4 – BLOOD AND AMBER

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In the Jurassic Park movie, Hammond walks with the help of a bone-shaped cane. At the crown of the cane is a representation of a mosquito, trapped in amber.

It’s not clear when Wu decided that cloning extinct animals – not even recently extinct animals, but Mesozoic animals in particular – was a viable proposition. But once he did lock on to the idea, he never let go. There was a power to the idea, even beyond the obviously alluring prospects of eternal fame and wealth beyond measure that such a feat would deliver him: it was the act of creation itself, the supreme triumph against victory, time, and death.

It is also clear that Wu’s enthusiasm for the idea was contagious. As 1980 gave way to 1981, Hammond had become obsessed with dinosaurs, touring natural history museums the world over, all the while Wu whispered in his ear about the miracle they could perform together. The project they were embarking on was no Petticoat Lane, no illusion. Were it to succeed, it would change the world forever.

But the obstacles in the way were significant, indeed, daunting: to many, even within InGen’s own staff at the time, they looked insurmountable, and the dynamic duo of Hammond and Wu was judged to be more and more detached from reality.

For a start, even assuming that the enormous technical and scientific challenge of bringing extinct animals back to life could be accomplished, there weren’t many ways to claw back a profit from the endeavour. The only realistic option was to shackle the power of genetic engineering to capitalist market logic. Given Hammond’s background, it is no surprise that he settled on the idea of a theme park (possibly more than one) very early in the process.

A theme park, however, required vast tracts of land. Staff and guest facilities would need to go hand in hand with enclosures meant for very large animals, attractions to make them visible, veterinary facilities to look after them, laboratories where to incubate their eggs, and so forth.

The purchase of this land, and preparatory construction work required, couldn’t wait until the first animals were born. It would need to begin years in advance. Thanks to the Pachyderm Portfolio, InGen had more than enough capital to get started. But eventually, investors would need to be convinced to back the project five, or perhaps ten years down the line, gambling that Wu could deliver the impossible.

If this gamble is enough to give one vertigo, then consider this further complication: construction work had to begin years before the birth of animals no one had ever interacted with in the real world, and whose particular needs couldn’t possibly be anticipated.

Suppose you wish to house a Tyrannosaurus rex. How big will its territory need to be? How forested, how open? How much water is going to be needed, what plants are safe to put in? Enrichment objects will need to be placed, but what does a Tyrannosaurus do to destress? The same questions would apply to every potentially cloned species. And there was no way to answer them. (1)

Then, there was the central question to it all. Could you clone a dinosaur?

Technological development equipped InGen’s geneticists with some fairly powerful tools. Computing power kept growing at an ever-faster pace, and as DNA became better-understood, the lab equipment required to sequence it also became more powerful and sophisticated.

But the most powerful photocopier in the world would be useless, without anything to copy. So, where would one find dinosaur DNA? Up to that point, the oldest DNA sample preserved was about a million years old. (2) The very last of the Mesozoic dinosaurs had gone extinct a whopping 66 million years ago, seemingly offering no prospect of recovering usable DNA.

Hammond and Wu didn’t flinch before this seemingly impossible challenge. During a rare moment of doubt on Wu’s part, Hammond reassured his employee with another quote that has since entered the collective unconscious.

“Creation,” Hammond told Wu, “is an act of sheer will.” (3)

So brazen was Hammond, that he promptly informed his investors – particularly in Japan – of his plans to open a theme park with real, living, breathing dinosaurs. He conspicuously failed to mention that there was no guarantee that this was even possible, implying – without ever stating it out loud – that his geneticists were certain of success.

Hammond went one step further, and proceeded to purchase a vast tract of arid land just outside San Diego, to boot. After having visited the local zoo as a kid, Hammond now planned to blow it out of the water with his brand-new creation: Jurassic Park.

Wu, in the meantime, had obtained an outsized level of influence over InGen. By whispering directly into Hammond’s ear, he completely bypassed the (still rather small) corporate structure around him, much to the resentment of his colleagues in the lab and the board room.

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Hammond, erratic and over-enthusiastic as ever, spent hours upon hours hanging from Wu’s every word regarding the best path forward in technical matters. In return, he subjected Wu to endless lectures about what the park would look like once finished, and what they would achieve together once Wu was proven right.

Fully confident in his hypothesis on soft tissue preservation, Wu believed that just enough DNA could be salvaged from fossils located in sedimentary conditions that were just right. He had no hard evidence to back up this idea, only conjecture and knowledge of some, as yet unpublished, mineralised tissue samples in the fossil record. But Hammond was convinced, and that was enough.

InGen began funding paleontological dig-sites the world over. This model proved immediately successful, as InGen behaved differently from other private financiers: they weren’t recovering prize fossils for rich individuals to display in their oversized mansions. (4) All they required was a six-month-period of exclusivity where the fossils would go through their labs, before being returned to public actors for regular studies. This was done under the guise of testing cutting-edge imaging techniques.

Together with Laura Sorkin, another rising star within InGen’s small but talent-heavy workforce, Wu confirmed what he had suspected all along. When subjected to the right preparatory treatment, some fossils could yield soft tissue, even non-mineralised soft tissue: collagen, protein chains… and DNA. (5)

This alone would have been the biggest discovery in palaeontology to date, but it was kept secret, as InGen quietly filed one patent after another. But despite its scientific significance, it was a far cry from what InGen needed to bring an organism back to life. If even the Pachyderm Portfolio had suffered, in spite of the availability of a full elephant genome, what hope was there for dinosaurs?

Sorkin and Wu, well-cognisant of which side their bread was buttered, delivered a carefully-worded report to Hammond, in which they described their findings as a stepping stone towards future success, an indication of progress, rather than what it actually was. (6)

Technically, Wu had been right, but it wasn’t enough, at least not yet. With many years and fossils examined, it would be possible to reconstruct partial genomes for a handful of species, but the timescale went beyond what InGen needed to deliver.

So, what would Wu and Sorkin do next?

The obvious answer, to them, seemed to lie by omission, craft optimistic reports, and buy time. In fairness to them, Hammond had certainly set the tone at the top: if he could lie to his investors, surely Sorkin and Wu could similarly lie to him.

Since leaving the company, Sorkin has expressed shame and regret at her behaviour at the time. This is hardly surprising, since she has become one of InGen’s fiercest critics in public. She has also referred to Wu’s “lack of scruples” as an “intoxicating” attitude that she should have resisted, but didn’t.

Whether Sorkin was genuinely enthusiastic about a potential Jurassic Park at the time, or was simply locked with Hammond and Wu in a death spiral of perverse incentives, one thing is certain: she and Wu needed nothing short of a miracle to make good on their promises.

InGen’s history is full of these inflection points. Moments where the abyss loomed large on either side of a very narrow road, and everything seemed poised to come undone for good – before an unexpected breakthrough inevitably saved Hammond’s dream.

InGen’s luck would hold - this time. (7)

In 1982, Wu and Sorkin had a brilliant idea, one that granted them access to much more paleo-DNA: what about mosquitoes, preserved in amber?

Mosquitoes featured the environments of the Mesozoic as much as they do the present world. Inevitably, some of them would have been caught in resin, dying as the viscous substance solidified into amber. With the right amount of luck, if the mosquito had fed on a dinosaur shortly before dying, its last meal could be recovered from its digestive apparatus. (8)

InGen immediately proceeded to place a considerable cash premium on mosquitoes preserved in amber, much to the perplexity of the paleontological community. As amber block after amber block came in, Sorkin and Wu could finally deliver the good news to Hammond.

InGen had its dinosaur DNA.

Footnotes:

(1) The movie elegantly solved this issue by making the park absolutely unprepared for any eventuality. Having said that, context helps. Think about modern animals. If you’d never seen a cat in person, would you know that it loves boxes? And cats are fairly adaptable animals, in spite of their fussy reputation. Large predators and herbivores today have very specific enclosure requirements, and the more specialised an animal (i.e. a cheetah) the more tailored the exhibit will need to be. Male Siberian tigers need 2000 km² of territory - obviously tigers in zoos will never have access to such largesse, but it’s critical to show just how many animal needs would be impossible to determine from skeletons alone.

We’re glossing over the more obvious issues of bacterial and viral compatibility, allergens, and the like. Oxygen levels are often cited here, but most of what the public knows about oxygen in prehistory is a misconception, and it is unlikely it would actually cause issues.

(2) And to my knowledge, that is more or less the real-world number to date as well.

(3) One of the best quotes from the original movie, in my opinion.

(4) Two original fossils, Tyrannosaurus “Stan” and Triceratops “Big John” have recently been sold to private collectors.

(5) Beating an extinct horse here, but just to reiterate: in the real world, no dinosaur fossil to date has yielded anything like sequenceable DNA, not even the cells found in Caudypteryx’s femur cartilage. As for Sorkin, she is a character first introduced in Jurassic Park: The Game, and a nice counterpart to Wu, I think.

(6) Tone at the top ripples downward, of course. A boss that manipulates information for his own benefit will “foster” a similarly calculating work environment.

(7) Cue dramatic music.

(8) For the record, this is obviously nonsense, but again, required for the story to work. Digested blood wouldn’t preserve intact for such long periods of time, not even in amber. It also leaves out extinct plants and marine animals, a detail that the movies hilariously gloss over – but that is why I went out of my way to include the preservation of DNA in non-amber fossils too, like in the original books.