When evolutionary biologist Vincent Lynch heard the news that a $10 billion biotech company had brought the once extinct direwolf back to life, he called foul. He took to the media to argue that these overhyped headlines threaten public trust in science.

And that's when things started to get weird.

In a story that feels like it came right out of Jurassic Park, we look into the murky world of "dark PR" and discover what happens when the principle of scientific discourse challenges the power of corporate science.

Featuring: Howard Wolinsky, Vincent Lynch and Nic Rawlence

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

You can read Howard’s entire investigation over at EMBO Reports.

Check out this example of one of the critical stories about Vincent.

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CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi

Mixed by Nate Hegyi

Editing by Taylor Quimby

Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Henke and Jessica Hunt

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Music by Beyza, Onoe Caponoe, Hanna Ekstrom, El Equipo Del Norte, The Yard Women, bomull, Twelwe, shamgang, Trevor Kowalski, and Dylan Joseph.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: From NHPR This is outside/in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegyi.

Vincent Lynch: It was Sunday, and we were just about to sit down and have dinner.

Nate Hegyi: And you get like, a knock on the door.

Vincent Lynch: Yeah.

Nate Hegyi: This is Vincent Lynch. He's an evolutionary biologist living in Buffalo, New York, and he was telling me about how last summer a guy showed up at his house.

Nate Hegyi: So did he do it? Like in the movies where they, like, throw it through the door? Or like, how did it go down?

Vincent Lynch: No, this very this very nice man just hand-delivered it.

Nate Hegyi: Vincent had just been served.

Vincent Lynch: He asked me to confirm my identity, and once I did, then he just handed it to me.

Nate Hegyi: And what did you do when you opened it? Like, what was your reaction?

Vincent Lynch: It wasn't even anything to open. It was just the paper. Like the piece of paper that it was written on. And my first thought was, um, you know, you get a little hot when you think you're legally in trouble. It's like, it's like when the police are behind you and you know, you're not doing anything wrong, but you're running through your head like, have I ever done anything wrong? Sort of. That feeling.

Nate Hegyi: At first glance, the letter looked like a cease and desist order, but as Vincent looked closer.

Vincent Lynch: So we read it. My wife. To read it over and over and over, and we realized that there's no legal justification in the thing. There was no legal jargon.

Nate Hegyi: It was from a law firm representing a company called Colossal Biosciences.

Vincent Lynch: And some of the comments were clearly intended. To to, to intimidate me.

Nate Hegyi: Today on the show, we have a story that feels like it was ripped from the pages of Jurassic Park, one with long extinct creatures and genetic manipulation, a story about what happens when the principle of scientific debate comes up against the reality and power of corporate science.

Nic Rawlence: When they start going after you and accusing you of being racist, it starts hitting home a lot more.

Howard Wolinsky: You know, he suffers no fools and doesn't feel any reason to be polite about it.

Vincent Lynch: I have a problem with what I believe is an intentional disinformation campaign.

Nate Hegyi: Stay tuned.

This is outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegyi.

Jon Hammond: Welcome to Jurassic Park.

Nate Hegyi: If you're a longtime listener, you know that I am an absolute nerd when it comes to Jurassic Park. Like, I can quote most of the movie. I had all the toys growing up. I mean, I almost named my dog Doctor Alan Grant.

Jon Hammond: They're moving in herds. They do move in herds.

Nate Hegyi: R.i.p. Sam Neill. Even though it didn't go well in the movies, this idea of bringing extinct animals back from the dead, it was enthralling. But it was also science fiction. Well, it was until last year.

News Report: Tonight, a howl 13,000 years in the making. In a first for science biotech company Colossal Biosciences says it brought the extinct Dire Wolf back to life.

Nate Hegyi: Let's go back a little bit. In 2021, a company called Colossal Biosciences launched with the very ambitious goal of bringing back animals like the Tasmanian tiger and the Wooly Mammoth. On their website, they say that, quote, extinction is a colossal problem facing the world, and colossal is the company that's going to fix it. But make no mistake, this is not an environmental nonprofit or a plucky little startup with big dreams. Colossal is a, well, colossal organization. It is valued at $10 billion. That's more than Elon Musk's Boring Company or the instant messaging platform discord. It has some very famous investors like Tom Brady and Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the rings. And it is led by a guy named Ben Lam.

Howard Wolinsky: Ben Lam, you know, came from sort of the Silicon Valley bro culture.

Nate Hegyi: This, by the way, is journalist Howard Wilensky. He's written quite a bit about Colossal and Ben Lam.

Howard Wolinsky: You know, he's free wheeling. He's smart. He's funny. He's sarcastic.

Nate Hegyi: Ben has long black hair. He rocks sneakers, washed out jeans and his sheer confidence. The audacity on display is wild.

Ben Lamm: I'm not a scientist, but that's. And I don't come from academia. I'm just an entrepreneur that knows how to build teams of smarter people than me. And I find cool, interesting, and I try to work on it. Right.

Nate Hegyi: He reminds me of a hipster, John Hammond. And for those of you not obsessed with Jurassic Park like myself, John Hammond is the dude who ran the whole park.

Jon Hammond: Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before.

Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could. They didn't stop to think if they should.

Nate Hegyi: And I am not the only one who thinks this, by the way. Joe Rogan said the same thing when he was interviewing Ben in 2025.

Joe Rogan: This is just like the guy in Jurassic Park, but this is basically the same conversation.

Ben Lamm: Yeah, but but but John Hammond, but John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a subplot that, you know, didn't make it to Final Cut.

Nate Hegyi: S first splashy breakthrough came in March of 2025 when they developed what they called a wooly mouse.

Howard Wolinsky: And so here's this fluffy little mouse that looks like he's got the kind of tufts of hair that you'd see on a mammoth. Then they came out with, we we have brought back the Dire Wolf.

Nate Hegyi: In April of that year. Colossal gave time magazine an ABC news exclusive access to their newest creation, three Snow White Dire Wolf Puppies.

News Report: 13,000 years after the last Dire Wolf walked the earth. Scientists say they've now brought them back. Here's our chief national correspondent, Matt Gutman.

Nate Hegyi: With the dire wolf was a big wolf that roamed the Americas during the last Ice Age. And in these news reports, the scientists and reps employed by Colossal Bioscience tended to say unequivocally that they had brought this animal back from extinction.

News Report: That animal looks like a dire wolf. It will behave like a dire wolf. And it is a dire wolf.

Nate Hegyi: But when evolutionary biologist Vincent Lynch heard about this.

Vincent Lynch: It was like white hot flames coming, coming from my head.

Nate Hegyi: Vincent teaches and does research at the University of Buffalo, and the dude knows his stuff. He earned his PhD at Yale. He's an expert in mammalian genomics. He's led peer reviewed studies sequencing ancient DNA, including the wooly mammoth. He was reading all of these breathless stories and watching news reports online.

Vincent Lynch: And it lacked any kind of outside expertise. It looked like a commercial. It didn't look like scientific reporting.

Nate Hegyi: Vincent's main complaint about Colossal's announcement was this.

Vincent Lynch: You cannot make a couple of mutations in a gray wolf and then call it a dire wolf, because it is not a dire wolf. It is a genetically modified organism that may or may not look like a dire wolf.

Nate Hegyi: In order to create these animals. Colossal sequenced prehistoric DNA from dire wolf fossils. But that alone cannot bring an animal back. Instead, they use that sequence as a kind of map, comparing it to the DNA of the modern gray wolf. Then they edited 14 of the gray wolf genes to give it a larger skull, broader shoulders, and a snow white coat. Finally, the edited gray wolf DNA was placed into an egg cell, developed into an embryo, and then implanted into a couple of hound dog surrogates. Those dogs then gave birth to these genetically engineered animals.

Vincent Lynch: You can't take 14 or 15 genes and 20 mutations and transform one species into another species.

Nate Hegyi: That's why Vincent is adamant these are not the same dire wolves that existed thousands of years ago. These are something new.

Vincent Lynch: And at least some of the mutations that they introduced appear to be explicitly to make it like ghost from Game of Thrones.

Nate Hegyi: That's right. Scientists aren't even completely sure what color real life direwolves were so colossal, Biosciences crafted them to match the fictional wolves from HBO's Game of Thrones. For Ben Lamb, the CEO of colossal, all of this is just semantics. Here he is in that rolling Stone interview.

Ben Lamm: If you don't think our mammoths are mammoths, that's fine. If you don't think direwolves direwolves, that's fine. But you should tell your kids that Jurassic Park is about, you know, genetically modified frog birds.

Nate Hegyi: But the body that governs the international version of the endangered species list, they agree with Vincent. They say colossal's dire wolves and the prehistoric dire direwolves are not the same species.

Vincent Lynch: They're misleading the public by calling them direwolves. And I worry that when the public realizes this, that they're going to have less trust in science and scientists in a time when there is already eroding trust in science and scientists, so much so that they don't really believe us anymore.

Nate Hegyi: But colossal is forging ahead. It's planning to use similar methods to create Tasmanian tigers, dodos, and, of course, the wooly mammoth. And that's one reason Vincent has an even bigger concern about what this all means for conservation at large.

Vincent Lynch: If you believe that extinct species can be brought back, then why try to preserve their environments and why try to conserve them?

Nate Hegyi: In 2025, after colossal announced the birth of their dire wolves. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum basically said exactly that.

Doug Burgum: Pick your favorite species and call up colossal and and instead of, you know, raising money to get animals on the endangered species, let's figure out a way to get them off. And this is one tool and create biodiversity, what it can do for everybody.

Nate Hegyi: To be clear, there are environmental groups and academics who think that de-extinction can be a useful conservation tool, but others are skeptical.

Vincent Lynch: It has the possibility of making people believe that we don't need conservation efforts, because we can just bring them back later.

Nate Hegyi: This is one reason why Vincent has been commenting on colossal publicly for years. He's been on YouTube live stream shows.

Vincent Lynch: What you don't want to do is lie about de-extinction things in order to garner press coverage.

Nate Hegyi: He's talked with reporters at NPR.

Vincent Lynch: You know, I'm pretty skeptical about this, but that mouse is pretty adorable.

Nate Hegyi: The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Guardian. I mean, sometimes he can't even keep them all straight.

Vincent Lynch: I usually get a call saying, you know, do you want to want to comment on this? I'm a scientist, so I want to comment on everything. So I was like, yeah, of course. What do you need to know?

Nate Hegyi: And he's on blue Sky Twitter and Substack saying some spicier stuff like calling the dire wolves a, quote, colossal pile of bullshit. But then one day, a reporter from nature reached out and asked Vincent if he had seen the multiple negative news stories not about colossal, but about him.

Vincent Lynch: There was one. There was two. Then there was four. And then there were six. And I have now lost track.

Nate Hegyi: That's next. After the break. Hey, this is outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Heggie. After that nature reporter called evolutionary biologist Vincent Lynch to let him know about these negative news stories they were reading about him. He hopped onto his computer.

Vincent Lynch: I started like, googling my name and terms like de-extinction, extinction, whatever.

Nate Hegyi: And he starts finding all of these articles. They are published on what look like legitimate news sites, albeit ones you've probably never heard of.

Vincent Lynch: There weren't even newspaper stories like blog posts on websites which look like they're real, real newspapers.

Nate Hegyi: These news websites. They're kind of weird. Lots of pop up ads writing that feels like it was done by AI.

Vincent Lynch: One was like CEO today and one was like grape EO. One was like, green matters.

Nate Hegyi: They have headlines like this.

Felix Poon: Vincent Lynch is unreliable.

Marina Henke: Vincent Lynch's repeated failures in stem cell research.

Felix Poon: Vincent Lynch's failures in genetic research cast serious doubts on his authority in the de-extinction debate.

Nate Hegyi: One story in particular really bothered him. It was published in something called USA Daily Chronicles, and it basically said that he was being a sexist gatekeeper against female scientists.

Marina Henke: If a male scientist with no direct success in a field is consistently granted the final word over the women leading the charge, we're not evaluating science. We're reenacting a power imbalance.

Vincent Lynch: As scientists. All we have to go on is our public image. So if there are relatively many news stories and blog posts that disparage me, it would disparage my reputation and show disrespect for me. And that's all we have in sciences is our reputation.

Nate Hegyi: It wasn't just the stories. Vincent's Twitter account was suspended. A YouTube show that featured him critiquing colossal was almost shut down.

Vincent Lynch: And then I realized, oh, it's not just me that this is happening to. It's many of the critics of colossal. Not all of them, but the most persistent critics of colossal.

Nate Hegyi: Um, Nick, do you want to start by. Just give me your first last name and the kind of work you do.

Nic Rawlence: Uh, yeah. My name is associate professor Nick Rawlins. I'm the director of the Otago Paleogenetics lab in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago.

Nate Hegyi: Nick works with ancient DNA and indigenous communities to better understand New Zealand's prehistoric ecosystems. Now, he doesn't actually dislike de-extinction. He thinks it could become a useful tool in the conservation toolbox.

Nic Rawlence: But one of the things that I did notice when colossal came on the scene is very much they're very aggressive, overhyped, um, science communication.

Nate Hegyi: When news of the Dire wolves was announced by colossal, Nick was one of the first scientists to criticize the framing. That's when the negative news stories about Nick started popping up.

Nic Rawlence: There was one published in Space Coast Daily, which is the small little online newspaper of the county in Florida around the Kennedy Space Center. That said, I was becoming too much of a media fixture, and I needed to go focus on my, uh, mediocre publication record.

Nate Hegyi: There were others like this, too, and in Nick's eye, the articles seemed poorly written and probably generated by AI. He could laugh those ones off, but the ones that really hurt his feelings came after colossal announced plans in 2025 to de-extinct the MOA. The MOA is a giant, flightless bird native to New Zealand that went extinct about 600 years ago. Colossal claimed to have the widespread support of local indigenous tribes for bringing this epic bird back from the dead, but Nick says it is way more divisive.

Nic Rawlence: Our lab works with Maori iwi or Maori tribes, the indigenous people of New Zealand all around the country, and there is little to no support for de-extinction.

Nate Hegyi: He said, as much to science magazine when colossal made their announcement. And then two other articles came out about Nick.

Nic Rawlence: Basically saying that I was co-opting the indigenous voice. I was being colonialist. I was being racist. When they start going after you are and accusing you of being racist, um, it starts hitting home a lot more.

Nate Hegyi: There are at least a dozen of these kinds of articles out there, along with a few Reddit posts and even a YouTube video. They focus on Nick Vincent and another researcher who has criticized colossal a lot in the media. And I gotta say, I went down a rabbit hole just to figure out who wrote these things. They were all on different websites, and the reporters who wrote them didn't seem to have any digital footprint. I mean, some of their headshots didn't even look real. They looked AI generated. I sent emails, I made phone calls, I got nothing back. One of the critical articles was published on a website called The American Reporter. It listed an address in Boston. So my producer, Felix Poon and I decided to pay them a visit. Okay, so we're walking up to it. It is not a street. It is definitely like an alleyway.

Felix Poon: Yeah.

Nate Hegyi: Cobblestone alleyway. Yeah.

Nate Hegyi: We were looking for a street called Cedar Lane. But as far as we could tell, there was no Cedar Lane. Only a Cedar Lane way.

Felix Poon: What's the address we're looking for?

Nate Hegyi: 25. 12.

Felix Poon: 25. 12. There's a six here.

Nate Hegyi: There's a six and a 39. 25. 12. There's an eight.

Felix Poon: And it dead ends to 56.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah. There was no 25, 12 Cedar Lane Way.

Felix Poon: Should we call them?

Nate Hegyi: Yeah.

Felix Poon: And say we're on Cedar Lane Way right now. Yeah.

Nate Hegyi: Let me give them a call. The number listed on the website is international.

Felix Poon: All right. Here we go. Just calling Patna. Bihar, India.

Verizon voice: Welcome to Verizon Wireless. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again. Announcement for welcome to Verizon Wireless. Your call cannot be completed as dialed.

Nate Hegyi: Point is, these are not your ordinary news websites. And something very strange is going on. Also, I am not the only reporter who has tried to get to the bottom of who is writing these articles.

Howard Wolinsky: I contacted every single publication that was involved.

Nate Hegyi: This is Howard Wilensky. You heard him earlier in the episode. He's a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter who now freelances. And he investigated this for the peer reviewed scientific journal Embo reports.

Howard Wolinsky: We were shining lights in dark corners that were, you know, were mainly used to grow mushrooms.

Nate Hegyi: After Howard reached out. A few of the articles disappeared. Other times, he was blocked from calling or emailing them again. One article was supposedly written by the head of a major British PR firm. Their company that provides pay as you go marketing and boasts, quote, an unparalleled network of publishing partners which can guarantee coverage. Howard called them up.

Howard Wolinsky: They answered and said that this guy had been gone from from this company for a number of years. We did everything we could to reach him and nothing.

Nate Hegyi: Howard does have one theory for why this is happening.

Howard Wolinsky: There's sort of a general name for these attacks, and it's called dark PR.

Nate Hegyi: These are essentially smear campaigns designed to silence critics. The most famous example is when the tobacco industry went after public health experts, or when oil and gas companies seeded doubt around climate change. Most recently, The recently, The New Yorker found that the United Arab Emirates was using dark PR to smear a commercial rival. And I should note that the UAE is also a major investor in colossal. There are a lot of techniques used during these dark PR campaigns. There's astroturfing where companies create fake grassroots movements to back them up. Then there's search engine poisoning where they use negative SEO to bury things they don't like. And then there's a tactic called news laundering. It's where firms will publish anonymous blog posts or paid guest content in online publications. These articles are typically written by content farm freelancers or third party PR agencies, even AI.

Howard Wolinsky: You put these articles in obscure publications, and if you do enough of them, eventually it takes on a life of its own. And it could affect your application for a job, you know. Is this guy A honest. Is this guy competent? Does he hate women? People's reputations can be harmed by this.

Nate Hegyi: So if this has all been part of a news laundering campaign, who's orchestrating it? I mean, the most obvious suspect would be colossal, right? After all, they aren't some plucky environmental NGO. Bringing back the dire Wolf may make for good, benevolent sounding PR. But the real play here is a lot bigger and a lot more lucrative than all that. They are patenting technology like novel gene therapies, gene editing techniques, and artificial wombs. And while a lot of this tech is open source for conservation efforts, colossal also wants to license its artificial wombs to third party companies who could use them on humans. Just imagine how lucrative and game changing that would be. Growing human babies in artificial wombs. But the truth is, neither I or Howard have been able to tie any of these articles directly to Colossal Biosciences. We did ask for an interview with Ben Lam, the CEO, but Colossal's spokesperson said, quote, we busy over here and will not be able to come on the show. One of the few things we know colossal did do is send someone to knock on Vincent's door and hand him what looked like a cease and desist order. It came after Vincent had suggested on X that colossal was behind all of these articles, smearing him and others.

Vincent Lynch: And about a week later, a process server shows up to my house and hand delivers a letter from Colossal's legal counsel, Ice Miller.

Nate Hegyi: During our interview, Vincent pulled the actual letter out from his desk.

Vincent Lynch: As a date June 19th, 2025, it says via hand delivery has my address on it. And then it says re untruthful statements about Ben Lamb in the press. And if you read it, it reads like a cease and desist order at first.

Nate Hegyi: But it wasn't not legally. Instead, it was a warning. It says that Vincent has a vendetta against Ben Lamb, that he crossed a line by suggesting that Ben was behind the articles.

Vincent Lynch: And then they say that I should consult my university's legal counsel, because very clearly I had stepped over the line into, um, defamation.

Nate Hegyi: While Ben Lamb wouldn't speak to me. He did respond to a list of Howard's questions by email.

Howard Wolinsky: Yeah. Ben Lamb brought up the question of whether Vincent Lynch had some Mental issues, which is pretty serious accusation.

Nate Hegyi: Ben Lamb said that, quote, we do not care that Vincent criticizes colossal and our mission for de-extinction and conservation while working to inspire kids. We do care if he spreads lies and insane and baseless tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. Ben suggests Vincent has engaged in a, quote, erratic, stalking like situation, and that there were concerns for the safety of Colossal's employees. For his part, Vincent said he's never met anyone at colossal, save for a Zoom meeting he had with Ben and a lead scientist years ago.

Vincent Lynch: But otherwise, I've had no interaction with anyone from colossal, and I don't even blame colossal scientists for what they're doing. Right. Like, I have no problem with this, with the science. I have a problem with the what I believe is an intentional disinformation campaign, mostly directed or at least publicized by Ben Lam.

Nate Hegyi: Vincent reminds me a lot of Doctor Ian Malcolm. He's the mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. Dark glasses. Leather jacket. He's one of John Hammond's most persistent critics.

Ian Malcolm: Yeah. Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power's the most awesome force the planet's ever seen. But you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun.

Nate Hegyi: John Hammond's annoyance with Malcolm culminates in an iconic, exacerbated line.

Jon Hammond: I really hate that man.

Nate Hegyi: I can see Vincent being a thorn in Ben Lamb's side. He's obviously pretty annoyed by the guy, but annoyed enough to launch a dark PR campaign against him and other critics. Ben says no. And who knows, it could be a colossal investor like the UAE or maybe just fanboys, as one colossal scientist has suggested. But whoever it is, Vincent told me, he will not back down. And if a reporter calls him up like I did, he'll still talk.

Vincent Lynch: I am a very direct person when it comes to science. I believe in the importance of science, and I believe that in order for us to do what we do, we need public trust in science and that what they're doing will mislead the public's trust in science. And you're not going to intimidate me into not doing that.

Nate Hegyi: All right, that is it for today's episode. It was written and produced by me, your host Nate Hegy, with some help from Taylor Quimby, who also edited the episode. And by the way, Taylor just got a big promotion. He is now head of Podcasts at NHPR. Big congrats to Taylor. And speaking of which, if you happen to be a great editor and you want to work on a really great show, check out our job postings at nhpr.org. Our staff includes Marina Henke, Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and Jessica Hunt. Music in this episode came from Owney Capone, Hanna Eckstrom, El equipo de Norte, The Yard Women, Biomol 12, Sham Gang, Trevor Kowalski and Dylan Joseph. Outside In is a production of NHPR.