct and gene-edited species into the wild
“So our goal for our extinct species are genetically modified gene drives and even cloning of endangered species. All of that is to go into the wild, but we have to have government and indigenous and global support.”
Lamm: Direct air carbon capture is a dumb climate solution
“So when we were solving these problems, if we are solving it in dumb ways, like, I think, you know, a lot of the air capture systems in other ways, the direct air caption carbon systems and others in a lot of other ways that we're trying to solve climate are d…”
Lamm: Colossal told investors inspiration matters as much as value creation
“So that, that, that like, so for us, and we told our investors this from day one, That inspiration needs to be as important as value creation, and you need to be on board with that. Like, if we do the greatest thing in the world that nobody knows about and lik…”
Colossal Biosciences targets thousands of multiplex gene edits simultaneously
“We're now pushing a new construct that we've designed and a new delivery mechanism that we think we can be doing thousands of edits at once.”
Lamm: Somatic cell nuclear transfer embryology will be automated with robotics
“But in the future, that whole process will be automated with robotics.”
Lamm: Claude Opus cannot perform ancestral state reconstruction or comparative genomics
“Turns out that like, you know, Opus doesn't do like an ancestral state reconstruction of like a genome and like it doesn't like build comparative genomics models.”
Lamm: Reprogramming scientists to use Jira was harder than reprogramming stem cells
“I think the hardest thing we've done is reprogram, not stem cells, but scientists to work in things like JIRA and Smartsheets, like traditional software, like things”
Lamm: Colossal's founding thesis was 'Harvard meets MTV'
“So how do you take, like, Harvard meets MTV? That was, like, Our thesis from, like, day one.”
Lamm: Working on mammoths gives Colossal an unfair recruiting advantage
“We have this unfair advantage of recruiting, being that you get to work on things like wooly mammoth cells and like, You know, done arts versus like yeast in an academic lab”
Lamm: Academic research labs are underfunded, politicized, and dilapidated
“Go work back in academia where you're underfunded. It's all like massively politicized and it's massively competitive and your labs are like held up by pizza boxes, right?”