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(Lansing State Journal, Jan. 8, 1997)
"Jurassic Park," like most good science fiction, relied and expanded upon sound scientific principles to weave a story beyond anything we have experienced, yet believable. Genetic engineers can do some of the things done in "Jurassic Park," but a clever imagination, computer animators and model builders were required to fill the gap between the story and current technology. And it is a mighty big gap.
In the story, DNA was extracted from a mosquito that lived in the time of dinosaurs and died when it was trapped in tree sap. After 65 million years or so, the sap turned to amber, which was found by prospectors looking for dinosaur DNA. Up to this point, the story is completely reasonable; in fact, DNA has been extracted from insects embedded in amber. More incredibly, a living, single-celled organism has been revived from an amber-embedded bee. But in "Jurassic Park," the story goes far beyond this current limit of technology.
In the story, dinosaur DNA was sequenced, with missing bits filled in with sequences from a frog. The DNA was synthesized and put into a synthetic egg to incubate. From this egg, a baby dinosaur was born. This part of the story is not yet possible.
In reality information stored in DNA is contained in the sequence of its building blocks (nucleotides) that are put together like beads on a string. For dinosaurs, this string may contain several billion beads.
This means that DNA recovered from the age of dinosaurs likely will be badly damaged; to get even a small bit of sequence from it would be difficult. To get the complete sequence would be effectively impossible.
Furthermore, the known DNA sequence of a frog is nowhere near complete. Synthetic DNA is limited to the hundreds of nucleotides, not millions, and putting synthetic DNA into a synthetic egg cannot result in a living creature of any kind. It becomes cleat that "Jurassic Park" currently can exist only in the mind.
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