Persuasive Essay (Bilingual English)

Daenna González Bilingual English III Group 330 MEI Daniel Acosta September 08, 2017

Is it possible the dinosaurs’ cloning?

With the pass of the years we have started to become into futuristic people without know it, and that is so true and completely real if we take a look into what we’ve made in the last recent years: we found water in Mart, we created machines which convert the sun light into electric light, we created 3d printers. Isn’t that so wonderful if you think about the past ages? And one of the best creations until today: the cloning. Since Dolly’s cloning we started to see that the science is taking the innovation for a “better” future so seriously.

Although, many years ago all of that was taken as unrealistic and impossible creations.

The cloning of animals started since Dolly the sheep. After that, the scientists started investigating and finding better and more efficient ways to clone. But now, what do they are going to want to clone? What if they take a dangerous but at the same time, wonderful and incredible election? What if their election is the dinosaurs’ cloning? Could they be great aspirants for the cloning? Most people think of dinosaurs as big, ferocious and extinct reptiles. The truth is that not all dinosaurs were ferocious and big, they came in all shapes and sizes.

There are many “science-fiction” possible cloning ways that you have already watched at least once in Jurassic Park’s movies. They made it all look so easy: super smart scientists extracting the DNA from the guts of hundred-million-year-old mosquitoes petrified in amber, and combining it with frog DNA, to finally by some odd, mysterious and easy process provide a living, breathing, and wonderful dinosaur. But the truth is that cloning a dinosaur would be a much, much more difficult undertaking for scientists.

You cannot imagine the unbelievable problems that scientists must overcome to clone, even more if we talk about prehistoric animals. The time is the most critical factor for these possibilities. Although, the synthetic development of the genetic code could be a great idea if we want the time factor to pass unnoticed. Moreover, the modern environment is completely different from the prehistoric one. That could mean the impossibility from a dinosaur to survive in our world. Maybe that’s why they got extinct.

There are so many problems that researchers would have to overcome to clone a dinosaur.

Time is the critical factor. The last of the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago.

For years, researchers have known that DNA starts to break down almost immediately after an organism die. Even in exceptionally preserved animals from more recent times, like the mammoth.

Don’t expect a "Jurassic Park" twist to work, the truth is that amber turns out, does not preserve DNA well. DNA can survive as long as a million years, but definitely not more

than

5

million

or

6

million

years.

In addition, any surviving dinosaur DNA will be highly joined, but yes badly damaged.

An intact dinosaur genome, even if one were ever miraculously to be discovered or engineered, wouldn't be sufficient, by itself, to clone a living, breathing, complete dinosaur.

Nowadays, it is not possible to bring dinosaurs or prehistoric animals back to life through their genetic material as like happen in Spielberg’s movies.

The expectation is that someday a group of scientists can carry out more advanced investigations with DNA, until the point to develop a new mechanism to broke the genetic code from these giant animals that were taken away from our planet millions of years ago.

Maybe in the future it will becomes possible to develop this genetic code artificially without the requirement of a code as model.

This can be possible simply by the fact that dinosaurs were the ancestors from the creatures that still among us: the birds. By the pass of the years, the evolution has made these animals, completely smaller and different creatures from the dinosaurs. However, it is possible that modern birds still carrying the genetic information from their ancestors.

This kind of technology do not exist yet. But when we theorize these experiments, it seems like science-fiction stuff. Now if we think about all the last centuries’ technologic evolutions, it is too easy to think and conclude that in a few, hundreds or thousands of years the science will be able to produce the dinosaur DNA in the laboratory. The bad side is that we won’t be there to appreciate it.

Let's imagine that researchers found or create a fully sequenced dinosaur DNA. This means

that

researchers

would

have

an

entire

genome.

Next, they'd have to find an organism to help clone the beast. It could be one of the modern descendants of dinosaurs: the birds. But a mother bird is a far cry from a mother dinosaur.

Again, let's say that, somehow, the mother was able to give birth to this creature. But could this animal survive in today's climate?

Its genes and proteins survived in a very different world. The carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere was different; the oxygen content was different; the temperatures were different. How is it going to function in the modern environment?

Moreover, dinosaurs were designed to break down dinosaur proteins, we don’t have prehistoric microbes neither modern animals with prehistoric digestive systems.

Cloning will be attractive because of some medical uses. Genetic replicas of geniuses might also benefit society. On the other hand, ruthless and egocentric despots may replicate themselves millions of times over. Beyond these important but obvious results, cloning raises problems that go to the core of human existence and purpose. The cloning is asexual and that is the worst thing if you think about the idea, even much worse because it has started to interfere scientists’ minds since a long time ago, specifically in the clone of animals.

The cloning of dinosaurs may not be a great idea. Even if it can be possible, we are not really sure if they could be able to survive in our current and bad climate circumstances.

Although our modern conditions weren’t different, the cloning ignores the essentially and unique biological interactions that actually constitute a living, growing and completely natural organism.

There will never be a real Jurassic Park. But I’m not especially sad about that. Our favorite dinosaurs may never come back to life in a literal sense, but paleontologists are finding ways to extract ever more details about dinosaur lives from what remains of the creatures.

We still having our dinosaur dreams. Although to be honest, if you think better about it, it’s not a good idea watching all day people running for their life because a herd of velociraptors are trying to hunt them, or be late to work because a t-rex was playing with the bus that carry you to work.