Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Dr. Dana Rashid, Assistant Research Professor, Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Montana State University.
Ira Pastor comments:
In the 1990 science fiction novel, Jurassic Park, written by Michael Crichton, a fictional genetic engineering start-up based in Palo Alto, California, called International Genetic Technologies, Inc. (InGen), has discovered a method of cloning dinosaurs. They do this by using blood extracted from mosquitoes, trapped in amber, during the Mesozoic era, the interval of geological time from about 252 to 66 million years ago, comprising the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.
Most viewers and listeners will be familiar with the amazing movie franchise that this seminal novel subsequently spawned.
Many are probably aware that 30 years into this franchise, tracking down the blood of dinosaurs in this fashion, and accomplishing anything akin to the biotechnological feats of Dr. Henry Wu, chief geneticist in Jurassic Park, are a bit remote – DNA sequences long enough to be usable and readable for cloning purposes can’t survive more than 1.5 million years.
But What About a Different Approach?
On previous episodes, we have independently talked about a range of themes from microevolution, to the physiological dynamics of how biological form is established, to the unique genomics of regenerative organisms like the amphibians. We’ve also dabbled in a bit of sci-fi type topics, not shying away from some “bleeding edge thinking” – cryonics, head transplants, astrobiology, etc.
Today we are going to merge a lot of this together.
Dr. Dana Rashid Researches Dinosaur Biology
I’m joined today by Dr. Dana Rashid, Assistant Research Professor, Cell Biology and Neuroscience, at Montana State University.
With a PhD from University of California, Davis, Dr. Rashid is an evolutionary biologist who in addition to studying dynamics such as the tail evolution from dinosaurs to birds which occurred over the last 150 million years, and the mutation events that transitioned the long tails of dinosaurs to the short, fused tails of today’s birds.
She also oversees the Dino-Chicken lab, established by paleontologist Jack Horner, with the goal of taking living descendants of dinosaurs (chickens) and reverse genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits, including teeth, tails, and even hands, to potentially one day make a “Chicken-osaurus”.
In addition to the obvious, “Consumer Biologicals” opportunities (as baby dinosaur pets are referred to in the Jurassic Park book), there are also fascinating human biomedical learnings stemming from such biotechnological work, related to diseases where we see a disruption of biological form, as in the case of the inflammatory disorder Ankylosing Spondylitis, a devastating and common human back disease where back bones fuse together.
On this episode we will hear from Dr. Rashid about:
Her background; how she became interested in science, evolutionary biology, and in the intersection of such biological knowledge with paleontology. A background of the genetic learnings emerging from the dinosaur-to-bird evolutionary events. “Baby Dinosaur” applications stemming from Dino-Chicken research. Human health applications stemming from Dino-Chicken research.
Credits: Ira Pastor interview video, text, and audio.
Follow Ira Pastor on Twitter: @IraSamuelPastor
If you liked this interview, be sure to check out our interviews with Professor Dr. Frank Rühli, Director of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine and on the Medical Faculty of University of Zurich and Professor George Church!
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