Neo Neanderthal

CGS-authored

Colossal Bioscience’s attempt to de-extinct the dire wolf is a dangerously deceptive publicity stunt

By David Coltman, Carson Mitchell, Liam Alastair Wayde Carter, and Tommy Galfano, The Conversation | 05.12.2025

Aggregated News

Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech company, made headlines this April after falsely claiming to resurrect the extinct dire wolf. The company presents this as a breakthrough for conservation biology. However, our team of conservation geneticists at the Western University...

Animal Biotechnologies

A Deeper Dive Into the Colossal Furor

By Pete Shanks | 04.23.2025

Biopolitical Times

^{Gray wolf by Jessica Eirich via Unsplash}

“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy”
– Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, The New Yorker, 4/14/25

Even the most casual consumers of news will have seen the run of recent headlines featuring the company Colossal Biosciences. On March 4, they announced with great fanfare the world’s first-ever woolly mice, as a first step toward creating a woolly mammoth. Then they topped that on April 7 by unveiling one...

Animal Biotechnologies

On Woolly Mice, Resurrecting Mammoths, and Tech Bros

By Pete Shanks | 03.17.2025

Biopolitical Times

^{Riquet Mammoth Kakao (c.1920)

by Ludwig Hohlwein, Public Domain via Flickr}

Colossal, the de-extinction company, scored headlines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) recently by announcing that they had created mice! Not just any mice, not even colossal mice, but genetically engineered, normal-size “woolly mice” that are the result of editing seven genes in mouse embryos. This Colossal presented as an important step toward making a specimen of charismatic megafauna – a...

Animal Biotechnologies

AI biotechs launch bioprospecting expeditions with Indigenous groups, agree to share benefits

By Ben Johnson, Nature | 02.14.2025

Aggregated News

A London-based biotech has amassed the world’s largest ethically sourced foundational biodiversity database for training artificial intelligence (AI) by setting up partnerships with 25 countries around the world. The startup, Basecamp Research, announced in January the launch of a new...

Animal Biotechnologies

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