Is there any chance that someday we could see a real-life dinosaur? Scientists are working these days on bringing several extinct prehistoric species back to life, including the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird and more. They are using a genetic engineering technique that might be used in the future for bringing the dinosaurs back to life as well. Does this remind you, perhaps, of a certain movie?
The story of Jurassic Park Steven Spielberg directed the movie Jurassic Park in 1993. The movie was about a theme park that was populated with dinosaurs, which were cloned from DNA extracted from mosquitoes that had been preserved in amber. The movie was a huge success: It won more than twenty awards, including three Academy Awards, and dinosaurs became one of the hottest merchandise of the decade.
The movie was based on a book by the same name from 1990 written by Michael Crichton, who later wrote the screenplay for the movie as well. Interestingly enough, Crichton came up with the idea for the book after learning about a real life research: in the early 80's, John Tkach, founder of "Extinct DNA Study Group" had posted the following thought experiment:
“What if, many millions of years ago, there had been a hungry mosquito that dined on a dinosaur then became trapped in amber, with its last supper still inside its stomach. If one could recover a dinosaur blood cell from inside that mosquito and then transplant it into an egg that had had its own DNA removed,” it might be possible to “grow a dinosaur.”
In 1982, the entomologist George Poinar from the University of California at Berkeley discovered a 40 million years old fly whose DNA cells were fully preserved. This discovery was a huge breakthrough that caused a great excitement within the scientific community. It was the first time ever that a preserved DNA cell from prehistoric time was found and the idea of growing a dinosaur suddenly became less crazy.
This discovery was also the inspiration for Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park". Knowing this, it’s much easy to understand how this movie could have predicted so accurately the future.
The resurrection of the woolly mammoth Over the following three decades scientists in real life learned and developed ways that could bring back to life extinct animals - exactly as Tkach proposed. One interesting specie that recently made headlines is the woolly mammoth.
The woolly mammoth is an extinct species that lived in the Pleistocene Era (AKA the Ice Age). It vanished about 4,000 years ago, probably due to a combination of climate change and being hunted by humans. In 2013, a fully preserved 39,000 years old female woolly mammoth was found frozen in the Siberian ice, which gave an unprecedented boost to the "de-extinction" research.
Prof. George Church, the scientist leading the “de-extinction” effort, announced several weeks ago at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting that his team is just two years away from a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant using a powerful gene-editing tool called "Crispr".
In the first stage, this creature will be more of a “Mammophant”: an elephant with mammoth traits such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. Nevertheless, it seems that it's only a matter of time until we can fully recreate the Woolly Mammoth using the gene data we possess today.
Not only mammoths
The Woolly mammoth is not the only extinct animal that is being brought back to life. Scientists are very close to assembling the complete genome of many other extinct animals, including the Little Bush Moa, the Passenger Pigeon, the dodo bird and the Tasmanian Tiger.
“De-extinction probability increases with every improvement in ancient DNA analysis” says Stewart Brand, co-founder of the nonprofit conservation group Revive and Restore which aims to resurrect vanished species.
Surprisingly, when it comes to de-extinction, dealing with animals that sprout from eggs turns out to be harder than cloning mammals. A reconstructed genome can be introduced into a mammalian egg with the cloning technique that produced Dolly the sheep. But that doesn’t work in birds - “at least so far,” according to Brand.
One hope is to get a workaround solution by inserting the genome into embryo cells that become either eggs or sperm, to achieve success in wild birds as well as mammals.
A a living dinosaur
With all due respect to mammoths and dodo birds, the real stars of the prehistoric era were undoubtedly the dinosaurs. And while bringing the dinosaurs back to life is a much more complicated task than resurrecting mammoths or dodos, it is indeed theoretically possible.
The main challenge of restoring the dinosaurs is finding their full genome structure. Almost all of our knowledge about dinosaurs comes from fossils, and up until a few years ago, the common belief was that when fossilization is complete, any organic trace of the animal is gone.
Nevertheless, in 1992, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer made a series of discoveries determining that dinosaur fossils “contain molecules that are found in red blood cells,” and that certain types of dinosaur tissue could “survive fossilization." It is true that even with these tissues we still don't have the dinosaurs' actual DNA, but many believe some day we might obtain the necessary genetic sequence.
Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York believe that it's only a matter of time:
De-extinction motivation
The motivation to de-extinct prehistory animals comes from several sources: the most trivial one is taking responsibility and trying to correct. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2014 observed that the earth has lost more than half (52%) of its wildlife population in the past 40 years. It is not a secret that mankind is responsible for most of this loss. De-extinction can serve as sort of an atonement.
The technologies involved in the de-extinction process could also have secondary applications, specifically to help species on the verge of extinction regain their genetic diversity, for example the black-footed ferret or the northern white rhinoceros.
Another interesting motivation for bringing back extinct species is environmental: if the newly developed mammoth hybrids were to be placed in areas such as Siberia and Alaska, the outcome may reverse the damage that global warming has caused for three reasons:
They could keep the region colder by eating dead grass, thus enabling the sun to reach spring grass, whose deep roots prevent erosion.
They could increase reflected light by felling trees, which absorb sunlight.
They could punch through insulating snow so that freezing air penetrates the soil.
But above all, the main motivation for this de-extinction momentum is probably the same as the one suggested in Jurassic Park: amusement. The revenue of amusement and theme parks in the US is expected to reach almost $20 Billion by the end of this decade and zoos and aquariums are generating similar incomes. Thus, the potential of a prehistoric them park is huge.
Is it that good idea?
Does bringing back to life extinct animals really makes us better people? If you think about it, the efforts and resources used to resurrect extinct species could have been better used trying to conserve endangered species that might themselves become extinct. The cost of reviving just a single species could amount to millions of dollars, while at the same time more than 20,000 species are currently threatened with extinction.
In the movie Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs eventually rebel against their creators and take over the island where the park is located. When you come to think about it - this scenario is not that unlikely.
It it very hard to predict the outcomes of such a dramatic event as bringing back to life a species that went extinct around 65 million years ago. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a physical takeover as suggested at the movie - prehistoric animals can also create environmental hazards such as plagues or diseases that might endanger the whole human kind.
In conclusion
William Arthur Ward once said: "if you can imagine it, you can achieve it". As time passes and man achieves unbelievable things, it seems that he couldn't have been more right.
Like many other science fiction movies, Jurassic Park was not only a great one - this movie seems to have accurately predicted the future. It probably won’t be at the near future but it will be much less than 65 million years…