While Elon Musk has spent the past few months making headlines with his ongoing love affair with cryptocurrency, the Tesla CEO has opened an entirely different can of (genetically altered) worms. Thanks to a tweet from his Neuralink business partner Max Hodak, Musk is now being looked at as the potential creator of a new… Jurassic Park? According to Hodak, the pair’s brain-implant technology could theoretically be used to engineer “super exotic” species including dinosaurs.
“We could probably build jurassic park if we wanted to” Hodak tweeted. “Wouldn’t be genetically authentic dinosaurs but 
. maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering to get super exotic novel species.”
we could probably build jurassic park if we wanted to. wouldn’t be genetically authentic dinosaurs but
— Max Hodak (@max_hodak) April 4, 2021
Hodak wrote a follow-up tweet arguing that that their technology could be used to conserve and protect current species, but the applications should go beyond that.
Biodiversity (antifragility) is definitely valuable; conservation is important and makes sense. But why do we stop there? Why don’t we more intentionally try to generate novel diversity?
— Max Hodak (@max_hodak) April 4, 2021
But before everyone gets excited about riding dinos past the Dogecoin machine at Elon Musk Park, CNET threw cold water on Hodak’s claims:
It’s pretty much impossible to resurrect a dinosaur. The science of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead isn’t really as sound as Hodak makes it seem though. Even humanity would have a tough time building a Jurassic Park in the next 15 years. First, we’d need some DNA from the prehistoric tyrants and unlike in the film Jurassic Park, where the DNA is retrieved from mosquitoes in amber and fused with frog DNA, that information has completely degraded.
However, CNET does suggest that, theoretically, the wooly mammoth could be a “target for de-extinction,” but that doesn’t sound as sexy as, “Hey, we’re making a freaking Tyrannosaurus over here.”
(Via CNET)