Apparently, we are entering the dawn of artificial gene synthesis and on the brink of de-extincting recently extinct species. If we were to advance those disciplines and include comparative DNA sequence analysis methodology, might we some day re-create reasonable bio-facsimiles of extinct dinosaurs? Forget the bio-ethics involved, let’s just say we want to re-create the biggest, baddest dino possible and keep it alive and functional for display until adulthood. What all is involved? Can it be done and if so, in what type of time-frame (decades, centuries, millennia)?
One problem, of course is that we have not found any intact dinosaur DNA, nor may we ever. We may have to settle for DNA fragments as the starting point. Another problem, certainly, is that we have only limited knowledge of dinosaurs from which to base our models with respect to morphology, biology, neurophysiology, etc. The limitations imposed by fossil records assures that we can perhaps only approximate particular dinosaurs based on scientific consensus (“we think he was blue, hopped like a frog and had anger-management issues”). Another problem to consider is how to grow the fetal dinosaur (“can we put that T-Rex embryo in the womb of this elephant, or do we need a giant plastic Easter egg?”). Lastly, what is the largest dinosaur that we could reasonably expect to keep alive till maturity in a habitable enclosure (“do we need a huge hyper-oxygenated terrarium, or would it be easier to sequence for more efficient dino-hemoglobin?”).
IMO, the hardest part of the equation would be blue-printing the synthetic dino-DNA based on found dinosaur DNA fragments, coupled with synthetic genes produced from comparative DNA sequencing analysis to fill in the gaps. Example: “that ostrich’s femur looks more T-Rex-like than this crocodile’s…let’s compare the appropriate genes and go from there.” I imagine it would be a tedious process requiring super-computational power and a lot of trial and error. But, it seems theoretically possible, and even likely to come to fruition…someday. Do you agree? When will we do it? T-Rex, or something less ambitious? Are there other limitations I haven’t considered?
When people start talking about filling in the gaps in the dinosaur DNA sequence, I always like to whip out the following metaphor. What you’re suggesting is taking the words “and” and “the”, plus a handful of isolated vowels, and attempting to “fill in the gaps” to recreate the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Even that is overly optimistic, since so far we don’t even have the isolated words and vowels.
Without an actual, complete genome, no extinct species can ever be “reborn”. Once you start synthesizing genes and extrapolating and interpreting, you wind up with, at best, a chimera. Even starting from birds - actual dinosaurs by descent - you can only hope to get a “modified bird”, not an honest-to-Osborn Tyrannosaurus.
The half-life of DNA is 521 years, from a quick Google search. With that being the case, you aren’t going to be finding even fragments of T-Rex DNA. However, given the kind of advances we’re seeing, I wouldn’t be too surprised if we’d be able to eventually trace back a given organism’s genetic evolutionary path and construct something based on that.
Assuming we can recreate the genomic series for a dinosaur species, we probably should start with small ones so that the epigenetic conditions can be replicated in a womb. Imagine starting with an ostrich as the original host mother and gradually making changes over generations. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I could be wrong, but I thought that (highly degraded) fragmentary dino DNA has been found…even dino soft tissue. You couldn’t build a dinosaur from it, of course, but I could have sworn I saw something on fragmentary DNA from certain dino species (a hadrosaur maybe?).
That’s how they would do it, from what I understand. You start with, say, a chicken, then you turn on or off certain gene sequences to bring out the traits you want (teeth, claws, a tail, etc) until you end up with something that, perhaps, looks like what we think a type of dinosaur looked like. It wouldn’t be one, of course…it would be a heavily modified chicken…but it might LOOK, sort of kind of, like type of dinosaur. I remember a show on Science where they were doing something like this, and had managed to produce a chicken with a long tail or teeth or something like that…sort of a proof of concept that, if you really wanted to spend the effort, time and money, you could, in theory build a chicken that looked sort of like a dinosaur. Or something.
There have been several claims now and then of people managing to isolate a few base pair sequences from dinosaur material. AFAIK, none of them have panned out. Even if they had, we’re talking on the order of maybe a hundred base pairs maximum. By comparison, the human genome is roughly three billion base pairs.
You may also been thinking of a fairly recent announcement of the supposed isolation of preserved soft tissue of a T. rex. Again, I’m not up on the latest literature, but I believe that this is (rightly) being treated with extreme skepticism. There’s a huge burden of proof that has yet to be met. Even if the claims turn out to be true, there’s still a HUGE gap between that and isolating any DNA, let alone an intact genome.
A few points:
-First, while there may be a small handful of inactivated ancestral genes hanging around the genome, the idea that ALL of the DNA you need to make a dinosaur is hanging out in the basement of the chicken genome is simply false. Unused, unnecessary DNA sequences degrades quickly over evolutionary time.
-Second, there’s a world of difference between altering a chicken to look sort of dinsosaur-y and resurrecting an actual dinosaur. The two things aren’t even remotely similar, scientifically.
Exactly. Birds have novel genes which were not present in their ancestors, and some genes which were present in their ancestors are lost forever.
Again, without a complete non-avian dinosaur genome to work from, there’d be no way to replicate said genome from current species…which would be obviated by the fact that you have a non-avian dinosaur genome to work from in the first place!
Or, to put it another way: you can’t get there from here. Evolution effectively moves in one temporal direction. If you start with an extant species, you can ONLY get a modified version of that species; you cannot recreate an actual extinct species therefrom.
That’s kinda my take on it, as well. Who cares if it has the same genome as the ones that lived 65 million years ago? If you can breed back something that’s a close approximation of a T-Rex, I’ll pay to see it. Heck, give me unicorns and dragons, too, while you’re at it.
If it walks like a T-Rex and it quacks like a T-Rex, who cares if it’s a genetically manipulated duck?
My point being, I understand that an authentic dinosaur can’t be re-born, because the genomes of all dinosaur species are forever lost to us. And, I didn’t mean to imply that we could simply gather up all the dinosaur DNA fragments that we may or may not currently possess and simply fill in a few gaps with synthetic genes to end up with the real deal. At most, any authentic DNA fragments may only give a wee bit of limited knowledge.
I would consider it a win if we started with a duck (or chicken) and genetically modified it over many generations to look and act like what scientists believe a real T-Rex would look and act like. Granted, that is no small feat, but perhaps in 100 or 1000 years it will be. That is the crux of the matter as far as I’m concerned and wherein lies my questions.
I’m no expert, so correct me if I’m wrong, but if the exact genome sequence of a species is known, is it not theoretically possible to re-create synthetically an individual of that species? If we knew, for example, the genome of T-Rex, could we not expect, at some future date to have the technology to give birth to one? If so, I’m not poo pooing the enormity or complexity of such a project—working with billions of base pairs is a daunting task…for us now.
But, of course we do not know the genome of an authentic T-Rex, and never will. So, we need to work with genetic mapping, analysis and engineering of known species until we can reverse engineer one. Will this be such a daunting task in the future, with the expected advances in super computers and genetic engineering? I think not. I think it will be a walk in the Jurassic Park.
It would still be an approximation without RNA, which helps regulate gene expression. We’d otherwise be guessing at how T-Rex genes actually work. And RNA decays even faster than DNA. And who knows what other cellular structures you’d need for the task.
I imagine we might one day be able to create some kind of reasonable facsimile, though, through a combination of breeding and gene manipulation of existing species.
I’m not about to argue that we shouldn’t create thirty-foot tall flesh eating lizard monsters, because why wouldn’t we want to do that? But as close as we could come to matching what scientists thinks a real T-Rex would look and act like, it still wouldn’t be a real T-Rex, just a model of what we think they were like. There’s a lot of guess work and assumptions in our current conception of prehistoric life, and those assumptions are pretty frequently challenged and revised based on new data.
Here’s a minor example of what I’m getting at: how did the T-Rex hold its tail? If we’d been able to clone a Rex in 1950, we’d have it stand upright and have a tail that it drags on the ground. However, if we did it now, we’d make it lean forward and hold its tail out behind it, as a counterbalance. If we’d made the clone in the '50s, we’d have a giant lizard, but it wouldn’t be a T-Rex, because we’d have made it all wrong. If we made the clone today, we might get the tail thing right (assuming our current conception of T-Rex movement is correct), but there’d be no end of other things about the creature that we’d get wrong. From a scientific point of view, the experiment would be useless, because we wouldn’t be testing most of our assumptions about the creature. From a “Holy shit, that’s awesome!” perspective, it would, obviously, be invaluable, but if we’re going into the exercise with the understanding that we’re just creating cool lizard monsters with only a tenuous connection to pre-history in the first place, why limit ourselves to what was around during the Jurassic?
Certainly. I never said we could replicate all or even most of the DNA…or even the gross features. I said we could, with a lot of effort, make a chicken that vaguely resembles a dinosaur. I’m fairly certain that we would (we certainly could) use DNA from other species to enhance the illusion or add features that, no matter how we manipulate the basic chicken we couldn’t get, but I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility we could make something vaguely dinosaur like.
I agree, and I didn’t say anything to indicate differently. As I said, it would be a chicken that vaguely resembled a dinosaur.
Again, I didn’t say they could make a dino out of the purported scraps they have found…if, indeed, any have been found at all. My Science Channel knowledge of this is pretty vague, and I could either be misremembering or the show could have been a bunch of hokum. Basically, even if they HAVE found scraps of DNA from a type of dinosaur it would be impossible to put it together into a coherent whole, let alone rebuild a dino out of it. A friend of mine described it as dropping a vase on the floor from a 10 story building, then grinding up some of the fragments and tossing out the rest, and from those ground up fragments attempting to put the vase back together while blindfolded and under the influence of some really good mushrooms…in the dark and with a stiff wind blowing.
This, precisely. You can already get land roving beasts that see you as dinner, this one would require at least an express rifle to bring down. What the hell is wrong with you people? Go cure cancer or something.
Lesson: If Spielberg can only do 1 passable Indiana Jones Sequel (Last Crusade), there’s no reason to think he can do a passable sequel with revenant dinosaurs.
