Aggregated News
In our first article in this series, we investigated the dark PR tactics that have accompanied Colossal Bioscience’s de-extinction disinformation campaign, in which transgenic cloned grey wolves have been showcased to the world as resurrected dire wolves – a species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago, and from which grey wolves diverged anywhere between 2.5 to six million years ago. And we noted how although Colossal’s co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamm, denied all involvement in the accompanying smear campaign against the company’s critics, he has happily joined in with the smears against its principal target – the evolutionary geneticist Vincent Lynch, leading Lynch to compare his actions to those of a “schoolyard bully”.
In this second article we look into the business background of Ben Lamm, who founded Colossal with the Harvard geneticist George Church, and why it might cast light on how Colossal came to be built around what the British geneticist Adam Rutherford calls “a con, full of gloss, bullshit and ghoulish greed”.
Hypergiant or giant hype?
Interestingly, Colossal’s CEO appears to have no background in...