There are many comparisons that can be made between Jurassic Park, a fictionist book about present day dinosaurs living on earth, and The Human Genome Project, a genetic project that consists of the cloning of people and animals. Throughout history there have been many concerns about cloning and the way it would affect society. About 65 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth. What would happen if scientists were able to recreate living, breathing monsters such as these? There would be calamity and destruction virtually everywhere. The Human Genome Project could achieve this with the help of blood samples and DNA. .
Initially, the Human Genome Project was created about fifteen years ago, in 1989. James Watson was asked to head this remarkable project. The Human Genome Project is expected to have major impacts on the diagnosis and prevention of treatment of more common illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, which often have a genetic component. "I think that many major diseases will be understood when we can get their genetic basis," Watson has said (Yount 53). "The goal of this project, which is expected to cost $3 billion, is to work out the base sequence of every gene in the genome, or complete genetic makeup, of human beings" (Yount 53). The Human Genome Project is sometimes called "biology's moon shot" (Yount 53). .
Sir Richard Owen invented the name dinosaur, meaning "fearfully great lizard," in 1842 (www.cooldinos.com). In Greek, deinos means "fearfully great" and saurus means "lizard" (www.cooldinos.com). Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, probably due to the effects of an asteroid that hit land off the Yucatan Peninsula. There are many theories as to why this extinction occurred, but the most popular theory, proposed in 1980 by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, state that there was indeed an asteroid impact (www.cooldinos.com). The theory states that an asteroid, 4-9 miles in diameter, hit earth about 65 million years ago.
