Question: Can you create a new animal

Robert Lees answered on 12 Nov 2015:

Hi Henrietta,

Creating a new species of animal is extremely difficult, because you need to change the DNA – the code which instructs your cells what to do, how to do it, when to do it and more! The code is very complicated, small changes have been made frequently over millions and millions of years for each animal – evolution! The code is different for each animal, some more different than others, if we tried to make a change, we probably wouldn’t understand the code well enough. But biologists are trying to work out how the code works, as we speak, and if we knew exactly how it worked, we could make new animals as we wished without having to worry about whether or not it would survive a single day!

Some people are starting really small, by just trying to create a new single-celled organism that has only the basics for life, we can’t even do that yet! One of them is Craig Venter – look him up, he’s a very interesting person 🙂