Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Sep 30, 2026 · 43m · 32m saved
With Ben Lamm, Co-Founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences
A year ago Colossal Biosciences was already delivering more than 300 gene edits at once at better than 90% efficiency, when most of the field still celebrates 20. Its chief executive now expects the company to bring mammals from conception to birth with no surrogate mother within 24 months.
Most biotech companies pick one disease and one product. Colossal set out to bring back the woolly mammoth and has spun the tools it built into separate companies, from AI for genomics to stored placental cells.
"I think within 24 months, Colossal will birth animal mammals fully ex utero —"
Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, started four companies in gaming, defense, AI and mobile before Colossal, with no background in synthetic biology. A host put Colossal's value at more than $10 billion. The conversation was recorded on stage at Moonshots Live on 25 September.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 43 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 predictions that matter.
Key Takeaways
Colossal expects to birth mammals fully ex utero within 24 months, never using a surrogate
Lamm put designing an animal's key traits on demand less than 10 years out
The field celebrates 20 edits at once; Colossal was delivering more than 300 a year ago and is now testing 1,000
AI cannot fix a genome from a single sequence, he said, but thousands of genomes compared side by side will get there
Trying to repeat published mouse experiments fails 40% to 60% of the time, a gap he expects AI to close
Colossal wants tens of thousands of mammoths, brought back in herds
Half of the world's biodiversity could be lost in 25 years, and backing it up needs billions in government funding
Anthropic's wet-lab announcement is "massively validating," not a threat to biotech
1. Teacup Mammoths
A host recalled Lamm saying at Abundance 360 that he wanted a pet woolly mammoth. Lamm said the request comes up often.
"But we get the request, the number two request we get is teacup mammoths." — Ben Lamm
He joked that Colossal could engineer a new melanin to make one pink, said it is not working on that, and said the mammoth project itself is making good progress.
