Talk about indirect: to bring dino-saurs back to life, the "scientists" of "Jurassic Park" had to extract dino DNA from the amber it had been embalmed in for millions of years, augment it with frog DNA, slip it into a crocodile egg and wait for the baby beast to hatch. Raul Cano skipped the preliminaries. In the current issue of the journal Science, the California Polytechnic State University microbiologist announces that he has brought a creature entombed in amber back to life. Directly. True, it's only a bacterium, not a Ford-crunching tyranno-saur. But if Cano has done what he says— other biologists have serious doubts—it will be the first time an organism preserved in amber has ever been resurrected. It will also be the oldest organism ever revived from the state of suspended animation known as a spore. Why bother? Cano believes the bornagain bugs will produce new antibiotics. The idea is "to tap into an unexplored universe of molecular diversity" to discover new drugs, says Robin Steele of Ambergene Corp., a biotech firm that funded Cano's work.
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