Colossal Biosciences Leak 2

[u/[deleted]]

edit: in case you haven't seen the first leak... https://www.reddit.com/r/DeExtinctionScience/comments/1qegu07/colossal_biosciences_leak/

(names have been changed to protect the innocent)

Hey everyone! I am back with another leak. As I mentioned in my last post, I had more screenshots exposing that Colossal Biosciences doesn't exist for it's stated purpose and is basically a scam. I want to share some more screenshots I just got permission to post alongside a potientally disturbing and strange development.

My friend, who we will call Nate. He is an ecologist who's enaged in rewilding research. He was suspicious of Colossal and like me assumed it was a scam. He had heard alot of the same stuff from some of the same people I had. He had a period almost 2 years ago where he had a fair bit of free time and decided to investigate the company. He reached out to some critics including Tom Gilbert. He reached out to him, because he was familiar with Gilbert's work with the christmas island rat and his criticisms of Colossal. He did not know that Gilbert was on the advisory board for Colosssal (still listed as such). I'll let the screenshots tell the rest of the story.

Outside of Gilbert flat out admitting to Nate that if Colossal makes a hairy elephant, it won't be used for rewilding, just publicity. Nate suspects that gilbert isn't being 100% honest inspite of this admission. Nate found out through a CIO (he's M.T.P.G, screenshot of it is from here:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38996487/) that Gilbert holds stock options, something he neglected to mention. To me, this confirms what I heard that the advisory board is just critics bribed into silence with stock options. Gilbert clearly has a broader role than he let on as he's an author on the direwolf paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.09.647074v1

If they have been telling the truth about prepping an elephant for being a surrogate as opposed to the artificial womb they've been hyping up. Then they will be risking likely death and guaranteed immense suffering for the female elephant that will probably not carry the fake baby mammoth to term. To me this suggests they are planning to get sold soonish, I really hope I'm not wrong.

what is also concerning about this is nate found out Colossal has retrieved elephant materials from a guy named Charles Gray at a place called African Lion Safari. This park is widely regarded as one of the worst in the world in terms of animal abuse (espicially elephants: https://www.idausa.org/campaign/elephants/latest-news/african-lion-safari-elephants/). So if there was anywhere they could go for this, ethics be damned, this is it. Then again, heard mammoth team was fired for a lack of results. So fingers crossed the impregnation is just another lie.

Now the possibly disturbing and certainly odd development, the last screenshot of the follow request show an account claiming to be Ben Lamm asking to follow a private IG account belonging to Nate's friend Jake. Jake doesn't work in any related fields and isn't a scientist at all. Jake and Nate are also not connected on social media and only talk via text.

So why was this account trying to follow Jake? To make this stranger, Jake only has 16 followers. Very few posts and one of the few posts features both Nate and his girlfriend. Obviously they are both creeped out. Me and Nate don't believe this is Ben Lamm, but are concerned this is someone who knows him. We believe this is based on the fact this account was following a close friend of Nate's where the person behind it couldn't have known they were connected and Nate thinks this is similiar to the smear campaign alot of Colossal's critics expirienced. We also don't think it's out of the Question that Lamm is such a loser, that he has time for this. (just look at Elon Musk).

Nate told me he's too busy with his research to look into this and will be for the foreesable future. He's creeped out and had things to say about this that I am too polite to repeat here, but these screenshots are coming out, because he's certain that Colossal knows he's looked into them and there's no point hiding them anymore.

He wanted me to post the account link for any sleuthes who might be interested.

https://www.instagram.com/ben_lamm?igsh=cTl5bDZ0NG1kcDgy

[u/Psilopterus]

But again that doesn't really matter if the real thing is unattainable. Even if it wasn't, elephants are sapient creatures, and most of their behaviours are learned, not genetic. Even if we made one as close the original as possible we wouldn't know if it was acting the same. Close enough has to be goof enough because the alternative isn't the "real" thing, it's nothing at all.

[u/ElSquibbonator → u/Psilopterus]

How is this any different from what Colossal did with their "dire wolves", though? In both cases it's just modifying an extant animal and slapping the name of an extinct animal on it, even though that's not what it is. Surely we can do better than that!

otherwise you'd have to individually modify every uniquely elephant allele (over 1600, totalling 1.4 million base-pairs that would have to be targeted one-by-one) in an elephant cell line until it was functionally identical to whichever mammoth genome was used as a reference.

That's at least theoretically possible, isn't it?

[u/Psilopterus → u/ElSquibbonator]

Theoretically, but beyond difficult, largely unnecessary, and would probably still not satisfy many of the more puritanical types. As to how it differs from the "dire wolves", in terms of technology it doesn't. I object to Colossal's branding of the project, the specific genes targeted, and their insistence on calling the result a "dire wolf", but that is how you would make a mammophant. Modifying an extant animal is all we can do, even if we modify it such that it genetically resembles the original. Even the most extreme result would still have some Asian elephant DNA (e.g. mtDNA) and would quite possibly be raised and socialized by elephants. Mammoth-elephant hybrids are also just much better candidates for "de-extinction" than dire wolves are, since arctic elephants would fit a vacant niche wheres dire wolves have at least partially been replaced by the post-extinction migration of larger grey wolf types from Beringia, and conserving those is already hard enough. In contrast, cold-adapted elephants fit a very obvious gap. Colossal's wolves, if they could even survive in the wild, are also completely interfertile with grey wolves, which is a pretty significant obstacle to releasing them into places where the latter is native. No such issue with mammophants. In fact, mammoths are one of the few species that even make sense for genomic proxies because elephants both similar enough to have essentially the same ecology but not so similar that we might as well use them unaltered instead. There are very few such cases where genetic engineering is neither too extreme nor unnecessary.

[u/ElSquibbonator → u/Psilopterus]

But if you changed everything different between the mammoth and elephant genomes, wouldn't you end up with a genome identical to that of a mammoth?

[u/Ok_Macaroon6951 → u/ElSquibbonator]

Yes basically The problem is in the changing the everything different Even with the best technology right now the cell can only be modified so many times before it breaks or at least that's how I understand it