Jurassic Park has a lot to answer for. It made the idea seem so simple. Take the DNA from a microscopic drop of dinosaur blood, preserved for 65 million years in the gut of a mosquito trapped in fossilised amber. Carry out a bit of jiggery-pokery involving chaos theory and Jeff Goldblum. Insert the dino DNA into the yolk of a crocodile’s egg and leave to incubate. Soon you’ll have a thriving menagerie of once-extinct beasts roaming the jungles of someone’s private theme park. The 1993 Hollywood blockbuster and Michael Crichton novel of the same name may not have invented the idea of “de-extinction” but they certainly put it out there as a concept. And like all good works of science fiction, it showed what goes wrong when scientists get above themselves. A rampant T-rex is, after all, the ultimate invasive species. De-extinction, or the idea of bringing extinct species back from the dead, has come a long way over the quarter century since Jurassic Park was first published. It has now matured into a quasi-serious science and has even been the subject of its own TEDx conference. Of course, no-one is talking about bringing back dinosaurs – their DNA is lost for good – but some scientists are proposing to resurrect a range of other, more-recently extinct species such as the passenger pigeon and the gastric-brooding frog, both lost within living memory. There are quite a few animals that have become extinct relatively recently that are potential candidates for de-extinction. They include the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a large marsupial carnivore wiped out by sheep ranchers a century ago, the Pyrenean ibex which was hunted for sport until the last one fell dead in 2000, and the Steller’s sea cow, a gentle giant annihilated by hungry sailors in the 18th century. MORE
last singns of planet earth earthquake,volcanoes activity,tornadoes,hurrcane,sanstorm,hailstorm,floods,Landslide,sinkhole,mistery,astronomy,fireball
4/16/2015
The race to modify the DNA of endangered animals and resurrect extinct ones
Jurassic Park has a lot to answer for. It made the idea seem so simple. Take the DNA from a microscopic drop of dinosaur blood, preserved for 65 million years in the gut of a mosquito trapped in fossilised amber. Carry out a bit of jiggery-pokery involving chaos theory and Jeff Goldblum. Insert the dino DNA into the yolk of a crocodile’s egg and leave to incubate. Soon you’ll have a thriving menagerie of once-extinct beasts roaming the jungles of someone’s private theme park. The 1993 Hollywood blockbuster and Michael Crichton novel of the same name may not have invented the idea of “de-extinction” but they certainly put it out there as a concept. And like all good works of science fiction, it showed what goes wrong when scientists get above themselves. A rampant T-rex is, after all, the ultimate invasive species. De-extinction, or the idea of bringing extinct species back from the dead, has come a long way over the quarter century since Jurassic Park was first published. It has now matured into a quasi-serious science and has even been the subject of its own TEDx conference. Of course, no-one is talking about bringing back dinosaurs – their DNA is lost for good – but some scientists are proposing to resurrect a range of other, more-recently extinct species such as the passenger pigeon and the gastric-brooding frog, both lost within living memory. There are quite a few animals that have become extinct relatively recently that are potential candidates for de-extinction. They include the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a large marsupial carnivore wiped out by sheep ranchers a century ago, the Pyrenean ibex which was hunted for sport until the last one fell dead in 2000, and the Steller’s sea cow, a gentle giant annihilated by hungry sailors in the 18th century. MORE
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
06/08/2022 - Shortage of fossil fuels, drought and heat waves, interruptions in raw materials, price increases due to the war in Ukraine,
-
June 2014 – REUNION ISLAND – This morning at 1:35 am tourists on the French Indian Ocean Islands La Reunion tourists witnessed a spect...
-
This afternoon in Alba Adriatica a resounding plane crash during an airshow.
-
50 km east from Cairo a mysterious structure is in the heart of desert.A discover the researcher Matthew Ianneo , UFO enthusiast and ...
-
The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a "tsunami bomb" designed to destroy coastal cities by using underw...
-
The planet Mars is also called the red planet because of the abundance of iron oxide present in its surface rocks.
-
Vitamin D may be a powerful antibiotic forgotten. Recent studies show that vitamin D in the body it stimulates the production of potent a...
-
In Romania in the national museum there is a strange battery that has been producing electricity continuously for 60 years. The inventor of ...
-
The albino humpback whale nicknamed Migaloo cruises along the eastern coast of Australia near Coffs Harbour with another whale in 2005. ...
-
November 24, 1011 — SICILY , It – Torrential rain battered eastern Sicily on Wednesday, where mudslides have killed at least three people a...
No comments:
Post a Comment