Resurrecting extinct creatures — it may sound like science fiction. Or maybe it reminds you of a familiar ’90s flick?

While the fictitious “Jurassic Park” notably does not have a picture-perfect ending, the leader of the real-life de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences — valued at more than $10 billion — thinks there are benefits to be had in bringing back creatures such as the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird and more.

Ben Lamm, cofounder and CEO of Colossal, joined Marketplace’s Nova Safo to talk about the emerging bioscience and the money behind it. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Nova Safo: So you’re not exactly bringing back the woolly mammoth. You’re creating a new hybrid. Is that right?

Ben Lamm: We are bringing back the core genes that made a mammoth a mammoth, and also a dodo a dodo, and also a thylacine a thylacine, and engineering them into their closest living relatives. I think it’s probably more accurate to say that we’re doing functional de-extinction in de-extincting the core genes in lost biodiversity.

Safo: You’re taking woolly mammoth genes and then adding in elephant genes to complete the puzzle, to be able to incubate a new woolly mammoth?

Lamm: What you described has kind of like been in movies. It’s exactly opposite. So we use a lot of different algorithms and computer models to understand what genes really made a mammoth a mammoth. We have about 65 mammoth genomes, ranging from about 3,500 years ago all the way back to 700,000 years. And then we engineer them into that of a living elephant cell. So we take an elephant cell, and we’ve built a reference genome for the Asian elephant, African elephant, other species of elephants. And then we do all the comparative genomics so that we can do very targeted editing in those cells to bring those lost genes back.

Safo: Ben, I gotta ask: Have you seen “Jurassic Park”? It doesn’t end well.

Lamm: We have seen a fictional movie that was designed to entertain well. I’ve also seen “Blade Runner” and “Ready Player One,” but I don’t think that’s happening either.

Safo: What would be the kind of climate change case that you’ve made for bringing that animal back?

Lamm: So all the species that we’re working on, we want to rewild back into their natural habitats, in collaboration with local governments, conservationists, ecologists and — importantly — Indigenous people groups. There’s about eight or nine peer-reviewed papers that talk about the reintroduction of cold-tolerant megafauna, specifically mammoth-modeling, and what it can do to the tundra, in terms of lowering ground temperatures by up to eight to nine degrees, hopefully creating a faster nitrogen oxygen cycle with the foraging and defecation and migratory patterns of elephants. I think that, you know, once we have mammoths, we have to work on the process of rewilding them and ensure that we are managing the intended and unintended consequences from them.

Safo: I understand you’re valued as a $10 billion startup. So what’s the business model here? How do you intend to make money?

Lamm: So we have a couple different models that are pretty interesting. Any technologies that we have that could solve other industrial use-cases or human health care, we spin out. Like, the Apollo program that built a lot of core technologies created trillions of dollars in economic value. So we’ve already spun out two businesses that we’ve announced publicly. One of them is valued over $100 million and is doing quite well in the computational field of human health care; another one’s around plastic degradation. So anything that we can monetize, we will monetize.