Illustration by Sigrid Lange
SCIENCE The big screen science of clones and dinosaurs by Chris Allen In 2015, the film and television industry renewed its love for cloning and genetic modification. This was best shown in the success of the dinosaur adventure, Jurassic World. But just how accurate are these blockbuster portrayals of science? Jurassic World How were the dinosaurs in the Jurassic film universe rescued from extinction? All the answers, it seems, are to be found in the first instalment of the franchise, Jurassic Park. A short welcome video on Jurassic Park informs the film’s protagonists that the genetic information required for cloning was discovered in prehistoric mosquitoes that had been preserved in tree sap. It just so happens that the mozzies fed upon sweet dinosaur blood, millions and millions of years ago. That sounds pretty exciting and plausible, but, unfortunately, it’s unlikely to happen in the real world. Attempts to find preserved, ancient DNA in insects has not been successful. First of all, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which took away our dinosaurs, occurred sixty-six million years before present day. Good luck finding any bugs that old, still floating around in tree sap. Second, in studies of much more modern insects, the DNA fragments to be found are short in length. This was shown in 2013, when a preserved bee that could not have been older than sixty was sequenced. This study used next-generation genetic methods, such as the quick and accurate sequencing technique, Roche 454. Researchers could only express low confidence in their DNA matches with microfloral DNA and bee mitochondria DNA. The Jurassic insect method is highly unlikely. Why dream of a Jurassic World dinosaur, when scientists haven’t even resurrected a Woolly Mammoth yet? The Mammoth only became extinct in the relatively recent Pleistocene epoch. An indirect cloning breakthrough occurred last year, when Current Biology published a conservation research study sequencing the Mammoth’s whole genome. While an explicable concern for the safety of elephant surrogate mothers will probably prevent further developments, cloning a Mammoth is far more achievable than a Tyrannosaurus rex. If you disregard everything I’ve just said about dinosaurs being an unrealistic goal, and pretend a plethora of dinosaur genomes are in human possession, would it be possible for scientists to engineer a genetic hybrid as whacked up as the film’s villainous Indominus rex? For the uninitiated, the Indominus is a smooshing together of the Tyrannosaurus rex genome with a few, choice species that include a Velociraptor species, a Tree frog, a cuttlefish and a pit viper. The film’s scientists mention ‘advances in gene splicing’ as the key to breeding hybrids. However, cutting up genes is not really a barrier to creating monster hybrids, thanks to all the natural cut sites in a genome. An expected barrier would be manipulating these distantly-related genomes into a transgenic organism that will survive development - this seems particularly challenging while there are no extant dinosaurs to guide experimentation. There is some good news on the hybrid modification front. Many experiments have been successful in taking a single or a few known genes interest from one species to another. Researchers have created transgenic organisms as strange as glowing, fluro-green kittens, and as ground-breaking as pigs with organs to be used in human organ transplants. Perhaps an Indominus rex isn’t that radical after all. Rating: Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong> | 35