Michael Crichton, the great speculative science fiction author, asked what might happen if scientists decided to use available technology to bring dinosaurs back from extinction and put them in an amusement park on an equatorial island. Two novels, a blockbuster movie trilogy and a pair of follow-up sequels have all made an impression on the modern consciousness about the consequences of awakening primordial beasts from extinction. The philosophical point of Crichton's novels is simple: just because we might have the technology to bring back tyrannosaurs, brontosaurs, and velociraptors does not mean we should do it. His premise opened a series of essential ethical questions about extinction, habitat and genetics worth considering.
The main thrust of these questions—in the movies, at least—is obscured by the cinematic standard of a handful of sweaty humans running away from Mesozoic-era dinos that have escaped their exhibits and reverted fully to their bellowing predatory behavior. By the end of each book and subsequent film, a few survive to escape—humans, I mean. The dinosaurs take over their island abode and wait for producers to realize how much money can be made from sequels. Thematically, this concept is excellent. The Jurassic Park films and books will go down in history as extremely popular money-makers. Audiences will always tune in or show up to watch someone else get chased by big, toothy lizards. Development is easy, too. It seems to be an infinitely recyclable series of tropes based on the classic film menace of big monsters and somewhat plausible scientific motifs.
Since the debut of the first film, which made excellent use of computer-generated imaging and believable animatronics, the available technology to produce realistic dinosaurs has become more sophisticated and believable. As long as the thunder lizards remain on-screen and do not cross over into our reality, everything is fine. Especially since humans and dinosaurs from the Cretaceous, Triassic, and Jurassic periods within the Mesozoic Era cannot and never coexisted.
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Despite the convincing nature of Crichton’s books and movies, dinosaurs could never be brought back from extinction. Too many factors prevent it; size not least among them. The square-cube law states that as an object grows, its volume increases faster than its surface area. This affects organisms (like a T. Rex) because the surface area is vital for exchange processes with the environment (like respiration and nutrient absorption). As organisms get larger, their surface area-to-volume ratio decreases, which can limit these processes. Larger organisms also need more structural support because their weight increases faster than their cross-sectional area.
Like modern birds—which are the genetic descendants of their dino ancestors—many dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era had hollow bones. An evolutionary adaptation, it allowed the big proto-bird dinosaurs to grow far larger despite the problem of the square-cube law, but that isn’t the only barrier to dinosaurs living today. The atmosphere of the early Earth contained much more carbon dioxide than today, which meant that there was also more oxygen available for respiration. As a result, large animals, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, could thrive despite their size. Their respiratory and cardiovascular systems were adapted to process oxygen at a much higher rate than animals today. In the modern world, lower oxygen levels mean that large animals are either proportionally slower, like elephants and rhinos, or like whales, live in the water where their weight is supported.
Since the world of the dinosaurs was cataclysmically destroyed when the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth and eliminated almost all life on the planet (and instigating the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event) there is no way that scientists could ever manage anything like the plot of Jurassic Park.
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Just three years after Jurassic Park hit theaters, scientists terrified humanity by cloning a sheep called Dolly. The ensuing public lamentation, especially in religious circles, about how such power belonged only to God flooded TV and newspapers and AM radio talk shows. Those of us who had read Crichton's novel or watched the movie were also a little spooked. A sheep was not likely to pursue humans and kill them like dinosaurs, but the cloning of Dolly meant that humanity had harnessed the scientific abilities necessary to move on to cloning humans and dinosaurs and whatever else they wanted. At least, that’s how it seemed.
The process that “created” Dolly was frighteningly simple, though unlike in horror tales, she was made in the full light of science. Despite hysterical criticism and fearful sermons from Rubes who had never read a single book other than the Bible, Dolly's was an experiment as enlightening as anything that science had uncovered so far. There was no intent to profit from her cloning, nor did the geneticists promote any kind of heinous eugenic motives. For decades, the discovery of the tools necessary to clone Dolly were gradually accumulated via careful and vetted processes. The human genome wouldn’t be sequenced for another ten years. Most of the public fears were based in ignorance and dread of science, as usual.
For well over a century, scientists had known that the “blueprints” of a living creature's genetic makeup were locked within its DNA. First discovered in the 1860s and referred to as a nuclien by the German biologist Friedrich Miescher, DNA was understood to reside in every cell of an organism. In the 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick figured out the double helix structure of DNA. When the project that led to Dolly was first undertaken, there was nothing scary or nefarious about it. Cows have been cloned for decades before Dolly, but this was the first time it would be attempted with non-embryonic cells.
The scientists took DNA from the mammary gland cell of a Finn Dorsett sheep and ‘reprogrammed’ it. They inserted it into the egg of another sheep that had had the nucleus removed. They stimulated the new egg using low-level electric pulses to begin the process of mitosis. They implanted the egg into a surrogate ewe who gestated an exact clone of the original Finn Dorsett. They named her Dolly. Dolly was not just a one-and-done experiment. The scientists had tried upwards of 277 times before they managed to successfully clone Dolly. She lived a normal (though pampered) sheep life and was able to give birth to normal offspring. Nothing terrifying ever happened.
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The success of Dolly’s cloning opened huge vistas of possibility in genetics and biotechnology. It also burned a series of brush fire-like questions through the scientific community, ranging from the careful and thoughtful philosophical queries about responsibility and necessity, to the ramped-up, panicky and shrill squeakings of the fearful. All along this spectrum, though, echoed Crichton's foundational premise: just because we can harness the power of genetics to clone doesn’t mean that we should.
If, for instance, Victor Frankensteinesque materials and processes were discovered after the success of Dolly’s cloning that allowed us to reanimate deceased humans, we might wish to spend a little time reflecting on whether it was a good idea to try. Here was a chance for philosophy, with its long contemplation on the ethical conundrums raised by scientific discovery, to show its worth. Mary Shelley—and much later, H.P. Lovecraft—toyed with the infernal implications of this (fictional) power in the safe confines of literature. Both of their mad main characters were motivated by apparent scientific discovery but likely lured to it by a power they had rightly assumed was beyond their grasp. In both cases, though, the consequences were grotesque and served as warnings of the danger of unfettered and unreflective discovery.
In Shelley’s short epistolary novel, Victor Frankenstein is immediately repulsed by his creature, understanding that he had stepped beyond a forbidden threshold into regions of divine power not meant to be meddled with by humans. In stealing forth Promethean secrets to revive his recombined monster, Frankenstein finds his mind tipped to the breaking point. Inadvertently setting loose a new creation on the world, neither human nor god, but somewhere in between and beholden to neither, Victor Frankenstein changes the face of humanity and science. Mary Shelley’s popular classic was a castigation of the forbidding patriarchal society which saw her and all women as nothing more than chattel and vessels for birthing male heirs and the potential of breaking those barriers forever, but the literal warnings are also relevant today.
The other (and more chilling) tale is Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator. Although not Lovecraft’s only story on this topic, Reanimator is the most memorable. Told from the point of view of West’s assistant, it tells of West’s hubris in the manic endeavor to prove that the human organism is merely an “organic machine” that can be restarted. He creates a serum that eventually does bring several corpses back to life across the story with devastating consequences for West and the small fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. The reanimated “zombies” seek West out and eventually disembowel him for his audacity in fiddling with powers beyond his comprehension. Lovecraft’s personal feelings on this will never be known, as he never wrote or shared an analogy for the story, though it can be assumed that his New England “sensibilities” had at their foundation a deep mistrust of the unbridled arrogance of scientific discovery.
Frankenstein has been made into countless movies and Lovecraft’s terror got a movie rendition that resembled the tale in name only. Both stories highlight a normal human preoccupation with death and the potential of science to slow or reverse the problem of subjective, individual extinction. We may be tortured by dreams from these terrifying tales, but when we wake up, we know that organisms that have ceased to live cannot have the spark reignited within them. This is true for our loved ones and also for the millions of living creatures that may have once roamed, squirmed, crawled or flown across the planet.
That is, until recently.
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Not far from the Chicxulub asteroid crater off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, scientists in Dallas, Texas are currently attempting to bring back a different extinct creature. Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnological company (anyone thinking of Crichton’s fictional InGen may feel chills) is making significant steps at bringing back an organism that is from this side of the planet-killing asteroid that vaporized the dinosaurs. Using gene editing similar to what allowed Dolly, and DNA from a preserved wooly mammoth carcass discovered in 1904, the scientists at Colossal intend to use “de-extinction” processes to bring the wooly mammoth back to life.
The technology already exists. Using massive supercomputers to calculate the genome and genetic similarities of modern creatures, scientists will likely achieve their goal of resurrecting the wooly mammoth within the decade. The Colossal scientists, similar to the fearless lab coats in the fictional Jurassic Park, have reflected upon the philosophical questions and are fairly certain that bringing back these fuzzy pachyderms will benefit their former ecosystem and our planet.
Using the DNA from the preserved mammoth artifact, and filling gaps in the genome with edited Asian elephant DNA (which, like ourselves and Bonobo chimps has about a 99.6% similarity) scientists can easily edit the strands to create an almost perfect copy of the extinct mammoths. CRISPR, a minuscule RNA strand that recognizes where edits are needed, can precisely cut DNA at any location with incredible accuracy. This groundbreaking genetic technology can insert, remove, or modify the strands using Cas9 proteins, thereby simplifying the gene editing process from thousands or millions of years of evolution to just a few weeks in some cases.
If Colossal is successful, the resultant revived wooly mammoth-like creature will be similar in almost every way to its ancient extinct ancestors, but with some pesky problems built in. The main question that arises is how to train a de-extinct organism to remember its biological imperatives after so long a time. Another issue stumbles around how many wooly mammoths are enough to safely reintroduce without causing catastrophic ecological mishaps on the scale of what happens when invasive species are inadvertently introduced.
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Unforeseen consequences—not quite on the scale as those described in Crichton, Shelley or Lovecraft—nevertheless present a sticky quagmire for the scientists at Colossal. Despite the surface-level view of their experiments, there are almost too many unknowns to predict outcomes. Even with the benefit of those aforementioned supercomputers.
Elephantidae, within the family of which are the modern African and Asian elephants, as well as the extinct wooly mammoth and mastodon, are social creatures that ‘raise’ their offspring and instruct them in a way similar to other mammalian fauna. If resurrected, a woolly mammoth would lack crucial inherited knowledge and learned adaptive behaviors tempered over millennia. These include foraging strategies, predator avoidance, social dynamics, migration patterns, environmental adaptation and disease resistance. Without these instincts, the mammoth would struggle to survive, highlighting the importance of considering not only genetic but also ecological and behavioral aspects of de-extinction. The world is never static, and each generation of mammoth likely faced different, unknown challenges. Things have changed significantly between the extinction of the mammoths and the present day.
The benefits of mammoth de-extinction may outweigh the challenges. Wooly mammoths were an important link in the food chain and they were a plentiful food source for larger predators, like polar bears and arctic wolves, both species that have suffered in their shrinking natural habitat. They also helped to keep greenhouse gasses to a minimum. The immense weight of mammoth herds compacted the snow, limiting its ability to insulate the ground. This exposed the permafrost beneath the snow to colder temperatures, which kept it from thawing too early each year, preventing the release of methane and carbon into the atmosphere. Additionally, mammoths played a crucial role in creating grasslands by toppling trees and uprooting shrubs. These grasslands, known as “mammoth steppes” were once Earth’s most extensive biome and were able to store carbon more efficiently than forests.
The herbivorous mammoth was once a keystone organism that promoted a far wider range of biodiversity in the Arctic before its extinction. Like bison on the North American prairies, wooly mammoths were once plentiful on the tundra, flourishing and reproducing without interruption. Climate warming after the last ice age may have caused a “natural” culling of the species as well as its competitors and predators over time. Ancient humans hunting mammoths for meat and pelts likely pushed the wobbly species into extinction.
It took eons for the wooly mammoth to evolve and thrive, decline and eventually fall into the abyss of extinction. The de-extinction of woolly mammoths would take only a tiny fraction of time. No one can know if that power is a viable or safe option. It seems too risky to rush. In the meantime, movie producers might exploit the scientific reality for profit, creating horror films about rogue mammoths terrorizing groups of horny young drug and alcohol-addled graduate students at remote research outposts on the tundra. These films would undoubtedly instill fear in the public, who would once again fill the media with panic-inducing stories of science gone wrong and claims of "playing God”, only this time, the horror will be based on reality and somewhere in the tundra, a genetically reconstituted wooly mammoth might be browsing through the naturally occurring grasses, herbs and short shrubs.
Everyone will have an opinion, and like all such click-bait-fed knee-jerk responses, most will be ill-informed and inane. That will not help us answer the question Crichton first posed in his speculative literature and it won’t help us solve those puzzles even after the speculation becomes a wooly reality.
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