Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 10, 1993 TAG: 9306100022
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Just as the dinosaur thriller movie "Jurassic Park" is set to open Friday, a team of scientists is reporting that they have extracted - and cloned - genetic material taken from an insect that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.
That scientific feat - cloning DNA from the dinosaur age - is the basis for the movie. Only it was all fiction when novelist Michael Crichton first came upon the idea.
Reporting in today's issue of the journal Nature, scientists say they were able to obtain DNA from an insect preserved in fossilized amber, which is hardened tree sap. They then cloned enough of it to determine that it was a previously unknown species of weevil that lived at least 120 million years ago.
The research team making the announcement includes George Poinar Jr., an entomologist at the University of California-Berkeley, whose research inspired Crichton to write his best-seller.
Keith Thomson, president of the Academy of Natural Sciences, called today's findings "very exciting" and "an important advance" in the emerging scientific field of molecular paleontology.
Crichton found the inspiration to write the novel "Jurassic Park" in 1983 after studying scientific papers from the Extinct DNA Study Group - California researchers that included Poinar.
At the time, no researcher had ever extracted and cloned DNA taken from ancient specimens that were trapped in amber. DNA, a substance found in all cells, determines the characteristics of each living thing.
In Thursday's announcement, Cano, Poinar and three other scientists have pushed back the earliest known date for extracting and cloning DNA threefold - to 120 million to 135 million years ago.
They cloned only enough of the weevil's DNA to identify it - a far cry from re-creating the entire insect.
While some scientists describe today's announcement as an important advance, they remain divided on whether DNA from dinosaurs will ever be found.
Thomson of the Academy of Natural Sciences said it is highly improbable that dinosaur DNA can be extracted from the blood inside an insect, as in the novel. That's because the insect's digestion would quickly break down the DNA. In addition, he said, it's highly unlikely that complete strands of DNA would remain intact for more than 100 million years.
But a number of scientific teams are searching for dinosaur DNA, possibly from fossilized bones, and Thomson said it's probably "just a matter of time" before dinosaur DNA is discovered.
But creating a dinosaur from DNA is a whole other matter.
Thomson said that while it might someday be technologically feasible, the odds against doing it are "mind boggling."
"It's like building the Taj Mahal by collecting grains of sand on a beach," he said.
Nonetheless, both Cano and Poinar said it might be possible someday to bring back to life simpler creatures - such as bacteria or fungi - that have been preserved in amber.
by CNB