Oscar Wilde said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” and boy is that ever true especially now.
Besides being an avid reader, I also love watching movies. I was especially fascinated by the films where science alters genetic DNA to bring animals from millions of years ago back to life.
I watched all of the Jurassic Park movies, and none of them ended well when scientists tried messing with Mother Nature.
When I first read about the plan to bring back the woolly mammoth, which disappeared thousands of years ago, I thought it was a promotion for another science fiction movie. But it was not.
Geneticists at the Harvard Medical School plan to do just that.
News reports noted the scientists don’t plan to extract DNA from woolly mammoth remains found frozen in permafrost like what was done in the movies, but to genetically engineer a mammoth-elephant hybrid that is supposed to be indistinguishable from the original one that disappeared 4,000 years ago.
The press release went on to explain, the hybrid mammal could help restore the Arctic tundra’s ecosystem, combat the climate crisis, and preserve the endangered Asian elephant, which is related to the woolly mammoth.
Millions of dollars are being pumped into doing that, and hybrid calves are expected to be produced in a few years.
George Church, who is the professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, has done cutting edge work in genomics. Some of his work has been described as having the ability to “rewrite the code of life.”
I question doing that — not just on a moral or ethical level, but because can you really control Mother Nature?
I strongly suggest those scientists who plan to alter genetics be forced to watch all of the Jurassic Park movies in 3-D with their eyes taped open.
Mary Drier is a freelance reporter and columnist for the Huron Daily Tribune.
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September 24, 2021 at 05:12PM
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Drier: Bad idea then, and still a bad now - Huron Daily Tribune
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