Carlos F Velázquez

Are we ready for a real Jurassic Park as part of a new Disney attraction? It's coming. We may soon have live woolly mammoths.

Michael Crichton was prescient when he forecasted what humanity would do with the power to alter or modify or revive DNA in his novel and film JURASSIC PARK.,

We're bringing the woolly mammoth back to life
newsweek.com

Tim adds:

If you want to see Jurassic Park why bother with cloning? You can just go to Washington D.C. and see a bunch of old dinosaurs any time you like.

The Russians were trying to do this well over a decade ago, I might add, but didn't succeed. Of course now the state of the art is better.

I don't worry about a Jurassic Park type scenario so much as about what little buggies will grow and mutate on such life forms. The species of this Earth have evolved along with microbes, and there is and always has been a constant biological arms race between larger creatures and bacteria and viruses. There are diseases endemic to given species. So what happens when we bring back an extinct species? Will an elephant virus mutate inside a Wooly Mammoth and jump back to the elephant population, perhaps wiping it out? (Better to bring back Mastodons which aren't elephants, although they look very much like them, or at least that is what I have read.)

I worry about all of this. We are now tampering with the fundamental structure of DNA and not understanding the possible consequences. This is ripe for diseases to jump species. ?We could be on the precipice of unleashing something terrible on our descendants. Or we could trigger a whole extinction event via the plagues that can be born of this tampering.

Rampaging dinosaurs is the least of our worries, even if disease is less amenable to the Big Screen.

Oh, and let us not bring back Phorusrhacid, the so-called "Terror Bird". Eight feet tall, razor sharp talons, beak like a couple of Bowie knives. Picture Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi with feathers! Born killers.

We should entitle the movie Pleistocene Park.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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