Science Vs - Jurassic Park: Hold On to Your Butts

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Could our dreams for a real Jurassic Park come true? Headlines say scientists are closer than ever to resurrecting prehistoric animals like the woolly mammoth. But is this for real!? Can we really bring back long-gone animals from the dead … maybe even the dinosaurs? We speak to paleontologists Professor Jack Horner and Professor Mary Schweitzer, and biologists Professor Beth Shapiro and Robyn Bortner.  Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/30IpnQm  This episode was produced by Michelle Dang and Wendy Zukerman with help from Nick DelRose, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Joseph Frederickson, Dr. Phil Bell, Dr. David Button, Dr. Andrew Farke, Professor Steve Brusatte, Professor Philip Currie, and Dr. Kenneth Carpenter. Special thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against fossils. Today on the show, welcome to Jurassic Park. Scientists are closer than ever before to resurrecting animals that have gone extinct. And some are getting big bucks to do it. Just this year, we learned that investors threw $15 million at researchers who were trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. And if we're getting closer to the woolly mammoth, could we push things even further?

And bring back T-Rex? Jack Horner has been waiting for something like this his whole life. When did your love affair with dinosaurs begin? I was born this way. I found my first dinosaur bone when I was eight, and I found my first dinosaur skeleton when I was 13. So I've never thought about doing anything else. Jack grew up in Montana, where dino bones kind of come out of

the ground like daisies. And at nights, he would dream about having a pet dinosaur to play with. Borsig, what kid in this world doesn't want to have a pet dinosaur? And once he realized that there was this job where you would dig around looking for dinosaur bones and get paid for it, he knew that's what he wanted to do. But he never thought he'd actually get there. You know, I went through school with dyslexia and flunked everything. And so, you know, I thought my chances of becoming a paleontologist were pretty close to zero. But he made it. And he's now a professor of paleontology at Chapman University in California.

And not only that, but he kind of became the face of paleontology. Jack was the inspiration for Alan Grant. You know, Sam Neill's cranky character in the Jurassic Park movies. Jack even consulted on the script. But the thing is, when Jack imagines a world with velociraptors or T-Rexes, he's not thinking about the giant lizards in the film. My ideas of dinosaurs are way different than, you know, Steven Spielberg and the Jurassic Park dinosaurs,

even though I worked on it, right? You know, they're just so different than most people think of them. So when Jack thinks of velociraptors, he thinks of birds. Because we know that some dinosaurs evolved to become birds. So Jack imagines something fluffy. They're feathered, completely feathered. And they don't learn how to open doors and stalk humans into walk-in freezers. Instead, they dance.

Picture a super feathered up male velociraptor prancing around to impress a lady raptor. Bounces up and down really fast and has this drumming sound coming out of him that sounds like a really rapid drum. In fact, Jack's Jurassic Park is full of color and life. Like take the Triceratops. She's going to have this big bright yellow shield and horns and red kind of comb-like structures around the edge of its drill and vividly coloured. I mean, just beautiful. Did you tell Steven Spielberg that? And was he like, no?

Yes, I did. And he said, I don't think colourful feathered dinosaurs would be scary enough. Wow. He could have changed a generation of minds. He could have. Today on the show, could we resurrect these flashy feathered dinosaurs? Using fancy new genetic engineering techniques like CRISPR, could we bring them back to life?

Plus, we'll talk about this big push to get woolly mammoths walking amongst us again. And I know how this sounds. I thought this whole thing was just fiction. But a little spoiler alert for you. By the end of this episode, we are going to meet a beast that's been brought back from the dead. When it comes to Jurassic Park, there's a lot of...

I want a pet dinosaur. But then there's science. Hold on to your butts. Science vs. Jurassic Park is coming up just after the break. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI.

And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. thing. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today on the show, can we bring extinct animals back from the dead? Let's start with the dinosaurs. If you ask around to scientists, they'll tell you that to even start thinking about bringing back the dinosaurs, we need one key thing, their DNA. So, do we have any of that dino DNA? Well, the big problem here is that our old pal T-Rex died out some 66 million years ago.

And for a long time, scientists thought that all we had left of her were basically a bunch of dried up old fossils. No DNA. But back in the 1990s, something happened that changed all this. It got a ton of attention, headlines all over the US. One even screamed, quote, Jurassic Park plot could become real life. And Jack was right in the middle of all this. Hello again.

Well, howdy. He said it started when he was working at the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. It's around where he grew up, that area known for dinosaur bones. And someone had stumbled across a fossilized arm nearby, and she showed it to Jack. She said, do you know what this is? And I looked at it and I said, yeah, I know what that is. I said, that is the only Tyrannosaurus rex arm in the world. That was the first one ever found.

And I was like, where'd you get that? She told him, and he sent a couple of teams to find the rest of the skeleton, which they did. Most of it was still there. So we were just super excited. After the fossils were all dug up and brought to the museum lab, they had to be cleaned carefully. And that's when a volunteer at the museum, Mary Schweitzer, realized something odd.

I noticed this dinosaur smelled funny. It smelled funny. It was a very, very sweet odor of decay. I kept that to myself for about six months, but every time I worked on the dinosaur, I could smell it. This was rather curious. Fossils aren't dinosaur bones. They're made of minerals that have replaced dino bones

over millions and millions of years. So they're basically rocks. And rocks shouldn't smell like that. Now, at the time, Mary was really getting into paleontology. She thought she might make a career out of it, which she eventually did. She's now a professor at North Carolina State University. But back then, she wanted to practice her skills. So Mary took a little bit off that smelly fossil.

She slid it under a microscope. And that is when she saw it. Something super, super weird. There were these little round red things. Little round red bodies. They looked like red blood cells. But could that be possible? That a few blood cells could have survived some 66 million years inside this fossil? Mary kept thinking about what these things could be. And so finally, I screwed up my courage and I said, I made an appointment with Jack and he kept me waiting

about an hour. And then I set up a slide under the microscope and he looked at it and he looked at it and he looked at it and he didn't really come up for air and started getting that brow furrow that's very scary when you're an insecure student. I agree that it, that's what they look like. They look like blood cells. I didn't think they could be. He looked up at me and he said, so what do you think they are? So I immediately rattled off all my, you know, they can't be blood cells because everybody knows blood cells can't persist for this long. So he said, Mary, prove to me they're not blood cells. The team got a grant from the U.S. government to find out what the devil those little red round things were. And because they figured it might be blood, Jack thought that perhaps it could have T-Rex DNA in it. DNA, the thing

we need to resurrect the dinosaurs. And just this scrap of hope fired off the media. They got a hold of the story and unleashed their Jurassic Park headlines. And at the time, Jack was pretty hopeful. Well, we thought we might find DNA. I mean, Mary and I thought, we both thought that it was a chance that there would be tiny bits of DNA that were viable. So Mary ran more tests on these fossils. And at the end, what she did find was heme. It's a protein that's found in blood cells.

The team wrote in their paper that most likely this came from dinosaur blood. But in the end, they couldn't find any actual blood. And no DNA either. But unfortunately, no. But even though this was pretty disappointing, just the fact that this stuff in blood might survive millions and millions of years, it was important. It was part of this new wave of dino discoveries that upended what a lot of paleontologists thought could be preserved.

And since then, we've realised that dinosaurs have left behind way more than bone-shaped rocks. Scientists say they've found T-Rex blood vessels and feathers. And just last year, researchers reported what could be the closest thing we've ever found to dino DNA. It was in this incredibly well-preserved cartilage from a duck-billed dinosaur. A slice of it reacted to chemicals in this very particular way that suggested perhaps, maybe, teeny remnants of DNA might still be around.

But even if further research backs up this claim, Jack is sceptical we'll ever get enough genetic information to make a full-grown dinosaur. And Mary does not think we're rebuilding a dino anytime soon. We don't have any verifiable dinosaur DNA from anybody, from any lab, anywhere. We don't have DNA. We have no way of getting DNA. DNA just doesn't last that long. By the way, in Jurassic Park, they got around this because they found a mosquito trapped in Amber with fresh dinosaur blood inside. But the truth is, Amber can't stop DNA from degrading after millions and millions of years. It's actually porous, which means stuff inside isn't that well protected.

Still though, Jack isn't giving up. He's so desperate to get his pet dinosaur that he's started looking at this problem in a whole new light. Rather than looking for dinosaur DNA that's preserved in fossils that are millions of years old. What if it's hidden in plain sight? Yeah, Jack has turned his attention to the humble chicken. Welcome to the world of the chicken-a-saurus. S***'s about to get weird. Jack wants to transform a chicken to make it look more like its prehistoric dinosaur ancestors. And he says that it actually shouldn't be that hard. Because as we know, birds are dinosaurs, right? Birds are dinosaurs. Yeah, as we mentioned, birds are direct descendants of the dinosaurs,

which means that their genetic code would actually be pretty similar to a dino's. But of course, over millions of years, lots of things have changed. Snouts evolving into pointy beaks. Serrated dino teeth smoothing out. And having their arms and hands transform into wings. And you can actually see this in the chicken embryo. As it grows, its spindly little fingers fuse into a wing. And what is super cool here is that we know some of those original dinosaur genes, say,

to make a bulging snout, are still in a chicken. They're baked in there. They're ancestral genes that have been turned off in the course of evolution, but are still there. And so all you have to do is turn them on. So for example, researchers who are looking at this for different reasons to study evolution have figured out how to turn the beak back into a snout. Yeah, instead of those super pointy bones, it has a rounder nose, a bit more like an alligator's. And what about the wings? How have you guys gone with turning the wings into hands?

Yeah, well, that's pretty easy to do because... Really? Oh, yeah. That's, it's really, that's actually the easiest one of all. That's child's play. That's child's play. Yes, it is. Scientists have tweaked the genes that make a chicken wing

so that instead it forms into these finger-like stubs. They've even brought back the beginnings of what we think might be dinosaur teeth. And now Jack is trying to crack the problem of how we get a dinosaur tail. If this works, you work out how to do the tail, you put all the pieces together, how big would it be? The size of a chicken.

Okay, so that is not the Velociraptor of my dreams. Well, Velociraptor isn't very much bigger than a chicken. Really? No, no, they're really little. What will it end up looking like? Well, it'll look like a weird-looking chicken. But after all that! And so, you know, they're not hatching these weird-looking chickens.

They're doing these experiments in embryos to see if they could even make the changes. It's almost like your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or if they could even make the changes. It's almost like your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. But ethics aside, that's for a different podcast. The bigger point for us is that this isn't your Jurassic Park dinosaur anyway.

And without dino DNA, which we don't have, we're not going to get one. Still, though, there is one prehistoric animal that people say we are way closer to bringing back, with headlines screaming that this could happen in the next decade. But is that true? The quest for a woolly mammoth. Coming up after the break.

Welcome back. So we just learned that Jurassic Park is basically out of the picture. Best case scenario, we get a little coop of chickenasauruses. But just a couple of months ago, a bunch of private investors announced that they're throwing a crap ton of money at resurrecting a different, massive animal. The woolly mammoth. A team of scientists aimed to genetically resurrect a woolly mammoth by 2027. Bringing back the woolly mammoth. From extinction, yes!

Geoscientist George Church and his company Colossal trying to revive the extinct creature. The lead scientist behind this is a fancy Harvard geneticist named George Church. And he claims that the new funding could help us get a beastie running around in as little as six years. And the team has a surprising rationale for this project. They reckon it could help with climate change. Yeah, they say that if we had herds of these huge animals roaming around the Arctic, they'd do stuff like stomp around, exposing the soil to cold air, which they say could help keep the permafrost from melting. On their website in caps lock, it says, quote,

the woolly mammoth is a vital defender of the earth, end quote. Weirdly, mammoths weren't a top agenda item at that big climate conference in Glasgow. And I'm not sure that I'm buying this climate explanation. But I do want to know, could they really pull this off? A little shaggy beastie running around in just six years? To find out, we called up Beth Shapiro. She's a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she has been researching woolly mammoths for over a decade. And she told us about one mammoth that she saw. It had just been uncovered and scientists were storing it underground in Siberia. It was in this underground ice chamber and lit by these crazy lights dangling from the ceiling and scientists wearing these lights on their heads with laptop computers around. It was just such, it was like a scene from a movie. And then Beth saw it, the mammoth.

It had this really shaggy hair and while alive would have been slightly bigger than an elephant. It was all shriveled up. To me, actually, the most amazing thing to me about it was the end of its nose, the little proboscis with the nostrils on it, which looked kind of soft and fuzzy as if you could reach out and touch it and it would be soft like an elephant's is. You know, you could imagine that in life. It was just like that. It was just a little soft furry end of an elephant nose that was, you know, rooting around there in the Arctic tundra trying to find something to eat.

Woolly mammoths roamed the earth for millions of years until they vanished just a few thousand years ago. And since the last ones were around so recently compared to, say, the dinosaurs, we have a bunch of really well-preserved mammoths. And inside them, we've found it. The key. The thing we need. DNA. The DNA is short and it's damaged, but there's a lot of it there. And using those fragments of DNA, we can piece together, 30 letters at a time, the entire sequence of the mammoth genome. And this has been done. Yeah, we actually know the full genome for a handful of mammoths,

all four billion letters in it. And this is what makes the venture to resurrect a woolly mammoth actually plausible, because we know what the whole genetic code is. We have the genetic instructions. But knowing this code is just step one. We still need to take that DNA and then build a whole new mammoth out of it. The DNA is just like the how-to manual. Now we need a factory to build it in, something that actually makes all the mammothy parts. In nature, our factory would be the cell of a mammoth that's alive. Right? You need a living cell.

And so we still, so we have no living mammoth cells? No. They went extinct more than 3,000 years ago. There are no living mammoth cells. But there might be a way around this. Through the power of synthetic biology. Do-do-do. Exactly.

Synthetic biology is the fandangle new science where researchers take DNA and then manipulate it in these very fancy ways using stuff like CRISPR. So here is the plan for the mammoth, the recipe to cook up a woolly mammoth using synthetic biology. First up, you take an Asian elephant cell, which is alive because we have Asian elephants. Asian elephants and mammoths diverged about five or six million years ago, and their genetic code is 99.6% identical. It's pretty darn similar. If you take your glasses off in the dark, it's basically the same animal. Still though, we now need to find out what genes have changed between the mammoth and the elephant. And for this, you open up that file on your computer saying mammoth code. Yeah, so the idea then is you line all of those up on a computer and compare it to the Asian elephant genome. And we can ask that computer to tell us

where the elephant is different from all of the mammoths. Then, using CRISPR, go through each of those differences and gradually, maybe a couple at a time or hopefully hundreds at a time at some point, cut and paste your way from a living Asian elephant cell to a cell that contains a mammothy genome. Sounds easy peasy.

The reason it's not so easy peasy is because there are about 1.5 million genetic differences between an Asian elephant and a woolly mammoth. How far have we gotten? Well, last I heard from George, they had made about 50 different changes. 50 out of 1.5 million differences. Now, the team behind this mammoth project say that they won't need to change all of those genes. They're just going to focus on the ones that make the mammoth mammothy, say its shaggy coat and adaptations to living in the cold. But even just finding all those differences and changing them, that's still going to take a while. Now, once this is done,

the next step is actually something that science has done before. It's cloning. And we can do this. You take your living cell filled with that mammothy DNA. And at the same time, you get an egg, say, from an Asian elephant. And you suck the nucleus, the nuclear material out of that egg. So you have kind of an empty egg cell. And then you stick the mammothy cell to the outside of the egg. You zap it with a bit of electricity. And really, you're literally just zapping it with a bit of electricity? Yeah, I am oversimplifying things to an insane extent, but it's kind of like this. Bada bing, bada boom, mammothy DNA shimmies its way into the egg. So now it's as if you have a fertilized egg cell. That is wild. What do you see as the biggest hurdle?

Yes. Let's see. Editing, editing the genome, yes, is a pretty big hurdle. And even if you sort out all this other stuff, typically with cloning, you then need to implant this thing that you're cooking up into a mama elephant. And it turns out that even this is rather tricky to do. You see, Asian elephants have a huge vagina. It's about a meter long. And their hymen has a tiny hole that pretty much only sperm can pass through.

So we would need to figure out how to squeeze our mammothy embryo to get up in there. Eventually, George plans to make an artificial uterus. So that's another thing we've got to work out. So we're really inching toward mammothdom. Meanwhile, headlines and the website of this new cashed-up company that's working on the mammoth project make it seem like we're going to get a real-deal mammoth clone. But in the fine print on that website,

what they're actually promising to give us is a, quote, cold-resistant elephant, end quote. And we reached out to them and they said, yeah, there has been some confusion here. Their goal is an Arctic elephant. So it's not really a mammoth. It seems the devil is all in the detail, and it all depends on how many elephant genes they're actually going to switch into mammothy ones. Chances are, if this does happen at all, we're not going to get a mammoth, be more like a weird-looking elephant.

So it's kind of like we're at Chickenasaurus all over again. But don't worry, we're not going to leave you hanging like this with a cupboard of half-baked Franken-animals. Because here's the thing, scientists have used some of this technology to bring back an animal from the dead. And it is not a dinosaur or some prehistoric enormous beast. It is a little critter called the black-footed ferret. Well, they are adorable, but they're also very feisty. We'll hear them referred to as prairie bandits. That's Robin Bortner.

She's a biologist at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center. These wild critters have black markings around their eyes and feet, so they kind of look like they're wearing black boots and a Batman mask. And when Robin says they're feisty, she means it. They can beat up and gobble up animals that are bigger than them. Here's what one sounds like if you rile it up. A lot of animals would back off from an angry ferret, I would bet. But as feisty as these critters are, they are no match for you and me. These little ferrets used to be all over the Great Plains, but they almost went extinct from

habitat loss and disease. And in the 1980s, there were barely any left. Scientists tried to save them and breed them. But by the 2000s, all of the black-footed ferrets alive descended from just seven ferrets. That's it, seven. It's one heck of a bottleneck. Even if we turned all the Great Plains into some ferret resort, one very nasty disease, and we could lose all of them.

It would just be devastating. They're just such an amazing creature. It would just be a devastating loss for the species to disappear. Several years ago, Robin's group teamed up with some other scientists. And they thought, hey, what if we use these cloning techniques to bring back a ferret that died, not thousands of years ago, but just a few decades ago? And the idea was that this new ferret would bring in all this genetic diversity. She'd make babies and that would spice up the ferret's gene pool. Luckily, researchers had saved the DNA of a ferret that died in the 1980s.

So the team whipped it out, did all that zap zap that Beth was talking about, impregnated a ferret, and on December 10th, 2020, just last year, this little baby ferret was born. They named her Elizabeth Ann. So she was so small, just a tiny pinky-sized little, completely helpless baby at this point. It didn't go all to plan, though. When she first came out, something was wrong. She had not squealed or taken a breath since she had been born, and so she just was making no noises at all.

They thought she might die. So Robin's team of vets put this little pink sausage on oxygen, giving it the tiniest oxygen mask. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh, she just gasped. So then we were like, what? Oh my gosh. She took her first breath. You could see her little chest expand and that she had just drawn a breath, which was really exciting because I think we maybe thought we might have lost her for a minute. But life found a way. Elizabeth Ann grew up to become a happy, healthy little ferret. Should we go see her?

Yeah, let's give it a shot. On Zoom, Robyn walked us through the conservation centre. Oh, thanks. let's give it a shot. On Zoom, Robyn walked us through the conservation centre. Right. So this is Elizabeth Ann. Oh my gosh. I see her. Hi, Elizabeth Ann. Oh my gosh. She's so sweet. Hi, sweetie. She's very curious, so she's like sniffing a little. She is a very curious ferret, and one of Elizabeth Ann's favorite things is destroying and killing, quote-unquote, paper bags.

She'll ensnare it and then proceed to tear it up into tiny pieces. Oh, so Elizabeth Ann, she is the hope for the black-footed ferret right there. This is her. I think she's going to be a big ray of hope. Clever girl. And it's not just the black-footed ferret. Researchers have also brought back an endangered horse in the same way. And we've got frozen DNA from loads of species that are dying off right now.

Whole frozen zoos of them. I'm serious. They're storing DNA from the northern white rhino, the golden bandicoot, even the green-thighed frog, which is terribly cute. So perhaps resurrecting more of these creatures could inject more genetic colour into their populations too. Now all this resurrection, it's not like we think it's going to be the saviour of biodiversity. But maybe just one more tool in the toolbox. So there you go. No T-Rex, no mammoth. But you do get Elizabeth Ann. And I'll tell you, at least she won't eat you while you're on the toilet.

Ah! Ugh! Ah! Thank you. That's Science Verses. Hello. Hello, Michelle Dang, producer at Science Verses. Hey, Wendy. How's it going? It's pretty good.

We just finished our Jurassic Park episode. Yay. Woo. How many citations in it? We have 100 citations this week. Ooh, nice round number, 100. Yes, very nice. And if people want to see these citations, where should they go?

Go check out on our show notes page. The link to the transcript will be over there. Thanks, Michelle. All right. Thanks, Wendy. Bye. Bye. Beth Shapiro has a new book out right now.

It's called Life As We Made It. It's on the history and future of biotechnology. So go check it out. Life As We Made It. This episode was produced by Michelle Dang and me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Nick Dalrose, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Akedi Foster-Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Fact-checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Joseph Friedrichson, Dr. Phil Bell, Dr. David Button, Dr. Andrew Fark, Professor Steve Brassati, Professor Philip Currie and Dr. Kenneth Carpenter. A special thanks to the

Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll fact you next time. Okay, so then, all right, so now we're about to travel over the duck-billed dinosaur. What sound would she be making, do you think? Maybe a honking sound is what people have suggested. A honking sound, like how? Like how would that sound? Wow. Try one, you know? There you go. Perfect. You're the best I've heard recently.

I mean, you know, little kids are always, you know. Amateurs. You need to make kind of a honking sound or, you know.