Ben Lamm predicts ex utero mammal birth within two years

Surrogate mothers cannot scale fast enough to bring back the woolly mammoth.

On September 30, 2026, Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm outlined an aggressive resolution on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, pledging that his team will gestate and birth mammals completely ex utero within two years. Eliminating live surrogate mothers addresses the primary bottleneck facing large-scale de-extinction programs, which require birthing thousands of herd animals to establish stable wild populations.

The target rests on rapid leaps in precision gene editing. Colossal routinely performs over 300 base edits per cellular delivery and has moved to testing 1,000 simultaneous modifications. Lamm expects full organism design software to arrive within ten years, allowing geneticists to type direct prompt inputs that translate into synthetic genomes.

Yet Lamm drew a hard line at human applications. Strict Food and Drug Administration regulatory timelines and severe ethical liabilities make human genetic modification unviable for the company. Colossal focuses exclusively on ecological restoration and animal ecosystems, leaving human genomic edits off the table.

The broader implications of this biotechnology carry massive security risks. Lamm warned that pairing high-performance computing, synthetic biology, and predictive artificial intelligence models will unlock capabilities far more dangerous than historical weapons systems. As DNA synthesis replaces multiplex editing as the primary method for writing code, national security frameworks remain largely unprepared for the resulting biosecurity threats.

Software alone cannot bridge the biological gap. Standard foundational language models struggle to generate functional living organisms directly from raw sequencing data without specialized training sets. According to Lamm, model architecture matters significantly less than access to comprehensive evolutionary datasets when mapping DNA to physical traits.

To build that dataset, Colossal created a global bio vault initiative to sequence endangered species in partnership with foreign governments before extinction wipes out their genetic code. The company also spun out Astromech, an AI venture dedicated to evolutionary prediction models that feed comparative genomic data into foundation models.

As ex utero gestation transitions from research concept to operational hardware, Colossal is positioning its platform at the intersection of bio-manufacturing and planetary ecology. Whether two years is a realistic engineering horizon or an optimistic fundraising milestone, synthetic biology is forcing regulatory systems to confront artificial life support sooner than expected.