In 1990, Michael Crichton published his novel Jurassic Park, in which scientists cloned dinosaurs using DNA from fossils in amber (the film of the same name was released in 1993).
13 years later, scientists were able to revive an extinct species for a short time. Celia, the last Iberian ibex, died in 2000. Three years later, her clone was born. The clone lived for only 10 minutes, and then died of suffocation. There was an extra lobe in his lungs, as a result, he could not breathe.
But the very fact of the birth of a clone is amazing. Scientists implanted clone embryos - Celia's DNA - into the eggs of 57 sheep, which played the role of surrogate mothers. Of the seven sheep that were able to get pregnant, six miscarried.
This project proved that the revival of extinct species is not just a fantasy.
Recently the film "Jurassic World", a continuation of "Jurassic Park" was released
In Australia there is a project called Lazarus, named after a biblical hero who rose from the dead. The goal of the project is to revive two species of frogs that became extinct in the 80s. Another group of scientists wants to revive the wandering pigeon and the Tasmanian wolf.
All these animals are united by the fact that they became extinct relatively recently. This means that scientists have a fairly accurate copy of their DNA. DNA begins to decay immediately after death.
Promotional video:
Complete disintegration takes a long time. The half-life of the DNA of a dead organism is 521 years. This means that a thousand years later, only a fourth of the genetic material remains. Even if the DNA was kept under ideal conditions at -5 ° C, the last piece of DNA would decay after 6.8 million years. The "youngest" bones of dinosaurs are 65 million years old.
Thus, with existing technology, a Jurassic park is unlikely to appear in the foreseeable future. However, a zoo of ice age animals is a very real task. Mammoths became extinct only 4000 years ago. Although scientists do not have enough genetic material to create clones, they can experiment by creating hybrids of extinct mammoths and modern elephants.
In March, George Church, a Harvard geneticist, successfully inserted mammoth DNA into the genome of a living Asian elephant using short palindromic repeat technology (CRISPR). This does not mean that the elephant will suddenly become covered with wool, but only means that the cells of a hybrid of an elephant and a mammoth can be grown in a petri dish. Church's ultimate goal is to place these cells in an artificial uterus in order to raise an elephant-mammoth hybrid.
In this case, science is closer to the plot of the novel "Jurassic Park" than to the film of the same name. In the novel, scientists created a genetically modified tyrannosaurus rex hybrid, and in the movie, at an amusement park, there were genetic copies of dinosaurs.
Ideally, Church would prefer to use elephants as surrogate mothers for mammoth hybrids. But for ethical reasons, given the many miscarriages in sheep and the elephant is a highly sensitive and endangered animal, an artificial uterus is a better choice.
From Church's point of view, the revival of extinct species is an inevitable process. The efficiency of genome sequencing machines that connect fragments of DNA from extinct species has increased significantly in recent years.
In 2013, Church announced that a Neanderthal infant would be born during his lifetime. This requires placing thousands of fragments of the Neanderthal genome into a human stem cell and creating a line of embryonic stem cells that will be close to the genetic sequence of the Neanderthal.
This raises the question of human cloning legislation that is unlikely to soften anytime soon. Human cloning is currently officially banned in 30 countries, including the United States, Japan and Western Europe.
In many countries around the world, there is a strict legal prohibition not only on cloning people, but also on manipulating human embryos. In April, Chinese scientists changed genes in human embryos for the first time. This sparked debate about the ethics of such experiments and condemnation from the international scientific community.