Behind the billionaire: Software mogul Ben Lamm wants to save the world by waking the dead
Billionaire entrepreneur Ben Lamm doesn’t care what academic elites think about his efforts to de-extinct species with celebrity investors like the Hemsworths, he’d rather make science “cool”.
American billionaire Ben Lamm is anything but your stereotypical, university science nerd.
Proudly spruiking celebrity investors for his radical Dallas and Melbourne-based de-extinction company Colossal and regularly referencing the hit film Jurassic Park, the serial software, gaming and AI entrepreneur is bringing species back from the dead — in real life.
And he’s using Australian starpower and top Melbourne scientists to help him do it.
Lamm talks fast and freely about making science accessible, “cool and fun” for regular folk, particularly kids, who he’d rather grow up to become “geneticists, biologists … scientists versus influencers”.
That’s not going to happen, he says, if science to them looks dry and boring.
Lamm’s disdain for academic “elites” who cast shade on his ambitious projects and fundraising methods is palpable — happily describing Colossal, as “MTV meets Harvard”.
Long-extinct dire wolves, woolly mammoths, thylacines (Tasmanian tigers), giant moa and dodo birds are all on his de-extinction list, with dire wolf pups already born and news this week that the first dodo chicks in hundreds of years are as little as five to seven years away.
It’s amazing what dollars and drive can achieve — and Lamm has plenty of both.
His personal net worth was this year valued at US$3.7bn while Colossal’s is about US$10.3bn (AUD $15.96bn).
The biotechnology start-up has raised $120m from investors — who include Australia’s superstar Hemsworth brothers and famed New Zealand film director Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit fame — for radical projects like reviving the dodo.
In an exclusive interview with the Herald Sun, Lamm says a growing concern over the extinction of species inspired his move away from software and satellite design, to resurrecting and preserving animals.
Conservation efforts are failing to keep pace with species becoming critically endangered and dying out, he says.
And if he can help change that with brains and a bank of cashed-up investors, he will.
As a new dad, Lamm says his fears for future generations of the human species were also growing.
Having enjoyed considerable success and wealth creating and running “a lot” of large software companies, Lamm says he found himself wanting to make a genuine difference to the world.
“It just seemed like ‘what was kind of my purpose in life’?” he says.
“I felt that my skill set from designing and building software systems and satellite systems could be applied to biology, and I could work with much smarter women and men than me — it just seemed like there was actual purpose in that, right? Like, what was the purpose of just going and building yet another software company?”
Lamm says he had heard about extinct species “like the thylacine, dodo and others” and an idea formed — by assembling a team of some of the world’s smartest scientists and bringing like-minded investors on board, “a de-extinction toolkit” could be developed.
A “mind-blowing” meeting with renowned Harvard geneticist George Church then made the impossible look achievable, Lamm says.
The unlikely pair collaborated and formed Colossal Biosciences, to bring species back from extinction and prevent those on the brink from dying out.
“He (Prof Church) inspired me that we actually had the technologies — almost like right out of a movie like Jurassic Park — where we could bring back extinct species, use those same technologies to save critically endangered species through conservation, as well as building technologies that could also be applicable to human healthcare,” he tells the Herald Sun.
“So the idea that we could start a business that used my ideas and George’s, and my innovations around technology, to inspire the next generation, create impact for conservation as well as creating value for shareholders … was something that was hard to miss.”
The Colossal team includes scientists at the company’s new Melbourne University headquarters, who are collaborating on the thylacine, dodo, moa and other projects, under the leadership of recently appointed chief biology officer, Melburnian Professor Andrew Pask.
Colossal has been “buying up more and more of his team’s Melbourne lab” over recent years, Lamm reveals.
Prof Pask’s University of Melbourne lab is now officially called Colossal Australia and is the company’s second global headquarters, with it’s main base in Dallas, Texas.
“It’s a very integrated team … some of our bio teams are located in Melbourne,” Lamm says.
Through de-extinction projects, Lamm says he hopes to make science exciting to the masses.
In a world where that meant “competing with the latest in pop culture and celebrity on TikTok”, he was more than happy to use film stars and directors to gain an edge, even if did ruffle some feathers in science’s ivory towers and academic circles.
“We are in the attention economy. Kids are not reading science and nature by itself. I wish they were,” Lamm says.
“We need to make science accessible, … back to those days of inspiration, of NASA and women and men going to space — that’s what I want … to make science fun and cool.
“We don’t want to be Harvard, we want to be MTV meets Harvard.”
Originally published as Behind the billionaire: Software mogul Ben Lamm wants to save the world by waking the dead
