here by many different groups is signaling a possible transition from biological evolution to biology by design.
One of the interesting twists to come out of this research is that scientists are developing the ability to “watermark” their creations by embedding genetic identity codes. As research here progresses, future generations may be able to pinpoint precisely who designed the plants and animals around them, and even parts of their own bodies, including when and where they were designed. This does, of course, raise some rather knotty ethical questions around ownership. If you one day have a JCVI-tagged dog, or a JCVI-watermarked replacement kidney, for instance, who owns them?
This research is pushing us into ethical questions that we’ve never had to face before. But it’s being justified by the tremendous benefits it could bring for current and future generations. These touch on everything from bio-based chemicals production to new medical treatments and ways to stay healthier longer, and even designer organs and body-part replacements at some point. It’s also being driven by our near-insatiable curiosity and our drive to better understand the world we live in and gain mastery over it. And here, just like the scientists in Jurassic Park, we’re deeply caught up in what we can do as we learn to code and recode life.
But, just because we can now resurrect and redesign species, should we?
Could We, Should We?
Perhaps one of the most famous lines from Jurassic Park—at least for people obsessed with the dark side of science—is when Ian Malcolm berates Hammond, saying, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Ethics and responsibility in science are complicated. I’ve met remarkably few scientists and engineers who would consider themselves to be unethical or irresponsible. That said, I know plenty of scientists who are so engaged with their work and the amazing things they believe it’ll lead to that they sometimes struggle to appreciate the broader context within which they operate.
The challenges surrounding ethical and responsible research are deeply pertinent to de-extinction. A couple of decades ago, they were largely academic. The imaginations of scientists, back when Jurassic Park hit the screen, far outstripped the techniques they had access to at the time. Things are very different now, though, as research on woolly mammoths and other extinct species is showing. In a very real way, we’re entering a world that very much echoes the “can-do” culture of Hammond’s Jurassic Park, where scientists are increasingly able to do what was once unimaginable. In such a world, where do the lines between “could” and “should” lie, and how do scientists, engineers, and others develop the understanding and ability to do what is socially responsible, while avoiding what is not?
Of course, this is not a new question. The tensions between technological advances and social impacts were glaringly apparent through the Industrial Revolution, as mechanization led to job losses and hardship for some. And the invention of the atomic bomb, followed by its use on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the second World War, took us into deeply uncharted territory when it came to balancing what we can and should do with powerful technologies. Yet, in some ways, the challenges we’ve faced in the past over the responsible development and use of science and technology were just a rehearsal for what’s coming down the pike, as we enter a new age of technological innovation.
For all its scientific inaccuracies and fantastical scenarios, Jurassic Park does a good job of illuminating the challenges of unintended consequences arising from somewhat naïve and myopic science. Take InGen’s scientists, for instance. They’re portrayed as being so enamored with what they’ve achieved that they lack the ability to see beyond their own brilliance to what they might have missed.13 Of course, they’re not fools. They know that they’re breaking new ground by bringing dinosaurs back to life, and that there are going to be risks. It would be problematic, for instance, if any of the dinosaurs escaped the island and survived, and they recognize this. So the scientists design them to be dependent on a substance it was thought they couldn’t get enough of naturally, the essential amino acid lysine. This was the so-called “lysine contingency,” and, as it turns out, it isn’t too dissimilar from techniques real-world genetic engineers use to control their progeny.
Even though it’s essential to life, lysine isn’t synthesized naturally by animals. As a result, it has to be ingested, either in its raw form or by eating foods that contain it, including plants or bacteria (and their products) that produce it naturally, for instance, or other animals. In their wisdom, InGen’s scientists assume that they can engineer lysine dependency into their dinosaurs, then keep them alive with a diet rich in the substance, thinking that they wouldn’t be able to get enough lysine if they escaped. The trouble is, this contingency turns out to be about as useful as trying to starve someone by locking them in a grocery store.
There’s a pretty high chance that the movie’s scriptwriters didn’t know that this safety feature wouldn’t work, or that they didn’t care. Either way, it’s a salutary tale of scientists who are trying to be responsible—at least their version of “responsible”—but are tripped up by what they don’t know, and what they don’t care to find out.
In the movie, not much is made of the lysine contingency, unlike in Michael Crichton’s book that the movie’s based on, where this basic oversight leads to the eventual escape of the dinosaurs from the island and onto the mainland. There is another oversight, though, that features strongly in the movie, and is a second strike against the short-sightedness of the scientists involved. This is the assumption that InGen’s dinosaurs couldn’t breed.
This is another part of the storyline where scientific plausibility isn’t allowed to stand in the way of a good story. But, as with the lysine, it flags the dangers of thinking you’re smart enough to have every eventuality covered. In the movie, InGen’s scientists design all of their dinosaurs to be females. Their thinking: no males, no breeding, no babies, no problem. Apart from one small issue: When stitching together their fragments of dinosaur DNA with that of living species, they filled some of the holes with frog DNA.
This is where we need to suspend scientific skepticism somewhat, as designing a functional genome isn’t as straightforward as cutting and pasting from one animal to another. In fact, this is so far from how things work that it would be like an architect, on losing a few pages from the plans of a multi-million dollar skyscraper, slipping in a few random pages from a cookie-cutter duplex and hoping for the best. The result would be a disaster. But stick with the story for the moment, because in the world of Jurassic Park, this naïve mistake led to a tipping point that the scientists didn’t anticipate. Just as some species of frog can switch from female to male with the right environmental stimuli, the DNA borrowed from frogs inadvertently gave the dinosaurs the same ability. And this brings us back to the real world, or at least the near-real world, of de-extinction. As scientists and others begin to recreate extinct species, or redesign animals based on long-gone relatives, how do we ensure that, in their cleverness, they’re not missing something important?
Some of this comes down to what responsible science means, which, as we’ll discover in later chapters, is about more than just having good intentions. It also means having the humility to recognize your limitations, and the willingness to listen to and work with others who bring different types of expertise and knowledge to the table.
This possibility of unanticipated outcomes shines a bright spotlight on the question of whether some lines of research or technological development should be pursued, even if they could. Jurassic Park explores this through genetic engineering and de-extinction, but the same questions apply to many other areas of technological advancement, where new knowledge has the potential to have a substantial impact on society. And the more complex the science and technology we begin to play with is, the more pressing this distinction between “could” and “should” becomes.
Unfortunately, there are no easy guidelines
