5 – TO CREATE AND TO DESTROY

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Mr DNA is such a cute mascot! Definitely not something that would ever be used by the kind of unscrupulous, venture capitalist workplace out of your worst nightmares, right?

Acrimony and controversy are inevitable, when disputing the paternity of a miracle.

As the year 1982 wore on, and InGen’s computers crunched numbers day and night in their attempt to sequence recovered dinosaur genome, Wu and Sorkin had emerged head and shoulders above every other geneticist – indeed, every other scientist – within the company’s ranks.

The corporate labs were a competitive, cutthroat environment. Compensation was more than adequate, but the stakes were too high for this to be enough. Those who would emerge ahead of the pack would go down in the annals of history; media opportunities, accolades, riches beyond measure, and professional pride in achieving the impossible, all motivated InGen’s geneticists to give it their all.

There was no solid cooperative framework to channel this competitiveness constructively. Hammond’s erratic leadership style, Wu’s unbridled ambition, and the lack of a strong corporate structure, had fostered a corporate culture that grew more callous and increasingly single-minded with every passing day. Overworking became the norm. Cutting corners on non-critical details became acceptable, and later on necessary, in the mad race to deliver a viable dinosaur embryo. (1)

Naturally, Wu had an in-built advantage. He’d been there from the start, and back then, he still enjoyed Hammond’s unqualified trust. In a way, the original idea of bringing dinosaurs back to life belonged to him more than to any other person, Hammond included.

But the task at hand exceeded the reach of any one man, and for all the accusations of hubris thrown at Wu (some definitely merited), he was acutely aware of this. Twice in a row, he had cooperated closely with up-and-coming star Laura Sorkin to keep the whole operation alive. And if Wu had been right all along about the preservation of DNA in fossils, the stroke of genius regarding mosquitoes and amber was a direct product of the two scientists working together.

Cooperation had undeniably furthered mutual goals. And yet, this was not enough for Wu and Sorkin to forge a permanent alliance, let alone strike a friendly personal rapport, and the same went for the rest of the staff. The reason for this is quite simple. If the way to get ahead was to make bigger and bigger promises to Hammond to get ahead, and every employee started to play the same game, where would it end?

Moreover, could you really trust your colleagues not to rat on you to curry favour with Hammond? Not to steal your work to gain the credit? Any setback, at any time, might put an entire career in jeopardy. The same logic applied to the outside world: if investor confidence collapsed, the whole house of cards could come down with it.

Escalation in promises also led to escalation in anxiety. Some of InGen’s employees turned to stimulants of various kinds, others to alcohol, more still to a variety of prescription medications to manage their growing psychological instability. By the end of the year, most of the lab was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Ultimately, Wu and Sorkin knew they were white-lying, delivering information selectively, and manipulating their boss, who was in turn using the same tactics on his investors. They knew their actions were fostering a growing climate of paranoia. But they were far too deep into the spiral to do anything to change its course. Besides, why should they change the rules of the game? They were winning it. (2)

Then, the real crunch came.

The Wu-Sorkin technique to extract DNA from fossils and amber was working, but it had limitations. Both fossils and amber only yielded incomplete genomes. There were gaps, lost information that would need to be filled, if the animals were to come back to life.

Given infinite time to work on the problem, surely it would have delivered the goods, eventually. But InGen was on a timer: while still infatuated by Hammond’s assurances that Jurassic Park was happening, investors began to clamour for progress. They wanted to see intermediate results, to be reassured that their investment would pay dividends. Their backing wouldn’t simply go on forever. (3)

Virtually overnight, InGen’s time horizon shortened dramatically. This had a profound impact on the workforce. The odd scientist quit, if under so much red tape and so many non-disclosure agreements that their careers in the field were essentially halted for the time being. They would become a prime headhunting target years later, but at the time, this seemed like the end of their careers.

At least three scientists are known to have committed suicide.

Criminal investigations are still ongoing. Allegations that InGen manipulated their records to make it seem as if these employees had already left the company before taking their own lives have never been conclusively proven, although the friends and families of the deceased have remained active, both in the courtrooms and in the wider lobbying environment.

Sorkin and Wu were aware of the suicides. To what extent this impacted their emotional state at the time is unclear. Their public statements on the matter diverge considerably: Wu speaks about it reflectively, citing it as an event that shook him greatly, and made him take a second look at best practices in the workplace.

“We’re a lot more open about this sort of issue now than we were then,” he said in a recent interview. “Not enough attention was given to mental health in the workplace in the 1980s. Not just at InGen, but in general. I’m happy that younger generations are correcting our mistakes in that regard. We should have been wiser.”

Sorkin publicly contests Wu’s version, claiming that she “definitely never saw an outward sign of contrition on his part” at the time, and indeed that it was Wu’s cold-hearted reaction to the tragedy that pushed a wedge between them. “That’s when he decided I wasn’t made of strong enough stuff,” she said. “I went from being a useful pawn, to a weakling to be discarded.”

Both accounts probably tell more about Wu and Sorkin’s current roles than they do about the actual events that transpired in January 1983. Wu plays the part of the elder statesman, who has wisened up to the social cost of his work, and fully supports InGen taking on more social responsibility. Sorkin, the whistleblower and public critic, denounces this as pure PR corporate strategy, presenting herself as the disillusioned employee who took a principled stance, and paid the price. (4)

The reality is that, in so far as we can ascertain, the two geneticists did get into multiple shouting matches in the wake of the resignations and suicides, but all of them centered on a very specific topic: how to quickly deliver tangible progress to Hammond and his investors.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Sorkin, relatively inexperienced in the fickle world of finance, and somewhat removed from the more brutal aspect of corporate politics, was quietly confident that there was plenty of time. She believed the three suicides alone would not suffice to bring huge negative attention to InGen, particularly when there was no obvious sign of any direct wrongdoing on the company’s part.

Investors, she believed, had already thrown in far too much money to simply walk away now that dinosaur DNA was being sequenced. InGen had everything to gain by waiting: as computing power increased and became cheaper on a virtually daily basis, the labs would soon have the ability to complete sequencing even with incomplete genomes available. The gaps could be filled by computers, producing a likely very accurate reconstruction of what the complete genome might have looked like – and thus, delivering accurate animals.

This was far from a disinterested opinion. Where Wu had started out with an obsession for paleo DNA, Sorkin had a background in bioinformatics instead. The computational approach would have cemented her position within the company, greatly increasing the prominence of her expertise.

Wu also made use of computational power in his own approach, but he didn’t share Sorkin’s blind faith that incomplete genomes could be reconstructed in the near future – certainly not soon enough to help InGen. Most fundamentally, he was a lot more apprehensive than Sorkin about the near future.

He knew how unpredictable the financial world could be, and had no desire to trust his future to the anxieties of investors half a world away. Subjected to daily calls and rants from Hammond, himself growing increasingly anxious and venting on his subordinate, Wu was under enormous personal strain at the time.

His nightmare scenario was the recent suicides generating some kind of inquest or negative publicity, scaring away investors and leading to a deathly financial crunch for the company. InGen, he argued, had nothing to gain by waiting. Results needed to come, and fast. Luckily, he believed he had a solution.

The vast majority of DNA, he argued, was similar if not identical from species to species. There was no need to wait on more and more sophisticated computer modelling: the gaps in the genome could be filled with DNA from virtually any source, and still produce a relatively accurate, and definitely viable, animal. (5)

After all, there were dinosaurs alive today, in the form of birds. There were also somewhat close relatives in existence, in the form of crocodiles. Using their DNA to fill in the missing gaps, the labs could proceed directly to the next stage of the process – trying to incubate eggs. If all went according to plan, Hammond could show a dinosaur egg to investors, and buy enough time for one to hatch – perhaps as little as two or three years away. (6)

The disagreement between the two geneticists grew to a veritable tug of war, which eventually involved Hammond himself. And here, Sorkin had made a critical mistake, one her career would never recover from.

Even today, Sorkin keeps claiming that InGen’s dinosaurs are no Mesozoic animals, but hybrids, synthetic constructs with no authenticity and no real connection to the past, (7) while Wu maintains the perfection of his creation.

There is no doubt that Wu underestimated the impact of the question of dinosaur authenticity. Years down the line, it would inspire a veritable arms race between InGen and its competitors, and shape a surprisingly large portion of the public debate surrounding the animals and their fate. (8)

But equally, Wu had perfectly calculated his position. He understood clearly that the actual scientific merit of the arguments was immaterial. Both approaches were viable, but only one promised Hammond what he wanted. InGen needed a solution now, not in five or ten years, and Wu said he had one.

The rules of the game hadn’t changed. Making promises to Hammond was the only way to get ahead. The stakes increased with every passing round, until Wu and Sorkin alone remained in the race. But that one final rise of the stakes proved too much for Sorkin. She flinched, or miscalculated, and backed patience where Hammond was requesting ambition.

This was not the end of Sorkin’s InGen career – indeed, she would remain with Palo Alto for many years after the fact. But any influence she had over decision-making was snuffed out virtually on the spot. And while her reputation has experienced something of a revival in recent years, if one still mired in controversy, ultimately Wu emerged from their struggle unquestionably victorious.

Wu now held all the toys. He had the paleo DNA, a way to complete it, and Hammond’s authorisation to proceed.

He’d be the one to deliver InGen’s miracle – and be credited, and blamed, for it.

Footnotes:

(1) It’s funny, because the movies obviously never go into this level of detail and negativity. Even the novel, which portrays InGen in an exclusively negative way (unlike the more mixed, but still critical portrayal of the adaptations) doesn’t go quite this far. We are presented with what is clearly meant to be a dysfunctional employer-employee dynamic between Hammond and Wu, and a large gaping void where you would expect a company to have structure. The groundwork is laid, but imho not fully exploited. When I started to think about how InGen would work in the real world, I quickly realised that it would operate under insidious perverse incentives. So I decided to run with it, and see where that hunch would lead me.

(2) At the cost of sounding self-congratulatory, I’m quite proud of how this section came out. I really feel like I followed the perverse incentives down the most logical avenue, and came upon an endpoint that arises organically from the set-up. InGen is a factory of horrors and miracles in one neat venture capitalist package. It’s nice to be able to show this, rather than just tell, if that makes sense.

(3) There is, of course, some exquisite irony in all of this. Hammond wanted something that “wasn’t an illusion”, but of course illusions are critical to InGen’s financial backing at this stage. The investors do not have the background, the knowledge, or the foresight to know for sure how big a risk they’re taking with their money in this instance. Even the geneticists working on dinosaur DNA cannot really be sure that the process will be successful, let alone of the timescales. But for work to continue, investors have to remain convinced, all of the time, that the process is going to work. This is Petticoat Lane on a much bigger scale.

(4) I will readily admit that Silicon Valley was on my mind as I was writing this. But you could replicate this across multiple industries, I feel. We live in an age where oil companies tweet about the importance of protecting the environment with a straight face, after all.

(5) What could go wrong?

(6) Ok, we need to get serious here for a minute. In the original novel (and in the first movie), Wu decided to use frog DNA to complete the dinosaur genome. Now, narratively, I am very critical of this choice. There is no in-universe reason why Wu would ever make this selection. There is a Doylist reason of course: frog DNA played a huge role in the novel and movie, even if it eventually went nowhere. In the official canon, all the animals Wu cloned were females, to prevent them from breeding without InGen’s control. But a few species of frogs are able to change their biological sex if they live in mono-sexed environments, and through the frog DNA, this ability was transferred to the dinosaurs, which began to breed without InGen noticing.

Yeah…

The concept of “frog DNA” has also been abused by later entries of the franchise, and by the fanbase, to explain away the persistence of inaccurate dinosaur designs in the franchise. This animal’s arms bend the wrong way, and it’s featherless? Frog DNA! This animal is poisonous for no good reason? Frog DNA! It has basically become a meme at this point.

Just so we’re clear: that is not how this sort of DNA integration would work, mixing and matching body parts like they’re LEGO sets. Moreover, this story will not be using Jurassic Park’s inaccurate animal designs, although Wu’s liberal utilisation of stock DNA will have narrative consequences. Last but not least, I don’t need the narrative expedient of the animals changing sex under Henry Wu’s noses, since this story will go in a radically different direction. In conclusion, this story will be 100% frog-DNA-free. :D

(7) She’s partially right, of course: these are hybrids. The same would be true of the mammoth cloning project in the real world: it would mostly be an Asian elephant with fur.

(8) As I said, there will definitely be narrative consequences - just not those you would expect to see in a high-budget action adventure movie.