First They Brought Back Dire Wolves. Next Up? Artificial Wombs

I n many ways, the last two northern white rhinos on Earth spend their days as if they were not the last two northern white rhinos on Earth. They lumber majestically along a dun and dusty landscape, as their ancestors have done for millions of years. They graze with dedication on tremendous amounts of grass — more than 100 pounds a day — uprooting the plant with the flat, powerful lips that evolution painstakingly bestowed. They wallow in the mud, or rest in the shade of acacia trees, or gaze, placidly, in the direction of Mount Kenya. Sometimes, they let egrets rest on their hulking, primordial backs. 

Then again, as the last two northern white rhinos on Earth, Najin and Fatu have lives that are singular. Armed rangers at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy guard them from poachers every minute of every day. Buses of tourists and schoolchildren gather at the conservancy’s electric fence, angling for a glimpse of the tail ends of an evolutionary line that’s been stretching back to the time horses were the size of dogs and the continent of Australia had not yet broken free of Antarctica. Normally, northern white rhino females would live with their young in small herds, but Najin and Fatu have only each other. The last male northern white rhino, Sudan, died in 2018. Najin and Fatu, his daughter and granddaughter, have health issues that make it impossible for them to reproduce; and so in a term both clinical and heartbreaking, the species is already considered “functionally extinct,” its remaining two members living in an evolutionary twilight. Some animals are so endangered and elusive that we don’t even know if they still exist; many extinctions happen without human awareness or acknowledgment. But we will know the exact minute when northern white rhinos go extinct. We will be able to mark the day dolefully on a calendar.

And yet. For the past 50 years, and in anticipation of their demise, scientists have been banking tissue samples of the species in repositories like San Diego’s Frozen Zoo. For some time now, they have been retrieving eggs from Najin and Fatu and fertilizing them with sperm collected from northern white rhinos that have already perished. Thirty-nine viable embryos have been created via IVF. In 2023, scientists and veterinarians achieved the first successful IVF pregnancy in a rhino species, using both an embryo and surrogate from the relatively more plentiful southern white as proof that the technique could work. The fetus was only 70 days old when the mother died of a bacterial infection. Since then, three northern white rhino embryos have been transplanted into southern white rhinos, but none of these interspecies transfers has been successful.  

Editor’s picks

The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far

The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

And yet, and yet. In February, scientists from Colossal Biosciences ushered me into a pristine lab inside their multimillion-dollar Dallas headquarters with the promise that they were nearing a breakthrough. Colossal is a for-profit company that was co-founded in 2021 by billionaire and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church with the mission of using recent scientific developments — in gene editing, in collecting and analyzing ancient DNA, in cellular biology, and in embryology, among others — to “de-extinct” lost animals. In early 2025, the company reported the creation of 38 “woolly mice,” in which gene edits had been made to replicate the long, thick fur and cold-resistant metabolism of woolly mammoths. (Though technically just a quality-control step to see how the genes would be expressed in an animal whose DNA is well understood, the mice turned out to be so freakishly adorable that people showed up at the lab trying to get their hands on one, and Colossal had to beef up its security.) Then, in April 2025, the company announced with much fanfare that it had extracted DNA from a 72,000-year-old skull and a 13,000-year-old tooth, used computational biology to figure out which genes did what within that DNA, made 20 edits to the cells of gray wolves that would cause them to express certain phenotypes, or physical traits, created embryos from those edited cells, and then de-extincted the dire wolf, a large Pleistocene canid that perished some 10,000 years ago when humans killed off much of its prey, including giant sloths roughly the size of school buses. “We are pleased to announce that, for the first time ever in history, we have successfully resurrected a prehistoric pop-culture icon,” proclaimed a promotional video by Krampus director Michael Dougherty.

Related Content

Noah Kahan Became a Superstar By Being Himself

Around a Dozen Scientists Have Died or Disappeared. What's Going On?

BTS Is Back on Top: ‘We Have to Push It to the Edge’

Confessions of a $7 Million Cat Burglar

This was followed up by photos of Game of Thrones writer George R. R. Martin cradling one of the two snow-white pups, a look of sheer delight on his impish face (the dire wolf figures prominently in the Game of Thrones series). A 10-hour, AI-generated “music video” of Romulus and Remus howling dropped on YouTube, transforming “the first dire-wolf howls in over 10,000 years” into a “sonic experience.” Remus graced the cover of Time magazine with a smoldering gaze. The Trump administration took the births as an opportunity to trumpet that they proved that “innovation — not regulation — had spawned American greatness.” Soon, the wolves were joined on their private 2,000-acre preserve by a third dire wolf, their cloned sister, Khaleesi. Reports circulated that Colossal had raised $435 million, was valued at more than $10 billion, and that its funders included not only Martin, but also Paris Hilton, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, and Chris Hemsworth. (It has now raised more than $600 million.)

Meanwhile, scientists the world over were losing their minds, both at the technical complexity of what Colossal had pulled off and at its ultimate import. Were the dire wolves dire wolves or were they simply gray wolves with some long-lost dire-wolf traits edited into their DNA? Was there a point in bringing back an animal (or the physical traits of an animal) whose natural habitat had disappeared at the end of the last Ice Age? Was it right to tinker with the building blocks of life? What could possibly go wrong?

Lamm, a 44-year-old with a slight Texas drawl, surfer hair, and a background mostly in gaming and AI, is not deterred by semantics (“Was Jurassic Park about dinosaurs or about genetically-modified frog birds?” he asks) or put off by ethical quandaries that would hold the technology back: “We, as a species, have taken a lot from nature, and we are not going to change our behaviors, right? We’re not going to live by candlelight, and stop driving cars and using AC and making clothes. So at the end of the day, we have to out-innovate the take that we have from nature.” His mission is not to constrain or minimize this brave new world of his creation, but rather to expand it, to build an “end-to-end” system in which animals can be “productionized,” upending the one essential truth of biology — and bane to some conservation efforts — that you need a rhino to grow a rhino, a ­marsupial to grow a marsupial, a whale to grow a whale. In December, the company hatched its first batch of chicks grown from eggs that it had 3D printed. Within the year, Lamm maintains, it’s on track to perfect an artificial womb and birth a mammal completely outside the body of another animal. When it comes to de-extinction or conservation, Colossal’s goal is to take the complications of surrogacy out of the equation — to remove the need for an animal to have a parent in any capacity beyond that of lending a portion of its genetic code. 

“People know that we are working on ex-utero devices, but it was like, ‘Oh, that’s just some science experiment.’ We have not had progress to show until now,” Lamm says. “Now, it’s really real. And, I mean, it looks straight out of a movie.”

‘Everyone Thought I Was Nuts’

ARTIFICIAL WOMBS HAVE BEEN on Colossal’s agenda since the company’s very earliest days, back when Lamm called up Church with a question about algae. Church is widely recognized as the father of synthetic biology and was one of the first scientists to edit the human genome with CRISPR, a technology that works like “molecular scissors” to cut DNA at precise points. He is also a TED Talk darling with a knack for supporting scientifically plausible ideas that sound like science fiction; he has discussed editing genes to make them do such things as age in reverse, encode and store digital information like books, and be resistant to the damage caused by radiation they would be exposed to in interplanetary travel. He has applied for 170 patents. He sees himself as an intellectual provocateur. “I think that’s probably my main role, not just in Colossal but in everything I do,” Church tells me. “I don’t try to change opinion about things, but I do try to help people see what is possible, and listen very carefully to what society wants and doesn’t want, as it is a moving target. Almost everything that’s really cool in technology at one point somebody hated, and usually the haters are particularly loud about it.”

Church’s ideas appealed not just to Lamm’s cowboy intellectualism, but also to his startup-dude capacity to view any human problem as essentially a challenge of engineering. Lamm’s most recent startup had created a bioreactor that used algae to capture carbon and keep it from contributing to climate change; he was curious about Church’s work editing blue-green algae to allow it to capture carbon more efficiently. “We talked about that for five minutes, maybe,” says Lamm. “And then I asked him, ‘What else do you find interesting? If you had unlimited capital, what would your one project be?’” As Lamm remembers it, Church replied that he’d bring back the woolly mammoth.

It was exactly the type of headline-grabbing, moon-shot proposition that Lamm found irresistible. He spent the next few months kicking the tires on the idea. “What was interesting is every scientist I talked to, globally, was like, ‘Yeah, we think this is all possible. But you know who you should talk to? George Church. Because if someone’s gonna do this, it’s gonna be him.’” Lamm had started out thinking that maybe he would fund Church’s lab. Then Covid hit, he got a nasty case of the virus, and he began pondering his legacy. He’d already had four “exits,” selling off his startups to other companies. He was already fantastically rich. And in the wake of the pandemic, the tech world was shifting: “Everyone wanted to focus on defense software and less on the [research and development] things that I love.” Soon, Lamm was planning his fifth exit. “[When] I resigned as CEO from our last company, they were like, ‘What are you going to do?’” Lamm said he was going to go de-extinct the woolly mammoth. “Everyone thought I was nuts.”

He wasn’t, entirely. In 1984, traces of mitochondrial DNA had been found in the skin of a taxidermied quagga, a zebra-like species that had been hunted to extinction in the 1800s. Suddenly, the proposition of reviving extinct animals seemed not completely impossible. In fact, when Michael Crichton published Jurassic Park in 1990, its premise was rooted in nonfiction: Within a few years, scientists would announce that they had found fragments of 80-million-year-old dinosaur DNA, offering a potential protein recipe for bringing these species back. All of these samples turned out to be too decimated to be of use; so-called molecular paleontologists now know how quickly DNA degrades, how easily it is contaminated, and that it’s unlikely that any usable DNA could be recovered from a fossil more than a million years old. (In other words, dinosaurs are gone for good.)

But the last woolly mammoths died out only about 4,000 years ago, after most of Stonehenge was built. And “mammoths did us a great favor: They went extinct in a freezer,” as Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, says of the Siberian permafrost where their remains were found. “We have beautifully preserved specimens.” Their DNA is so prevalent you can buy samples off eBay. 

That means mammoths clear one of the three main roadblocks to trying to revive a species the Colossal way: There is enough genetic material out there to get a workable genome. They also clear the second hurdle, which involves the feasibility of comparing their genome to that of their closest living relative — in this case, the Asian elephant — and figuring out which genes lead to which species-specific traits and whether it’s possible to engineer those variants in the nucleus of the relative’s cell without having the cell self-destruct. (In the U.S., it is illegal to do germ-line edits, or edits that would get passed down to future generations, on human DNA, but it is legal to do them on animals; those animals only need FDA approval if they are to be offered for sale.) “We thought there were about 45 specific target areas of the [woolly mammoth] genome that matter” when it comes to distinguishing it from the elephant, Lamm says. “That’s been expanded to about 85, but it’s not a billion, right?” 

The final hurdle is figuring out how to take that edited, intact cell and grow it into an animal that would weigh up to 300 pounds when born. The first woolly mammoth proxy would likely be birthed by an Asian elephant, but, as Lamm explains, “You have a 22-month gestation with a non-model species, which is hard.” And it’s not an outcome that Colossal could, in the parlance of the tech world, scale. Elephants are endangered: If their wombs are in use, then they should probably be making more elephants. “We don’t want to do a thousand elephant IVFs, right?” Lamm continues. “But, eventually, we want to do thousands of mammoths. So artificial wombs have been on the plan from day one. It’s not critical path for us to be successful on [de-extincting] species. It’s critical path for us to hit massive scale.” 

And like all tech companies, scale is Colossal’s goal. They are not, Lamm maintains, attempting to create one-off animals, living museum pieces revived to lead lonely lives and then go extinct a second time. Colossal’s mission has always been de-extincting animals and “rewilding” them, helping to restore equilibrium to the ecologies that have suffered from their loss, much as the gray wolf did when it was reintroduced to Yellowstone in the 1990s — a successful campaign that Colossal points to as proof that rewilding a species can work. “Our plan is to rewild everything,” Lamm says. “But it’s not 100 percent up to us. It’s up to conservationists, private landowners, Indigenous people, a consortium of people. Some of the rewilding projects will take longer than the science, and that, to me, is amazing.”

In 2024, the company created a nonprofit arm, the Colossal Foundation, allowing it to interface more readily with established conservation groups that might otherwise be wary of a flashy, for-profit organization. The foundation has leveraged Colossal’s tech to partner with Save the Elephants and use AI and drones to monitor populations in the wild. It’s installed bioacoustic cameras in Yellowstone to track wolves and analyze their howls. Its work on de-extincting woolly mammoths has, somewhat indirectly, led to the development of a vaccine against elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus, the number-one killer of young elephants in captivity and a significant threat to species in the wild. “So if we do nothing else, I think we’ve made a bigger contribution to elephant conservation than anyone in the world,” Lamm says with characteristic swagger. 

The foundation is also focused on what it calls “genetic rescue,” using the tools of synthetic biology and genome engineering to support endangered species: cloning animals from the frozen cells of dead ones, for instance, to beef up a dwindling population (in November, Colossal acquired ViaGen Pets & Equine, the company that cloned Barbra Streisand’s dogs), or editing cells to provide resistance to certain pathogens or even to express traits, like cold tolerance or heat tolerance, that would enable endangered species to extend their habitats beyond the encroachment of humanity or better adapt to climate change. For bottlenecked species whose numbers are so low that breeding carries a risk of inbreeding, making tiny tweaks to the DNA could create synthetic genetic diversity and expand the gene pool. With artificial wombs, there would be a way to grow enough iterations of these gene-edited animals to create an entire generation en masse.

Over time, these efforts — or at least some — have endeared Colossal to many conservationists, who may not think using vast sums to de-extinct animal proxies is the best use of resources, but who see the benefit of an influx of interest and capital into the space. 

“This money Ben raised for Colossal would have gone to cryptocurrency or some other random thing. I mean, this is a huge win for conservation,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer and a world expert on ancient DNA. Lamm tells me, “On day one, we had zero global conservation partners — not even zero; we had negative. Now, we have 75.”

In the meantime, Colossal forges ahead with revival projects for each of its so-called flagship species — the dodo; the mammoth; the thylacine, or “Tasmanian tiger”; and the South Island giant moa, a massive flightless bird native to New Zealand — Pleistocene-era animals chosen, in part, because their loss activates something in the human imagination and, in part, because their revivals ­present unique technical challenges to overcome with uniquely marketable for-profit applications. Just as the mammoth project birthed the quest for artificial wombs, the moa ­project spurred the development of artificial eggs, since no bird alive today is big enough to lay a moa. The thylacine project has led to breakthroughs in the number of gene edits that can be made at one time to one cell — a necessary advancement since the thylacine’s closest living relative is the fat-tailed dunnart, a tiny Australian marsupial fairly far from the thylacine on the evolutionary tree. “We’re turning a mouse-sized marsupial into a ­wolf-sized marsupial. That’s a lot of editing,” Lamm says. 

And all of these projects rely on advances in computational biology, using AI to compare genomes of different species and also to intuit and fill in the gaps of ancient DNA. “Like, who isn’t skeptical, right?” says Shapiro of the awesome power of these tools. “We’re doing crazy shit that nobody’s ever done before. Am I skeptical that we’re going to succeed? If [by ‘succeed’] we mean that we’re going to bring something back that looks like a mammoth, acts like a mammoth, and fills those ecological niches, then, yeah, I’m pretty sure we can do that now.”

Lamm even offers a timeline for the moon shot. “Our target goal for the mammoth is late 2028,” he says. “And we are on track for that.”

Science Fun House

TO ENTER COLOSSAL’S 55,000-square-foot Dallas headquarters is to find one’s senses fairly assaulted by the Power of Tech. Outside, an otherwise unremarkable industrial park lulls under the weak February sun. Inside, the front desk is flanked by an animatronic dire wolf and a life-size acrylic woolly mammoth peering out from what appears to be a massive block of ice. “It’s even cooler when the dry-ice machine is going,” a chipper young man tells me, as he strolls through the lobby with purpose. Soon I am being led down a hallway where projection-mapping screens serve up high-tech imagery of animals no human alive has ever actually seen. Throughout the labs and offices, every employee wears Colossal merch, T-shirts designed by Lamm to evoke an Eighties hair-band vibe (my favorite: a black stonewashed number announcing the dire wolf’s “Original Tour 8500 BC, Encore Performance 2025”). Not to be weird, but it’s hard to imagine a more telegenic collection of science nerds. 

To date, Colossal has spun out three other startups: Form Bio (an AI tool for genome therapies), Breaking (which is gene-editing the microorganism X-32 to help it more efficiently break down plastic), and Astromech, which inscrutably offers “an autonomous intelligence system designed to navigate the deep architecture of life” (the deep architecture of life!). But awe has arguably been the company’s most valued output, the product that has brought eyeballs and thus investors and thus the resources to attract top talent and pull off scientific feats of derring-do that drum up even more awe than before. “We totally could make a Neanderthal. It actually would be easier than some of the work we’re doing,” Lamm says blithely. “We are not competing with cancer therapies,” he continues. “We’re competing with the Kardashians. We are in the attention economy. Like, we want Middle America to be excited about science, right? If we want people to care about things like genome engineering and CRISPR and conservation, it has to be as thoughtful, as interesting, as what they’re going to see on MTV or Bravo. If we do all this cool stuff in a vacuum, that doesn’t move the needle of consciousness.”

In order to move the needle of consciousness, many wondrous things were happening
in and around the Colossal lab on the days I visited. Scientists from near and far had converged in one conference room for a so-called Tooth Summit, to compare notes on the morphology of different kinds of teeth (the company also hosts summits on horns and beaks). In another part of the lab, cells were being shocked with electricity to open up their walls or were glowing eerily on petri dishes. In the avian lab, species head Anna Keyte, wearing earrings made from pieces of emu eggshell, walked me through the high-wire science act she’d devised to grow a dodo: ­collecting and editing the primordial germ cells of Nicobar pigeons, inserting those cells into embryonic chickens, and having the cells (hopefully!) migrate to the chickens’ gonads so that one day the birds will grow up, mate, and lay eggs with dodos rather than chickens inside. Let me state that again: Keyte’s plan is for chickens to lay eggs with dodos inside (or at least birds that look a hell of a lot like dodos). 

The same process could largely be used for the moa, which was added to Colossal’s list of flagship species after a friend introduced Lamm to Lord of the Rings director and New Zealand native Peter Jackson. “He was pretty aggressive,” Lamm says of Jackson’s zeal. “He was like, ‘Why aren’t you fuckers working on the moa?’” Soon, Lamm found himself in Jackson’s kitchen, extracting DNA samples from Jackson’s personal collection of moa bones while the filmmaker texted George R. R. Martin to talk up Colossal.

Jackson invested millions to fund the moa project, but one hitch was that the adult South Island giant moa stood more than 12 feet tall and weighed up to 500 pounds, and its chick developed in an egg the size of a football. In order to have an emu surrogate grow an egg large enough for a moa to develop to term inside it, the bird would have to be genetically engineered to be substantially larger. This was possible, but not very efficient. Plus, “emus are assholes,” Shapiro tells me. 

For Colossal, it was easier to just engineer a moa egg itself, which it had done in the lab marked “exo-dev” (for “exogenous development”) in a bespoke font. Here, 3D-printed egg prototypes of various sizes are lined up on a sleek, black counter. Engineer Chris Lambert, sporting a white lab coat, opens an incubator and pulls out a seven-day-old chicken embryo wiggling like a little alien inside its futuristic shell, which has a honeycomb pattern of holes designed to enable optimal airflow, is lined with a proprietary gas-permeable polymer, and could be screwed open at the top to attach microscopes and cameras, or just to peek inside. “You can see its eye developing, you can see the heartbeat, little buds that are becoming wings,” Lambert says, as he diffuses the shell with different wavelengths of light used to image different aspects of chick development: green for the vasculature; blue for gene expression. Though Colossal was not the first to upset the whole chicken-or-egg conundrum (you can actually watch videos of chicks being grown without eggs on YouTube), they are intent on disrupting the egg space, developing technology to not just mimic biology, but to also improve upon it. “We’re reengineering the egg for maximum efficiency,” Lamm says.

While avian exo-dev happens in Dallas, the mammalian counterpart is being overseen by Andrew Pask, the company’s smiley and mustachioed chief biology officer, at the Colossal lab he runs in Australia. Settling into plush seating in Lamm’s office, Pask shows me a timeline of the fat-tailed dunnart’s gestation — which, at 13 days, is one of the shortest of any mammal — divided, by “major transition points,” into three sections. Pask then explains that, using a dialysis-like machine of inputs and outputs — as well as proprietary algorithms and AI to measure chemical cues coming from mother and baby, determine from those cues what gases and nutrients were needed, and deliver those needs robotically in real time — the Colossal team had achieved successful dunnart development in all three stages. They’d also bridged the transition between stages two and three. The only remaining hurdle at that point was bridging the transition between stages one and two; the team was doing more studies of the uterine fluid of successful ­pregnancies at that time. “We designed the system so you just have to tweak all the chemical cueing,” Lamm specifies. “This is now a chemical cueing thing. It’s not a hardware or software problem.”

In other words, the tech was no longer the issue; the enduring complexity of nature was. Here, too, Lamm is confident that nature could be disrupted: “We’re on the one-yard line of this, which is insane.” 

The Womb Reality

HOW LONG IT TAKES COLOSSAL to cover that last yard remains to be seen. The company has been cagey about deadlines in the past, and to keep dunnarts alive past birth, Pask’s team would still need to develop a synthetic pouch for the tiny animal — born smaller than a grain of rice — complete with synthetic ­nipples that get progressively larger as the baby grows. Yet when it comes to birthing a mammal fully ex-utero, Colossal has quite possibly gotten further than anyone has before. “OK, that’s quite an achievement,” says John Rodger, the first researcher ever to develop assisted-breeding technology in ­marsupials, when I explain the stages ­Colossal says it’s conquered. “If they’ve done that, if that’s true, that’s quite an achievement.” (In what it calls its “placental interface project,” Pask’s team has also gotten a mouse embryo’s placenta to implant in a gelatinous “biomatrix” and start to meld with synthetic blood vessels.)

And though there is still a long way to go before species could be “mass produced,” as Lamm envisions, it’s possible that even a womb that fails to bring a pregnancy to term could be a game changer in the conservation space, where the most decimated populations are being supported by attempts at assisted reproduction. “What we’ve noticed is that a very high proportion of pregnancies are lost at the beginning, and we don’t know why,” says Pierre Comizzoli, a scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. “Having an artificial womb would be fantastic, because you could really see in a dish what’s going on, and you could understand what the problem is.” Then, presumably, you could go about fixing it.

Of course, the implications would be far greater — colossal, even — if an artificial womb didn’t fail. “De-extinction is interesting, but the artificial-womb innovation feels much bigger and more important to me, honestly,” says Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. “Proof of concept in a mammal, or success in a mammal, is proof of concept for other mammals, like humans. And you start going to artificial wombs in humans, that’s like … that’s a giant … I don’t know.” Kahn pauses, momentarily at a loss for words. “I mean, there’s just a giant set of issues as a result, everything from amazing help to premature babies to radically altering the abortion debate.” Indeed, ethicists are grappling with a potential future in which the point of fetal viability is pushed all the way back to day one. “We have giant questions to answer about fetal rights and who controls decision-making about future children,” Kahn says. “Break[ing] the connection between the body and the baby on which so much of reproductive law and reproductive ethics is based — that, to me, is the big shot heard around the world.”

If this connection is ever broken, Colossal will not be the organization that breaks it — at least not directly. In some of their earliest meetings with ethicists, Church and Lamm determined that the company would not do any research on or edits to the human genome, or even to that of nonhuman primates (they will not be making King Kong, as Lamm has been known to say; there will be no Neanderthal). But their business model was always to spin out or partner with companies that might. “Growing an elephant fully ex-utero is significantly harder, scientifically, than growing a human,” says Lamm, pointing out that so much more is already known about human reproduction. “I think that you’re going to see these artificial-womb technologies come to bear in our lifetime. Will Colossal be the provider of that system? No. Will Colossal technologies be spun out and licensed to someone to leverage that? Yes.” An article on the company published last year by Brownstone Research stated that, when it comes to potential use cases for humans, the “addressable market for artificial wombs is at least $20 billion.” Says Lamm, “We will make those decisions on a case-by-case basis.” 

In fact, other organizations are already working on creating artificial human wombs with some degree of success. In 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who were studying ways to help extremely premature infants devised a “biobag” that could keep fetal lambs alive for weeks; the lambs even opened their eyes and grew wool. Advancements have also greatly extended the number of days human embryos can grow in vitro at the earliest stages of pregnancy. In 1990, when the U.K. passed the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act prohibiting lab embryos from being grown in vitro longer than 14 days, that restriction had seemed almost hubristic; no human embryo had survived outside of a body past day seven. Now, the guideline has been voluntarily adopted by many scientific communities, including those in the U.S., where there is technically no legal limit. A number of researchers have recently advocated for extending the limit to day 28. 

All of which means that, in its pursuit of resurrecting nature’s past, Colossal’s developments may have profound effects on humanity’s future — effects of which the company is well aware. “The moment in vitro fertilization was developed in the late Seventies and early Eighties, we had choices we never had before, and we thought about things we’d never thought about before,” says Alta Charo, a former member of the World Health Organization’s expert advisory committee on global governance of genome editing and Colossal’s current head of bioethics. “Never in human history was there a sensible question about whether you could donate an embryo, sell an embryo, do research on an embryo, because they were never accessible — but suddenly they were accessible, and that meant that we had to ask questions about their moral status. Brand-new problems, brand-new issues.” 

With the development of artificial wombs, Charo believes we are nearing such an inflection point again.

What the Future Holds

AT THE END OF MY LAST DAY visiting Colossal, I meet with Lamm in the room where I’d seen the woolly mice, a comparatively staid space where framed news stories line the walls. A fossil of some sort has been left for the moment in a Ziploc bag on a shelf by the door. 

A few days ago, Lamm had flown back from Dubai, where he was breaking ground for the first Colossal biovault, a sort of Noah’s Ark of frozen tissue and genomic data — the “backup” needed to theoretically make an exact replica, rather than just a proxy, of any of the 10,000 species the vault will contain. He says he’s still jet-lagged, though it’s not apparent as he runs his hands excitedly through his hair and tells me that, just in the past week, his scientists achieved a breakthrough in efforts to de-extinct the bluebuck, an African antelope hunted to extinction around 1800. The company is also working on creating more dire wolves from a new cell line, since Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are technically clones and therefore will not be allowed to breed. They are old enough now that they could, and are pulling away from their creator as teenagers tend to do. “I did cry the last time I was in the ecological preserve, because they’re behaving like wolves, right? They’re being distant. Their heads [are] down,” says Lamm. “I was like, ‘These are no longer the puppies that I bottle-fed.’ I got a little empty-nest syndrome.” 

Trending Stories

The Olivia Rodrigo Dress Outrage Feels Like Bot Behavior

‘Good Night and Good Luck, Motherf--kers’: Letterman and Colbert Toss CBS Property Off the Roof

Drake Finally Unveils ‘Iceman’ — and Surprise Drops Two More Albums

‘SNL’: Watch Paul McCartney Perform ‘Days We Left Behind,’ ‘Band on the Run’

Then again, Lamm is not one to forestall the future. He’s an optimist, he tells me, about the opportunity the future presents to undo the tragedies of the past. He’s an optimist about taking the ingenuity and technological prowess that got humanity into this mess and using it to get us out of it. About playing God, as humanity has played God since we picked up spears and decided what to kill with them — but doing it better this time. What other choice, Lamm wants to know, is there? The U.N. has declared 50 percent of all species could be in danger of becoming extinct in the next 25 years. The rate of extinction is at least 1,000 times higher than what it would be without human involvement. One could throw up one’s hands and admit ecological defeat, or one could envision a warehouse of biobags growing any kind of animal you please, and then set about making it a reality. “Think about how our end-to-end system solves a problem like the northern white rhino,” he says. “A world where you have ecosystem collapse, food and water security issues, a world with less biodiversity, is dystopian. [Ours is] a message of hope.”

By the time I leave Colossal, night has fallen in Kenya. The last two northern white rhinos on Earth, Fatu and Najin, are one day closer to the end of their evolutionary line. They’ve spent the day doing what their ancestors have done for millennia. They grazed on grass and rested in the shade, letting egrets land on their hulking, primordial backs. Now, they’re sleeping, guarded by their watchful keepers, never dreaming of what future might be in store.