Colossal Biosciences as an organization identify was picked to have interaction kids, says chief government Ben Lamm.Credit score: Colossal Biosciences
The truth that the world will lose as much as 25% of all biodiversity between now and 2050 is a big drawback. At my firm, we requested ourselves, how will we provide you with a reputation that encompasses three parts: the issue, the answer and our flagship species, the mammoth?
Local weather change, biodiversity, CRISPR and gene modifying, synthetic intelligence, computational evaluation and superior embryology may be troublesome ideas for the general public to totally grasp. We got here up with ‘Colossal Biosciences’ as a result of dropping species is a colossal drawback, our resolution is colossal and the mammoth is a colossal animal.
We felt that our model and identify shouldn’t solely replicate the issue and resolution, but additionally be approachable to kids, together with some who will develop as much as learn Cell, Nature and Science. Each week, we get little photos of dodos and child mammoths that youngsters draw, and their mother and father mail us bodily letters, saying issues corresponding to: ‘Thanks a lot for doing what you’re doing. My child is worked up about science. You’re making science cool.’
A giant, superior identify
To provide you with Colossal, I labored with Chris Klee, government vice-president of design on the firm, and Chris Stevens, co-founder of Maven Inventive, our branding company, in Orlando, Florida.
We’ve labored collectively for the previous 20 years. We had an inventory of seven or eight potential names — together with ‘Big’, ‘Macedon’ (an historic kingdom) and ‘Footprint’ (as a result of each species has a novel one). Every little thing was centred across the idea of ‘huge and superior’. Clearly, ‘Mammoth’ was on the listing as a result of the world is dealing with a mammoth problem, however we felt that calling it that may have pigeonholed us to at least one species.
We additionally favored ‘Colossus’, and the thought of utilizing ‘us’ to indicate a workforce effort. However Colossus is a personality within the Marvel Universe media franchise, and we didn’t need to be too Hollywood. We additionally thought-about names linked to evolution, and thought ‘Darwin’ may very well be a cool one. However once we stated ‘Colossal’ out loud, we had been like, ‘That’s it!’
Alongside the identify, there’s the model — so earlier than we selected Colossal, we underwent a course of to provide you with a model that encapsulated ‘Harvard College meets 1980’s MTV’.