Science and the Silver Screen: "Jurassic Park"

Any historian will tell you that it's not fair to judge the past with knowledge that they didn't possess.  The same goes for Science and the Silver Screen.

I'll cut to the chase and tell you right now that Jurassic Park will get top marks for its depiction of biological and paleontological science, but you'd better not use it for any book reports, because the science is indeed inaccurate, but only because of what we've learned since the film's release.  For what we knew it 1993, it was pretty spot-on.  In fact, in many ways, it was downright prophetic.

So: can we clone a dinosaur, and can we do it using the methods described in Jurassic Park?

Not really, and no.

The method described in Jurassic Park requires 1) the acquisition of several dozen metric shit-tons of amber, 2) extracting preserved dinosaur DNA from the insects inside, 3) sequencing the DNA and filling in any gaps you find with frog genes, 4) injecting the resulting DNA strand into a crocodile ova, and then finally 5) incubating the embryo in a synthetically-prepared egg.

This won't work, for several reasons.  First, it's very hard to find preserved bugs in amber, and then it's even harder to find those that lived contemporaneously with dinosaurs, and then it's even harder to find those that died with a belly full of dinosaur blood in their guts.

Then again, Michael Crichton pointed all of this out in his novel, and noted that John Hammond had to amass the world's largest collection of Mesozoic-age amber before the park got rolling, so it's not really a mistake.

But the idea of extracting even partially-complete DNA strands from 250-65 million year old amber is.  It's not possible.  No way.  That's just too old.  What we've been able to do since Jurassic Park was released is recover pieces of DNA strands from amber that old, but nothing even close to a full strand.

And yet, once again, Jurassic Park seemed to know this.  Scientists weren't extracting complete DNA strands in the film; they were extracting incomplete strands and then splicing in frog DNA to complete them.  Why frog DNA?  Because in 1990, when Jurassic Park was published, scientists knew more about sequencing amphibian DNA than anything else.

Frogs are, and always have been, where it's at.

Again, bad science, but not for 1993.

Beyond the process of cloning dinosaurs, other writers have criticized the film for its numerous taxonomic errors: specifically, that the "velociraptors" in the film in no way resemble the actual creature known as Velociraptor mongoliensis.

But the thing is, in 1988, a well-meaning but terribly misguided paleontologist named Gregory S. Paul decided that the three-foot-tall velociraptor, native to Mongolia, was actually the same species as the five-foot-tall Deinonychus antirrhopus, native to the American badlands.

Somebody must have told Michael Crichton that this was the new way that scientists were going to start classifying dromeosaurs (read "raptors"), because that's the change he made to subsequent drafts of his novel.

Again: bad science, but not for 1993.

What's more, in the same year that Jurassic Park hit theaters, paleontologists Kirkland, Gaston, and Burge named Utahraptor ostrommaysorum, a six-foot-tall dromeosaur native to the American midwest.  Uncanny stuff.

None of them could run "50, 60 miles per hour if he got out in the open," and none were even a third as smart as what was presented in Jurassic Park or any of its sequels, and yes, all theropods were feathered to some degree, and no, dilophosaurus had no frill or spitting venom, but all of this was either unknown, or harmless speculation, back in 1993.

I know I've blogged about the science of Jurassic Park before, and I thank you again for reviewing all the data with me, but I wanted to examine this film specifically for Science and the Silver Screen to demonstrate that one of the beauties of science is its astonishing ability to self-correct.

Unlike this guy.

The science presented in Jurassic Park was wrong -- but it was a combination of the best theories available when it was made, and they were bound to be corrected (by science, and not necessarily by the sequels).

Scientists do not work to prove their theories, they work to disprove them, and that's why science is so awesome.

The fictional scientists of Jurassic Park lost sight of that process, electing to build the park with one good reason to do so, when in fact, they should've been looking for reasons not to.

--Serge