Keely Keele
Process Essay
Amber Dinosaurs Michael Crichton’s classic novel Jurassic Park sparked controversy among scientists, excited science-fiction fans, and captivated paleontologists as Chrichton proposed the idea that dinosaurs could be cloned. The plot elicited criticism from scientists around the world, but support from others. Cloning a dinosaur was made possible in the fictional text: take some amber, fill in missing DNA, obtain an ostrich egg, keep the egg in a controlled environment, then a dinosaur is born. Unfortunately, each of the steps are of intricate design. For the first step, cloning is only made possible through a perfect sequence of DNA (meaning no gaps). Doctor John Hammond, the leading scientist in the revolutionary novel, knew this. The man bought several amber mining facilities with no publicized reason. Turned out, amber, a fossilized tree resin, held the golden properties Hammond was searching for. Since amber turns hard, the resin is able to preserve any specimen that lands in it. When Dr. Hammond received the call from Juanito Rostagno, an amber miner, the wait for
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DNA has to be in a perfect sequence. Finding mammals, amphibians, and even reptilians to fit in the gap was a far stretch. Looking for relatives of dinosaurs was the better game. In the end, rainforest tree frogs, a few selected birds, and an unnamed reptilian was the closest to the dinosaur’s genetic code. However, the small amount of DNA obtained from the amber would not be enough to find the genetic code. To fix the problem, scientists multiplied the DNA through the use of the Polymerase chain reaction (a tool that produces thousands of genetic codes through the DNA put into the device). From there, the genetic code was known as A,T,C,G. Scientists then used computers to find the overlapping regions and set out the specific genetic code. The leading geneticist, Henry Wu, was the man attributed with the fame of completing the
samples. In our experiment we learned the how to replicate tiny samples of DNA into usable
“They’re breeding.”(Crichton 164). Ian Malcolm had predicted that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were, in fact, breeding. This was discovered to be true later on in the book, when the numbers of dinosaurs were exceeding the expected count. The use of frog DNA to restore missing portions of dinosaur DNA was the underlying cause. It gave them the ability to reproduce by switching gender. Malcolm had said, “But life finds a way”(Crichton 160), early on in the trip to Jurassic Park, and as he had said, life truly did find a way. The very process of making certain that the dinosaurs were all female, thus unable to reproduce, through first, genetically engineering them to be female, and then irradiating them may have been the very reason why they did in fact reproduce. Any miniscule change, possibly caused by the irradiation, could have caused a metamorphosis. Or it may have been...
Dinosaur fossils are one of the few ways in which scientists can study the history of life on earth millions of years ago. Each new discovery is unique in its own way and provides valuable information about the past. No two finds are exactly identical; therefore, when dinosaur remains are uncovered, the possibility and excitement of new information or even a new species exists. Until the year 2000, no dinosaur has ever been found with a fossilized heart. Scientists at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences discovered a sixty-six million year old Thescelosaurus with a heart.
Today, we as a society world wide have a new issue to deal with. Science has discovered the means in which to clone animals, opening a whole new discussion. Many people are inclined to say why would science even wish to peruse this method of research. Lewis Thomas says in his essay "The Hazards of Science"
Of course it was the movie Jurassic Park who seemed to coin the phrase “Dino DNA.” This movie gave the public the thought that, a) it is possible to find dinosaur DNA and b) we can clone dinosaurs from this DNA. This essay is not going to pick apart Jurassic Park’s scientific value, however it will share the current knowledge and information on dinosaur DNA. The discovery of DNA is important because it may uncover different bits of information. The idea of cloning dinosaurs, especially at this point is out of the question. It is really hard to clone living animals today, with full DNA and genome strands, we can’t even think about recreating animals millions of years ago.
Jurassic park is a novel presented about a group of scientists who visited an island and they were able to gather leftovers of DNA from an insect that was well kept in amber. The fossil DNA was “cloned” into selected amphibian DNA, and presto, replicated fossils were rejuvenated out of destruction on the island. Jurassic Park was printed in 1990, amid the passion of the information period when apparently the entire world was rapidly concerned with mechanizing. Corporations and entities wanted to mechanize their lives and jobs, although occasionally on a considerably smaller scale than that of Hammond's Park. This happened just a decade before the foretold ‘Turn of the Millennium’ super-computermal function that had computer mechanics and Information Technology specialists across the sphere revitalizing for disaster.
contains mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), completely intact. Mitochondrial DNA is tougher than the DNA found in cell nuclei; it is also found in the cytoplasm of a fertilized egg and is passed only through maternal lineage. This makes it much easier for the team to study and makes testing more accurate. Paabo’s team, from Leipzig, Germany, used a method of amino acid content as a way of measuring extractible DNA from the bones. The amino acid method was a means for testing the DNA content in the fossils.... ...
Jurassic Park is a book about the cloning of dinosaurs and they are used as the park entertainment on an island. In this park where dinosaurs are the attraction, not every thing will go as planed. Reading this book will teach someone how Michael Crichton feels about biological science and the cloning of extinct animals. There are things that caused the park to be unsuccessful. Dr. Malcom and Dennis Nedry where two of the parks problems, and the other was the nature of the animals.
In the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton the character John Hammond, the owner of InGen and a well-known dinosaur fanatic, invests many years and millions of dollars into the project of cloning dinosaurs. Although his love of the ancient creatures seems sincere, Hammond is also determined to turn the idea into a huge profit. This greed often seems to hamper his judgment, especially when the park starts malfunctioning and several of the people on the island express a desire to shut it down. Even though many other characters try to persuade him to take the time to research and be more cautious with the dinosaurs he continued with what was real . It is this stubbornness, obsessiveness, naivety that leads to the end of not only the park, but to him as well.
Then the sequence was loaded into Velvet where it was trimmed to the desired k-mer length for alignment and contig formation. Mitos and MEGA alignment Explorer were also used in order to get the DNA sequence to a
Modern-day genetic technology has granted mankind with the opportunity to bring back extinct species from the dead. If humans have come to possess the DNA from an extinct animal population, it is possible to create an identical clone of the animal in question, effectively “bringing it back from the dead”. Many ethical dilemmas surround the practice of de-extinction, and rightfully so. Recreating an extinct species could produce groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs, generating exciting opportunities for future genetics-based research. However, there could also be monumental consequences: the newly revived, once-extinct species might destroy the ecological equilibrium of modern Earth
One of the oft-heard arguments against reproductive cloning is that humans should not be interfering with nature or "playing god". When it comes to endangered species, I am not persuaded. For the past few millennia, and particularly the past century, humans have been the driving force behind the overwhelming majority of species' extinctions. In other words, we have already been very busy playing god.(Nicholls)
When a paleontologist makes a discovery about Dinosaurs it is usually a celebrated event and will appear on all sorts of covers of magazines and even newspapers, with good reason. These discoveries are often quite exciting for a few reasons. The whole experience of finding a fossil that is hundreds of millions of years old is quite an adrenaline rush, but the fact that each discovery has the ability to answer questions in relation to evolution is quite amazing. Each finding of Dinosaur remains can help answer questions of how that certain species evolved from another. If our species can fully understand how Dinosaurs evolved, maybe in the future we can learn something about our evolution. Without discoveries from the past how is our society supposed to persevere and learn from mistakes that may lead to our own extinction, and who to learn better from than perhaps the dinosaurs that have gone through many stages of evolution and have faced extinction.
Even though that quote is from the first release of the Jurassic Park Franchise, it still sticks to this day. And the best part about is that it happened, life had found a way. In the beginning when John Hammond first thought of the idea, to go back to blood sucking insects found in amber and find left over DNA and mix it with different animals of our time, everyone thought of him to be insain. But, he found a way for that to happen, through a process called cloning.
Steve: But cloning is not new. In 1952, researchers in Pennsylvania cloned a live frog. What makes Dr. Wilmut's achievement so special?