About a week or two ago, my dad yelled from the other room, telling me to come watch the program on television. The program was a special on CBS’s 60 minutes talking about the cloning of endangered and potentially extinct animals. Having always been interested in biology, I watched the segment and found it extremely interesting. Scientists were collecting skin cell samples of hundreds of endangered animals and storing them in giant freezer tanks. The skin samples would then remain living until they were removed to extract DNA. The DNA could then be put into a fertilized egg and then placed in a surrogate mother of a similar species. In this way, they could clone endangered animals to increase their population sizes and reduce the chance of extinction.
Now I have begun reading Jurassic Park (which I cannot believe I have never read before) and am really enjoying it. The process they use to clone dinosaurs is very similar to what they are experimenting with now with endangered animals, and I thought it was incredible that Michael Crichton had in 1990 when the book was published, come up with an idea that is just beginning to be experimented with today, and with a process very similar to what is being used in genetic research laboratories in modern times. I can’t wait to read more of Jurassic Park and I think I am going to be researching the cloning of endangered and extinct animals for my tech research project. =)
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