Why is it not possible to make a complete living organism from the samples/remains found from millions of years ago?
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We can’t even make a living organism from remains found from yesterday, so you expect to do it with millions of years old remains?
Stuff degrades over time. We would need a LOT of DNA samples from that living organism, unless we substituted gaps in the DNA with the DNA of other creatures (Which 1. Would mean they aren’t the original creature anymore and 2. Jurassic park shows us how well that would go)
Sadly for Jurassic Park enthusiasts, DNA has a half-life of a few million years. Yes, we could frantically search fossils for signs of preserved soft tissue and hope we can sequence a full genome from many pieces over time, but that’s so hard to find. Then we have to build DNA artificially and get it to multiply and form a proper embryo.
Edit: I was several orders of magnitude off. Turns out after a few million years, *DNA is gone completely.* Half-life is 521 years. I swapped numbers around in my head. Sorry guys. So this is impossible to start with.
Even with complete DNA, then what? DNA is not an organism. An organism would have to be cloned, and cloning is still technically difficult when we have living examples.
If it’s an egg-laying animal, we would have to manufacture an appropriate egg cell and also a physical shell and incubate the creature. We can’t do that. For a placental mammal, we would need to create the egg cell and also get it to implant and grow in a host mother. That might be possible if there were surviving very close relatives, but even having an elephant give birth to a mamma orb would be a huge technical challenge after the huge technical challenge of creating a mammoth zygote.
It may be possible one day, if the DNA could be found, but right now it’s not.
I am still waiting for when they clone successfully that mammoth calf they unburied from the permafrost that was in such great condition.
DNA breaks down over time. We could theoretically make a mammoth from ~10000 years ago because we found a decent example preserved in the ice, but even that would be tricky.
The half life if DNA is 521 years, so in that mammoth, only 1 ten thousandth of a percent of DNA would be intact. The only way we would have a chance is because we’d have a whole mammoth worth of DNA to start with.
Fossils also aren’t organic at all. A fossil means that something died, fell into sediment, was buried rather quickly, and that sediment hardened around them. Over time, the bones decayed, leaving a void that was then filled with new sediment, so the structure was preserved because the two samples hardened at two different times.
Jurassic Park wouldn’t work because
1. There is so little DNA in the blood sucked out by a mosquito
2. You wouldn’t be able to tell which dinosaur is which
3. The DNA would have broken down long ago
The prevailing theory on what actually happened in the story is that Dr. Hammond was genetically modifying chickens and other birds to recreate dinosaurs, and the amber was a cover story. That also explains why the dinosaurs didn’t have feathers because he was modeling then off of what we thought dinosaurs looked like at the time.
It’s just not. We don’t have the technology, because it’s never been invented. It’s not possible, because nobody can do it. It would either require magic or scientific discoveries that we aren’t even remotely close to. It isn’t possible. It’s impossible. It can’t be done. You can’t do it.
Putting aside that the DNA would be degraded to shit by now, there’s the issue that even if we have a perfect DNA sequence of a dinosaur there’s no way to bring it to life. We can’t just input the DNA code into a printer and generate the organism.
The closest possibility would be to clone it in an existing organism by replacing the host organism’s embryonic DNA with the dinosaur DNA, assuming you have viable dinosaur cells with actual intact nucleuses. But even if you manage that, there’s no guarantee that the embryonic development will succeed, or that the dino DNA is compatible with whatever organism you use. To put it overly simply, while DNA is a universal “language” across all organisms, some segments of code in the DNA of specific organisms will only “make sense” to the right organism. Like an elephant DNA may have certain lines of DNA that result in certain reactions that require hormones found in elephants, so you can’t just try to clone in a rhino for example. It’s why the scientists looking to clone and bring back the mammoth have their best shot with the modern elephants, but even then it’s not a guarantee. And if it does work, one could argue that it’s not a true mammoth because the embryonic development process has already been hybridised with the elephant’s.
Because to make life you need life: life is carried over from parents to offspring. A living organism is made from the combination of the living mother and father cells, it’s never dead in the middle. If you had dead cells from a mother and a father you wouldn’t be able to make an organism either.
From what I know, the halflife of the molecules that make up DNA limits Jurassic Park kind of research to only as far back as 50,000 years or so. Which in a geological scale is not very far.
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