mini-break to his latest and greatest masterpiece, just off the coast of Costa Rica.
We quickly learn that, beneath the charm, Hammond is fighting for the future of his company and his dream of building the ultimate tourist attraction. There’s been an unfortunate incident between a worker and one of his park’s exhibits, and his investors are getting cold feet. What he needs is a couple of respected scientists to give him their full and unqualified stamp of approval, which he’s sure they will, once they see the wonders of his “Jurassic Park.”
Grant and Sattler agree to the jaunt, in part because their curiosity has been piqued. They join Hammond, along with self-styled “chaotician” Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), on what turns out to be a rather gruesome roller-coaster ride of a weekend.
From the get-go, we know that this is not going to end well. Malcolm, apart from having all the best lines in the movie, is rather enamored with his theories about chaos. These draw heavily on ideas that were gaining popularity in the 1980s, when Crichton was writing the novel the movie’s based on. Malcolm’s big idea—and the one he was riding the celebrity-scientist fame train on—is that in highly complex systems, things inevitably go wrong. And just as predicted, Hammond’s Jurassic Park undergoes a magnificently catastrophic failure.
The secret behind Hammond’s park is InGen’s technology for “resurrecting” long-extinct dinosaurs. Using cutting-edge gene-editing techniques, his scientists are able to reconstruct dinosaurs from recovered “dino DNA.” His source for the dino DNA is the remnants of prehistoric blood that was sucked up by mosquitoes before they were caught in tree resin and preserved in the resulting amber as the resin was fossilized.5 And his grand plan is to turn the fictitious island of Isla Nublar into the world’s first living dinosaur theme park.
Unfortunately, there were a few holes in the genetic sequences that InGen was able to extract from the preserved blood, so Hammond’s enterprising scientists filled them with bits and pieces of DNA from living species. They also engineered their dinosaurs to be all females to prevent them from breeding. And just to be on the safe side, the de-extinct dinosaurs were designed to slip into a coma and die if they weren’t fed a regular supply of the essential amino acid lysine.6
The result is a bunch of enterprising scientists reengineering nature to create the ultimate theme park and thinking they’ve put all the safeguards they need in place to prevent something bad happening. Yet, despite their best efforts, the dinosaurs start breeding and multiplying, a compromised security system (and security specialist) allows them to escape, and they start eating the guests.
Even before the team of experts get to Jurassic Park, a disgruntled employee (Dennis Nedry, played by Wayne Knight) has planned to steal and sell a number of dinosaur embryos to a competitor. Nedry is the brains behind the park’s software control systems and believes he’s owed way more respect and money than he gets. At an opportune moment, he disrupts the park with what he intends to be a temporary glitch that will allow him to steal the embryos, get them off the island, and return to his station before anyone notices. Unfortunately, an incoming hurricane7 interferes with his plans, resulting in catastrophic failure of the park’s security systems and a bunch of hungry dinosaurs roaming free. To make things worse, two of the guests are Hammond’s young nephew and niece, who find their trip to the theme park transformed into a life-and-death race against a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex and a pack of vengeful velociraptors.
Fortunately, Sattler and Grant come into their own as paleontologists-cum-action-heroes. They help save a handful of remaining survivors, including Hammond, Malcolm, and his nephew and niece, but not before a number of less fortunate characters have given their lives in the name of science gone badly wrong. And as they leave the island, we are left in no doubt that nature, in all its majesty, has truly trounced the ambitions of Hammond and his team of genetic engineers.
Jurassic Park is a wonderful Hollywood tale of derring-do. In fact, it stands the test of time remarkably well as an adventure movie. It also touches on themes that are, if anything, more important today than they were back when it was made.
In 1993, when Jurassic Park was released, the idea of bringing extinct species back from the dead was pure science fiction. Back then, advances in understanding DNA were fueling the fantasy that, one day, we might be able to recode genetic sequences to replicate species that are no longer around, but but, by any stretch of the imagination, this was beyond the wildest dreams of scientists in the early 1990s. Yet, since the movie was made, there have been incredible strides in genetic engineering, so much so that scientists are now actively working on bringing back extinct species from the dead. The field even has its own name: de-extinction.
More than the technology, though, Jurassic Park foreshadows the growing complexities of using powerful new technologies in an increasingly crowded and demanding world. In 1993, chaos theory was still an emerging field. Since then, it’s evolved and expanded to include whole areas of study around complex systems, especially where mixing people and technology together leads to unpredictable results.
What really stands out with Jurassic Park, over twenty-five years later, is how it reveals a very human side of science and technology. This comes out in questions around when we should tinker with technology and when we should leave well enough alone. But there is also a narrative here that appears time and time again with the movies in this book, and that is how we get our heads around the sometimes oversized roles mega-entrepreneurs play in dictating how new tech is used, and possibly abused.
These are all issues that are just as relevant now as they were in 1993, and are front and center of ensuring that the technology-enabled future we’re building is one where we want to live, and not one where we’re constantly fighting for our lives.
De-Extinction
In a far corner of Siberia, two Russians—Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita—are attempting to recreate the Ice Age. More precisely, their vision is to reconstruct the landscape and ecosystem of northern Siberia in the Pleistocene, a period in Earth’s history that stretches from around two and a half million years ago to eleven thousand years ago. This was a time when the environment was much colder than now, with huge glaciers and ice sheets flowing over much of the Earth’s northern hemisphere. It was also a time when humans coexisted with animals that are long extinct, including saber-tooth cats, giant ground sloths, and woolly mammoths.
The Zimovs’ ambitions are an extreme example of “Pleistocene rewilding,” a movement to reintroduce relatively recently extinct large animals, or their close modern-day equivalents, to regions where they were once common. In the case of the Zimovs, the father-and-son team believe that, by reconstructing the Pleistocene ecosystem in the Siberian steppes and elsewhere, they can slow down the impacts of climate change on these regions. These areas are dominated by permafrost, ground that never thaws through the year. Permafrost ecosystems have developed and survived over millennia, but a warming global climate (a theme we’ll come back to in chapter twelve and the movie The Day After Tomorrow) threatens to catastrophically disrupt them, and as this happens, the impacts on biodiversity could be devastating. But what gets climate scientists even more worried is potentially massive releases of trapped methane as the permafrost disappears.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas—some eighty times more effective at exacerbating global warming than carbon dioxide—and large-scale releases from warming permafrost could trigger catastrophic changes in climate. As a result, finding ways to keep it in the ground is important. And here the Zimovs came up with a rather unusual idea: maintaining the stability of the environment by reintroducing long-extinct species that could help prevent its destruction, even in a warmer world. It’s a wild idea, but one that has some merit.8 As a proof of concept, though, the Zimovs needed somewhere to start. And so they set out to create a park for de-extinct Siberian animals: Pleistocene Park.9
Pleistocene Park is by no stretch
