Is Elon Musk Building a Real Jurassic Park?

Thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. Find out more later on. Hey Thoughty2 here. The very best books and films really make you think. The Matrix had us wondering whether our world might be a simulation. The Lion King forced me to google whether or not Hakuna Matata really did mean no worries. It does, in Swahili. And Jurassic Park alerted us to the possibility that we humans might one day be able to bring the dinosaurs back from extinction. This last idea got a lot of attention earlier this year when rumours began to circulate online that a certain Elon Musk had developed the technology to recreate Jurassic Park. And this wasn't just your standard internet smoke and mirrors either. The rumour was triggered by a tweet written by Max Hodak, the man who co-founded neurotechnology startup Neuralink with Elon Musk himself. We all know Mr Musk has his fingers in lots of pies. But so far as anybody knew at the time, bringing the dinosaurs back from extinction was one baked good he hadn't penetrated with any of his many appendages. So was there any truth to the rumour? Sadly, no, there wasn't. The Max Hodak tweet was real, but it turns out he was just speculating about humanity's growing technological capabilities rather than announcing some previously top secret Neuralink tech. As it turns out, the whole bringing animals back from extinction thing isn't quite as far-fetched as you might think. In fact, we've already done it. Not with dinosaurs, admittedly. The animal in question was a Pyrenean ibex, a kind of mountain goat that was once abundant on the Iberian Peninsula before it became extinct. In 2003, scientists successfully cloned this creature for a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Unfortunately, the Pyrenean ibex didn't stay un-extincted for very long. Cloning is still an inexact science and only one live ibex was born out of over 200 attempts. The baby only survived for a handful of minutes before succumbing to a malformed lung. Even so, it was a huge milestone. For a brief time, an animal that was once thought gone forever breathed again on planet Earth. Think of it as being a kind of non-evil necromancy. Only don't call the scientists involved necromancers. They don't like that. Do you love travelling? Then you'll love the fastest and easiest VPN, Surfshark. Did you know Surfshark helps you to avoid price discrimination based on your location so you can actually save money on plane tickets and car rentals whilst travelling? Surfshark runs on any device, anywhere, and it's packed full of features such as industry-leading uncrackable encryption, IP and DNS leak protection, an internet kill switch if your VPN drops out, and 24-7 customer support. 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Because as great as being murdered by a flanking velociraptor might sound in principle, it turns out that casting Rey's dead on the dinosaurs is going to be orders of magnitude harder than it was for the Pyrenean iBex. You see, the reason we were able to bring back the iBex is that it died out very recently, just over two decades ago in the year 2000. Scientists at the time already knew cloning was possible. Dolly the sheep, the first mammal clone via somatic cell nuclear transfer, was born in 1996. So, when it became clear the Pyrenean iBex was not long for this world, tissue samples from the last surviving female were taken and frozen, and hidden within those cells was everything we needed to make a brand new iBex. DNA As you're probably aware, the dinosaurs met their maker some 66 million years ago. There weren't any scientists around at the time to take any handy tissue samples, meaning if we want to get our hands on some dinosaur DNA for cloning, we're going to have to get creative. The obvious place to start is with fossils, but we could also have a go at finding dinosaur blood in the stomachs of ancient biting insects preserved in amber, like they did in Jurassic Park. But there's a major problem with both of these approaches that wasn't fully understood when the first Jurassic Park film came out. It turns out that DNA is an incredibly fragile molecule that degrades relatively rapidly after its owner dies. To put some numbers around that, our current best guess is that a DNA molecule loses around half the information encoded within it every 521 years, meaning the older a DNA sample is, the more damaged it's going to be. Thanks to this gradual degradation, if we go back far enough, around 6.8 million years, recoverable DNA will essentially cease to exist. Lots of things have happened here on Earth in the last 6.8 million years. Modern humans evolved. I ate breakfast more than 10,000 times. And Piers Morgan won the seventh series of Celebrity Apprentice in America. But none of these things involve dinosaurs. Well, except maybe that last one. I should point out that a fair few scientists have claimed to have found genuine dinosaur DNA fragments in recent years, which might blow this whole theory out of the water. But as of today, all of these findings are pretty controversial, and none are widely accepted by the scientific community. The oldest confirmed DNA fragments recovered and sequenced came from a Siberian woolly mammoth that died 1.2 million years ago, well short of dino time. So yeah, it's no exaggeration to say that according to our best estimates, there may well be not a single molecule of recoverable dinosaur DNA in existence on planet Earth today, which isn't a great starting point for cloning a dinosaur. But hey, if there's one thing we humans should have learned by now, it's that our best guesses are often pretty ----. Just ask anyone alive before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The problem is, even if we're wrong and tiny fragments of dinosaur DNA do exist out there somewhere, it doesn't really change much. If dinosaur genetic material has survived, it will have degraded to such a degree that the most we'll ever find will be tiny snippets of DNA containing just a handful of base pairs. To put that into context, TRX DNA is estimated to have contained more than 2 billion base pairs. And in order to reconstruct the entire genome, we'd need to find all of it. That simply isn't going to happen. If you're a proper Jurassic Park geek, you'll know that scientists from InGen overcame the problem of incomplete dinosaur genomes by filling in the gaps with DNA sequences from other animals. Frogs, in the case of the films. But the reality is, you can't fill in the gaps in a DNA sequence unless you know where those gaps are. And you don't know where the gaps are if you don't know what the whole sequence is supposed to look like in the first place. To put all of that very simply, if we can't find decent volumes of high-quality dinosaur DNA, we just can't clone any dinosaurs. And we can't find dinosaur DNA because the dinosaurs have been extinct for 66 million years. Or have they? Actually, no, they haven't. As you're probably aware, modern-day birds are descended from dinosaurs. In fact, in a very literal sense, birds are dinosaurs. Feathered theropods, if you want to get technical. On the face of it, that might not seem to help much either. Birds do give us access to complete genome sequences of genuine dinosaurs, but only of the species of dinosaur that still exist today. And by that definition, we don't want to bring them back from extinction. Still, if birds evolved from theropods, a group of dinosaurs that includes dino-A-listers like T-Rex and the Velociraptor, then, in theory, their DNA should be able to tell us quite a lot about those long-dead creatures. In fact, if we were somehow able to undo all the changes that have accumulated in modern bird DNA since the time of the dinosaurs, it might just be possible to actually make reverse-engineered dinosaurs. Now, admittedly, that might sound pretty far-fetched. And yeah, sorry, it is. We aren't going to be able to pull a T-Rex out of the bird DNA hat. But that doesn't mean reverse-evolving birds is a total bust. In fact, there are some pretty smart people out there working on doing exactly that right now. Chief amongst them is a man called Jack Horner. You probably aren't familiar with that name, but he just so happens to be the inspiration for Alan Grant, the paleontologist played by Sam Neill in the Jurassic Park franchise. Yeah, he's kind of a big deal. Progress in reverse evolution in the last decade or so has actually been pretty remarkable. Jack Horner and other scientists like him have already been able to identify certain genes that appear to have been instrumental in several key evolutionary advancements that took place as birds evolved from dinosaurs. Things like beak formation, for example. And by inhibiting the expression of those genes in chicken embryos, we've been able to make chickens with dinosaur-like snouts instead of beaks. Weird. Progress is already being made in identifying some of the genes involved in wing and tail formation, too. So, as mad as it may sound, it looks like it's only a matter of time before we're able to make ourselves a bunch of genuine dino-chickens. But a dino-chicken isn't really a dinosaur, or at least not one that ever existed here on Earth. It's just a chicken that's been genetically engineered to have certain dinosaur-like properties. And even then, it's easy to forget that there's an awful lot about the dinosaurs we still don't know, which means we don't have a clear idea what dinosaur-like properties actually are in the first place. And we're talking pretty fundamental things here, too, like whether or not dinosaurs were warm or cold-blooded. All of which means genetically engineering a chicken is more of an interesting science experiment than a genuine attempt to resurrect long-dead species. So, whilst reverse evolution can teach us a lot about evolution and gene expression, it isn't exactly Jurassic Park. And the cold hard truth is that nothing ever will be. For the reasons we've already talked about, and several others we haven't, we will almost certainly never be able to bring the dinosaurs back from extinction. But whilst a part of 10-year-old me just died inside, that doesn't mean we can't bring other extinct species back. Plenty of animals that died out in the last million years or so, many of which sadly have us to thank for their demise, could be perfect candidates for a spot of good-natured necromancy. Though there are still quite a few hurdles to overcome before de-extinction becomes de-rigueur. At the moment, cloning via somatic cell nuclear transfer requires donor egg cells from living animals to act as hosts for the genetic information of the species you want to clone. But if the egg cell itself comes from a different species, by definition, the resulting creature isn't an entirely pure clone. Dolly the sheep, for example, had the mitochondrial DNA of whichever sheep donated the egg cell she grew out of. There are other challenges to overcome too. When scientists brought the Pyrenean ibex back from extinction, the cloned embryo was inserted into the womb of a surrogate mother, a domestic goat closely related to the Pyrenean ibex. We'd have to do something similar for every species we want to bring back, but for extinct species with no surviving close relatives in the animal kingdom, we have nowhere to grow our cloned embryos. Artificial wombs could provide the solution, but that's very much an embryonic science. I'm so sorry. Still, unlike finding dinosaur DNA, that probably doesn't exist anymore, these are the kinds of challenges we could conceivably overcome in the relatively near future. Which means we may well be able to bring some animals back from extinction sooner rather than later. Likely candidates include the woolly mammoth, the phylocene, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, and the passenger pigeon. Not quite as exciting as a rampaging T-Rex, I admit, but on the plus side, you aren't very likely to be eaten by a passenger pigeon. Thanks for watching. Then you're in luck because you can now listen to the new Random Interesting Facts podcast with me, 42. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You'll find a link to it in the description below. Check it out today and give your eyes a break. You're welcome.