Science and Weather

Real-life ‘Jurassic Park’ likely impossible to due new DNA measurement

October 12, 2012 at 9:43 a.m.

Regardless of the clear message of the Jurassic Park book and movies, that irresponsible scientific development is dangerous, and regardless of nearly everyone in the stories ending up eaten by dinosaurs, there are a lot of people who still think that having a real-life Jurassic Park would be extremely cool — me included.

Well, fortunately or unfortunately — however you personally view it — science hasn't brought us closer to this achievement, it has now actually pushed it farther away, possibly completely out of reach.

This news — good or bad — comes in a new research paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, titled The half-life of DNA in bone: measuring decay kinetics in 158 dated fossils, which shows that the half-life of the DNA molecule is only 521 years.

The researchers examined the fossilized bones of three extinct species of flightless bird called moa. These were chosen because, although they come from different periods in history, they were all from the same region and underwent the same environmental conditions. Differences in environmental conditions can have a large impact on DNA degradation, so having the same conditions for these fossils allowed a more accurate comparison.

The term 'half-life' is usually reserved for radioactive materials, but the term can actually be used for anything that experiences 'exponential decay' over its entire lifetime. After one half-life has passed, half of the material still exists. After two half-lives, one quarter of the material is still there. After three half-lives, one-eighth remains, and so on.

With the DNA molecule's half life being only 521 years, and with any dinosaur DNA we may find locked in amber or anywhere else being at least 65 million years old, that means that over 124,000 DNA half-lives have passed by now. Since it only takes 7 half-lives to get to less than 1 percent of the original amount of the decaying material, we can be sure that after all this time, all dino DNA molecules have decayed and are gone.

On behalf of science... sorry.