Genetic Engineering In The Movies |
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| Introduction Genetic Engineering In the Movies Cloning Through the Ages?! |
Jurassic Park: In the Footsteps of a Dinosaur "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could or not, that they didn't stop to think if they should." (Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park) In the movie "Jurassic Park", fictional scientists clone dinosaurs from DNA trapped in ancient remains. Would this really be possible? 80 million years is a long time. Simply put, DNA does not last that long. At least, that’s what scientists thought. In 1992 Dr. Raul Cano extracted DNA from ancient amber, just like in Jurassic Park. 2 years later, in a 1,800-foot-deep coal mine near Provo, Utah, Dr. Scott Woodward found DNA molecules on what is suspected to be dinosaur bones. One thing is for sure: the DNA matches no known animal. However, these molecules only produced nine readable sequences from a single strand of DNA for a particular gene. A clone cannot be created from such a small amount of information. DNA is too unstable and too easy to contaminate! This is especially true of extinct, ancient animals like dinosaurs, as there is already very little biological information about them. On top of that, some scientists believe that the DNA found in ancient bones and eggs isn’t that of a dinosaur, but just pollutants. So until we have the ability to better recognize and harvest DNA, and until we can clone dead cells, there will be no modern dinosaurs. And it will most likely stay that way for a long time.
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