Bringing Back the Wooly

- Neha C V & Ronak Gupta

When Jurassic Park released in 1993, moviegoers were spell-bound looking at the dino-saurs brought back to ‘life on screen’. Micheal Crichton’s science fiction book had a fanciful and thrilling plot that translated into pure cinematic joy. Scientists somehow revive T-Rex and Velociraptors and all hell breaks loose. Besides entertaining the hell out of cinema lovers, the movie planted everyone with an idea. Can we bring back extinct animals from the dead?

As it turns out, we probably can. Scientists at Harvard are trying their best to revive the Wooly Mammoth (Remember Manfred “Manny” from Ice Age). Wooly Mammoths are one of the most easily recognizable extinct creatures and were wiped out in one of the five mass extinction events. And now, we can possibly see them in flesh - thanks to a revolutionary tool that can modify the code of life - DNA. This tool, CRISPR, has been making the news lately for being a means of genetic engineering that precisely modifies available DNA samples with minimum errors, enabling scientists to model and find a cure for many genetic diseases. But how is this achieved? We have broken down the process of this seemingly magical technology in the November issue of Digit and although the inner workings of this process seem sound enough, there is a nagging question that remains – where will the DNA of the “dead” animals come from?

The DNA Question