The crafty and malevolent Velociraptors in Jurassic Park could probably be cloned one day. But if they were, what on Earth could they eat?
Credit: Universal Pictures
Michael Crichton's bestselling novel, which translated into Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie, is a story of science gone wrong. Reckless humans embark on an entrepreneurial journey in which technology outstrips wisdom and the result is catastrophe.
Despite this cautionary message, one of the questions asked most frequently of palaeontologists is whether such a re-created dino theme park might ever be realised. Will we one day possess the technological prowess - presumably still without the corresponding wisdom - to clone dinosaurs and set up a prehistoric zoo?
For better or worse, I think the answer is no. However, such a succinct response is rarely satisfactory, so let me elaborate.
When scientists shoot down the Jurassic Park dream, they tend to focus almost exclusively on cloning. The central problem is recovery of a complete, intact sequence of dinosaur genetic material dinosaur. Crichton's clever fictional solution enlisted mosquitoes trapped in amber.
As the story goes, these ancient mosquitoes bit dinosaurs, consuming small quantities of their blood. A number of the pesky insects later became stuck in tree sap, which in turn became fossilised into amber, preserving both the mosquito and blood with dino DNA.
Find enough fossil mosquitoes, so the idea goes, and you can retrieve DNA from a range of dinosaurs. Then it's a 'simple' matter of cloning the dinosaurs and voilà, Jurassic Park.
So far, dinosaur blood has not been found in any fossilised biting insects. But in a stunning sequence of recent papers, Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and her colleagues have put forth evidence that dinosaur fossils occasionally preserve not only original bone but also muscle fibres, blood vessels and, yes, even genetic materials. Working with John Asara at Harvard University in Boston, the researchers went on to discover the amino acid sequence of collagen extracted from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex and then a hadrosaur.
Some of these discoveries are still questioned by the scientific community. More to the point of this discussion, however, a chasm separates identification of ancient genetic bits from the cloning of a T. rex. Because DNA deteriorates over time, any genetic materials preserved from the Mesozoic are almost certain to be grossly incomplete.
If this information is not preserved in its entirety somewhere in the fossil record, then no amount of technology will be able to provide a solution. Even if you had the outstanding good fortune to recover all the genetic material from a dinosaur, the tiny fragments would have to be placed in the correct order, a gargantuan task equivalent to reconstructing a jigsaw puzzle of millions of pieces, all shaped exactly alike. Imagine transforming a book such as War and Peace into a basket full of words and then attempting to reconstruct the original text.
Yet some have suggested that we might not need ancient DNA to make a dinosaur. Given that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs and carry the great bulk of this heritage in their genes (see "Once were dinosaurs", Cosmos 31), perhaps we could 'reverse-engineer' a dinosaur, figuring out which genes to modify during embryonic development in order to generate such features as teeth, bigger bodies and a long, bony tail.
With the present astounding rate of advancement in molecular biology, such monstrosities may be feasible by the end of this century. Yet it is difficult to imagine that these Frankenstein creatures would, in any real sense, be Mesozoic dinosaurs brought back to life.
jurrassic park
well, you forget that quantum computers, now expected to happen within a 15 year time range instead of 20 (recent nanotech advances), could rapidly scan the incomplete genomes of thousands of specimens and 'fill in the gaps' just like in the movie, through direct simulation of protein expression. All you need is one miracle out of a trillion mistakes, and you get back the dinosaur, more or less intact. There is also the possibility of using the 'old addage dna' sequence inside the cells of birds, that could also be used during the scanning of the sequences by a future quantum computer, to reconstruct by 'fill in the gap' techniques, in the same way frogs were used for the same thing in the movie.
Obvcourse, such is highly speculative. But I think a computer that could resolve prime factoring in seconds compared with billions of years with current computer architecture, might be able to solve these problems quite easily...perhaps doing the very thing you described and reconstructing leo tolstoy's book in a way similar to 'least irrational meaning' by computing all the possible permutations.
I think its a bit premature. Personally, I really have no idea how nanotech and all these advances are going to evolve. We may even discover a way of 'backward evolving' species back to their original forms in the past...perhaps there is a genetic history in cells that we have not yet discovered (the 'free fragments' that compose most of the dna in a cell but is not actively used but passed on from generation to generaiton....surely, they must store some information). However, if it is to happen, I predict around the 40's...The world may look kind of different then and we likely won't be using electrified fences to keep the dinosaurs in or a jurrassic type car that runs on an electrified track...Alhtough now that I think about it, we may, just for novelty.
Unpredictable future.
after all, there is a surprise breakthroughs in nanotech as they are related to computing nowadays practically everyday. The recently discovered memristor behaves similarly to the synapse found in the biological brain, for example. A new photonics breakthrough even sparked the head scientist of the team that discovered it to say that we may be close to a functional quantum computer whithin 5 years. Who knows what the future will bring. Such raise the possibilities o super super powerful computers. I think they may very well be able to sequence such terrible impossibilities as you describe found in genomes today, if not recreate entire organisms from protein expression simulations, as you suggest might happen in the late 21st century.
Its just too early. We'll see....or we won't see, but we will see it coming.