Antoine Boutros - Ninety-five million years ago, two flies were flying above the surface of a wide lake that later became the American State of New Jersey. They landed on the trunk of a tree most probably to rest or eat. Unfortunately, the tree’s bark was full of fissures out of which sap was flowing, making its trunk a deadly trap to each insect unfortunately landing in that place.

Gradually, the sap flowed over the flies and covered them until it formed a transparent wall that completely isolated them from the outside world and soon solidified. Although the tree eroded over time, the fossilized sap has resisted the forces of nature and transformed over time to a yellow transparent semi-precious stone known as amber.

These two flies came to light again following the work of paleontologists and an ​​exciting idea came to their minds: the idea of bringing them to life again.

Bacteria inside the two flies may still be intact though solid and chemically active. Remnants of their last meal, perhaps containing traces of the blood and skin of a dinosaur who was the lord of the land millions of years ago in the Jurassic period, may appear. This may provide scientists with the internal remains of this animal and specially DNA Cells belonging to dinosaurs, which can be extracted from the bowels of these two flies, may be a cornerstone in the process of reviving the complete dinosaur. What is required is to obtain the code, which contains all the information concerning the cell’s transformation from a micro-organism to a complete organism with various functions, body parts and specifications. Fortunately, this code and information are stored within each cell, which makes the inside of every individual similar to a complex computer data base.

Living beings especially humans are the most complex information processing system. Whether conscious (like language and communication) or unconscious (hormonal systems), human activity amounts to processing up to 1024 bits per day. This staggeringly large figure exceeds, by a million times, the sum of all human knowledge accumulated during the evolution of human civilizations that lasted thousands of years.

The penetration of scientists into the depths of life led them to an important discovery: the laws of life and growth that seemed mysterious and incomprehensible are based on a mechanism founded on clear, well-defined and carefully gathered information and instructions. These instructions are inside each living cell and act as an action program dictating the work of each cell while at the same time ensuring the dissemination of these instructions in the offspring and dictating an individual’s life in terms of health and development, disease and aging, the beginning and end.  Perhaps the most important progress made in biology in the twentieth century was the discovery of the Genome, the human genetic code. Furthermore, some scientists, like Richard Dawkins, believe that all forms of life are in fact nothing but containers whose first and foremost goal is to secure the transmission of the DNA molecule that carries the secret of life, one generation after the other, and from century to century... until the end, therefore making the information not just a new capital or complementary resource to the natural one, but much more: a cornerstone of existence along with material and energy.

In March 1982, an exciting scientific discovery was made by two specialists in insects in Berkeley in the United States, Georges Poinar and Roberta Hess, who were studying insects preserved in amber using an electron microscope. They discovered cell elements stored in the amber such as the nucleus,   ribosomes (centers for protein synthesis in the cell) and chromosomes.

The importance of this discovery is that the cell nucleus is not only a center of business and management control of all vital events in the cell, but also the key to heredity. Therefore, they store the genetic material and instructions, i.e. all information and programs needed to build a new organism as a whole.

A final word as to the importance of information in human evolution: Dawkins says that the DNA has an aim in life which is continuity, the continuity and transition from one generation to another. To ensure its survival, the DNA may move from humans as a container to another suitable container, in order to ensure its well being and evolution.  The celebrated scientist Maynard Smith believes that DNA works within the framework of the so-called “evolutionary stable strategy.”