Geneticist against Cloning

New advances in genetic engineering are on the cusp of bringing extinct species back to life, but nobody explains how difficult, risky, and expensive this is--especially given the high percentage of failed attempts before a successful live birth is achieved. You plan to investigate for the judges the estimates given by molecular biologists for the number of attempts that are necessary before a fully formed, live dinosaur hatchling can be achieved. You'll also want to explore the challenges of preventing high rates of infant mortality or cross-contamination in the lab. As an example, look at what happened just last year--a Japanese scientist cloned the first living mammoth (refer to the cloning e-folder for an explanation of the procedure). After all the time, energy, and expense, the baby mammoth only lived for a few days, and this was the clone of an animal that died out only a few thousand years ago. Does viewing this as a real step forward in cloning dinosaurs accurately represent or actually misrepresent the facts? With regard to dinosaur cloning, problems with verifying if it's really dinosaur DNA and changes in DNA over the past 66 million years need to be considered as well--is there a possibility of creating a "Frankenstein-"like hybrid that will be out of control and beyond the limits of Nature and natural selection in the Darwinian sense? Think about whether evolution is like a series of reinforcing cycles, which once begun are too complicated and powerful to stop. You'll need to work on clarifying how a dinosaur clone would be created--for example, would the clone be a bird-dinosaur or crocodile-dinosaur hybrid? Or would the "clone" be just a chicken walking around with some dinosaur DNA as part of its genetic make-up? After considerable expense, will the hybrid be fertile or sterile and which dinosaur would be resurrected--T. rex perhaps? Which dinosaur-related species would provide the donor eggs, and which species would be the surrogate mothers? You plan to explain to the court that now is the time for scientists and society to acknowledge that many scientific advances will result from new cloning techniques but not useful information about dinosaurs from resurrecting a few dinosaur-hybrid species.