Is it really possible to recreate dinosaurs (or other extinct animals)
like they did in the film?
Some experts would say no, for several reasons.
Firstly, DNA is a fragile molecule, and finding large sequences of DNA
from fossilised remains (trapped in amber or not) is very unlikely. The best it
seems we can hope for is a scrambled collection of smallish fragments.
Secondly, the development of an embryo requires more than just the DNA.
The environment surrounding the embryo has to be recreated as well, and this
requires additional chemistry.
Although ‘whole’ DNA is unlikely to be found in fossils, it is perhaps
possible to find it in frozen remains – an approach being looked at for
recreating the woolly mammoth. But even if we only have fragments of DNA, all
is not necessarily lost. We could try the Jurassic park ‘technique’ of splicing
dinosaur DNA fragments into that of something reasonably similar genetically.
Remember that the DNA of humans differs from chimpanzees by only about 1%. Now
it could be tricky to know which 1%, but we are getting smarter at DNA
sequencing all the time, and finding new ways of looking at what the proteins
sequenced by DNA actually do. Protein remains have also recently been extracted
from fossils, which could give us further DNA sequences by reverse engineering.
Software techniques for DNA sequencing could perhaps be utilised to reconstruct
‘whole’ DNA from a variety of fragment information. This is all some way off,
but there are enough ideas around to suggest that it just might be possible one
day.
The second point is perhaps easier to deal with than the first. Although
it is true that to produce an animal from DNA may not be initially possible,
there may be a way of approaching it. The trick would be to utilise an animal
that is reasonably close to the desired animal in its chemistry. Using DNA of
the target introduced into the live animal’s reproductive mechanism could
produce a hybrid with some of the characteristics of both. This trick has already
been used to a limited extent, and people are hopeful it could be used to
recreate recently extinct animals like the Tasmanian tiger.
The trick could then be repeated by again using the target DNA in the
new hybrid, and so on. Eventually this could result in the recreation of an
effective clone of the original host of the DNA – or something pretty close.
The reason that this method prompted me into writing this small piece is
that I have come across similar techniques in computer software – in particular
in writing (software) language compilers.
Let us start with the situation where you have a computer language A, and a compiler for it which takes programs written in A
and produces an executable module for a computer C. Call this compiler AA.
Now you want to develop a new language B, and a
compiler for it.
First you can write a compiler for B in language A (call it AB), and
then compile it using AA. Now you have a compiler executable (call it B1) for B
that you can run on computer C. Now you can rewrite the compiler for B in B
itself (call it BB), and compile it using B1 to create B2 that also runs on
computer C. Finally you can recompile BB using B2 to create B3. This is a
compiler for B written in B and compiled using itself. All ist Klar?
This kind of process is called bootstrapping, and is moderately familiar
in the world of computer science. Though thankfully not everyone has to go
through the process I outlined above. But I have. It can get very confusing,
trust me.
The process can get even more complicated if you want to compile the
compiler to run under a different computer D. Then you can modify the compiler
BB to produce code for D and run it on C to produce B4. B4 can then be run on D
to compile BB again to produce B5. OK? I think I’ll stop here. Its hard to explain this stuff simply and clearly and easily
– it’s a bit like mathematics. So maybe you can use similar processes, though
in a very different field, to move towards recreating an animal using DNA.
Of course I have only been touching the surface of a complex issue.
There may well be moral and practical grounds for not recreating extinct
animals – would they be happy? But I can’t help thinking that if it does prove
to ever be possible, someone is somewhere going to do
it. The temptation would simply be too great.
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