A sweeping effort to freeze the genetic blueprint of the planet's most vulnerable wildlife is now underway. The company Colossal and scientists at the US Fish and Wildlife Service are working together to gather cells, reproductive tissues, and DNA from the more than 2,300 plant and animal species, both in the US and around the world, that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. Each sample will be cryopreserved and stored at Colossal's lab in Dallas, with duplicate copies distributed across the country.
This is the same company that last year claimed to have created living dire wolf pups. Colossal will run genetic sequencing on the collected samples and make the resulting data available to researchers and conservationists. Under the terms of the partnership, the samples themselves will be owned by the federal government.
“We want to back up as many samples of species as we can,” says Colossal's chief executive officer and cofounder Ben Lamm.
How the samples are being collected
Colossal is handing its field partners collection kits so they can take samples of blood, skin, and other tissue. According to Lamm, collection has already begun.
“This collaboration brings together the scientific expertise of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the ingenuity of the private sector to develop new tools that can help recover species, preserve critical genetic resources, and strengthen the future of wildlife conservation,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says in a statement. Fish and Wildlife, which is part of the Interior Department, did not respond to a request for more details on the partnership.
A path back from the brink
In theory, the stored samples could be used to rescue a species teetering on the edge of extinction. Fish and Wildlife has done this before, when it cloned the black-footed ferret, one of the most endangered mammals in North America, using cryopreserved cells from a ferret that died in the 1980s. Announced in 2021, it marked the first time a US endangered species had been cloned. The sample for that work came from the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Changes to the law, and the controversy around them
Under the Trump administration, Fish and Wildlife has proposed major changes to the landmark 1973 Endangered Species Act that could weaken protections for at-risk plants and animals. The proposed changes would factor economic and national security considerations into how protected habitat is determined, and would eliminate a “blanket rule” that automatically gives threatened species the same strict protections granted to endangered ones.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump convened the so-called God Squad, a group of top administration officials that includes Burgum, to decide whether to bypass endangered species protections in the Gulf of Mexico. The group, which has met only a handful of times since the Endangered Species Act was created, chose to grant exemptions to oil and gas drillers in the region. Environmentalists sued the administration over that decision.
What critics are saying
Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based nonprofit, says the new initiative with Colossal lines up with the administration's approach to conservation, partly because it doesn't clash with industry interests.
“This isn't biodiversity preservation,” he says. “This is like a last-ditch effort. We'll only need this genetic material if the administration fails at recovering endangered species.”
The Center for Biological Diversity has criticized the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act. Greenwald argues that conservation efforts should instead focus on protecting public lands such as national parks and wilderness areas to prevent species from disappearing. Even if technology can someday bring back extinct or endangered species, he says, there needs to be habitat left for those species to survive.
A partnership four years in the making
Lamm says Colossal's partnership with the federal government has been in the works for four years, with the earliest talks beginning under the Biden administration.
“Working with both sides of the aisle, while they have different views on things like climate change, they do agree that a world without species is bad,” he says.
Last year, Burgum praised Colossal's dire wolf announcement while at the same time criticizing the endangered species list as favoring “regulation more than innovation.” In a post on X, he pointed to the company's de-extinction technology as a way to “help forge a future where populations are never at risk.”
“They really do like technology,” Lamm says of the Trump administration. “They seem to like making money and saving money.” Colossal's pitch to the administration was that it would front the costs of the biobank itself.
Ambitions to bring extinct species back
The five-year-old startup has made splashy announcements about reviving extinct species, including last year when it used gene-editing techniques on gray wolves to recreate traits found in extinct dire wolves. It also used gene editing to produce what it called “woolly mice,” named for their mammoth-like fur. Valued at more than $10 billion, the company also has ambitions to bring back the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth in the name of restoring ecosystems and fighting climate change.
The collaboration with the US government is part of Colossal's BioVault project, which the company announced earlier this year. Colossal has not said exactly how much money it has poured into the initiative, but Lamm puts it in the range of “tens of millions of dollars.” It is also partnering with the United Arab Emirates, whose government recently invested $60 million in the company, to bank genetic material from endangered species both inside that country and globally. That collection will be housed inside Dubai's Museum of the Future.
Lamm says the BioVault is not meant to compete with existing conservation techniques but instead works as a “redundancy backup.”
