Ben Lamm (on de-extinction)

Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, joins Dax to discuss the science and motivation behind de-extinction. He shares his journey from being raised by a single mom and his grandparents in Texas to founding his first company at Baylor, and how a fateful conversation with geneticist George Church led him to build a team to engineer a mammoth from scratch. Ben walks through specific breakthroughs, including creating woolly mice in just 30 days and resurrecting dire wolf puppies from 73,000-year-old DNA. He explains that de-extinction is ultimately about developing new technologies and taking responsibility for species humans have driven to extinction, and that inspiring public excitement about science is as critical as the animals themselves.