Genetics Components in Jurassic Park

Jurassic park’s setting is on the fake island Isla Nublar placed near Costa Rica’s Coast, where a billionaire and a small group of genetic scientists have created an amusement park of different cloned dinosaurs. However all goes bad when the power goes out and all the dinosaurs escape wrecking havoc on the scientist and workers at the amusement park. Later to make things even worse the extra DNA that the geneticist put in to fill in the missing holes mutated allowing for the dinosaurs to change sex and reproduce.

Cloning is the process of producing populations of genetically identical organisms. Cloning in biotechnology is the process used to create copies of DNA fragments or molecular cloning, cells or cellular cloning, or whole organisms. The most famous clone was a sheep named Dolly whom was created in a lab in Scotland. There are three different types of cloning, Reproductive cloning, which creates copies of whole animals, Gene cloning which creates copies of genes or segments of DNA, and Therapeutic cloning which creates embryonic stem cells.

The cloning portrayed in this film was pretty accurate to what cloning actually is although scientist today do not have the tools that they would need to clone a long extinct species, but the basic idea behind the idea is essentially the same. The type of cloning shown in Jurassic park is nuclear transfer as well as having a little bit of genetic engineering when they use frog DNA to fill in the missing holes in the dinosaurs DNA. The DNA the scientist got were taken from amber incased mosquitos and than transferred via nuclear transfer. Nuclear transfer is the act of taking DNA from one organism and than inserted into an egg than a small jolt of electricity to make the two fuse this process fertilizes the egg.(Genetic Science Learning Center)

In conclusion it is my belief that the movie jurassic park is a great movie that has some fairly accurate genetic roots within it. Although some aspects of this movie are a bit far fetched such as splicing the dinos with frog DNA while others are very realistic such as nuclear transfer. All in all Jurassic park is a good story and a great movie.

Sources

Genetic Science Learning Center. “What is Cloning?.” Learn.Genetics 7 January 2013

Animal Science. Animal cloning 05/20/10