Jurassic Park: Fact... or Fiction?
Undoubtedly the greatest film of the 20th century, but could it really happen?
Click above for a download of the Geological timeline.
At the very most, you might hope to be able to obtain a dinosaur DNA fragment. Biologists could only guess at what was missing from the complete genome, without knowing for certain. It would be like trying to predict the contents, and order, of a complete library of information from the facts contained in just one page of a single book.
Scientists are currently working on gene therapy for humans, where they target, extract and replace a faulty gene which causes disease. This isn’t easy, even though the genome for a human is known. Image how difficult it would be to replace ‘missing’ genes for an extinct animal?
Dr David Stearn has suggested that in the future scientists will be able to ‘map backwards’ to create a complete dinosaur DNA sequence. Put simply, the premise is that DNA sequences will become mapped for living relatives of dinosaurs (reptiles and birds) and scientists will be able to work backwards from these known sequences to create a dinosaur genome.
However, it must be remembered that a small change in genome can manifest as a very large change in organism (remember the human and the banana!). Jeremy Austin of the Natural History Museum suggests imagining the dinosaur genome as a jigsaw puzzle with billions of pieces. Instead of flat pieces of cardboard, each piece is a cube with a different fragment of the overall picture on each side. To complete the puzzle, not only must each piece be in the correct place, the correct face has to be showing too.
So far scientists have successfully mapped the genome for two bacteria, a
yeast, a nematode worm and, amazingly, for humans. Let us imagine that
dinosaur DNA is similar in complexity to humans – some 3 billion base pairs. The human genome project took 15 years to complete with research teams from around the world
collaborating. It is estimated to have cost $3 billion. The cost and timescale
to accurately map living dinosaur relatives, and then map backwards from
there, would be immense.
In the film, where chunks of dinosaur DNA were missing, the ‘scientists’ simply filled in the gaps with frog DNA. This is called splicing, and we know that this just won’t work. For a start, a frog is an amphibian, and dinosaurs were reptiles. Also, a complete and accurate genome is required for each and every organism. A ‘mixed’ genome of spliced frog and dinosaur would give you (assuming it were viable) a …………………..dino-frog or possibly a frogasaur!
The image adjacent is of the Congo tree frog. It was a frog such as this that was used in the film Jurassic Park because, astonishingly, it is able to change sex when in a single-sex environment! A very important device in the film, and a subject for a whole new project!

Trying to sequence your strand would be even harder than this Dinosaur Jigsaw puzzle!

Image of the Human Genome

The Congo Tree Frog