Colossal Biosciences attempts to bring extinct animals back to Earth, including mammoths and dire wolves, and these efforts remind people of "Jurassic Park."

The company's CEO and co-founder, Ben Lamm, stated last week on CNBC AI Forum regarding CNBC's Julia Boorstin that he understands this analogy.

“I think that people who watched ‘Jurassic Park’ in the 90s but didn’t find it that cool wouldn’t be very interesting at a party,” Lamm joked, “But indeed, I have watched those movies. I liked them. They made us happy and also scared us.”

However, Lamm said, "I often have to remind people on X that, you know, those are just movies." He said, "I don't think 'Jurassic Park' has any model of protection or general human interests, so we try to take a slightly different perspective."

Since the available dinosaurs DNA no longer exist, it is actually impossible to resurrect them. However, the project being pursued by Colossal includes not only genetic engineering modifications on dire wolves and mammoths but also on species such as the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, and a giant bird known as moa.

“It’s very likely that in the next one or two years, people will continue to see us bringing extinct species back to Earth, and we might even have more dire wolves,” Lamm said to Boorstin.

The process of creating these wolf cubs involves extracting genetic material from a skull and a single tooth, with these samples being thousands of years old. Using the AI model and with the help of ancient DNA, they reconstructed the genome of the dire wolf and mapped it to its closest living relative—the gray wolf. Subsequently, the team created embryos by editing the cells of modern gray wolves.

The three cubs were named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi respectively, and they were born to a domestic dog that served as the surrogate mother.

Boorstin points out that skeptics believe that this is not a true 'resurrection' of the fearsome wolf, but rather the creation of a genetically modified gray wolf.

Lamm refers to this kind of argument as a "semantic debate" and states that it is "seeing the trees but not the forest."

"The grey wolf is just a terror wolf that has undergone genetic modification. It's just that this process is carried out by nature, God, or whatever you want to call it," he said.

Colossal is also undergoing a similar process in the Mammoth Project, which involves genetic modification of Asian elephants. Lamm stated in an interview with Time in August that the company's goal is to see a mammoth born in the 2030s.

"We call it a mammoth," he said, "because if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and performs the same ecological functions as a duck, then in our view, it is a duck."

Lamm said that he began to take an interest in this work after meeting with the renowned Harvard geneticist George Church in 2019. Lamm refers to Church as "the father of synthetic biology."

Church established a personal genome project, and in 2021, he told CNBC that he had dreamed of bringing mammoths back to life for decades.

However, the vision of reviving animals such as mammoths is far more than just creating a real-life version of "Jurassic Park."

"[Church] has a vision: we can use CRISPR as well as all these tools and technologies to revive extinct species, apply some of these technologies to human medicine, and then create a programmable life model that we can utilize in many different scenarios on Earth," said Lamm.

These applications include the benefits that are promised by the revival of extinct species, which are oriented towards protection. For example, genetically modified mammoths could help combat climate change by compacting the snow in high-latitude Arctic regions, allowing the soil to remain frozen; they could also knock down trees and transform heat-absorbing forests into grasslands.

But Lamm says that the process of reviving extinct species is also opening new doors for genomic engineering and developmental biology.

He said that this could affect various aspects, from microorganisms to plastic in the oceans, to gene therapy and targeted delivery in humans, as well as the elimination of genetic diseases. Lamm also speculated that these efforts surrounding the synthesis of DNA might even lead to the development of crops or trees that grow faster.

"We are breaking through the boundaries of DNA synthesis to create larger-scale DNA payloads," he said, "which will greatly change our understanding of programmable life."

A company spun off from Colossal Astromech is entering the field of "convergent evolution" mentioned by Lamm, researching why species that are similar in almost every aspect may have different immune systems or other health issues. For example, elephants have a much lower cancer rate than humans. Lamm states that such research can be used to address human medical challenges or to cope with pandemics. According to reports from D Magazine, Astromech was valued at $2 billion in March.

"We are in a biodiversity crisis, so we need these tools because we will lose about half of our biodiversity in the next 25 years. Therefore, we truly need cryopreservation, we need biobanks, we need genetic rescue, and such tools," said Lamm. "This opens the door for us to ask: what can we learn from these models and evolutionary trends? How can this be applied to other uses? And how can we use directed evolution in a broader range of fields, from crops to human medicine?"

These efforts to address some of the world's largest problems make Colossal Biosciences attractive to investors. In July, the company announced the completion of a $200 million Series C financing led by TWG Global, raising its valuation to $10.2 billion. Since its establishment, the company has raised a total of over $435 million in funding.

However, Lamm also recognizes that many people, especially young people, are inspired by the idea of bringing animals back from extinction. Lamm says that 30% of the company's investors "come to us because of their children."

"If we can inspire the next generation to be excited about science, education, and conservation efforts, and then build a synthetic biology platform that can be widely used in various scenarios, that would truly be the mission at hand," he said. "Our children will inherit our problems, as well as the decisions we make about how to solve them."