The American government partners with Texas-based fire extinguishing company Colossal biosciences build a national repository of genetic material from endangered and threatened species. This effort comes as the Trump administration prepares to weaken protections for endangered species, including recently deciding to abandon them to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.
In collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, scientists aim to collect cells, reproductive tissues and DNA from more than 2,300 plant and animal species in the United States and around the world that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. The samples will be cryopreserved and stored in Colossal’s laboratory in Dallas, and duplicate samples will be distributed nationwide.
The company, which claimed last year to have created live wolf puppieswill perform genetic sequencing of the samples and make the data available to researchers and conservationists. Under the partnership, the federal government will own the samples.
“We want to save as many species samples as possible,” says Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of Colossal.
Colossal provides collection kits so its partners in the field can collect samples of blood, skin and other tissues. Lamm says the collection has already started.
“This collaboration brings together the scientific expertise of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the ingenuity of the private sector to develop new tools that can help restore species, preserve critical genetic resources, and strengthen the future of wildlife conservation,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. (Fish and Wildlife, part of the Interior Department, did not respond to a request for more details about the partnership.)
Hypothetically, the samples could be used to save a species from the brink of extinction. Fish and Wildlife did this by cloning the black-footed ferret, one of North America’s most endangered mammals, using cryopreserved cells from a ferret that died in the 1980s. Announced in 2021, it was the first case of cloning of an endangered species in the United States. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Frozen Zoo provided the sample for this work.
Under the Trump administration, Fish and Wildlife proposed major changes to the landmark 1973 Endangered Species Act that could reduce protections for imperiled plants and animals. THE proposed changes would take economic and national security considerations into account in determining protected habitat and eliminate a “blanket rule” that automatically grants threatened species the same strict protections as endangered species.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump convened the so-called God Squad — a group of senior administration officials that includes Burgum — to determine whether to circumvent protections for endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico. The group, which has only met a few times since the Endangered Species Act was created, decided to grant exemptions to oil and gas drillers in the region. (Environmentalists continued the administration on the decision.)
Noah Greenwald, director of endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based nonprofit, says the new initiative with Colossal is consistent with the administration’s stance on conservation, in part because it does not conflict with industry interests.
“This is not about preserving biodiversity,” he says. “It’s like a last resort effort. We will only need this genetic material if the administration fails to recover the endangered species.”
The Center for Biological Diversity has criticized proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act. Greenwald says conservation efforts should instead focus on protecting public lands such as national parks and wilderness areas to prevent species loss. Although it is possible to bring back extinct or endangered species through technology, he says, habitat must be left to support those species.
Courtesy of Colossal
Lamm says Colossal’s partnership with the federal government has been four years in the making and talks initially began with the Biden administration.
“Working with both sides of the aisle, even though they have different views on topics like climate change, they agree that a world without species is bad,” he says.
Burgum rented Colossal announced the dire wolf last year while simultaneously criticizing the endangered species list as favoring “regulation over innovation.” In an article on X, he cited the company’s de-extinction technology as a way to “help shape a future where people are never in danger.”
“They really like technology,” Lamm says of the Trump administration. “They seem to like making money and saving money.” Colossal’s argument to the administration was that it would cover the costs of the biobank.
The five-year-old startup has made splashy announcements about resurrecting extinct species, including last year when it used gene-editing techniques on gray wolves to create traits found in extinct giant wolves. He also used gene editing to produce what he nicknamed “wooly mice” due to their mammoth-like fur. The company, valued at more than $10 billion, also aims to bring back the dodo and 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, announced earlier this year. The company hasn’t said exactly how much money it has invested in the initiative, but Lamm says it’s in the “several tens of millions of dollars.” The company is also partnering with the United Arab Emirates, whose government recently invested $60 million in the company, to store genetic material from endangered species in the country and around the world. This collection will be housed at the Museum of the Future in Dubai.
Lamm says the BioVault does not compete with existing preservation techniques but rather functions as a “redundancy backup.”
