Will Jurassic Park Be Built? - Alternative View

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Will Jurassic Park Be Built? - Alternative View
Will Jurassic Park Be Built? - Alternative View

Video: Will Jurassic Park Be Built? - Alternative View

Video: Will Jurassic Park Be Built? - Alternative View
Video: Why Elon Musk Building A Jurassic Park Isn't As Crazy As You Think... 2024, March
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The idea to bring extinct animals back to life appeared relatively recently - at a time when scientists finally learned how to decipher the genomes of multicellular organisms. And today it has a chance to be realized in practice. Should we wait for the invasion of dinosaurs?

MONSTER CLONING

The famous movie "Jurassic Park", based on the science fiction novel by Michael Crichton, presents one of the possible technologies for the revival of ancient creatures that inhabited the Earth millions of years ago. Crichton believed that over time, genetic engineering will develop so much that scientists will be able to create any animals, literally growing them from a single egg, into which the appropriate artificial DNA is implanted. What if someday you can read and reproduce DNA from dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters? Then there will be a possibility of their resurrection.

In the first part, Crichton's prediction was surprisingly accurate. In 2009, Spanish geneticists were the first to experiment with the introduction of the DNA of a deceased female Pyrenean ibex Celia, which was the last representative of its subspecies, into the egg of an ordinary domestic goat. Fifty-seven "modified" embryos were implanted into the uterus of several goats. Only one embryo went through the entire development cycle, and an animal genetically identical to Celia was born. Unfortunately, as is often the case with cloning, the cub quickly died, but a start was made.

Although timid experiments have failed one after another, scientists are confident that there are no fundamental restrictions on the revival of animals that have become extinct relatively recently and left behind enough genetic material: for example, woolly mammoths, primitive tours, Tasmanian wolves, sea cows, wandering pigeons. seaside buntings, caroline parrots, rheobatrachus frogs.

As for the second part of Crichton's forecast, it is still far from reality - primarily because science does not have a single complete sample of dinosaur tissue at its disposal.

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DINOSAUR BLOOD

In the movie "Jurassic Park" the genome of dinosaurs was extracted from their contemporaries - blood-sucking insects preserved in amber. This original idea was suggested by the American physician John Tkach when he heard about the discovery of entomologist George Poinar, who discovered in 1980 a whole fly with intact cells frozen in an amber stone 40 million years old. More recently, several projects have emerged to extract genetic material from these time capsules, but none have been successfully completed.

Nevertheless, in 2013, paleontologists David Penny and Terry Brown decided once and for all to answer the question of whether it is possible to extract DNA from "amber" insects. For the experiment, they used bees taken from a copal, a hardened tree sap. One sample was about 10 thousand years old, the other just 60 years old. The results are eloquent: in the first sample, it was not possible to identify any traces of DNA, in the second, DNA strands of bacteria were identified, but not the bee itself. The problem is that when an insect solidifies in resin, which then turns into amber, a complex chemical process takes place, and the molecule containing the genetic information is destroyed. It is clear that if it is not possible to identify DNA in a sample that is 10 thousand years old, then it will all the more be impossible to detect it in amber stones, which are orders of magnitude more ancient.

Huge hopes were aroused by the 2005 report that paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of the University of North Carolina, opening the fossilized bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, discovered fragments of blood vessels and even something similar to red blood cells! In the process of studying these tissues, it was possible to isolate collagen - a protein that forms the basis of the connective tissue of the body (tendon, bone, cartilage, etc.), and it was shown that its chemical composition is similar to bird collagen. Based on amino acid residues, it was even possible to recreate seven short gene regions encoding this protein, and they showed the greatest similarity with the corresponding chicken genome (58%).

In 2015, the scientific world was shocked by a new achievement - Tim Cleland, an employee of Schweitzer, using a more advanced technique, managed to isolate from the thigh bone of a duck-billed dinosaur that lived 80 million years ago, whole vessels, which included at least two laboratory proteins - collagen and myosin. Paleontologists are studying them today.

The discoveries of Schweitzer and Cleland are an extraordinary event, almost miraculous, but much more genetic material is required to revive the dinosaurs. And here, unfortunately, there is no need to wait for a breakthrough: special studies have shown that the half-life of DNA under normal conditions is 521 years, so the finds of fragments of the ancient genome will always be rare.

ANCIENT INSIDE

However, there is another path to the revival of extinct creatures, which scientists point to. Montana State University paleontologist Jack Horner, consultant for Jurassic Park and research director Mary Schweitzer, is confident that with the right funding, he can “assemble” a dinosaur in five to ten years, without having to resort to ancient DNA.

Horner argues as follows. If dinosaurs are the direct ancestors of birds, then within the genome of the latter, sequences that are inherent only in extinct monsters should be preserved. There is a technical possibility to activate the "dormant" genes - why not apply it to ordinary chickens and by enumerating various combinations not to get something that looks like a dinosaur? In fact, it is proposed to reverse evolution by restoring the lost species characteristics.

Although Horner wrote an entire book outlining his plan, other scientists made the first progress in this direction. The Kazakh evolutionist Arhat Abzhanov, who works at Harvard University, has been comparing the development of embryos of reptiles and chickens for several years in order to reveal the mechanism of beak formation. In the course of research, he was able to find differences between the expression of proteins involved in these processes. Abzhanov and colleagues managed to block the required proteins in chicken embryos, as a result of which chickens were formed inside the eggs, whose skulls looked more like the heads of dinosaurs than birds. Unfortunately, they were not allowed to hatch, interrupting their development for "ethical" reasons, but the idea of creating a "kurosaurus" finally received a visible justification.

Of course, by experimenting with bird genes, it will be impossible to "assemble" a real dinosaur, as Horner promises. If they are successful, then fundamentally new creatures will appear, which probably never existed in living nature. For them, they even came up with a special name - relictoids (that is, having the appearance of ancient animals).

Why, then, will they be needed? Science fiction writers usually offer the simplest uses for relictoids: amusement parks, exotic cooking, scientific research. However, genetic combining technology can do much more. For example, it opens the way to the creation of artificial biospheres, adapted to the conditions of other planets. Or the use of evolutionary mechanisms to regulate terrestrial species. Or even to the emergence of intelligent life forms - our younger "brothers in mind". Thus, the distant past will serve to improve the future.

Anton Pervushin