Could Jurassic Park Happen In Real Life? | Unveiled

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Could Jurassic Park Happen in Real Life?</h4>

By 1990, the author Michael Crichton already had a decades-long career behind him. And after multiple novels highlighting the dangers of unchecked science, he published “Jurassic Park”. The book would come to be his best known, adapted as it was into a record-breaking film and multiple sequels.

In both the book and the movie, a futurist named Hammond enlists a team of scientists to create a theme-park full of dinosaurs created from recombinant DNA. “Jurassic Park” is a story of hubris, of man approaching the glory of creation… but of it all going slightly wrong. It’s a modern-day “Frankenstein”, and at the time of publishing it was certainly a work of science fiction. But technology has significantly evolved in the time since Crichton and then Steven Spielberg first introduced us to this world. 

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: Could Jurassic Park happen in real life.

As with many Crichton novels, “Jurassic Park” is a speculative story that dives deep into science. Biology sits at its heart, specifically the subfield of genetics and cloning. In general, the true science of genetics dates back to the experiments of Gregor Mendel, a biologist and monk born into the Austrian Empire in 1822. Mendel spent the 1850s and ‘60s researching pea plants, in particular. His goal was to establish rules of heredity traits while cross breeding them, but his research didn’t really make a splash in the scientific community until the turn of the century. A lot has happened since then, though, and research into genetics has progressed on a somewhat parallel path in the interim. 

Modern day studies are fixated on genes, the building blocks within cells that contain the blueprints for biological traits. They’re linked to, but not the same as, DNA; it might be said that if genes are the blueprints then DNA is the pencil used to draw the building. All known organisms, from a microscopic virus to the largest dinosaurs of the ancient past are built out of DNA, and therefore wholly dependent on genes. DNA can also be thought of as complex particle chains, with these chains containing all the genetic instructions that eventually lead to the development, function, and reproduction of all life as we know it. 

The first steps toward discovering DNA occurred only a few years after Mendel’s pea plants. A Swiss researcher named Friedrich Miescher discovered nucleic acid inside white blood cells in 1869. A Russian researcher, Phoebus Levene, developed ideas on the structure of DNA, first hypothesizing the existence of nucleotides in 1919. Various scientists each found pieces of the puzzle in the mid 20th century. James Watson and Francis Crick are most famously credited with the ‘discovery’ of DNA, but there was a great deal of work and a great number of prior breakthroughs before them. And much of even what they achieved is now more widely thought to have been made possible only thanks to the concurrent research made by the lesser known Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Nevertheless, understanding the structure and function of DNA was central to expanding upon Gregor Mendel’s early dabbling with what would come to be known as cloning. 

At its simplest level, the purpose of cloning is to recreate the genome of one organism inside of another. Sometimes, the goal is to enhance or copy specific physical traits. Other times, scientists are looking to create an entirely identical organism. Interestingly, cloning has almost as long a history as its parent field of genetics. Although the parameters are still up for debate, the first modern experiment into cloning took place in 1885. Germany’s Hans Driesch took simple two-celled sea urchin embryos and physically shook them to separate those two cells. It was found that, from that point forward, each then split and developed into an individual urchin. Afterwards, and for the next century or so, chemists and biologists intensely studied embryonic cells. By the late 1920s, the importance of the cell nucleus in embryonic development had been realized. And, around the same time that Watson and Crick were publishing their research in the 1950s, other scientists - Robert Briggs and Thomas King - were already transferring embryonic nuclei from one frog cell to another. In the eyes of many, this marks the first time that an animal was ever truly cloned.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s, though, during (and just after) the time of Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”, and the field jets into overdrive. By now, scientists are about six years into their journey to map the human genome. DNA and RNA research, in general, has been around for almost fifty years. Nuclear transfer research has progressed to mammals. Embryonic cells can now be cultured. Specific genes can be spliced into or out of the nucleus, even if we don’t yet fully understand the implications. In 1996, three years after “Jurassic Park” (the movie) shattered box office records, researchers in Scotland shocked the world by introducing us all to Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. Dolly was created using somatic cell nuclear transfer. The nucleus of an adult cell - an udder cell, in Dolly's case - was transferred into an egg cell without a nucleus. The eventual result was a perfect genetic copy; effectively, Dolly was the genetic twin sister of one of her biological mothers. And, in the years since her birth, we’ve seen a growing list of animals cloned in the same (or in a similar) way.

In real life up to this point, the applications of cloning are wide. It has led to breakthroughs in medical and pharmaceutical research. Some envision a future when fully cloned organs will keep animals (and perhaps even humans) alive indefinitely. Cloned food was first approved by the FDA in the US, in 2008. The concept of lab-grown meat is no longer all that alien, and a scaled up lab meat industry is said to be coming over the horizon. One of the reasons why advocates believe we need it is to reduce the effects of climate change and to slow (or reverse) the Holocene Extinction - an extinction-level event that scientists believe we’re currently in the midst of.

Which brings us back to “Jurassic Park”. To contemporary minds, the now not-so sci-fi science of cloning and gene editing could also become one of the best tools to combat humanity’s contribution to the Holocene. “Jurassic Park” is easily the most prominent pop culture example of a concept known as de-extinction. Which, in short, involves extracted DNA being injected into the embryo of an extinct animal’s closest living relative. The extinct animal is then brought to term and then effectively resurrected. Or so the theory goes.

There have already been some tentative steps toward making this actually happen, though. For instance, in 2003, the Pyrenean ibex was briefly brought back to life, after it had gone extinct shortly before, in 2000. Scientists used cryopreserved skin cells from the last Ibex to birth another one, using a domestic goat as a surrogate. However, of all the clones they tried only one was actually born, and it only survived for a few minutes. And crucially, compared to “Jurassic Park”, the experiment was really started before the species had originally gone extinct, with scientists deliberately taking cells in preparation for the future. 

Nevertheless, there are those who believe a more Spielbergian scenario is possible. The Harvard Professor George Church has emerged as a trailblazer in gene sequencing and editing. Operating through the biotech firm Colossal, which he co-owns, he received millions in funding in 2021 and has reportedly devised a plan that, if it worked, would truly take the headlines. Church wants to bring the wooly mammoth back from the dead. According to projections, it could happen by the end of the 2020s, with the procedure resting on the fact that the DNA of the mammoth is a 99.6% match to that of the Indian elephant. Using DNA samples discovered in melted arctic permafrost, scientists (it’s hoped) will be able to edit the genes of an embryo (to make them more mammoth-like) and implant the result into an elephant mother. If successful, that elephant would give birth to Earth’s first wooly mammoth in thousands of years. What’s more, in 2023, Colossal Biosciences announced a similar initiative to bring back the dodo bird, as well.

Importantly, there is some debate over the authenticity of the de-extinct animals that Colossal (or anyone else) might produce. Because the work is so dependent on the presence and contribution of a closest living species, it’s said that whatever is born will only ever be a copy of a mammoth (or dodo) rather than the real thing. In terms of a real life Jurassic Park, however, that distinction doesn’t really matter. And, if it ever did come to fruition, then the Colossal experiment would seemingly prove that a dino-theme park scenario is possible. The big challenge, however, would be getting eyeballs on some true dinosaur DNA. 

In the Crichton novel, Hammond and his team famously find and extract dinosaur DNA from mosquitos that have been long frozen in amber. In real life, it’s thought that that just wouldn’t be possible. DNA is extremely fragile, and the prospect of finding intact specimens after tens of millions of years is dicey at best. One 2012 study, published by the Royal Society, suggests that the half-life of genetic material is only 521 years. Under the most ideal conditions imaginable, it was calculated that there would be a best-case cut-off of about 6.8 million years. And, in truth, most DNA samples that have been discovered are less than 2 million years old, at best. The dinosaurs breathed their last some sixty-six million years ago, so all signs are that we’ll never have the DNA we’d need, even if it were possible to bring them back. 

That said, some possible samples have been found before. It’s thought that a hadrosaur skull fragment unearthed in 2020, for instance, may contain cartilage samples with degraded DNA. In 2021, a separate team claimed to have extracted DNA from a 125 million year-old Caudipteryx bone, found in China.  Some scientists have even recounted exactly what happens in “Jurassic Park” but in the real world, claiming to have extracted ancient DNA from amber. Although, across the board, those studies are disputed.

All in all, reproducing a Jurassic Park in real life actually isn’t as crazy as it sounds, in theory. And, unlike in 1990 when Michael Crichton’s novel was published, a lot of the technology to make it happen does now exist. Were scientists able to find ancient enough DNA and a viable modern-day embryo in which to implant it, then we perhaps would have a dinosaur. But, don’t get too excited. Because the key let down, at the moment at least, is that finding that DNA just isn’t likely to happen. Not because we don’t have the technology to, but because the DNA most probably no longer exists, anywhere at all.

So, barring the freak discovery of a mass dino graveyard that is frozen and perfectly preserved, that’s why “Jurassic Park” is never likely to happen in real life. An Ice Age Park with a mammoth as its main attraction; maybe. But the T-Rex is too long gone. Of course, there are some ideas that scientists might one day be able to back track through the DNA of living species far enough to recreate a hybrid dinosaur - rather than to resurrect a real one - but that’s for another time.