Prehistoric animals, creatures that literally existed before written human history, have often taken on the role of the threatening monster in science fiction and horror movies. Prehistoric monsters have been based on actual extinct creatures, usually dinosaurs, but have also been drawn with an eye to myths and legends. The hypothetical use of ancient DNA in genetic manipulation experiments has opened up new narrative possibilities for the prehistoric monster movie. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, for example, exist in the present-day solely due to genetic engineering. They are natural creatures from a time before mankind exerted any influence on the planet, but mankind must take responsibility for their presence in the modern world.
Time-travel, lost worlds and genetic engineering
Time-travel or lost world scenarios have been the traditional devices for bringing humans and prehistoric creatures together in the movies. Prehistoric animals are found in remote locations in time or space. Humans travelling back in time around 65 million years are likely to encounter them. In films set in the Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous periods, dinosaurs can feasibly be found anywhere on the planet. However, in stories set in the present-day humans must explore until they find lands that time forgot, usually far-flung islands or hidden valleys where civilised men and the laws of evolution have never set foot. These lost world films benefit from the search element in their narratives, entailing eventful journeys during which all communication with the rest of world is lost. In essence, time-travel and geographic isolation effectively lead to the same place. This place is virgin territory for humans, full of exotic but natural dangers, and a long way from contemporary society.
This is to suppose that all prehistoric monster movies stick to even the rudimentary facts of geological time. It has become common to see Stone Age humans, for instance, coexisting with dinosaurs in films like One Million Years B.C. (1966). (1) Stone Age man may have co-existed with woolly mammoths some 40,000 years ago, but not with the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago. Dinosaurs in fact lived for a long period of time on Earth, from around 280 million to 60 million years ago. Dinosaurs from very different time periods are often also erroneously seen co-existing in the movies. Therefore, many movies have just ignored the realities of geological time, rather than propose time-travel or lost world scenarios to explain the co-existence of humans and dinosaurs.
Many science fiction film scenarios can be traced back to the fictional writings of H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. Stories involving time-travel and lost worlds, for example, have been much influenced by Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and Doyle's The Lost World (1912), respectively. Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) is also a journey back to prehistoric times. These classic stories, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, have provided inspiration for generations of film-makers.
In Doyle's The Lost World, Professor George Edward Challenger and his colleagues journey to remotest South America to locate a plateau in the high Andes where they suspect prehistoric creatures still live. On this plateau they find a number of dinosaur species, including pterodactyls, iguanodons, stegasauri and an unnamed carnivorous species; giant elk and other more recently extinct animals; and a tribe who represent the missing link between apes and man. Challenger explains the co-existence of all these creatures by postulated that they all immigrated into the Lost World at different times, and once there remained the same. The Lost World is therefore literally a timeless place. In addition to finding species known from the fossil record, the travellers also encounter animals drawn from Doyle's imagination, for example, the three-eyed fish-lizards that inhabit the central lake. To prove to the Zoological Institute in London that they had indeed found the Lost World, the explorers return with a pterodactyl, which they unveil at a meeting in the Albert Hall. However, the creature escapes and flies towards home. This basic story is echoed in King Kong (1933) and numerous other prehistoric monster movies.
The silent film The Lost World (1925) was the first movie adaptation of Doyle's book. It featured some of the most realistic dinosaurs then seen on the big screen. They were sculptured by Marcel Delgado and bought to life with stop-motion animation by Willis H. O'Brien. Stop-motion animation and realistic modelling were later used by Ray Harryhausen to create state-of-the-art dinosaurs in films such as One Million Years B.C. (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969). These techniques were not bettered until the 1990s and the combined use of animatronics and computer animation.
The incorporation of genetic engineering technology into storylines can now provide an alternative to the classic time-travel and lost world scenarios. Biotechnology can be invoked to provide a reverse time machine, bringing extinct species to the present time - using cloning and DNA recombination techniques that are part of today's scientific reality. Genetic engineering plot devices mean that a film's narrative no longer need be located in a remote time or place, but can be firmly located in a present day setting. Previously dinosaurs were natural monsters, but with genetic engineering they become our responsibility (an external threat, but dependent on human activity). The mad scientist therefore enters the prehistoric monster movie. These movies can now deal with modern-day concerns, such as the risks associated with genetic engineering itself. The first film to exploit these possibilities was Jurassic Park (1993), the first genetic engineering "blockbuster". Its success taught Hollywood about the potential profitability of screening DNA.
Jurassic Park: themes and variations
In Jurassic Park (1993), genetics is used a give novel twist to a story composed of elements from classic horror and science fiction scenarios. Basically, the film is a fusion of the mad scientist scenario of Frankenstein and the evolutionary manipulations of The Island of Dr. Moreau. The film can be also be read as a hybrid of Jaws (1975) and Westworld (1973). Jaws, like Jurassic Park, was directed by Steven Spielberg and featured a natural creature - a great white shark - that threatens humans. Westworld was written and directed by Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel Jurassic Park and the first draft of its screenplay. Jaws meets Westworld when genetic engineering is used to recreate extinct creatures in a theme park setting.
Westworld is set in a futuristic theme park, where robots are programmed to interact with human visitors. The use of sophisticated electronics enables visitors to act out fantasy situations on movie locations, most memorably on a Western set. However, due to malfunctions in the complex computer technology and the development of emergent behaviour, the robots "evolve" minds of their own. At first only minor accidents occur, for example, an engineered snake bites a visitor. The scientists re-assure everyone about the safety of the technology and how everything is under their control. However, the robots turn against the humans, that is against their creators. A gunslinging robot (Yul Bryner) programmed to repeatedly die in barroom shoot-outs, instead kills a human opponent and then goes on a killing spree throughout the theme park. The robotic technology that drove the theme park in Westworld is replaced by genetic engineering in Jurassic Park, although Crichton's theme of the inherent dangers of new technology remains the same.
In addition to Jaws, other Spielberg films are also echoed in Jurassic Park. The film has benign as well as threatening dinosaurs, and Production Designer Rick Carter has described it as "Close Encounters of the Prehistoric Kind", in recognition of its parallels with Spielberg's optimistic alien encounter movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The first appearance of the palaeontologist hero Alan Grant (Sam Neill) in Jurassic Park at a dig in the desert, meanwhile, recalls the archaeologist character Indiana Jones, first seen in Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Spielberg himself said that if he aspired to equal any one film while making Jurassic Park it would be Howard Hawk's Hatari! (1962), which he considered a "high water mark" of the man-versus-nature theme in a feature film. Hatari! follows the fortunes of a group of conservation-minded hunters working in a game reserve in Africa. The character of the respectful game warden Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) most closely connects the film with Hatari. (2) In his analysis of Jurassic Park, Peter Wollen also identified elements of the slasher subgenre of modern horror movies. The animal slasher movie can be traced back to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) - much is made of the fact that dinosaurs are ancestors of birds in Jurassic Park - and this subgenre also includes Spielberg's Jaws. Although humans do not unleash the threat in animal slasher movies, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park threaten with their teeth and claws in ways that recall the creatures in these films. The pitch for Deep Blue Sea (1999), a film discussed later, was Jaws meets Jurassic Park and it combines the strands of natural slasher and DNA modification, when genetically-enhanced sharks gain in intelligence and acquire a particular taste for human flesh. Jurassic Park can also be read as a paleo-zoological version of a zombie movie, like Night of the Living Dead (1969), with the dinosaurs being metaphorically exhumed from the fossil graveyard. (3)
In his work, Michael Crichton has consistently explored the possible consequences of technological advances. The narrative of The Andromeda Strain (1970) centered around a disease-causing microbe of extra-terrestrial origin, which is carried to Earth on a returning space probe. The possible contamination of space rockets and probes was a topical subject of scientific discussion from the early 1970s onwards. Realistic scenes of scientific investigation drove the film's narrative, setting the trend for science laboratory sequences in the years to come. In Crichton's novel The Terminal Man, breakthroughs in neurosurgery and psychiatry are used to prevent violent urges in patients, with disastrous results. His novel Jurassic Park depicts the unregulated commercialisation of biotechnology for the pursuit of profit by the entertainment industry. (4) The novel's thesis about the dangers of greedy multinational corporations patenting extinct life forms, and exploiting risky technology for the relatively trivial purposes of entertainment, however, is toned down in the story's translation to the screen. A number of changes, such as the more sympathetic portrayal of the entrepreneur Hammond, who is killed by his creation in the book (in time-honoured mad scientist fashion), but not in the film, serve to dilute the novel's warning tone. (5)
Scientific authenticity and its limits in Jurassic Park
Throughout pre-production, scientific consultants were hired to make the mise-en-scène and the scientific content of Jurassic Park as authentic as possible. Hollywood now regularly calls upon real-life researchers and laboratory technicians for just this purpose. This attention to detail can be seen, for example, in Outbreak (1995), The Net (1995) and Species (1995). Ron Rogge, then a technician at the University of California at Los Angeles, helped make the laboratory in Jurassic Park look like a modern molecular biology laboratory. Rogge can be seen in the laboratory sequence drilling into amber to extract dinosaur DNA from an insect. A number of scientists were consulted in order to incorporate recent discoveries concerning the analysis of ancient DNA into the screenplay. (6)
In the film, soon after the two palaeontologists, Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), the chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and the lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) arrive on the island, they are given a laboratory tour by John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). He is the man whose money and vision have made the dinosaur theme park possible. This seven-minute sequence introduces the science on which the story is based. Hammond first leads the visitors through an entrance hall with dinosaur skeletons, representing the old-style dinosaur museum, and into a small movie theatre. Here Hammond uses a script to interact with himself in the park tour's introductory film. Hammond pricks the finger of his celluloid double, who is visually cloned from a schematic white blood cell to give a row of Hammonds. Meanwhile, a cartoon character called Mr. DNA explains how DNA, extracted from a cell, can be used to clone individuals. Mr. DNA goes on to explain how dinosaur DNA, extracted from the guts of blood-feeding mosquitoes trapped in amber, can be used to clone the dinosaurs on which the insects' fed. The shots are filmed in a simple graphic style in primary colours, and are accompanied by cartoon-style music on the soundtrack. These shots are intercut with images of DNA being extracted from an insect fossilised in amber, a scientist using a virtual reality headset to explore a complex molecule in 3-D, and general shots of a molecular biology laboratory. The camera repeatedly returns to a point of view in a row behind the visitors, making the audience party to their whispered conversation. We are on the tour with them, and we are manipulated to feel awe at the science being presented. The audience's point of view is reverse cut to reaction shots of the backlit visitors watching the film, who (over)act looks of amazement. The dialogue is concise and information-rich, in keeping with the role of this sequence in conveying the background scientific information relevant to the plot. Since Jurassic Park, film-makers have increasingly assumed that audiences have a basic knowledge of DNA technology. This awareness may in part be due to genetic plot devices in movies.
The cinema then suddenly turns into a vehicle for a theme park ride, as bars come down to restrain the visitors in their seats. The screen slides away to reveal a window that looks into the laboratory that was seen in the instructional film. At this point the lawyer asks Hammond if the scientists are autoerotica (meaning animatronics, computer-controlled robotic models frequently seen in theme parks, and a technology used by the film-makers to animate dinosaurs in later scenes). As the ride threatens to move on, the three scientists break free of their restraints and insist on seeing more of the scientific procedures. The laboratory is far from being filled with the pseudo-scientific clutter of, for example, the Frankenstein movies from the 1930s, but is filled with genuine state-of-the-art molecular biology equipment. In the foreground is an injection microscope, necessary for introducing DNA into embryos, while elsewhere can be glimpsed other optical instruments, on hire from Zeiss, and a gene sequencer. The attention to detail is demonstrated by the water baths, glass flasks containing liquid cell cultures (food dye in the film), microfuges, balances, pipette tips, rolls of blue absorbent paper and boxes of Kimwipes, all of which would be seen in any genetics laboratory. Flasks and bottles are credibly labelled, biohazard stickers are authentically placed and even fake notebooks are filled with appropriate jargon. Eight scientists, dressed in white lab coats, are engaged in a variety of research activities in the background, for example, watching monitor screens, discussing data or walking between pieces of equipment. (7)
However, authenticity has its limits. Once the scientific consultants had set up the laboratory, Spielberg and his Art Directors rearranged it for dramatic and compositional reasons. Sinks and some other equipment were sidelined for aesthetic reasons, while a circular egg hatchery was set up in the centre of an adjacent area. In real-life, any hatchery would be in a separate room, where temperature and other environmental could be precisely controlled. The film's open hatchery is spot-lit, while subdued light conceals the edges of the laboratory, to allow attention to be focused on the dinosaur eggs. An improbable-looking robotic arm rotates the eggs - even grabbing one back from Neill who has removed it from the nest to take a closer look.
When the visitors first enter the laboratory, we see Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), the head geneticist, leaning against the hatchery and writing in a notebook. He is introduced to them, which initiates the dialogue that establishes each character's position on the use of cloning to recreate extinct creatures. The camera focuses on the hatchery as the first dinosaur egg hatches. Celestial choral synthesiser music and reaction shots of the two awe-struck palaeontologists enhance the sense of wonder. We are also made aware that the scientists could learn more in a few days on the island, about dinosaur behaviour and physiology, than they could in years of conventional study. Grant and Sattler's enthusiasm for knowledge tempers any concern they have about the risks of this use of biotechnology.
Hammond's megalomania becomes apparent when he talks to the hatching dinosaur, willing it to become imprinted on him so that it recognises him as a parent. He sees the dinosaurs as his creations and is blind to any possible consequences of his actions. In this sequence he comes closest to resembling the mad scientist archetype. Dr. Wu, the geneticist, comes across as arrogant, and is irritated by the questions of Ian Malcolm, the film's (and Crichton's) voice of scepticism. Malcolm warns that,
"The history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free".
Malcolm's speech, predicting the dinosaurs' inevitable escape from human control, cuts to Neill, at the moment when he realises that the hatchling is a velociraptor, a ruthless carnivore that hunts in packs. The chirps of the hatchling are dissolved into the roar of an adult as the scene cuts to an outdoor cage containing a fully-grown velociraptor. The sense of threat is clearly established for the first time. From this point on, the film seeks to replace the audience's sense of awe with one of fear.
Prior to Jurassic Park, the benchmark for realistic dinosaurs on screen was the stop-motion animation of realistic models by Ray Harryhausen in the 1960s. The makers of Jurassic Park drew upon technological advances in model-making and computer animation, and made extensive use of scientific consultants, to significantly advance the look of movie dinosaurs. The dinosaurs for the most part were made to look and behave realistically, based on current scientific knowledge. Jack Horner, who heads the largest dinosaur research team in the USA, the palaeontologist Mike Greenwald and the herpetologist Jacques Gauthier were among the scientific consultants who visited the set of Jurassic Park. Horner advised the crew, for instance, on the paleontological dig seen early in the film. Horner's team were responsible for finding the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered, formulating some of the current ideas on dinosaur social behaviour, and naming the herbivore species Maiasaurus (literally, good mother lizard). (8)
The six dinosaur species in the film were portrayed as warm-blooded and bird-like, rather than cold-blooded and reptile-like, in line with current scientific thinking. (9) Therefore, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were more active, agile and intelligent than dinosaurs previously seen on the big screen. The film also incorporated recent theories of herding or flocking behaviour, and probable parental care in dinosaurs, drawn from evidence collected at nesting site excavations. (10)
The film-makers wanted to find the animal in the dinosaurs, as opposed to the monster, and to this end sought to have them behave authentically. In the scene where the velociraptors hunt the children in the kitchen, the tongues of the dinosaurs originally moved when the creatures were stationary - to provide some motion in the frame. However, these tongue movements were removed when the scientific advisors told the film-makers that raptors would have been unable to make them. However, alterations to known scientific fact were made elsewhere to aid the narrative. Dilophosaurus in actuality stood about ten feet high, but in the film it is shown to be around four feet high to avoid the audience confusing it with the velociraptors. In addition, the Dilophosaurus were portrayed as venom-spitting creatures, although both the venom-spitting behaviour and their fan-shaped hoods, which they erected when they were about to strike their prey, were fabrications. (11)
In Jurassic Park, the key premise is that prehistoric DNA extracted from dinosaur blood, obtained from the ancestors of today's mosquitoes preserved in amber, could be used to create living dinosaurs. This premise was extrapolated from research being done at the time in the new field of molecular archaeology. In turn, Jurassic Park generated intense discussion about the extraction of viable DNA from dinosaurs and other extinct animals.
The oldest DNA fragments ever found have reportedly been found in amber - the fossilised resin of trees. Amber deposits date back to the Carboniferous Period, around 310 million years ago. Within these deposits can be found fossilised insects and other creatures, trapped as the resin exuded by trees in ancient forests hardened on exposure to the air. The fine detail of preserved insects can be viewed through the amber, which also preserves the creature's internal organs. Insects preserved in amber were regarded as a promising sources of ancient DNA, and Michael Crichton acknowledged the ideas of George O. Poinar Jr., and his colleagues at the University of California's College of Natural Resources in Berkeley, in the novel Jurassic Park. In their book The Quest For Life in Amber, Poinar and his son Hendrik summarised research in this area up to 1994. (12)
A paper published by Raul Cano of the California State Polytechnic University (CSPU), and collaborators including George O. Poinar Jr., around the time that the film of Jurassic Park was released, described the discovery of nucleic acid from insects that had been trapped for 25 million years in amber. (13) The CPSU team also reported, in 1995, finding bacterial spores in the stomachs of these ancient insects, whose present day descendants have similar symbiotic bacteria living in their guts. Bacterial spores are a resting stage, in which the bacteria dehydrate and stabilise their DNA, to survive adverse conditions for long periods. Raul Cano and his colleague Monica Borucki claimed to have isolated 1,200 types of bacteria and fungi from amber up to 130 million years old. Jurassic Park ensured that their work received widespread media attention. (14)
Researchers in the USA also claimed to have extracted DNA from dinosaur bones - from the parts inside fossilised bones that have not become fully mineralised - around the time the film was playing in cinemas. A team of scientists from Brigham Young University, Utah, led by Scott Woodward claimed to have obtained DNA sequences from 80-million-year-old bone fragments found in a coal mine, which did not match any modern-day DNA sequences held on databases. Meanwhile, Jack Horner and colleagues from the Museum of the Rockies, Montana, claimed to have extracted DNA from blood cells inside a 65-million-year-old T. rex thighbone. (15)
However, these reports of ancient DNA may have been erroneous, due to contamination during the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) process. (16) PCR is a powerful technique, developed in 1983, which enables small samples of DNA to be amplified many times. Repeated cycles of replication, involving heating and cooling in the presence of special heat-resistant enzymes and the basic building blocks of DNA, result in a particular DNA sequence being multiplied in an exponential manner (1,2,4,8,16,32,64 and so on). Within a few hours a very small sample, for instance 1ng (1 x 10-9 g) of DNA, will have multiplied by about a million times, to give a mg of material - enough for many DNA tests. The technique has revolutionised forensic science, but contamination can be a major problem. A small amount of contamination on a specimen, for example from a touch or a sneeze, can easily be amplified instead of any DNA of interest. Researchers at the Natural History Museum in London have gone so far as to question all ancient DNA findings. They attempted to extract DNA from 15 insect specimens trapped in 35-million-year-old amber, using a range of techniques, but the only DNA they obtained was from recent contamination. (17) In casting doubt on all reports of ancient DNA findings, the London team also noted the lack of reproducibility in previous studies and the suspiciously long DNA fragments obtained from ancient specimens. DNA degradation rates have been calculated, for example, which suggest that only very short fragments will remain even after a period of several thousand years. (18) The Natural History Society paper angered some US researchers, including Raul Cano, who stood by their original findings. Their negative results do not mean everyone else is wrong, Cano is reported as saying. (19) However, scientific consensus has now shifted away from regarding as valid findings of ancient DNA from dinosaur bones and insects trapped in amber.
Meanwhile, DNA has been obtained from at least six extinct species that lived much more recently than the dinosaurs. The first analysable DNA from an extinct species was obtained in 1984, from a museum hide of a quagga, a zebra-like animal that became extinct in 1883. DNA analysis showed that its genetic material was practically identical to the present-day plains zebra. A breeding project in South Africa, headed by Reinhold Rau, is underway to selectively breed plains zebra, choosing those with the most quagga-like features in each generation, in order to recreate the quagga. This project influenced the storyline of Jurassic Park.
DNA has also been extracted from a woolly mammoth, which died 40,000 years ago, found frozen and particularly well-preserved in the Siberian permafrost. (20) A team of Japanese researchers, led by Kazifumo Goto aims to resurrect the mammoth by using sperm they hope to obtain from a frozen carcass. They hope to use the sperm to artificially inseminate an egg of a present-day African elephant, using an elephant as a surrogate mother. Sperm containing X chromosomes could be used to obtain female offspring. These offspring would be hybrid animals, but by repeatedly using mammoth sperm to fertilise their eggs an animal that was genetically 88 per cent mammoth could theoretically be produced in three generations. Most scientists are highly sceptical about Goto's chances of success, however, given the highly fragmented state of initial DNA samples obtained. The project also raises ethical questions about recreating animals whose natural habitats no longer exist. Nevertheless, Goto's pioneering techniques, which showed that the DNA in dead and frozen sperm could still fertilise eggs, are likely to prove useful in preserving species at or near extinction. The sperm from endangered species is today being frozen and stored for the benefit of future generations.
The DNA of the mao, a giant flightless bird resembling an ostrich, which died out about 300 years ago in New Zealand has been isolated and analysed - apparently ostrich breeders have expressed interest in its genes. A giant sloth that dried out in winds 13,000 years ago in the Chilean Andes has also yielded DNA. It might, therefore, one day be possible to recreate extinct species in some form by using fragments of their DNA and the eggs of related present-day species. This will be dependent on which genes have been preserved in the ancient DNA fragments. It is now suspected that genes function in a hierarchical manner, with a set of key genes called the homeobox or hox genes determining the basic body plan. The hox genes determine which body segments grow in which parts of the body. Mutations in hox genes can have dramatic effects, resulting in laboratory fruit flies growing legs instead of antennae, for instance, and humans being born with extra fingers. Such homeotic mutations may have played an important role in the evolution of new species. If these important genes were identified, then it would aid in engineering a modern hybrid species to resemble an extinct species. However, recreating long-extinct species, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, is way beyond current science.
Ancient DNA would be very delicate and in a highly degraded state. Obtaining sufficient dinosaur DNA fragments from amber or fossils, however, may be the easy part of recreating a dinosaur. The problems that would be encountered during each stage of engineering a dinosaur are described in a book by Rob DeSalle and David Lindley called The Science of Jurassic Park and The Lost World or, How To Build a Dinosaur. They start the book by pointing out that the amber from the Dominican mine in the film would not be old enough to contain DNA from dinosaurs - suggesting the archaeologists try amber deposits in the less exotic location of New Jersey instead! The first big hurdle comes at the PCR stage, when DNA fragments have to be multiplied for further analysis. The considerable contamination problems have already been alluded to, but another problem is the lack of suitable primers for dinosaur DNA, to kick-start the replication process. As no base coding sequences are known for dinosaurs, the necessary complementary sequences used in primers cannot be produced. A time-consuming and costly random primer procedure would have to be used - requiring a vast number of tubes in a laboratory probably no smaller than the size of a couple of football fields. (21)
The dinosaur DNA fragments then have to be assembled to reconstruct a workable genome. This is an immense project in itself and complete gene sequences have to date only been obtained for relatively few species, for example, a yeast, a bacteria and a nematode worm. This is done using a computer to match sequences at the ends of different fragments, and fitting the entire sequence together from these overlaps. This is also the technique used in the Human Genome Project, due to be completed in a couple of year's time. However, enzymes in these cases are used to cut up existing genomes at known points, whereas random disintegration would have produced the fragments of dinosaur DNA, making the job very much harder. Gaps are certain to occur in the genome. In the film, Dr. Wu explains how these gaps are filled with frog DNA. Using bird DNA would have been more logical in terms off relatedness, but the frog DNA provides the narrative means by which "life finds a way". The Jurassic Park dinosaurs are all engineered to be female, but some have managed to change sex. Neill compares them to South African frogs, which can spontaneously change sex in single sex environments, and suggests genes in the frog part of the dinosaur's DNA are responsible. In reality, as related by DeSalle and Lindley, it would be a massive co-incidence for the sex change genes to be in the bits of frog DNA used to patch the dinosaur genome, while sex change behaviour would most likely be controlled by a network of genes situated all over the frog genome. In addition, if frog genes were moved into a dinosaur genome, they would almost certainly function differently in their new environment. In any case, even if just 1 per cent of the dinosaur DNA was lost (representing, for example, the difference between chimps and humans), a dinosaur would not be produced. (22)
Even in the unlikely event of an entire dinosaur genome being sequenced, there is then the problem of how to wrap the entire DNA into highly compact chromosomes. Scientists are still unsure how proteins take on their complex shapes once amino acid chains have been linked together during protein synthesis. Chromosomes, which consist of protein components as well as extremely long strands of DNA, present a much bigger challenge. In addition, no one knows how many chromosomes dinosaurs had. However, DeSalle and Lindley suggest that even bigger problems will occur in the following stages, after the reconstructed genome is put into an egg. As a dinosaur egg is unavailable, this will have to be the egg of another species. In the film, the dinosaur DNA is placed into a fertilised crocodile egg, from which the original nucleus has been removed, and later transferred to an artificial egg. An egg, however, is a complex structure that interacts with DNA in complicated ways. A set of little understood maternal gene products must already be in place in the egg for the embryo to develop correctly. The eggs of different species are unlikely to interpret dinosaur DNA in the same way as the DNA of their own species. In the unlikely event of this obstacle being overcome and embryos developing successfully, a high infant mortality is likely soon after birth due to disease. (23) All these difficulties, and many more that are described by DeSalle and Lindley, are glossed over in the film. During the laboratory tour, the visitors are shown DNA sequences on a computer screen, followed directly by the egg hatchery, as if nothing else need occur in between. Stephen J. Gould has also commented on how the film's narrative gives insufficient recognition to nature's complexity by "heaping impossibility upon impossibility", with the accumulation of highly improbable stages rendering the project truly impossible in scientific terms. (24)
For all the liberties that Jurassic Park takes with scientific fact, however, the film-makers use recent ideas in genetics to drive the narrative. The representation of genetic engineering gives the dinosaur film new twists and added interest. One happy influence of the film resulted in one of the most important dinosaur fossil finds of recent years coming to the attention of the scientific community. An amateur fossil collector in Italy found the exceptionally well-preserved skeleton of a small dinosaur called Scipionyx (similar to the small Procompsognathus depicted in the film), but did not realise that the creature might be a dinosaur until he had seen Jurassic Park. (25) After the success of Jurassic Park, a number of other prehistoric monster films exploited ideas derived from genetics, including the sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).
The Lost World: Jurassic Park and beyond
The second Jurassic Park film takes its basic story from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), via the Michael Crichton novel of the same name. (26) A number of years have passed since the incident on Isla Nublar. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) summons the mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and tells him of the existence of another island, Isla Sorna, on which InGen built its Site B dinosaur production facility. The dinosaurs were released to fend for themselves and have established populations on the island. Hammond wants Malcolm to lead an expedition to study the dinosaur population. Hammond has been ousted from the InGen board by his nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), however, who is portrayed as a much less sympathetic type of capitalist. Ludlow stresses the company's ownership of life through patenting ("We patented it. We own it"), in opposition to Hammond who has now become environmentally minded.
Malcolm arrives on the island, accompanied by documentary film-maker Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) and equipment expert Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff). They first locate palaeontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), Malcolm's girlfriend, who has already been on the island for several hours. They then start their observations and are overwhelmed by the sight of their first stegosaurus, but Malcolm warns them in self-referential fashion: "That's how it always starts - the 'oos' and 'ahs' -but later there's running and screaming". The group's research is interrupted by the arrival of the new InGen team. The incoming company money-men are accompanied by a team of big game hunters, who promptly set about hunting and capturing the dinosaurs. The genetic engineering device here enables the archetypal movie big game hunter, who usually has to be content with elephants or lions, to hunt dinosaurs without resorting to clunky time machines or unlikely lost worlds. (27) Van Owen turns out to be an "eco-activist", however, who believes cloned dinosaurs also have (animal) rights. He turns loose all the dinosaurs captured by InGen, which were destined for a theme park and zoo on the mainland. This starts in motion the events whereby the dinosaurs threaten all the humans on the island.
In Michael Crichton's book, Malcolm and his colleagues find clues to how the dinosaurs were genetically engineered in the big production facility at Site B. He learns, for instance, that for every embryo that hatches, there are one thousand failures. This is an optimistic rate by DeSalle and Lindley's calculations. Site B is where the difficulties of getting dinosaur embryos to grow and survive were worked out by InGen, but the technical details are unsurprisingly not revealed in Crichton's book. This information is omitted altogether in the film, however, which diverges much more from Crichton's source novel than did Jurassic Park. The reduced scientific content of the movie can be correlated with the reduced contribution of Crichton. The sequel is not concerned with genetic engineering, but instead takes onboard a range of influences and themes, none of which seem to be coherently thought through. In one review, Jonathan Romney pointed out the co-opting of iconography from Hollywood Vietnam movies, for example, as if Spielberg wanted to make his own non-political Vietnam film. (28)
The InGen corporation bring a Tyrannosaurus rex back from the island to their mainland theme park in San Diego, just as a brontosaurus in The Lost World (1925) and the giant ape in King Kong (1933) were bought back to civilisation. (29 The T. rex is taken from the island to entertain the public for profit, however, unlike the scientific motive for transporting the pterodactyl in Doyle's book. The T. rex escapes and rampages through the city streets in scenes that recall Japanese Godzilla movies. The T. rex is recaptured and taken in a boat back to Isla Sorna, which has been declared a nature reserve. In an accompanying news broadcast Richard Attenborough plays the business tycoon-turned-environmentalist Hammond in the style of his naturalist brother David, delivering slogans such as: "Trust in nature". Meanwhile, we see idyllic scenes of a "self-supporting ecosystem" of dinosaurs. The final image of a pterodactyl landing in this ecological utopia is straight from Doyle's book, but appears irrelevant to the film.
The ecological message serves to undermine Crichton's warnings about unregulated genetic engineering in the first film. The message however is not as ecological as the film-makers may have intended. It suggests that it's all right to manipulate life because nature will always find a way. This appears to derive from a superficial reading of the ecological literature and recent environmentalist theory, such as the Gaia hypothesis advanced by James Lovelock. The assumption is that these dinosaurs have rapidly adapted or evolved to form a dinosaur ecosystem. However, many of these dinosaurs are from different geological eras: the procompsognathus from the Triassic, the stegosaurus, apatosaurus and the dilophosaurus from the Jurassic, and the tyrannosaurus, the maiasaur and velociraptors from the Cretaceous. (30) These geological eras had very different climates; the Cretaceous was temperate, while the Jurassic and Triassic had a hot humid climate. While dinosaurs may have lived in temperate forests in the Cretaceous, they would have lived in steamy swamps in the Jurassic. An appropriate ecosystem for the herbivorous species would also include prehistoric plant life, which appears to be lacking on the island.
Humans have therefore thrown together a disparate group of organisms onto an island, which is almost certainly too small to support the numbers of dinosaurs shown in the film. (31) The herbivores would not have enough grassland and would soon degrade the environment, although the dinosaurs may well have killed each other off before this happens. In the book, Crichton has Malcolm propose that the carnivore population is kept down by a Spongiform Encephalopathy - mad dinosaur disease - picked up from the feed they were given as infants, which presumably contained the rendered carcasses of various diseased creatures raised by modern agricultural practices. This explanation is undermined by the abundance of thriving adult raptors seen in the film and unsurprisingly was not included in David Koepp's screenplay.
A further dilemma for the dinosaur environmentalists is what to do with the modern-day fauna and flora on the island. Should an area of present-day tropical island ecosystem, rich in biodiversity and probably containing rare indigenous species, be destroyed so that an attempt can be made at creating a prehistoric ecosystem? If modern species remain they may well drive the dinosaurs to extinction; for example, small mammals would eat their eggs. The processes of immigration and emigration are also important to all island ecosystems, which means that modern species will certainly establish on the island and dinosaurs will escape to colonise the mainland - not a good idea given the evidence of dinosaur behaviour presented in the two films!
At the time of writing Jurassic Park 3 was in production, with a Steven Spielberg storyline and Joe Johnston directing. Meanwhile, in the wake of Jurassic Park, a number of other prehistoric monster movies used genetic engineering plot devices. (32) In Carnosaur (1993), the Roger Corman produced low-budget anti-Jurassic Park, Diane Ladd (mother of that other film's Laura Dern) plays Dr. Jane Tiptree, an early outing for a women in the mad scientist role. She fertilises chicken eggs with the DNA of T. rex to genetically engineer her dinosaurs. These of course break out of her control and threaten the hapless local population. (33) She goes further, however, than just trying to recreate dinosaurs using bird or reptile eggs, and uses the human reproductive system to gestate the creatures. This plot invokes secret government conspiracy and culminates in a lizard gaudily erupting from Tiptree's womb - in a scene echoing Alien (1979). In D.N.A. (1996), a prehistoric creature is reconstructed from DNA obtained from fossils found deep in a remote jungle. This film also combines a prehistoric monster, a mad scientist, genetic engineering and elements of alien invasion movies, and it will be discussed further in the chapter dealing with the cloning of aliens. Meanwhile, the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) pioneered in Jurassic Park has now been repeated in films as diverse as The Flintstones (1994) and Dragonheart (1996), and in the major BBC documentary series Walking With Dinosaurs (1999).
There should be some mileage yet in the concept of using genetic engineering to resurrect long-dead creatures in the movies. (34) In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs were cloned with the aim of making them just like the original species. Hammond declines the geneticist's suggestion that they could be modified to make them more docile, just as battery chickens will shortly be genetically modified so they do less damage to each other in their cages. The entertainment corporation wants authenticity rather than tame creatures. Any number of modifications could, however, be made to extinct animals, for example to make them better predators or more intelligent, in a movie scenario. Alternatively, the ideas that first hit the screen in Jurassic Park could be spliced into a number of other tried and tested science fiction and horror scenarios, as occurs in D.N.A. and Deep Blue Sea, to create new hybrids of old genres.
Notes
Chapter 3: Confronting the Clone.
References:Complete bibliography of book, including all names on multi-author publications and details of edited books.
Chapter 2: It came from the laboratory.
Chapter 3: Confronting the Clone.
Chapter 4: Cloning the Alien.
Chapter 5: Danger: Genetically Modified Organisms.
Chapter 6: Designer Babies.
Chapter 7: All in the Genes?
Chapter 8: Real-life Science.