The Mercury

Bringing dinos back to life not in its DNA

- Dareen Griffin and Rebecca O’Connor

THE fifth instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise will be on the big screen today, reinforcin­g a love of dinosaurs that has been with many of us since childhood.

There is something aweinspiri­ng about the biggest, fiercest, and “deadest” creatures that have ever walked the planet. But the films have had an additional benefit – they have sparked an interest in dinosaur DNA.

The “Mr DNA” sequence in the original movie is a great piece of science communicat­ion, and the concept of extracting DNA from the bodies of “dino” blood-engorged mosquitoes is an outstandin­g piece of fiction. It is, however, just fiction.

Quite by chance, we’ve recently identified the overall genomic structure

A READER writes:

“I told you a little bit about friends and family that we have had to cut ties with over the years.

Recently you have written about reconcilia­tion in families. In our sad experience it always takes both parties to come to the table and if they don’t then it’s pointless.

For three decades we’ve had to put up with verbal abuse, insinuatio­ns, insults, and then being completely ignored by a family member.

How does one even begin to try and reconcile with such an obviously troubled, unstable, irrational, angry and downright nasty soul?”

RECONCILIA­TION takes at least two people. If you have done your part in searching your soul and cleansing your heart and clearing a path toward estranged of dinosaurs. The genomic structure is the way that genes are arranged on chromosome­s in each species.

Although individual animals from the same species will have a different DNA sequence, the overall genomic structure is species-specific.

We began by working out the most likely genomic structure of the bird-turtle ancestor, before tracing any changes that occurred from then to the present day.

This lineage includes the emergence of dinosaurs and pterosaurs – 240 million years ago, passing through the theropod dinosaurs (whose members include T.rex and Velocirapt­or) and ends with birds.

Despite us not making any claims to have extracted dino DNA, the question that seems to be on most people’s lips is “does this bring us closer to a real Jurassic Park?” The answer is an emphatic “no”, and here’s why. family members, and you are willing for reconcilia­tion to occur, then you have done all you can do.

Forgivenes­s takes one person. You are able to forgive the person who has treated you in the manner you have described. I’d suggest you do so, for your sake, not for the sake of the “downright nasty soul.”

Reconcilia­tion is always better than estrangeme­nts and tension; forgivenes­s is always better than resentment and anger.

There are times when reconcilia­tion seems impossible. A former Durbanite, Smith is a family therapist in the US. You can e-mail him at RodESmith1­22@ gmail.com

First, the idea that there is intact dino DNA contained within blood-sucking insects preserved in amber just doesn’t add up.

Prehistori­c mosquitoes containing Dino blood have been found, but any dino DNA contained within them has long since degraded. Neandertha­l and woolly mammoth DNA has been successful­ly isolated, but dino DNA is just too old.

The oldest DNA ever found is around one million years old, but for dino DNA we would need to go back at least 66 million years, so realistica­lly we’re not even close.

Second, even if we could extract dino DNA, it would be chopped up into millions of tiny pieces, and we would have little clue as to how these pieces should be organised. It would be like trying to do the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzle with no idea what the picture looks like or whether there are

OH BOY! A world in turmoil. As the G7 industrial nations –which more or less coincide with Nato – meet in Canada this weekend, it’s Donald Trump versus the rest as he slaps on trade tariffs willynilly.

Nothing like this has happened post-World War II. The Canadian prime minister describes Trump’s statement that Canadian steel and aluminium will be subject to tariffs on grounds of national security as “insulting”. The entire EU is outraged.

And a leading Republican­supporting economist warns that tariffs are tricky and unpredicta­ble. They generally hurt the country imposing them more than they hurt the target (Mexico has already announced counter-tariffs on bourbon whiskey from Kentucky), and in 1929 that led to the Great Depression.

This should be a lively G7 meeting.

Rugby Test

MATTERS will also be lively at Ellis Park tomorrow. Both the Boks and England have an eye on the approachin­g World Cup and both have to re-establish themselves as contenders.

Each has a canny coach and each has new and untested players who need to slot in.

It should be a great encounter. We look to something better than last weekend against Wales.

The gals of the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties are becoming restive. There any missing pieces.

In Jurassic Park, the scientists find these missing pieces and fill them with frog DNA, but this wouldn’t give you a dinosaur, it would give you a hybrid or a “frogosaur”.

These bits of frog DNA could have all kinds of negative effects on the developing embryo. It would also be infinitely more sensible to use bird rather are murmurings of a knickers boycott, a withholdin­g of elastic for the fashioning of catapults for the traditiona­l celebrator­y feu de joie, in which the streetligh­ts are shot out in the event of victory.

Perish the thought! This is rugby, not the G7.

Frightened fawn

A BAMBI moment. Jessie Larson was driving down a country road in Washington state, in the US, when she saw a female deer and her fawn in the road ahead.

She slowed down and the mother deer sprang aside. But the fawn collapsed in fear in the middle of the road, according to Huffington Post.

Jessie stopped and honked her horn. “I honked once to see if she would move, but she was too scared.” She then cut the engine to reassure the mother deer, who returned and nudged the fawn.

The two of them then trotted off together.

Yislaaik! What’s with these Yankees? Don’t they like biltong?

Sportswrit­ing legend

NORMAN Canale, a legend of South African sportswrit­ing, died this week, aged 93, at Waterfall, outside Durban, where he had retired from Johannesbu­rg which was his than frog DNA as they are more closely related (but it still wouldn’t work).

Third, the idea that all you need is a strand of DNA and, hey presto, you can recreate a whole animal is, again, science fiction.

DNA is a starting point, but the developmen­t of the animal inside the egg is an intricate “dance” of genes switching on and off at the right time with a stamping ground.

Canale was a writer who brought several new dimensions to whatever sport he was covering – boxing in particular – and to the sportsmen themselves. You could just about smell the garlic on their breath.

His was an inimitably colourful style, known to several generation­s of readers. Consider this account of his interview in America with Two-Ton Tony Galento, who almost defeated the indestruct­ible Joe Louis (as contained in Canale’s memoir, Snakes in the Garden of Eden).

“None of the weird things I had read about American heavyweigh­t boxer ‘Two Ton’ Tony Galento prepared me for the man I eventually met. It had the same startling effect as if I had bumped into the Abominable Snowman.

“I mean, apart from coming within a whisker of knocking out the immortal Joe Louis, this weirdo brawler boxed a kangaroo, and a Russian bear and wrestled an octopus.

“The face behind the fat cigar that greeted me looked like it had come off second best in a collision with a brick wall, and the voice sounded like a cement mixer in urgent need of an series of environmen­tal cues.

In short, you need the perfect dino egg and all the complex chemistry contained within it. In the book, they generate artificial eggs, in the films they use ostrich eggs.

Neither would work, you can’t put chicken DNA inside an ostrich egg and hope to get a chicken (people have tried).

And this is before we even consider legislatur­e, planning permission, protest groups and the effect on the ecosystem.

So we can’t resurrect a dinosaur, but… Here’s the thing: dinosaurs never became extinct. Quite the contrary, they are among us right now.

Birds did not evolve from dinosaurs. Birds are not closely related to dinosaurs.

Birds are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs (including birds) are the survivors of at least four extinction events, emerging each time in more diverse, weird and wonderful forms.

One key element of our paper is that we theorise that their ability to do this is facilitate­d by their genome structure.

We discovered that birds and most non-avian dinosaurs had a lot of chromosome­s (packages of DNA).

Having so many allows animals to generate variation, the driver of natural selection.

Neverthele­ss, and it is a long shot, it may be possible in future to use Jurassic Park technology to help undo some of the harm that humans have caused.

Mankind has seen the extinction of well-known avian dinosaurs such as the dodo and the passenger pigeon.

Recovery of DNA that is a only few hundred years old from these birds is a far more realistic propositio­n.

It may also be that eggs from closely related living species might just be good enough.

In the right conditions we may be able to use them to resurrect some of these species from extinction. – The Conversati­on

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PICTURE: REUTERS Pupils play bumper ball, which involves strapping football players into giant inflatable balls, in Moscow recently.
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 ??  ?? The ‘Mr DNA’ sequence in Jurassic Park and the concept of extracting DNA from the bodies of ‘dino’ blood-engorged mosquitoes is an outstandin­g piece of fiction.
The ‘Mr DNA’ sequence in Jurassic Park and the concept of extracting DNA from the bodies of ‘dino’ blood-engorged mosquitoes is an outstandin­g piece of fiction.
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Iol.co.za/mercury TheMercury­SA Mercpic TheMercury­SA
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