artificial birth from leftover DNA? (rumors)?

Question

i remember i heard somewhere that scientists were able to give life to dna they found from million-aged bones. is it true and if so, does that mean they can possibly bring dinosaurs back to life?

Answer 1

That's a loooong way away, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view..). Remember that DNA codes for proteins that run things in the body. A gene is just a section of DNA that has the protein recipe with a 'start copying' signal at the beginning and a 'stop copying' signal at the end (there's more to it than that, but that's the basic idea). When we're alive, our DNA is constantly subject to damage from lots of sources like chemicals, radiation and so forth. A big effort of the cell goes into repairing the DNA to keep it accurate. Once something dies, its DNA starts getting broken down (like all the rest of it) and there's nothing to repair it. The longer it sits, the less of it there is in any kind of readable shape. If you're extraordinarily lucky, you might find some unmineralized fossil tissue that still has some fragmentary DNA that hasn't been completely smashed all to smithereens in the intervening thousands and thousands of centuries of being buried in the rock and dirt. So, you're talking about reconstructing a mile-long pearl necklace from maybe 3 pearls and a couple little fragments of a few others. Then, once you've got it pretty much perfect, you've got to turn it into a viable embryo. Like somebody giving you a couple metal rods and saying "OK, now go ahead and build the Eiffel Tower." There's a lot of stuff that has to be done to get from point A (the little DNA fragments) to point B (the dinosaur). Now it was just reported that actual protein was succesfully extracted from dinosaur bones. That's very cool, in that we now know that (assuming there wasn't a screwup somewhere in the process) proteins are tons more stable than DNA, but it doesn't get us any much closer to making live dinosaurs. Still, we can go out and watch birds hunting things on the ground and get an idea of what theropod dinosaurs looked like.

Answer 2

Well, they need to have enough DNA to do PCR (polymerase chain reaction), to increase the amount of DNA. If they can then do that, they need to find an egg from an animal alive today that is sufficiently like the egg of the animal they are trying to clone. Then, they need to find a species of animal which could act as the surrogate mother for the embryo, and carry it until it gives birth, and find out what they need to feed it on. If they can do all this, they can put the DNA inside the egg, electrocute it to make it start dividing, put it in the uterus of a surrogate mother, and hopefully it will take. I think about 5% work at the moment, when we clone cows and pigs and things.

Answer 3

it is a rumor..DNA alone is not sufficient to produce a new life..it may be useful to identify organisms ....but producing a new life is entirely different..