Clones: I want a dinosaur for Christmas!

So one of the more amusing subjects that seems to always come up when I'm talking about the environment is, "How real is Jurassic Park, anyway?" Because a velociraptor is so much cooler than a pony, I suspect. Or maybe it's the idea that we can conquer a global extinction from about 65 million years ago. Our science is just that badass. Yes!

No!

Okay, here's the deal. Nova did a program on this about 15 years ago, detailing exactly how difficult it would be to pull this off. Here's where you can check out some details. To sum up: not yet. Definitely not by this Christmas. Maybe not by Christmas 2100, either.

Get the DNA, Clone the DNA, Grow the DNA, Make Yourself a T-Rex

How difficult are each of the above steps, given that we've only had the ability to clone animals over the last fifteen years? The first step is the hardest: the kind of DNA, eggs, or tissue needed to grow a dinosaur doesn't survive 65 million years very well. Sure, Jurassic Park did it with fossilized blood in a mosquito caught in amber, but that would've been dinosaur blood mixed with whatever the mosquito had last bitten in the previous day or so. Plus nearly impossible to isolate, and separate from the mosquito itself, too.

The second step, cloning the DNA, putting it into an egg, watching it grow, has mixed results with small animals, and even less reliable ones the larger you get. About 30% of animal clones have severe physical development problems-- out of the maybe 2 out of a 100 tries that actually work. Errors creep in. (It's not like their feet and hands get transposed, but internal organs fail, respiratory problems occur, heart conditions develop. Sometimes they just fall over and die for no apparent reason.)

The Human Genome project just finished sequencing (counting, categorizing, classifying, organizing, labeling, and indexing the heck out of) the genes for human beings in 2003. To do that to a dinosaur? Would probably take another 13 years, at least. But, let's say you did find enough material to transfer dinosaur DNA to a reptile egg, and had the time to sequence it, and managed to get a viable amount together to inject in an egg-- oh wait.

There are no compatible animals whose eggs you can use to host the dinosaur DNA. Whoops.

Again, in the movie, a frog egg was used for this step. In actuality, a bird, maybe an ostrich, or possibly a reptile like a Komodo dragon, crocodile or alligator would be a closer match. Maybe even a platypus? We can't be sure if dinosaurs were cold or warm-blooded. That said, it's still not close enough for an extinct dinosaur to grow inside a bird or reptile egg. The egg would reject the alien DNA faster than you could say "James Cameron." Possibly if future geneticists come up with either an artificial gestation machine, or drugs that could suppress DNA rejection from a host animal's egg, this will be a viable holiday gift.

So, how many years before you get your own velociraptor?

Maybe not never, but certainly not soon. Totally aside from how you'd house-train a dinosaur, this all depends on the efforts of stalwart paleontologists to find DNA for us to get our own little no-longer-extinct pets. And heroic genetic researchers to come up with cloning techniques that are still on the drawing board, and probably will be for at least another generation or so. And someone obsessed enough to want to fund it all in the first place.

Like the guys currently working on the sequence for a wooly mammoth. Now, that's not 65 million years old, only 30,000 years old. We already have the DNA, they'll get the sequencing done in another decade, and some lucky non-extinct cousin like an elephant can be impregnated... Win!

So, get your coupons out for a wooly mammoth clone by the end of the century. A much better deal than a T-Rex, and cuter and fluffier, too.

Sources:
Wilson, Tracy V. "Can Scientists Clone Dinosaurs?" How Stuff Works. http://animals.howstuffworks.com/dinosaurs/dinosaur-cloning.htm

The Human Genome Project: Cloning Fact Sheet http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/cloning.shtml

Real Life Isn't Star Trek

But sometimes it seems we're getting there.

Objects imagined on TV as science fiction are showing up in reality all the time, twenty, thirty, and forty years later: cell phones. Portable computers. Downloadable music. Robots. Hybridized food. Separating out what's possible from what's impossible is sometimes just a matter of a few decades.

And, sometimes it's obvious that Hollywood doesn't want to waste time on research when there's a good story with a lot of explosions or evil clones to be had.

During my time teaching, I usually opened up my college environmental science classes to wild questions about once a month, and got things like: Can we clone a dinosaur, really? Can we make meat grow on trees? Are we going to all end up cannibals? Is there really a headless chicken factory in the depths of KFC?

(Answers: no; no, not unless you count tofu; no oh no no no; and no, but it's not as unlikely as you'd think.)

I'm teaching again after a four-year hiatus, and talking about the environment always brings up myths from TV and movies; about global warming, about pandemics, about the limits of technology to solve the problems we already have.

So this blog is dedicated to all aspects of that: mocking Hollywood disaster movies for their bad science, talking about appliances you have because some movie writer imagined it and someone else said "Cool!" and what kind of stuff I'm hoping someone invents to save the planet in the next fifty years. Believing is seeing, just a little bit later.