Australian Billionaire Wants To Build Jurassic Park-Style Resort

Crichton was trying to make a point with his Jurassic Park novels. It was a cautionary tale about "the law of unintended consequences".

And so? Why should we take Jurassic Park, or any work of fiction, as a guide to the way this would work in the real world?

Cautionary tales of Science Run Amok are at least as old as modern science itself (Frankenstein was published in 1818, arguably about the point where science as we understand it today was emerging from the morass of religious teleology, superstition, and philosophical maundering) and for just as long, they've been held up as examples of why we shouldn't do this or that: "That which we know now is Good and Right and The Way Things Are, but this new knowledge you're seeking is in the realm of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know!" And for the entire time, science has gone ahead anyway, and within a generation or two everyone pretty much agrees that it was a good thing... just in time to complain about whatever new field of knowledge is opening up and is therefore Scary and Dangerous.

I'd say spending any amount of money to clone dinosaurs is a bad idea, but that's not because the end result will be people getting eaten by raptors. It's because we don't have any dinosaur DNA* and aren't likely to have enough to get anything like a complete sequence, nor do we have nearly enough basic biological knowledge to create a viable embryo even if we did have the genetic information. Now, speaking as a bioinformaticist, if Clive Palmer wants to devote a portion of his considerable wealth to creating the knowledge that would allow us to clone dinosaurs if we were lucky enough to retrieve some reasonably intact tissue, I'll applaud -- but I hope he's not expecting to have a pet stegosaurus any time in the next few years, or even decades.

*Not counting bird DNA, which of course is plentiful, but reconstructing the ancestral sequences back to the point necessary to create "dinosaurs" as most people think of them would be just about as huge a challenge as building the whole thing from scratch.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/GyT51a_Q_N8/australian-billionaire-wants-to-build-jurassic-park-style-resort

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