Could We Really Bring Back The Dinosaurs?

Jurassic Park arrived in 1993, and it’s pretty much thrilled everybody with the idea of dinosaurs walking around in the real world ever since. Jurassic World is even going one better and engineering its own dinosaurs. But is this even possible in the first place?

In theory, yes. This is an actual branch of scientific endeavor, albeit a fringe one, variously called resurrection biology, de-extinction and species revivalism. And, if you’ve seen Jurassic Park, you actually know the basics: Find the DNA, create an embryo with the DNA, transplant it to a surrogate, and boom! De-extinction!

The issue, as you may have guessed, is with actually getting it to work. The closest we’ve gotten to this is with the Pyrenean ibex, which was hunted to extinction. The last known member was found dead in 2000, and attempts to re-engineer it in 2003 and 2009 failed: Only one clone was born alive and it only lived for seven minutes due to a defect in the lungs.

Other projects are ongoing, like an attempt to revive the woolly mammoth, but the truth is that we need to understand far more about biology than we do to get this to work. But considering resurrection biology might be one of the few ways to bring back the biodiversity of the planet, a lot of money and time is being thrown at this idea. Sooner or later, we’ll crack it… but then we’ve got the issue of actually finding dinosaur DNA.

DNA just doesn’t stick around that long, and before you ask, no, it would not be preserved in amber. Finding dinosaur DNA in the wild is more or less scientifically impossible, at least as the state of the art stands right now.

So, that’s the end of it, right? Well… not necessarily. This is where another fringe science comes into play: Synthetic biology. Granted, we’re talking early days, here: So far, the big achievement is re-engineering yeast. However, the potential of synthetic biology is vast; building chromosomes and entire genomes from the ground up can help eliminate disease, create better crops and allow us to colonize other worlds.

That said, we’re going to have to work our way up to that, learning how to engineer the building blocks of life and trying to avoid creating any Xenomorphs or nightmare fuel along the way. But the money will be there; some incredibly rich guy is going to want to build a dinosaur petting zoo sooner or later.

So, yes, Jurassic Park will be reality one day. It’s just that we might not see it for a century or two.

(Via longnow.org, Nature, Royal Society Publishing and the Telegraph)

×