The science of Jurassic Park - Genome engineering: It never ends well

Putting the science in fiction - Dan Koboldt, Chuck Wendig 2018

The science of Jurassic Park
Genome engineering: It never ends well

By Mike Hays

When I read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (Knopf, 1990) for the very first time shortly after its release, as the small Procompsognathu appeared on the Costa Rican beach, I jumped out of my chair with excitement and hit my head on the hanging light fixture in my living room. By the time I settled back down with the book in one hand and a towel pressed against the cut on my scalp with the other, I was hooked. After the revelation of the cloning of dinosaurs and the science involved, I was firmly in “can’t-put-this-book-down-or-even-talk-to-my-wife” mode.

This is what good science fiction does. It brings together plausible science elements to build a story world that the reader can easily enter and be completely convinced this is a place worth spending time in. I still re-read the book about every five years and that magic is always there, a magic grounded in the book’s science and technology. And, of course, there are the dinosaurs.

I was a fledgling molecular microbiologist when the book first came out. I was learning the technology of molecular cloning and the revolutionary new technique of polymerase chain reaction in order to study infectious diseases. I remember the science of Jurassic Park, both the fictional and the actual science, created an uproar within the science community and led to the big question:

Could we really clone dinosaurs?

Scientists thought about it.

Scientists argued about it.

Scientists wrote about it.

There was much debate about cloning, sequencing, embryology, and paleontological theories on dinosaur behavior. What was perhaps overlooked in the discussion was the fact that Jurassic Park was a science fiction thriller. Michael Crichton did such an exceptional job building the world that I think we all got caught up in the possibilities he presented.

In science fiction, the science need not be 100 percent accurate; the science needs to be plausible and logical within the world built. In my opinion, Crichton does that rather well in Jurassic Park. He lines up the scientific details, everything from large cobra-venom-like protein toxins to genomic space-filling frog DNA, and ticks them off like a timer on a bomb counting down the seconds to disaster.

The good science

Here are some of the accurate science things in Jurassic Park.

Dinosaurs!

Michael Crichton brought the most cutting-edge theories in paleontology to life within the framework of the most exciting new molecular technology ever discovered. He reinvigorated dinosaur mania for a whole new generation.

Chaos Theory

To me, the most impressive science facet of Jurassic Park was the integration of chaos theory into the story. Chaos theory is when small changes in the initial conditions of a complex system lead to drastic changes in the results.

I like the double pendulum system as a nice and simple model to illustrate the basics of chaos theory. We’ve all seen a single pendulum swing back and forth with precision and beauty. As the single pendulum moves back and forth, its path and speed stay fairly stable. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Predictable and ordered.

In the double pendulum system, a hinge is introduced in the center of the pendulum’s arm to provide one small change in the system. As the double pendulum swings, it pretty much holds to an orderly swing pattern for about five trips. After the fifth trip, though, the order breaks down and the arm goes haywire. That small initial change manifests into a totally chaotic pattern later on.

Now, think back to Jurassic Park. The first part of the visit to the park is relatively ordered, just like our pendulum model. Then one by one, the compounding small mistakes inherent in the system, which existed in the park’s plan from its inception, begin to crumble the perceived order of the entire park system.

Every facet of the Jurassic Park vision tumbles into chaos. Small initial changes have a tremendous effect upon the entire system.

Molecular Biology

Jurassic Park pushed the limits of the fledgling molecular biology knowledge base in the late 1980s. Crichton did the best with the technology he had available and did his best to be accurate. In areas where he was weak in his knowledge base in Jurassic Park, such as the sequence database information errors in some of the representative GenBank sequences, he brought in bioinformatics experts as consultants for his sequel, The Lost World (Knopf, 1995).

The stretches in science

Here’s where Michael Crichton took more creative license and less hard science.

The Genome Factor

Cloning basically means to copy, so if you want to clone something that is or once was living, what do you need, first and foremost? An intact genome.

But finding a genome template from ancient samples with enough intact information in the blueprint to produce more than a few genes is very difficult. The quality and amount of ancient DNA depends on the sample preservation and natural degradation of the genomic DNA. DNA, the chemical strands that contain the genetic instructions for the development and function of living things, is a fairly stable biological molecule. DNA is stable enough that LIFE trusts it with its past, present, and future. But DNA degrades over time. It is difficult to find intact pieces in ancient DNA, especially in amber-trapped insects found in South American rainforest environments, as laid out in Jurassic Park. The extraction of the blueprint DNA from this source would probably not produce enough viable genetic information to clone even one deadly claw.

Recent advances in extraction technologies, enrichment of target DNA, and incredible jumps in genome and whole organism sequencing science have increased the prospect of someday being able to cloned prehistoric animals.

Researchers have reported the successful sequencing of woolly mammoths (ten thousand years old), Neanderthals (thirty-eight thousand years old), the genome of a girl belonging to an early species of Homo sapiens called the Denisovans—a close relation to the Neanderthals—who lived about eighty thousand years ago (the study even reports she had brown eyes, hair, and skin!). To push the envelope even further, the entire genetic sequence of a 700,000-year-old extinct species of horse was published in the journal Nature.

Interesting to note, all these ancient samples were discovered in a frozen state. Having probably been frozen for millennia, the DNA was better preserved than anything found in a rainforest environment, like amber-trapped insects. The result was a better genomic template, and better templates = better sequence.

These advances in genome sequencing have stretched the ability of scientists to gather genetic information from extinct organisms almost a million years old. Not quite to the age of dinosaurs yet, but I hold out hope we may someday find a sixty-five-million-year-old frozen dino-popsicle containing a solid genome.

Embryo Availability

Another scientific criticism from back in 1991 was the limited available choices for embryo development once a clone was established. The synthetic eggshell technology in the book was an easy out in this regard, but really wasn’t an applicable real-life method to hatch a dinosaur clone. Cloning dinosaur embryos may be one thing, but actually hatching and raising viable progeny is a whole different ball of wax.

With recent advances in stem cell technologies and the ability to reprogram a blank cell with a new set of DNA instructions through gene editing, perhaps this hurdle could be overcome if we can learn to piggyback on existing natural reptilian systems.

Time Scale

As a professional scientist, I am pretty certain the discovery, development (especially on a scale of cloning dinosaurs!), and building a secret theme park on Isla Nublar would have easily taken more than a decade. Even with a well-funded army of scientists, cutting-edge laboratories, and all the Cray supercomputers one could get one’s greedy hands on, it would have been a long process. Plus, how did they sneak all this technology and equipment past the regulatory agencies?

That’s what science fiction does

So, from a pure scientific standpoint and within the science knowledge base of the late 1980s, Michael Crichton did a pretty darn good job with the genetics and molecular biology in Jurassic Park. He took these cutting-edge technologies and crafted a very entertaining and thought-provoking story world. Sure, there were reaches, but the reaches in science were plausible and logical within his story world.

Besides, can’t we give Michael Crichton a pass on some of the science flaws? He cloned dinosaurs! He lit a fire under the imagination of science and technology and raised the bar on the possibilities of new fantastical projects that could actually happen. He sowed a seed in young scientists for future discovery.

That, my friends, is successful science fiction.

And that is enough for me.

(Just keep me away from Steven Spielberg and that cartoon DNA-strand narrated animation ride he used to explain the background science of Jurassic Park to visitors in the movie. Grrrr...)

Now, where did I put that tattered paperback copy of Jurassic Park? I’m ready for a re-read.