The Interior Department is partnering with Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas de extinction company, to cryobank cells and DNA from roughly 2,300 species: a backup that preserves the option of future cloning while the administration simultaneously weakens the habitat and legal…
The black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann was born in 2021 from cells that had sat in a freezer for nearly four decades. The cells came from a wild ferret captured in the 1980s and cryopreserved at the Frozen Zoo, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance's long-running genetic bank. Elizabeth Ann was the first cloned endangered species in the United States and the proof of concept for an entire field: conservation genetics can rescue animals that no longer exist in breeding populations, if their DNA was saved in time.
Now the federal government is trying to industrialize that idea. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is partnering with Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based de-extinction company best known for claiming to have produced "dire wolf" pups, to build a national genetic repository the company calls the "BioVault." The program is meant to cryobank cells, reproductive tissue, and DNA from roughly 2,300 plant and animal species protected under the Endangered Species Act, with duplicate samples distributed across multiple US sites for redundancy, and the service has signaled interest in expanding to international material as well. If it scales as Colossal envisions, the repository could eventually hold millions of samples.
The biology is real. A freezer full of viable cells from a vanished subspecies gives future biologists the option to clone, edit, or re-introduce animals that would otherwise be gone forever. The genetic-rescue model has produced results once already, in the ferret. It might work again. It is also a single layer of a much larger system, and the rest of that system is being cut back at the same time the BioVault is being built.
The same administration that announced the partnership has moved in parallel to weaken the legal and habitat protections those species depend on. In November 2025, the Fish and Wildlife Service revised its Endangered Species Act implementing regulations, framing the change as "strengthening implementation." Wired reports the partnership against a backdrop of broader Trump-era rollbacks of ESA enforcement.
Storing a species' DNA in a freezer does not restore the habitat an ESA listing was meant to protect, and it does not revive a population that has already collapsed. It preserves a different kind of option: the chance that a future biologist might clone, edit, or re-introduce an animal that has otherwise been lost. That option is real, and the ferret is the proof. It is also narrow.
There is the unusual structure of the deal to account for as well. The federal government retains ownership of the samples. Colossal stores them at its Dallas lab, sequences the genetic data, and distributes it to researchers and conservationists, according to the company's announcement. The company is providing standardized collection kits to field partners around the country, and chief executive Ben Lamm has publicly framed the program as an effort to back up samples from as many species as possible before they are lost. Wired, which first reported the partnership, noted that contract scope, term length, cost, and data-access terms are not public. A public agency is paying a private de-extinction company to be the operational layer of a national biodiversity archive while the same agency steps back from the regulatory layer that gives those species any standing at all.
The scientific-credibility question hangs over this. Colossal's 2025 announcement that it had produced "dire wolf" pups drew skepticism from conservation geneticists, who pointed out that the animals were gene-edited to resemble dire wolves rather than reconstructed from viable ancient DNA. The company has used that attention to position itself as the natural home for a national biobanking effort, and the ferret precedent is the clearest evidence that gene-banking can work. The BioVault is not the same scientific claim. It is a logistics and access project as much as a science project, and its success will turn on the boring infrastructure of contracts, custody, and data sharing rather than on any single breakthrough.
What to watch is the contract. The terms that govern which species are banked, who accesses the data, what happens to the samples if the partnership is not renewed, and how the BioVault is integrated with the rest of federal conservation policy are not public. They are also the levers that determine whether the BioVault becomes a national asset or a private gatekeeper standing between the country's endangered species and the researchers who want to study them. The cryobank will outlast the current administration. Whether the policy environment around it does is the open question.