Life Finds an Investor

Karoline Huber discusses the phenomenon of “de-extinction” in SF and popular culture.

By Karoline HuberOctober 15, 2025

• SF

WHAT IF Jurassic Park was real, and it was exactly what Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm warned us about? Welcome to the work of Colossal Biosciences.

According to an Instagram post by Wired, “the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the mammoth, and it’s starting with a woolly mouse.” Colossal’s chief science officer Beth Shapiro explains: “We did not just shove mammoth genes into a mouse. There’s 200 million years of evolutionary divergence between them, and that wouldn’t make any sense.” In the full article, she clarifies that Colossal used CRISPR gene-editing technology, rather than mammoth DNA, to change the fur of the mice.

The company maintains, however, that “Colossal scientists also mined ancient mammoth genomes to identify three genes that seemed to be important to mammoths’ adaptation to the cold.” Hoping they will one day be able to create a cold-resistant, mammoth-like Asian elephant, the company has slapped the easily misleading label of “de-extinction” on this particular gene-engineering project.

De-extinction, as environmental humanities scholars Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose explain, is an umbrella term that includes back-breeding—that is, selective breeding of animals to bring out features of that animal’s extinct ancestors—as well as “the new possibilities opened up by interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer and allele replacement techniques.” This is exactly what Colossal is doing.

The company made headlines with a larger project shortly thereafter: the supposed de-extinction of the dire wolf, a lupine species made famous by the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011–19). Promotional photos of George R. R. Martin, author of the books the show adapted, and Colossal founder (and “serial entrepreneur” tech billionaire) Ben Lamm holding the dire wolves have gone viral on social media and earned the company much publicity. One of the wolves even graced the cover of Time magazine.

Colossal’s website features many outrageous claims about how they want to provide a technological fix for the climate crisis through the genetic engineering of extinct animals. For instance, they argue that, by “reintroducing such mammoth-like creatures to Arctic tundra environments,” their mammoth project “could help stop the release of greenhouse gases from the ground and reduce future emissions.” How will mammoths accomplish this? By trampling trees and hindering the forest from spreading, of course.

Colossal’s marketing language bears a striking similarity to the fictional corporate discourse that appears in James Bradley’s Ghost Species (2020), a cli-fi novel about a billionaire who wants to bring back extinct animals like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. In the novel, tech billionaire Davis Hucken seeks to reintroduce mammoths to the Arctic tundra: “[I]f we can reintroduce large herbivores,” he proposes, then “we can re-create the conditions of the last Ice Age and keep the forest at bay.” It almost seems as though Colossal’s founders used Bradley’s novel as a blueprint.

This is not Colossal’s only connection to science fiction. One of Colossal’s celebrity investors (alongside Peter Jackson) is Thomas Tull, former CEO of Legendary Entertainment and executive producer of Jurassic World, the 2015 reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise. Ironically, Colossal seems to have taken its cue from Jurassic Park—not so much in terms of the series’ plots, which explicitly warn against the dangers of de-extinction, but rather in the company’s endless determination to raise its own brand from the dead in order to generate enormous profits.

Ghost Species also takes inspiration from the original 1993 Jurassic Park. In the opening pages of Bradley’s novel, a male and female scientist in a helicopter approach a mysterious island owned by a billionaire who wants to hire them for a project that resurrects extinct animals. Sound familiar? This structural parallel functions as foreshadowing: the project fails, suggesting that humans should not interfere with extinct species, or with nature in a broader sense. The de-extinct animals do not have a positive influence on the environment or restore destroyed ecosystems, as the fictional billionaire claims at the beginning of the book. Rather, they are maladapted to live in an ecosystem that has been transformed by anthropogenic climate change.

Kate, the female scientist, raises ethical and environmental concerns about this when she first meets Davis, the billionaire investor. When he shows her an engineered lichen that was designed to absorb more CO2 and reproduce faster than the endemic species, Kate asks, “Doesn’t that mean it will out-compete the un-engineered lichens?” Davis replies that they are past the point where this prospect should be of any concern to humanity. According to his defeatist viewpoint, it is too late to save the environment; we should thus abandon it and create something new.

Here we see another parallel between the fictional project in Ghost Species and the actual work undertaken by Colossal. While creating a more resistant hybrid species, like a cold-resistant mammoth-elephant, might make the hybrids more capable of surviving the climate crisis, it may also accelerate the extinction of native species whose food or habitat the hybrids would claim. This is another problem Colossal is not addressing.

Van Dooren and Rose have raised a related issue: even if the creation of a hybrid mammoth were successful, what would happen to these animals? Could they become pests that need to be controlled or eradicated? “[O]ne wonders on what grounds we can expect success from these incredibly complex and expensive de-extinction projects,” they muse, “when we seem to have so much trouble finding room in the world for a broad range of species who aren’t yet extinct.”

As an example, they offer the dingo, which is considered an invasive species and a nuisance to farmers in Australia. What purpose would it serve to bring back a Tasmanian tiger to the same terrain when sheep farmers were the main factor in the species’ extinction in the first place? Who’s to say the extinct Tasmanian tiger would not be fought aggressively by agricultural interests, as is currently happening with the dingo? If these potential problems could be rationally managed by the systems and regulations in place, we would never have found ourselves in a situation where de-extinction was even on the table. A social order capable of rational management of de-extinction practices would arguably be rational enough to never produce a situation where de-extinction could emerge as a desired possibility.

One such scenario occurs in Ray Nayler’s 2024 novella The Tusks of Extinction, in which mammoths are “de-extincted” but end up facing the same problems elephants have now: the threat of hunters who slaughter them and sell their tusks for profit. The story falls short of questioning the economic and social factors behind the hunters’ actions as well as the appeal of de-extinction as a climate-denialist solution; rather than condemn capitalism, the book blames simple greed, conceived as a basic attribute of human nature. The de-extinction method described in the book is identical to that proposed by Colossal. This is unsurprising, seeing as Nayler lists Beth Shapiro’s nonfiction book How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (2015) as one of the sources in his acknowledgment section.

While Ghost Species also imagines mammoth and Tasmanian tiger hybrids, its most provocative storyline centers on cloning a Neanderthal child named Eve. The scientist Kate, who becomes Eve’s adoptive mother, confronts the urgent questions of who will raise these children and where they will belong. Her fears are realized when Eve, undocumented and medically vulnerable, struggles to survive outside the lab. This scenario recalls Isaac Asimov’s 1958 story “The Ugly Little Boy,” in which a Neanderthal child is exploited for publicity until his caretaker recognizes his humanity and risks everything to save him. In both works, the figure of the protective caregiver highlights how little the institutions behind such experiments consider the basic dignity of the beings they create.

In a 2021 Guardian article, Bradley, the author of Ghost Species, responded to the launch of Colossal with surprising approval: “de-extinction technologies will play a part” in the process of restoring damaged ecosystems, he suggests, in a manner seemingly at odds with the ethical values his own book promotes. A closer look at the ending of Ghost Species suggests it is less critical of de-extinction than it at first appears—the story closes with Eve, now a teenage Neanderthal, discovering online that she is not alone and setting out to find other hybrids in France. By this point, society has collapsed and the climate remains unstable; most de-extincted species have already failed, exposed as costly gimmicks. On her journey, Eve finds a dead mammoth—proof of the project’s futility—yet she herself is framed as humanity’s future. As she reunites with fellow Neanderthals, including a couple with a child, the novel turns hopeful, implying that hybrids may endure and even form a thriving species.

De-extinction is therefore not entirely disparaged by the novel, which explains Bradley’s stance in The Guardian, where he says that “[e]ven assuming Colossal succeeds in creating an animal that looks like a mammoth, it will not be a mammoth. Instead it will be something new, a being—and perhaps eventually a species—that will have to learn new ways of being in the world if it is to survive.”

The ethical and practical questions surrounding whether or not companies like Colossal should de-extinct Neanderthals may be more relevant than we realize, even though Colossal has not proposed any projects of this kind. Colossal Biosciences co-founder George Church, a Harvard geneticist, proposed creating a human-Neanderthal hybrid in a 2013 interview with Der Spiegel. When asked about his lack of ethical considerations, Church clarified that he was misunderstood: just because he claimed that it was theoretically possible did not mean he was advocating or working on such a project. Although Church suggested that it would take an “extremely adventurous female human” to act as a surrogate for a Neanderthal baby, he clarified that he is not actively seeking out such a surrogate, as some news outlets had claimed.

The Neanderthal surrogate misunderstanding would not be Church’s last public scandal. Another was the dating app he designed in 2019, which was supposed to “match users based on their DNA in an attempt to eliminate genetic diseases.” The app would sort out potential partners based on the compatibility of their DNA. Critics have pointed out the obvious eugenic subtext of the project, which may have been the reason the app was never actually developed, but Church called these accusations ridiculous.

This background on Colossal’s co-founder is important for understanding the deeper structural (and possibly intentional) motivations behind the company’s work. It is worthwhile to note that Church accepted research funding from Jeffrey Epstein—and, yes, there is proof that he was on the billionaire pedophile’s now-infamous island back in 2007 as part of a group of Harvard researchers. Epstein and Church remained in contact until 2014, even after the former served a prison sentence for solicitation of prostitution with a minor and was registered as a sex offender.

In a 2019 interview, Church distanced himself from Epstein and claimed that he did not witness anything untoward on his island visit. When asked if he regretted taking the money from Epstein, Church responded that he regrets not being more informed about his donors. It is worth noting that Church’s research for Colossal is funded partially by the CIA—through their venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. What the CIA is hoping to gain from this investment is not clear. Given this record, it is troubling that Church now wields such influence over which species might be resurrected.

Church’s past remarks also reveal the speculative nature of Colossal’s ambitions—for instance, in the Spiegel interview, he mused about whether a dinosaur could ever be recreated. He stated that—due to a lack of viable DNA, which has a shelf life of approximately one million years—this would not be possible. However, according to Church, “even if you don’t have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it”: one could look at the dinosaur’s closest living ancestor, the ostrich, and reverse-engineer the differences to create a dinosaur approximation.

Church’s suggestions sound very similar to what Colossal has been doing in recent years. As New Scientist reports, Colossal acknowledges that they did not make real dire wolves. Rather, Shapiro concedes, they’re genetically modified “grey wolves with 20 [gene] edits.” As one wolf conservation group concluded, de-extinction “isn’t conservation—it’s biotech branding.” While fully admitting that they are not resurrecting actual mammoths, the company pretends to make a meaningful contribution to the conservation of endangered species. A long list of partners on their website, including nonprofit organizations actually working on wildlife conservation, produces an appearance of legitimacy for Colossal’s project.

Colossal’s rhetoric of de-extinction has reached the highest levels of government. On April 7, US secretary of the interior Doug Burgum posted the following on X: “The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave […] [T]he marvel of ‘de-extinction’ technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.” Framing de-extinction as a “solution” to the loss of endangered species in this manner is itself dangerous: it risks legitimizing a climate-denialist narrative in which technological fixes replace conservation altogether, offering political cover to weaken environmental protections—regardless of whether the technology itself ever delivers on its promises.

This denialist narrative is already spreading widely: de-extinction advocate Ben Jacob Novak (no affiliation with B. J. Novak from the sitcom The Office) has proposed that species should not be considered extinct while there exists frozen genetic material through which they could be potentially revived. Advocating for so-called de-extinction is a convenient nonsolution for accelerating species loss. It conceals the real cause of climate change—capitalist exploitation of the environment—and creates the illusion that climate destruction is reversible so long as the species that have been destroyed can be restored by a private company. De-extinction turns species loss into an investment opportunity through a speculative narrative.

Despite the fact that all the damning background information about the company and its co-founder is accessible online, Colossal’s marketing strategy has been incredibly successful. They’ve secured several million dollars of funding, and their hybrids have been a dominant presence in the news cycle. But how is it that a company that has produced nothing but social media buzz around knockoff fantasy wolves should be valued at 10.2 billion dollars? What Colossal sells, first and foremost, is a good story, a science fiction narrative that evokes nostalgic childhood memories of Jurassic Park, as well as fantasies about a time when it was easier to ignore climate change and pretend it wasn’t happening—a time when it seemed, at least to some, that environmentally destructive economic growth could continue forever.