The Science of Jurassic Park

By Josh Weiner

CCTP-656-01, “The Global Science Fiction Film”

Georgetown University

December 18th, 2017

INTRODUCTION

“An adventure 65 million years in the making” first hit theaters nearly 25 years ago in the summer of 1993. Jurassic Park was an overwhelming smash, grossing $900 million to become the most successful film in worldwide box office history— director Steven Spielberg’s third film, after E.T. and Jaws, to claim such a title. A generation later, its profound influence on the summer blockbuster model and the prevalence of computer-generated imagery in Hollywood cinema is undeniable.

At the heart of Jurassic Park is the essence of science fiction: a story of humans being pitted against their creations. It is the story of a theme park whose lifespan lasts no longer than a single test tour when the cloned dinosaurs on display break out and hunt down the visitors. A bioengineering start-up company named InGen (International Genetic Technologies, Inc.), which had envisioned a park full of prehistoric beasts on a Pacific island called Isla Nublar. Revolutionary though that concept was, it quickly spiraled out of control, with many clawed-up corpses to show for it.

Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel established that scenario, and it became culturally emblematic when adapted for film three years later. But does this premise have any scientific validity? And would such a scenario be worth pursuing, even if proven to be plausible? Jurassic Park continues to inspire fascination with dinosaurs, which makes the science and ethics within the story worthy of academic overview.

This essay will explore the scientific community’s formal reaction to Jurassic Park. It will consider how arguments for and against the cloning of prehistoric life have progressed since the franchise emerged in the early 1990’s. There will be three guiding questions for the essay:

1. What is the specific scientific premise established in Jurassic Park?

2. Over the years, how has the scientific community responded to the Jurassic Park premise regarding dinosaur cloning and genetic engineering?

3. What concerns should we have about the consequences of such a process?

The first question analyzes Jurassic Park’s essential scenario, a combination of sophisticated research and artistic license of Crichton’s behalf. As described early on in the story, the park’s dinosaurs were achieved when prehistoric D.N.A. was uncovered within a mosquito preserved in amber. After a period of intense laboratory work, embryos were formed out of that D.N.A. and placed into plastic eggs. As the creatures hatched, they became the first living dinosaurs on the planet in 65 million years.

The second question features an overview of the tremendous scholarship that has emerged in response to Jurassic Park. When the film was first released in 1993, critics dismissed the premise as being outside the reasonable boundaries of contemporary science. Yet over the ensuing generation, technology has improved, animal cloning has emerged, technology in general has expanded, and public curiosity with dinosaurs has endured. How have all of these advancements come to influence the debate over the academic merits of the franchise?

Finally, the third question of the essay will address what reservations we should have about cloning prehistoric life forms, even if we have indeed approached the necessary technology to do so. The Jurassic Park character who best embodies these concerns is Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician who is fiercely critical of InGen’s actions, feeling that they are doomed from the start. His first reaction, upon seeing the Tyrannosaurus Rex break out of its paddock, is “Boy, do I hate being right all the time” (Spielberg, 1993). This section will summarize Dr. Malcolm’s arguments and describe how his concerns have been echoed by real-world critics of animal cloning and de-extinction.

Another ethical dilemma to consider involves the staging of cloned animals in a for-profit theme park. The Jurassic Park franchise can be read as a broad critique of the tourism industry, most explicitly in the most recent installment, Jurassic World, in which the failed experiment of the first film is resurrected as a successful, dino-filled amusement park. What arguments have emerged against harnessing cloning technology for purposes of a popular tourist attraction?

The presence of special effects-aided dinosaurs in Jurassic Park has had profound impact on Hollywood cinema. Those same dinosaurs have similarly influenced scientific discussions over how such beasts might be achievable by means of emerging technology. The scientific background of one of science-fiction’s most prominent franchises is worthy of further scrutiny and evaluation.

LITERATURE REVIEW

 

1. What is the specific scientific premise established in Jurassic Park?

As soon as cinema became a viable means of storytelling, filmmakers became eager to bring dinosaurs to the screen. One of the very first animated films was 1914’s Gertie the Dinosaur, Windsor McCay’s technological breakthrough featuring an Apatosaurus reacting to the orders of its off-screen master. That same year, D.W. Griffith released Brute Force, one of the countless short films from his pre-Birth of a Nation career phase, featuring cavemen confronting live animals and mechanical beasts disguised to resemble dinosaurs. This is perhaps the first example of dinosaurs appearing in a live-action film.

In the years that followed, dinosaurs continued to make their way into the movies. Films like The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) told the fascinating stories of modern citizens traveling to remote corners of the earth and encountering prehistoric life. Kong’s battle with Tyrannosaurus Rex, with a helpless blonde girl screaming in terror nearby, is perhaps the most iconic scene in early cinema of dinosaurs making their mark on the silver screen.

But how did the dinosaurs get there, exactly? Most of these films offer no serious scientific explanation as to how these dinosaurs managed to survive into the present day and interact with humans. It is often assumed that dinosaur-filled terrains, such as the treacherous jungles of Skull Island in King Kong, somehow escaped the extinction event of the end of the Cretaceous period and managed to preserve its dinosaur population for another 65 million years. These creatures’ presence in the modern world was given a pass, simply because audiences were ready to acknowledge them as fantasy products, along with the giant gorilla that sometimes brawled with them.

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton’s 1990 bestseller which fast became Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster, was the first major cultural product to offer a compelling suggestion as to how dinosaurs might be brought to life in the modern era. Crichton was inspired by the advances in cloning and paleobiology of recent times, particularly the work of Berkeley professor George Poinar, Jr., who had discovered that “amber could preserve intracellular structures, such as nuclei and mitochondria, in an organism trapped inside” (Tu, 2016). Having explored genomics in many of his previous sci-fi novels, including Congo (1980) and Sphere (1987), Crichton returned to this theme more ambitiously than ever by imagining such an amber-confined organism as a pathway to dinosaur resurrection.

As described in the novel by Dr. Henry Wu, InGen’s chief geneticist, the first step in this process is to obtain dinosaur D.N.A. from fossilized sources. “Using the [fictional] Loy antibody extraction technique, we can sometimes get D.N.A. directly from dinosaur bones,” the brilliant scientist tells the park’s first visitors. “Most soluble protein is leached out during fossilization, but twenty percent of the proteins are still recoverable by grinding up the bones and using Loy’s procedure” (Crichton, 1990, p. 99).

This is an intriguing concept, and it was referenced earlier in the novel during the paleontological excavation scenes in Montana. Yet it has largely been forgotten by popular culture, since it was never mentioned in the movie and was not the main technique used in the novel, either. Wu quickly addresses the limitations of this concept: “a twenty percent yield is insufficient for our work. We need the entire dinosaur D.N.A. strand in order to clone” (p. 99).

For that, the Jurassic Park team turns to one of the franchise’s most iconic items: a block of golden amber with a mosquito trapped inside. Within this fossilized resin of prehistoric tree sap lies an insect that, as chance would have it, had consumed the blood of a dinosaur shortly before meeting its own demise on the branch of a tree. “If this insect has any foreign blood cells, we may be able to extract them, and obtain paleo-D.N.A., the D.N.A. of an extinct creature,” Dr. Wu explains (p. 99).

After extracting, replicating and testing the blood from the mosquito, the scientists’ hopes are fulfilled. Inside of InGen’s “incredibly powerful genetics factory”— featuring Hamachi-Hood automated gene sequencers and Cray XMP supercomputers— the D.N.A. is confirmed as belonging to dinosaurs (p. 101). Since much of prehistoric D.N.A. will be fragmented or incomplete, InGen’s supercomputers use restriction enzymes to identify which parts of the genetic sequence need repairing.

These gaps in the genetic code are filled with compatible reptilian, avian and amphibian D.N.A. The resulting embryos are then inserted into plastic eggs and stored in a well-monitored hatchery. This process finally gives birth to what are essentially modern-prehistoric hybrid animals, genetically programmed to resemble and act like dinosaurs.

Some final security measures are taken. First, the animals are made to be lysine-dependent, meaning that unless they are fed “a rich dietary source of exogenous lysine— supplied by us, in tablet form— they’ll go into a coma within twelve hours” and expire. Essentially, the dinosaurs are “genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world” (p. 113). Second, chromosome control procedures ensure that all of the dinosaurs in the park are female, bred in laboratories rather than in the wild, so that population sizes on the island do not get out of hand.

The creatures are then released all over the park on Isla Nublar— a fictional island of the coast of Costa Rica where Jurassic Park is located. The name “Isla Nublar,” meaning “cloud island,” conjures the same kind of mystique as King Kong’s shrouded Skull Island, another famous site of human-dinosaur interaction.

In compliance with cinema’s “show, don’t tell” rule, the film adaptation of Jurassic Park spends less time than the novel does on the specifics of how this whole genetic engineering process would work. Some of the early scenes, particularly the “Mr. D.N.A.” cartoon which the characters view at the start of the tour, touch upon the essentials.

     Twenty-five minutes into Jurassic Park, Dr. Ellie Sattler is seated in the theater with her fellow dinosaur experts, befuddled by the overload of scientific puzzles she has just encountered. “Paleo-D.N.A. from what source?” she asks aloud. “Where do you get 100 million-year-old dinosaur blood?” (Spielberg, 1993).

Her question proves to be well-timed: at that point, Mr. D.N.A. pops up on the movie screen and offers his answer. A Mesozoic-age mosquito had gotten stuck in tree sap shortly after biting a dinosaur and been preserved in amber ever since, “until Jurassic Park scientists came along,” the narrator explains. “Using sophisticated techniques, they extract the preserved blood from the mosquito and… Bingo! Dino D.N.A!” (Spielberg, 1993).

Mr. D.N.A. also addresses a concern which the audience members had voiced moments earlier: “Loy extraction [the fictional Loy antibody extraction technique referenced in the novel] has never recreated an intact D.N.A. strand, not without massive sequence gaps.” He acknowledges that the D.N.A. strands extracted from the mosquito had gained holes with age, but that the geneticists of the Jurassic Park team had successfully managed to break down the strands and locate its gaps by means of “thinkin’-machine super-computers, gene sequencers… and virtual reality displays.” Afterwards, “we use the complete D.N.A. of a frog to fill in the holes and complete the code. And now, we can make a baby dinosaur” (Spielberg, 1993).

In the next scene, the guests visit the laboratory and receive a further explanation from Dr. Henry Wu, played by B.D. Wong. Dr. Wu’s role has been considerably shrunk from the novel— he got even by being the only character from the original Jurassic Park film to reprise his role in Jurassic World (2015)— and he has also been spared the grisly death at the claws of the Velociraptors which Crichton bestowed on him. Nonetheless, he uses his limited screen time productively by furthering his guests’ understanding of how the park was achieved and maintained.

“Population control is one of our security precautions,” Dr. Wu explains as a baby Velociraptors is born in the laboratory. “There’s no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park… because all of the animals in Jurassic Park are female. We’ve engineered them that way” (Spielberg, 1993).

This outcome has been achieved in the same way it was in the book: by chromosome control. “All vertebrate embryos are inherently female anyway,” says Wu. “They just require an extra hormone given at the right developmental stage to make them male. And we simply deny them that” (Spielberg, 1993).

Dr. Malcolm immediately expresses his doubts— capping them off with his famous story-summarizing line, “life finds a way”— and eventually is proven right. Later on, after the tour has embarked and gone awry, Dr. Grant and the two kids come across dinosaur eggs in the middle of the park, revealing that the dinosaurs have found a way to breed on their own.

“Amphibian D.N.A.,” Grant remarks, and it immediately occurs to him what has happened: the scientists must have used the D.N.A. of a frog which (as some West African frogs are known to do) had the ability to “spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single-sex environment” (Spielberg, 1993). When the frog’s D.N.A. was combined with that of dinosaurs to fill in the gene sequence gaps, the frog’s capacity to switch gender must have been passed along to the dinosaurs.

This is one of many scientific miscalculations that eventually spells doom for Jurassic Park. Although the idea for the “the most advanced themed park in the entire world” was a grand one, its execution wound up being fatally flawed in many areas (Spielberg, 1993). The same can essentially be said of the science in the story: although very imaginative and adventurous, it takes many liberties for the sake of compelling science fiction which would be difficult to replicate for in a real-world setting. The next part of the essay will explore how the Jurassic Park premise, as has been outlined here, has been studied, criticized, and re-evaluated over the nearly-30 years of the franchise’s lifetime.

2. Over the years, how has the scientific community responded to the Jurassic Park premise regarding dinosaur cloning and genetic engineering?

Both the book and film were immensely successful, combining for 12 million copies sold, $900 million at the worldwide box office and three Academy Awards. Scientists joined the general public in devoting massive attention to the franchise; unlike loving audiences, they emerged with their fair share of criticisms. In the early 1990’s, when no animals had been cloned and only limited amounts of ancient D.N.A. had been uncovered, the consensus was that the premise in Jurassic Park was far more fictional than scientific.

“For anyone who’s wondering, given the current state of technology, the situation postulated in Jurassic Park cannot happen,” film critic James Berardinelli wrote in his review. “Not only do the necessary cloning techniques not exist, but the likelihood of retrieving dinosaur DNA from an amber-encased prehistoric mosquito is extremely small. While insect specimens have been unearthed, for there to be dinosaur DNA, circumstances demand that the mosquito had bitten a dinosaur shortly before its fatal imprisonment, and the chance of that is slim, at best” (1993).

Professional scientists could outline such factual shortcomings with even greater precision. The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World: Or, How to Build a Dinosaur, written by zoologist Rob DeSalle and physicist David Lindley, declares: “Wu’s explanation of how he and his colleagues assembled a dinosaur genome, though it has some plausible elements, is ultimately highly implausible” (p. 68).

According to this book, the problems with the Jurassic Park premise begin as soon as the mosquito is discovered in the amber mines of the Dominican Republic at the start of the film. All of the amber found in that country, or anywhere in Central America, has been 35 million years old at best, well short of the 65 million-year minimum required for an overlap with the age of the dinosaurs. Even if a sufficiently old block of amber containing a well-preserved insect were to be discovered elsewhere, the extraction process Jurassic Park describes would be quite precarious and likely contaminate the D.N.A. Were this extraction to be successful, by some profound stroke of luck, the difficulties would only just be starting.

Prospecting for dinosaur D.N.A. would be a very tedious process. The naked eye has no way of knowing whether an entombed mosquito contains dinosaur blood, and powerful computers would similarly have great difficulty in determining whether such blood features usable segments of dinosaur D.N.A. The latter part of the process would require a series of sophisticated P.C.R. (polymerase chain reaction) experiments, and “you’d have to set up an awful lot of P.C.R. experiments before you found even a single fragment of dinosaur D.N.A.” (p. 49).

Even if scientists were to discover such D.N.A. fragments, long as the odds of doing so may be, there would still be many obstacles to overcome until the “Bingo! Dino D.N.A!” moment could arrive. In between biting a dinosaur and landing in tree sap, the mosquito would have likely digested enough of the blood to make the remnants unusable. Even the D.N.A. molecules that survived this digestion would likely have decayed over the millions of ensuing years. DeSalle and Lindley are also highly dubious of Crichton’s assertion that the leftover fragments of dinosaur D.N.A. could be salvaged if combined with the complete D.N.A. of a frog.

Overall, the conclusion of The Science of Jurassic Park is that its title is a misnomer. “The idea of extracting dinosaur DNA from an amber-trapped insect is a huge step beyond what any scientist has currently achieved and doesn’t claim like a strategy you could rely on,” the authors explain (p. 42). “It’s easy to have clever ideas, but it’s rare to have clever ideas that actually work” (p. 43).

That conclusion seems to be the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community: cloned dinosaurs are one of many products of science fiction, along with time travel and intelligent life on Mars, which stand little to no chance of becoming a reality. “In the wake of the 1993 Jurassic Park film, scientists who have anything– or even nothing– to do with paleontology or molecular biology are almost always asked the same question: ‘Can we resurrect a dinosaur?’” as PhD student Elizabeth Jones has summarized. “The answer is always an emphatic no” (2015).

However, advancements in cloning technology have kept Jurassic Park hopefuls alive. A mere three years after the film’s release, Dolly the Sheep became the first animal cloned from an adult somatic cell, independent of the usual fertilization process. Dolly excited the world about what new forms of cloning might be achieved next. One eventual breakthrough was the first cloning of an extinct animal in 2009— a Pyrenean ibex, which had expired nine years earlier. Although Dolly, the ibex, and many clone experiments wound up living short lives— suggesting that self-sustaining populations of cloned animals, even common ones, of the sort seen in Jurassic Park remain unachievable—  cloning has developed enough to keep the Jurassic Park debate from fading entirely.

Along with cloning technology, D.N.A. research continues to develop. Shortly after Jurassic Park was released in theaters, molecular biologist Scott Woodward “reported the recovery of D.N.A. from eighty-eight-million-year-old fragments of dinosaur bone found in a Utah cave mine” (Horner & Gorman, 2010, p. 88). These D.N.A. fragments were collected and identified via the P.C.R. technique, the same one employed in the laboratories of Jurassic Park.

Although sizable quantities of dinosaur D.N.A. have yet to be collected, “other kinds of molecular and cellular preservation have been reported in fossils, including blood cells, skin cells and the original cellular components of feathers and muscles” (Hunt, 2016). “Whole genomes — both nuclear and mitochondrial ‘ancient-D.N.A.’ — have been shotgun-sequenced and reassembled from eight extinct species so far,” writes scientist Stuart Bland (2014). Well-preserved dinosaur body parts have also been uncovered, including “the tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur entombed in amber” in northern Myanmar and “evidence of blood cells with the protein intact in eight [75 million-year-old dinosaur] fossils” (Zhang, 2015). Perhaps science might in fact be inching closer to the technology and biological material that could make Jurassic Park a reality.

When Jurassic Park was re-released in theaters in 2013 in honor of its 20th anniversary— allowing the film to gross another $100 million and pushing its overall total past $1 billion— new scholarship on the film surfaced. An article from The Washington Post traced the ways in which the science of the franchise was now outdated: scientists now suspected that many dinosaurs were smaller and more feathered than their onscreen incarnations had been, and that Spielberg’s fearsome hunter, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, had in all likelihood merely been a scavenger of the Cretaceous period.

Most disappointingly for fans, The Washington Post announced that experts had recently declared the premise of Jurassic Park to be scientifically inconceivable. Researchers in Australia had discovered a brand new way to measure D.N.A.’s “half-life”; a method similar to that which is used to determine the age of metallic substances and the Earth’s crust might now be applied to D.N.A. This research team had used this technique to measure determine the age of several moa bones they had discovered, and estimated that the molecules of any D.N.A. strand, from no matter what species, would likely decay in 6-7 million years at most.

Dinosaurs, meanwhile, went extinct 65 million years ago. Even if a mosquito that had bitten a dinosaur were to be discovered perfectly preserved, as seen in Jurassic Park, all of the D.N.A. inside of the insect would have decayed tens of millions of years before human scientists could have come along.

Yet the same article applauded Jurassic Park for correctly forecasting the advances humans would make in animal cloning technology. Dolly the Sheep, the first cloned adult animal, and Noah the guar ox, the first cloned endangered species, both had been created within a decade of Jurassic Park’s release. There was also some good news for fans: if a mosquito were to be found with the D.N.A. of a more recently-expired creature, such as the saber-toothed tiger or a woolly mammoth, perhaps “Ice Age Park” could be achieved in lieu of “Jurassic Park.” The Washington Post supports this idea: “current or near-current science could repair the fragmented genetic material of mammoths using elephant templates and then implant an embryo in an elephant womb” (Dhar, 2013).

According to evolutionary biologist Hendrik Poinar— son of George Poinar, Jr., the scientist whose research inspired Michael Crichton’s original novel— such technology will likely emerge within 10 to 50 years. “We’re closer and closer than we ever expected to be,” he said. “People with enough money will absolutely do it” (Dhar, 2013).

Maddie Stone, a PhD candidate in Environmental Science from the University of Pennsylvania, agreed with this perspective. “Thanks to incredible advances in genomics and synthetic biology,” she wrote for Gizmodo, we now have a credible chance of giving many extinct animals, including woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, Chinese river dolphins, and perhaps dinosaurs themselves, a second chance in the evolutionary cycle (2015).

Some of the most convincing insight on this matter comes from Jack Horner, the paleontologist who served as the technical advisor for all of the films and was a partial inspiration for the character of Dr. Alan Grant. A dinosaur expert, Horner has frequently commented on the scientific validity of Jurassic, from the physical representation and behavior of the creatures to the resurrection techniques the film portrays.

In his book How to Build a Dinosaur, co-authored with James Gorman, Horner caps off this commentary by saying that he believes that dinosaurs might in fact be able to be recreated, albeit not in the manner seen onscreen. Horner believes that the route to real-life dinosaurs lies not in paleo-D.N.A. extraction but by genetically altering the embryo of a chicken, the animal which he considers to be dinosaurs’ closest living relative.

“We don’t have to give the embryos new genes, just adjust the growth factors and other chemicals that direct development,” he writes. “If we learn enough, this will give us enormous insight into the fundamentals of biology, development and evolution. It will also be the first step in growing a dinosaur” (2009, p. 191). Horner’s detailed analysis of what he calls “reverse evolution” — tampering with embryos so that they develop untraditional sets of physical features— has convinced him that “we can start with a chicken embryo and hatch out something that looks like a nonavian dinosaur” (p. 192)

Although not much seems to have surfaced from this idea in the eight years since How to Build a Dinosaur was first published in 2009, clearly much progress has been made in the scientific fields related to Jurassic Park. An article from The Conversation credits the franchise with some of this progress, claiming that many biologists and paleontologists seek to capitalize on Jurassic Park’s massive popularity by publically pursuing projects relevant to the franchise.

Elizabeth Jones says that this much was made clear in 1993, when “a team of researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from a 125-130m-year-old ancient weevil in Lebanese amber” and published their findings right as the first movie came out (2015). Also that year, the National Science Foundation granted Horner a massive grant for a proposed project to investigate DNA from dinosaurs. “To some extent, Jurassic Park did actually drive and develop the science and technology of ancient D.N.A. research” (2015).

In conclusion, the technology needed to bring dinosaurs back to life is still not here, and maybe never will be. However, technology has certainly come a long way since the early ‘90s, when no living animal had ever been recreated out of raw D.N.A. Jurassic Park, easily the most famous story of animal cloning in all of popular culture, has arguably played a significant role in buoying the public’s enthusiasm for animal cloning and inspiring the corresponding scientific research.

3. What concerns should we have about the consequences of such a process?

While the technology to recreate dinosaurs is still not here, there now exist sophisticated methods of animal cloning and genetic engineering. Those methods may never result in the rebirth of dinosaurs, but they do seem to be on the verge of achieving plausible “de-extinction” methods of other life forms.

In Michael Crichton’s novel, the character who best embodies the skepticism over such technology is Dr. Ian Malcolm, “a mathematician specializing in chaos theory” (Crichton, p. 245). As described by John Arnold, InGen’s chief engineer, “chaos theory describes nonlinear systems. It’s now become… very trendy to apply it to any complex system where there might be unpredictability” (p. 245).

Given Malcolm’s background in “[using] computers to model the behavior of complex systems,” he was hired by InGen to model the system at Jurassic Park electronically (p. 245).

Malcolm expresses strong disapproval for InGen’s violation of natural laws, as well as the company’s arrogance in believing they could safely control their cloned products. The company failed to recognize the “unpredictability of complex systems” which Malcolm describes.

“I always maintained that this island would be unworkable,” the self-declared “chaos theoretician” explains in his first scene in the novel. “I trust by now that we all know what the eventual outcome is going to be. You’re going to have to shut the thing down” (p. 73). John Hammond refuses, ultimately condemning many characters to violent deaths, but Malcolm refuses to abandon his position.

His statements would make today’s critics of de-extinction proud: “There is a problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen” (Crichton, p. 76) and “you know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct” (Crichton, p. 189). After chaos erupts within the park, Malcolm’s tone shifts from “I’m warning you” to “I told you so”: “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something” (p. 284).

In the 1993 film, Jeff Goldblum’s portrayal of Dr. Malcolm is faithful to the original source, and many of criticisms of InGen’s “lack of humility before nature” are preserved from the text of the novel. “What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world,” he tells Hammond candidly, after the latter had dismissed his worries as “a load of fashionable number-crunching” in a previous scene. “Your scientists were so preoccupied about whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” (Spielberg, 1993).

Malcolm’s train of thought has its real-world predecessors. According to The Guardian, “chaos theory rose to prominence as a branch of mathematics in the late ‘80s,” right when Crichton was writing Jurassic Park (Oltermann, 2015). In the afterword of the novel, Crichton writes that “the work of the late Heinz Pagels inspired Dr. Malcolm” and that “some discussions of chaos theory derive in part from the commentaries of Ivar Ekeland and James Gleick” (p. 400). As scientific talk has matured and the concepts of “de-extinction” has become more plausible, other experts have joined in expressing concerns of their own.

In How to Build a Dinosaur, Jack Horner recognizes that his aspired projects “will outrage some people as a sacrilegious attempt to interfere with life, and be scoffed at by others as impossible, and by others as more showmanship than science” (p. 15). Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University takes these criticisms further. Not only would re-introducing extinct species into nature disrupt modern ecosystems— how exactly would herds of woolly mammoths or flocks of passenger pigeons respond to today’s natural world? — but the time and money it would take to bring these species back to life are better spent elsewhere.

Ehrlich is fully dismissive of this vision he describes as “Jurassic Park in reality, bringing vanished animals back to life, made possible by spectacular progress in molecular biology.” Even if effective de-extinction were possible, the entire concept would still be “a misallocation of resources” that could have otherwise gone towards far more pressing environmental efforts (2014).

“It is much more sensible to put all the limited resources for science and conservation into preventing extinctions, by tackling the causes of demise: habitat destruction, climate disruption, pollution, overharvesting, and so on,” the Stanford biology professor writes. “If people begin to take a Jurassic Park future seriously, they will do even less to stem the building sixth great mass extinction event” (2014). Bringing species back from extinction— especially ones that could uproot today’s ecosystems as badly as dinosaurs likely would— is described here as a needless and counterproductive enterprise, both for the natural world and the scientific community.

Further ethical concerns would arise if such animals were to be placed in zoos and theme parks, as seen in Jurassic Park. This element of the storyline can be read as a critique of the tourism industry, as it presents a world in which scientific research is a slave to consumerism and the science that matters most is “the most profitable way to exploit the new D.N.A. technology” (Frost, p. 226).

If dinosaurs were somehow to be recreated, they would almost certainly be bred as zoo specimens. Ancient animals of such massive diets, including carnivores such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and herbivores like Stegosaurus and Triceratops, could not conceivably be introduced into modern ecosystems without causing massive chaos. Moreover, these creatures would be so monstrously expensive to clone and recreate that gathering them into a theme park would surely be one of the very few ways to break even.

While the original Jurassic Park hinted at this reasoning, Jurassic World (2015) carries it further. The fourth and most recent entry in the franchise— until Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) comes out next summer— imagines Isla Nublar as the home of the successful dino-park which InGen had originally envisioned.

No matter how profitable such a park may be, reviving extinct creatures as part of a massive commercial operation entails ethical uncertainties. In its review of Jurassic World, Variety compares this moral bankruptcy to that of the gladiator fights of Ancient Rome. “Two thousand years after the Roman arena shows, we’re still throwing slaves to the lions, only now the slaves are feckless consumers, and the lions are bigger, louder, with way more teeth” (Debruge, 2015).

Of course, this logic becomes validated after the park introduces its new genetically-engineered creation, the Indominus Rex. Once that T-Rex-on-steroids breaks outs, Dr. Malcolm’s chaos theory is brought to raging life as an entire island full of tourist becomes chased down by ravenous prehistoric creatures.

All of this is not to say that de-extinction should be automatically cast off as a greedy, purposeless, corporate enterprise. Several scientists argue that “some of the methods they’re honing through de-extinction efforts, including cloning and infusing cell lines with gene diversity, might be co-opted to help restore genetically impoverished populations” (Stone, 2015).

Science writer Stewart Brand has challenged Dr. Ehrlich’s ideas, arguing that reviving extinct species could indeed be beneficial for modern ecosystems and erase some of the guilt that humankind has had to carry since eliminating a number of such populations. “It’s a goal worth pursuing, with real benefits for conservation and our sense of the natural world,” he says (2014).

The debates over the likelihood and ethics of de-extinction will continue. But the

community’s ongoing discussions over the ethics and practicality of reviving species from extinction and introducing them into the wild— all while making a lucrative profit in the process— are important to the scientific implications of the Jurassic Park franchise.

CONCLUSION

“‘Jurassic Park’ is a cautionary tale. We stand on the shoulders of giants to create the next great thing, and yet we take no responsibilities for our own creations. But it’s an old, time-worn science fiction story. It’s what brought Godzilla up from the depths: you mess with atomic energy, you get Godzilla.”

· Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg (2017)

In terms of recreating dinosaurs out of D.N.A. extracted from an amber-preserved mosquito, the premise of Jurassic Park seems to have been conclusively disproved. But other forms of science that appear across the franchise— including de-extinction and genetically rebuilding life forms out of recovered biological material— are very much alive and constitute some of the most exciting current advancements within contemporary technology.

The end results of such progress may never quite measure up to what Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg envisioned in their ultra-popular works. Nevertheless, Jurassic Park can be credited with fueling the public’s undying fascination with dinosaurs, as well as a solid amount of the research which stems from the premise of the iconic franchise. While it may not be wise, or even possible, to bring prehistoric life forms back from the dead, the influence of Jurassic Park on science, cinema and popular culture is in no risk of extinction.

BIBLIOGRPAHY

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