Will We Clone A Dinosaur?

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Remember, at this stage nothing has left the computer; all they have is a DNA recipe. But by the end of this century, if not sooner, biotechnology may have reached the point where it can take just about any DNA recipe and read off a passable 3-D interpretation of the animal it would create. After a massive amount of digital trial and error, the nerds reckon they have a recipe for a creature that would closely resemble a small, running dinosaur like Struthiomimus ("the ostrich mimic"). The rest is as easy as Dolly the sheep: call up a company that can synthesize the genome, stick it into an enucleated ostrich ovum, implant the same in an ostrich and sit back to watch the fun.

Of course, there will be teething troubles--literally. Or somebody might have forgotten to cut out the songbird's voice genes, so the first struth chirps like a sparrow. Or maybe the brain development did not quite hang together and the creature is born incapable of normal movement. As this suggests, the first such experiment will almost certainly produce a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, and the whole idea may well therefore be cruel and unethical, in which case, let us hope it never happens. But that is not the same as saying it will be impossible.

And it just might prove much easier than I am implying. Who knows? Rusty old pseudogenes left over from the great sauropods may still be intact, hidden somewhere in the genes of a hummingbird.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue and Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters