Could a technology that brings back extinct animals eventually bring back everything that ever lived? Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, doesn't expect so. He says the harder question is who decides what should return.
Lamm took these questions on stage at Moonshots Live 2026, in a conversation recorded on September 25, 2026 and published as an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis on September 30. Colossal is a biotechnology company that uses genetic engineering and AI for species preservation and "de-extinction", the effort to recreate lost species or their traits.
A 19th-century dream of universal resurrection
Alexander Wissner-Gross, a computer scientist and the founder of Reified, opened the topic with a philosopher. Nikolai Fedorov, a late 19th-century thinker, was a parent of a strain of philosophy called Russian Cosmism. He argued that science and technology should ultimately be used to revive every human who has ever lived. An encyclopedia entry on Fedorov, who lived from 1829 to 1903, describes this "common task" as a moral duty meant to unite humanity around physically resurrecting every past generation. In Fedorov's view, remembering the dead was not enough.
Wissner-Gross said that Colossal was, to his knowledge, the first company with at least a plausible business model or technical path toward going after "the entire historical biosphere". That might include not just every human but every other organism that ever lived. He then asked the question directly: in an age of superintelligence, when grand challenges are "falling left and right", would reviving every organism, or at least every human, become possible?
"We are not doing that currently," Lamm said. He doesn't think it will happen. He expects that DNA synthesis, prediction models and parts of synthetic biology will produce "pretty close approximates" of lost organisms, not the originals themselves.
Why humans are off the table
Lamm's first caveat was that Colossal does not use any of its technologies on humans. He said working with humans needs different governance, a different process and sometimes different investors. Peter Diamandis, the host, added that it also needs more patience.
Lamm credited the approach to early advice from Bob Nelson. Nelson told him not to apply the work to humans for a while, because "you effectively go into like code freeze with the FDA". In Lamm's account, the advice was to develop the technologies until they level off before taking them into human use.
The fossil record problem
Lamm's second caveat was about evidence. Fewer than roughly 100 T. rex specimens have ever been found, he said, even though billions of the animals may have lived at different times. "Very few things leave a fossil record," he said, and he doesn't think anyone really knows everything that existed.
That is why he thinks it is more likely people will engineer "programmable life" to their own specifications than bring back everything that existed. He added a twist. With AI superintelligence, someone may eventually design an organism that did once exist, and no one would ever know, because it left no fossils.
Could you clone Mozart?
Even when cloning and genome engineering can bring something back, Lamm argued, a copy of the DNA is not a copy of the life. Environment matters, and so does epigenetics, the chemical marks that control which genes are switched on. A cloned Mozart would not necessarily grow up to fix the "terrible trajectory" of music, he joked.
Wissner-Gross pushed back. Mozart's life is well documented, he said, so in principle his childhood environment could be reconstructed. "To a point," Lamm answered. He stressed that he was not encouraging the idea of growing humans this way. But he said it is accurate to say that we understand people's genetic disposition toward certain traits, and that in the right environments a "Mozart 2.0" could probably be better than the original.
Pikachu and the real barrier
Diamandis steered the conversation back to animals. The premise of the field, he said, is that AI systems can design a genome sequence that produces a desired set of traits, such as a longer snout or wings. He recalled asking Lamm on stage at FII, a previous event, whether Colossal could make a Pikachu.
Lamm called Pikachu a "fan favorite". He said people are more accepting of that kind of animal genome engineering than of engineering humans. Wissner-Gross summed up the exchange: it sounded like the objection was not technical but social, political and regulatory. Lamm agreed, and said the limit was ethical.
Who decides what comes back?
Salim Ismail, founder of Open ExO, then widened the question. He cited writer Stewart Brand's 1968 line that humans are "as gods" and might as well act like it. He asked Lamm to set Colossal's own projects aside: if any species could be brought back, who should decide which ones, and on what evidence?
Lamm said there is no perfect internal algorithm. As the "guinea pig in this world", Colossal weighs several questions:
- What did the species contribute to its environment and to the food web?
- Why did it go extinct?
- How do Indigenous peoples feel about it? Some of the species Colossal works on have a deep spiritual connection for Indigenous communities, he said, so you can't simply walk in and quote Brand to them.
- Is there an educational benefit?
His example was the dire wolf. Lamm said that Colossal worked with Indigenous groups and Red Wolf Coalition teams, and also deliberately weighed the pop-culture appeal. The hope was that fans of science fiction, Game of Thrones and Magic: The Gathering would be drawn into wolf conservation and learn about genome engineering, because something they had thought of as a fantasy creature had come back. Colossal's own technical description says its dire wolves involved 20 targeted edits across 14 genes in modern wolf cells.
Lamm was frank about the odds of getting this right. "We're probably going to get it wrong. And I think society is going to get it wrong. But we're going to continue to try," he said. He expects that as these technologies spread and more governments use them, each government will have to weigh these factors case by case.
Ismail pointed out how tangled those factors can be. His example was hypothetical: a tribe worshipping the Tasmanian devil would not settle whether it should be brought back. He argued that the power Lamm's field brings is unlike anything in human history.
Lamm agreed. Society has seen Jurassic Park, he said, and he thinks the film's Ian Malcolm "was really right". In Lamm's view, the combination of synthetic biology, computing, AI and eventually quantum computing will be more powerful than any weapon system ever created.