We
have taken cells from the carcass of an animal that died decades ago and
brought them back to life and so it is possible using today's technology to
take bodies, carcasses of animals that died decades ago and resurrect them in
the form of clones.
Now we have also sequenced the genes of the Neanderthal man, meaning that at
some point in the future it may be possible to bring back the Neanderthal man.
In fact, at Harvard University one professor even made a proposal as to how
much it would cost to reassemble the genome of the Neanderthal man. And then of
course, if a young Neanderthal boy is born then the question is where do you
put the boy, in a zoo or at Harvard?
This
is a question that we're going to be facing in the coming decades because it is
possible that we might be able to bring back the mammoths. We're talking
about creatures that walked the surface of the earth tens of thousands of years
ago and we have their genome and it's a serious proposal now that we're closing
in on sequencing all the genes of a mammoth to bring the mammoth - by inserting
a fertilized egg inside the womb of an elephant and having an elephant give
birth to a mammoth.
Now
dinosaurs are much more difficult. They perished 65 million years ago,
not tens of thousands of years ago. However, something has happened that
I thought would not happen in my lifetime and that is we have soft tissue from
the dinosaurs. I never thought it would be possible in my lifetime.
If you take a hadrosaur and crack open the thigh bones, bingo. You find
soft tissue right there in the bone marrow. Who would have thought?
T-Rex's too and scientists have analyzed not the DNA, but the proteins inside
the soft tissue. Not surprisingly, we find the proteins of chickens and
also frogs and reptiles, which means of course that dinosaurs we can now show
biochemically are very closely related to birds. In fact, we think birds
are dinosaurs that survived the cataclysm of 65 million years ago.
Now
there is another proposal to use what is called epigenetics. Nature does
not simply throw away good genes. Nature simply turns them off. For
example, we have the genes in our own body that would put hair all over our
body and you can actually turn that gene and create, quote, unquote, a
werewolf. In fact, in Mexico City there are two young boys with hair all
over their bodies that are acrobats in a circus and scientists have sequenced
the genes and yes, it is a very ancient gene that they have.
With
chickens we can actually see the genes for chickens that were turned off
because of epigenetics, genes that give webbing between the toes of a chicken
because a long time ago chickens had webbed feet and also teeth. You can
actually bring back teeth inside chickens. So then the question is, is it
possible to make the next big leap to use epigenetics, to use gene therapy, to
use all the different kinds of therapies we have, mix all these things up in
the memory of a computer and have the computer give the best fit for a reptile
that is like a dinosaur, insert that perhaps, into the womb of maybe an
alligator or a whatever and perhaps give birth to an egg, which will hatch something
resembling a dinosaur.
Well
that's not possible today, but it's not out of the question. It's not out
of the question that at some point in the future we'll use a computer to take
all these bits of DNA from living lizards, from the—extracting information from
the proteins of soft tissue from hadrosaurs and assemble the best mathematical
approximation to a dinosaur and have it give birth to an egg.
Michio Kaku
Watch
the video
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