San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune
June 10, 1993

DNA Rocket to Stardom
Poly pair are media darlings thanks to "Jurassic Park"

By Jan Greene
The phone rang and Raul Cano stopped the conversation for the umpteenth time to pick it up. It was The New York Times, telling the Cal Poly professor he'd be on their front page today.

It was like that all day Wednesday for Cano, a molecular biologist, and his graduate student research partner, Hendrik Poinar.

That's because the unassuming pair from an unassuming teaching school have found the oldest known DNA in the world, in an ancient weevil encased in hardened tree sap, called amber. The weevil is believed to be 120 million to 135 million years old - it lived when the dinosaurs did.

Besides doing what no other research team in the world has been able to do - successfully extract DNA from anything that old - the researchers showed great timing. Publication of their paper today in the science journal Nature happens to coincide with the opening of the new movie "Jurassic Park."

That film from a novel by Michael Crichton, is based on the idea that geneticists could create whole new, living dinosaurs using ancient DNA from a dinosaur's blood found in the stomach of an ancient mosquito.

Crichton credited his whole thesis to George Poinar, Hendrik's father, who is a researcher at UC Berkeley. He's the one who goes around the world collecting ancient insect specimens encased in amber. A couple of years go his son Hendrik took a class from Cano and they talked afterward about playing with the idea of finding DNA in those well-preserved bug bodies.

Their accomplishment so far is astounding. It's highly unusual for a Cal Poly researcher to get a paper published by Nature, considered the leading natural science journal in the world.

And next week, young Hendrik will have his own paper published in Nature - something almost unheard of for a graduate student, particularly one at a university not known for its graduate-level research.

What's also amazing about Cano and Poinar is that they did it with practically no money and little in the way of special, expensive equipment. That's in contrast to their biggest competitor, a team in New York that's got a big lab and a multimillion dollar budget - but no dinosaur-age DNA.

So how did they outsmart the big boys?

Basically, by spending a lot of time in the lab. A lot of time.

"Lord knows I've been here weeks and weeks at a time," said Poinar, looking around at the small laboratory in Cal Poly's Fisher Science Hall.

Actually, it's all happened pretty fast. In mid-1992, after several months' work, the two were able to extract intact DNA from a 40-million-year-old bee, the oldest found at that time. They published their results in a smaller British journal, creating some attention in the scientific world but not making a lot of waves in the mainstream press.

"Everyone believed that DNA should depurinate after 4 million years," Poinar said. But in amber, there is no light, moisture or air to make the animal tissue and its genetic coding break down, so they were able to do something ground-breaking.

Once they figured out hw to crack open the amber, get a good sample and identify the DNA they decided to try to find it in an older specimen.

They got a piece of amber from George Poinar containing an ancient weevil. The sample was already cracked, which ended up helping them through the chancy process of freezing and breaking open the hardened amber without wrecking the prehistoric insect inside.

"This was a serendipitous event," said Cano. "We got lucky."

Actually, the Cuban-born professor was on vacation in Spain "sipping manzanilla" while Poinar sweated over the amber piece.

"The fax lines were burning up during that time," Poinar said with a laugh.

Once they were able to extract the sample and sequence, or read, the DNA, they had to do it all over again three or four times to prove to the scientific world it could be done.

As they worked over the past year, they put up a sign calling themselves the Ancient DNA Research Lab and brought in a few more undergraduate students to help.

"The ancient DNA group is seven dogs, a cat and three scientists," joked Cano, prompting a good-natured poke in the ribs from his young collaborator.

Cano sees this kind of work as a way to motivate students.

"This is meaningful and generates a lot of excitement among students," he said. "I want to put them smack in the middle of science."

The student help was also crucial because they had such a small budget - basically, none.

While Cal Poly top brass have given moral support to the researchers, Cano said, there's been little in the way of money sent their way. He's applied for outside grants from the National Science Foundation.

Also, in his "spare time" Cano continues doing his bread-and-butter research work for the dairy science industry on the side to keep the lab going.

Actually, the lack of money gives them some measure of freedom, Cano said.

"We are broke anyway so we don't have to justify our existence," he said.

Still, money for labor-saving laboratory equipment would help.

Poinar is even raffling off a $700 piece of amber containing an ancient bug at tonight's San Luis Obispo premier of "Jurassic Park." The proceeds will help keep a student or two working over the summer, he said.

They hope the massive publicity from the new Nature article and "Jurassic Park' will draw more money for their efforts.

Meanwhile, the researchers have produced several more papers and are continuing their work at a feverish pace to actually find dinosaur DNA itself.

Still, they don't believe that cloning dinosaurs like the geneticists do in "Jurassic Park" is ever going to be possible. That's because they only get partial DNA, giving them only a part of the message about a specimen's sex, height, weight, color and everything else about it.

For Cano, the dinosaur search "has romantic appeal," but isn't the ultimate reason he pursuing DNA research.

"We hope to use our skills to study the evolution of parasites," the long-time Poly professor said. He'd like to find new genetic ways to fight diseases such as malaria that are carried by parasites.

Poinar has similar motivations. While the dinosaur-related work has been interesting, he'd ultimately like to work in gene therapy, manipulating DNA t fight disease.

He's also been nominated by the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution for a top national honor for graduate students - to him, "the same thing as the Nobel prize."

Poinar, young enough to still be idealistic about his chosen profession, was disappointed by the lack of ethical scientific standards in the movie version of "Jurassic Park." The pair were invited to San Francisco earlier this week to see a press preview of the film.

While Cano called the special effects in the film "awesome," Poinar said the science in it is "not remarkable."

He was bothered by an inaccurate drawing of DNA as well as the lack of ethics displayed by scientists in the film.

"They're creating dinosaurs and say, "I can choose the second and these other traits,'" Poinar said indignantly, "but they never stop and question whether they should. They just go ahead and do it."

Poinar has also been surprised how many people believed that the book and movie were plausible.

"It's clear science education in this country is lacking," he said.