Let's bring back the woolly mammoth: One company's quest might become our reality.

• Author: Dodson, Jack

BEN LAMM, a Texas-based serial entrepreneur, had been busy for years. He'd created several technology companies spanning sectors like gaming, mobile, Al, and conversational intelligence.

"Those were great," he says, explaining that each had created value for shareholders and employees, and affected thousands of people's lives through their work. "But a lot of those didn't have a lot of impact."

One project, for example, was a robotic, Al-driven bioreactor that used algae to stem carbon emissions from large buildings. It led Lamm to dive "deeper and deeper into climate change." Eventually, he became interested in the idea of de-extinction, which involves reviving species that have died off and reintroducing them. The argument is alluring: key species reintroduced to ecosystems could have a balancing effect, helping stabilize at-risk environments--or even the planet as a whole.

For years, Harvard and MIT geneticist George Church has been pursuing this technology to bring back the woolly mammoth, with the idea that reintroducing the species to arctic environments could stop temperature increases. Lamm set up a meeting with Church in late 2019.

Lamm recalls, "When one of the fathers of synthetic biology says, 'We have the capacity to achieve this, we just need the right level of focus and funding.' From a business perspective, I was like, 'Well, how much do you need?"'

The disappearance of individual species is speeding up at a pace never seen in human history, and ecosystems are notoriously delicate. As one group of scientists put it in a 2020 paper, "Extinction breeds extinction." The researchers argued that the ongoing sixth mass extinction in the planet's history results from one species within a chain dying off, which kills other endangered species.

One 2014 review in the journal Science found that the rate of species extinction is 1,000 times faster than it would have been without human intervention. Another paper published in the same journal in August found industry poses a particular threat to species. Indigenous lands were found to be a safe haven for endangered primates, with those groups acting as protectors of biodiversity in general against encroaching human-made threats.

A 2019 report from the United Nations rang similar warning bells. It found grave impacts around the world due to species extinction were "likely," with more than 1 million species headed for extinction in the coming decades. Nearly all of the reasons for...