It is necessary to emphasize how significant this shift in attitude actually was. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IMB labs, was only for those who couldn’t get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were able to discuss the issues at the highest levels.
Mike Bowman then showed Guitierrez the picture that Tina had drawn. Guitierrez nodded. “I would accept this as a picture of a basilisk lizard,” he said. “A few details are wrong, of course. The neck is much too long, and she has drawn the hind legs with only three toes instead of five. The tail is too thick, and raised too high. But otherwise this is a perfectly serviceable lizard of the kind we are talking about.”
“But Tina specifically said the neck was long,” Ellen Bowman insisted. “And she said there were three toes on the foot.”
“Tina’s pretty observant,” Mike Bowman said.
“I’m sure she is,” Guitierrez said, smiling. “But I still think your daughter was bitten by a common basilisk amoratus,”
Such a new and distinctive pattern led Guitierrez to suspect the presence of a previously unknown species of lizard. This was particularly likely to happen in Costa Rica […because] within its limited space, [it] had a remarkable diversity of biological habitats: seacoasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific; four separate mountain ranges […]; rain forests, cloud forests, temperate zones, swampy marshes, and arid deserts. Such ecological diversity sustained an astonishing diversity of plant and animal life. Costa Rica had three times as many species of birds as all of North America. More than a thousand species of orchids. More than five thousand species of insects.
New species were being discovered all the time at a pace that had increased in recent years, for a sad reason. Costa Rica was becoming deforested, and as jungle species lost their habitats, they moved to other areas, and sometimes changed behavior as well.
It was outrageous. It was irresponsible. It was criminally negligent. But no action was taken against Biosyn. The Chilean farmers who unwittingly risked their lives were ignorant peasants; the government of Chile had an economic crisis to worry about; and the American authorities had no jurisdiction. So Lewis Dodgson, the geneticist responsible for the test, was still working at Biosyn. Biosyn was still as reckless as ever. And other American companies were hurrying to set up facilities in foreign countries that lacked sophistication about genetic research. Countries that perceived genetic engineering to be like any other high-tech development and welcomed it in their lands, unaware of the dangers posed.
Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax—an ingenious, skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Every biologist knew that the threat of a hoax was omnipresent. The most famous hoax, the Piltdown man, had gone undetected for forty years, and its perpetrator was still unknown. More recently, the distinguished astronomer Fred Hoyle had claimed that a fossil winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, on display at the British Museum, was a fraud. (It was later shown to be genuine.)
The essence of a successful hoax was that it presented scientists with what they expected to see. And, to Ellie’s eye, the X ray image of the lizard was exactly correct […] It was a young Procompsognathus.
“It looks kind of distorted,” one of the kids said. “But I don’t think it’s the computer.”
“No,” Grant said. “It’s just time. Lots and lots of time.”
Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years—the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.
In the classroom, Grant tried different comparisons. If you imagined the human lifespan of sixty years was compressed to a day, then eighty million years would still be 3,652 years—older than the pyramids. The velociraptor had been dead a long time.
In the 1980s, a few genetic engineering companies began to ask, “What is the biological equivalent of a Sony Walkman?” These companies weren’t interested in pharmaceuticals or health; they were interested in entertainment, sports, leisure activities, cosmetics, and pets. The perceived demand for “consumer biologicals” in the 1990s was high. InGen and Biosyn were both at work in this field.
Biosyn had already achieved some success, engineering a new, pale trout under contract to the Department of Fish and Game in the State of Idaho. This trout was easier to spot in streams, and was said to represent a step forward in angling. (At least, it eliminated complaints to the Fish and Game Department that there were no trout in the streams.) The fact that the pale trout sometimes died of sunburn, and that its flesh was soggy and tasteless, was not discussed.
“If I use a cannon to fire a shell of a certain weight, at a certain speed, and a certain angle of inclination—and if I then fire a second shell with almost the same weight, speed, and angle—what will happen?”
“The two shells will land at almost the same spot.”
“Right,” Malcolm said. “That’s linear dynamics.”
“Okay.”
“But if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity—and if I then repeat it with almost the same temperature, wind, and humidity—the second system will not behave almost the same. It’ll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms instead of sunshine. That’s nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified.”
Gennaro was speechless. He had known all along what to expect—he had known about it for years—but he had somehow never believed it would happen, and now he was shocked into silence. The awesome power of the new genetic technology, which he had formerly considered to be just so many words in an overwrought sales pitch—the power suddenly became clear to him. These animals were so big! They were enormous! Big as a house! And so many of them! Actual damned dinosaurs! Just as real as you could want!
Gennaro thought: We are going to make a fortune on this place. A fortune.
He hoped to God the island was safe.
“You arrogant little snot,” Hammond said. He stood, and walked out of the room.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Gennaro said.
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said, “but the point remains. What we call nature is in fact a complex system of far greater subtlety than we are willing to accept. We make a simplified image of nature and then we botch it up. I’m no environmentalist, but you have to understand what you don’t understand. How many times must the point be made? We build the Aswam Dam and claim it is going to revitalize the country. Instead, it destroys the fertile Nile Delta, produces parasitic infestation, and wrecks the Egyptian economy. We build the—”
“Excuse me,” Gennaro said, “But I think I hear the helicopter. That’s probably the sample for Dr. Grant to look at.” He started out of the room. They all followed.
Look, we’re not fools. We understand these are prehistoric animals. They are part of a vanished ecology—a complex web of life that became extinct millions of years ago. They might have no predators in the contemporary world, no checks on their growth. We don’t want them to survive in the wild. So I’ve made them lysine dependent. I inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. As a result, the animals cannot manufacture the amino acid lysine. They must ingest it from the outside. Unless they get a rich dietary source of exogenous lysine—supplied by us, in tablet form—they’ll go into a coma within twelve hours and expire. These animals are genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world. They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.
“What you see here,” Arnold said, “is an entirely separate counting procedure. It isn’t based on the tracking data. It’s a fresh look. The whole idea is that the computer can’t make a mistake, because it compares two different ways of gathering the data. If an animal were missing, we’d know it within five minutes.”
“I see,” Malcolm said. “And has that ever actually been tested?”
“Well, in a way,” Arnold said. “We’ve had a few animals die […]”And in each case, once the animal stopped moving, the numbers stopped tallying and the computer signaled an alert.”
Yes […] Look here. The basic event that has happened in Jurassic Park is that the scientists and technicians have tried to make a new, complete biological world. And the scientists in the control room expect to see a natural world. As in the graph they just showed us. Even though a moment’s thought reveals that a nice, normal distribution is terribly worrisome on this island […] Based on what Dr. Wu told us earlier, one should never see a population graph like that […because it] is a graph for a normal biological population. Which is precisely what Jurassic Park is not. Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world. In that sense, it’s a true park, rather like a Japanese formal garden. Nature manipulated to be more than the real thing, if you will.
“Let’s keep it in perspective,” Hammond said. “You get the engineering correct and the animals will fall into place. After all, they’re trainable.”
From the beginning, this had been one of the core beliefs of the planners. The animals, however exotic, would fundamentally behave like animals in zoos anywhere. They would learn the regularities of their care, and they would respond.
Muldoon worried even more about the velociraptors. They were instinctive hunters, and they never passed up prey. They killed even when they weren’t hungry. They killed for the pleasure of killing. They were swift: strong runners and astonishing jumpers. They had lethal claws on all four limbs; one swipe of a forearm would disembowel a man, spilling his guts out. And they had powerful tearing jaws that ripped flesh instead of biting it. They were far more intelligent than the other dinosaurs, and they seemed to be natural cage-breakers. […] Raptors were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees. And, like chimpanzees, they had agile hands that enabled them to open doors and manipulate objects. They could escape with ease. And when, as Muldoon had feared, one of them finally escaped, it killed two construction workers and maimed a third before it had been captured.
But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us […] that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. […] That’s a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.
Yet, you’ll remember […] that the original genetic engineering companies, like Genentech and Cetus, were all started to make pharmaceuticals. […] Unfortunately, drugs face all kinds of barriers. […] Even worse, there are forces at work in the marketplace. Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease—as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine it is your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish. But do you really think that the government will let you do that? No, Henry, they will not. […] Something will force you to see reason—and sell your drug at a lower cost. From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind.
Hammond was like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen. Whether it was Disney or the Navy, management guys always behaved the same. They never understood the technical issues; and they thought that screaming was the way to make things happen. […]
But screaming didn’t make any difference at all to the problems that Arnold now faced. The computer didn’t care if it was screamed at. The power network didn’t care if it was screamed at. Technical systems were completely indifferent to all this explosive human emotion. If anything, screaming was counterproductive, because Arnold now faced the virtual certainty that Nedry wasn’t coming back, which meant that Arnold himself had to go into the computer code and try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was going to be a painstaking job; he’d need to be calm and careful.
“Malcolm’s models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Malcolm Effect. The whole system could suddenly collapse. And that was what he said about Jurassic Park. That it had inherent instability.”
“Inherent instability,” Gennaro said. “And what did you do when you got his report?”
“We disagreed with it, and ignored it, of course,” Arnold said.
“Was that wise?”
“It’s self-evident,” Arnold said. “We’re dealing with living systems, after all. This is life, not computer models.”
Malcolm’s just another theoretician. […] Sitting in his office, he made a nice mathematical model, and it never occurred to him that what he saw as defects were actually necessities. Look: when I was working on missile, we dealt with something called resonant yaw. Resonant yaw meant that, even though a missile was only slightly unstable off the pad, it was hopeless. It was inevitably going to go out of control, and it couldn’t be brought back. That’s a feature of mechanical systems. A little wobble can get worse until the whole system collapses. But those same little wobbles are essential to a living system. They mean the system is healthy and responsive. Malcolm never understood that. […] Look, the proof is right here. […] In less than an hour, […] the park will all be back online. […] And that’s not theoretical. That’s a fact.
Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”
“He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see an immediate situation. They think narrowly and call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t’ see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”
Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.”
But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. There is no discipline lasting many decades. There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsify—it doesn’t matter. Not to you, or your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards. They are all trying to do the same thing: to do something big, and do it fast.
At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair […] Now we know that what we call ‘reason’ is just an arbitrary game. It’s not special, in the way we thought it was […] And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old—the dream of total control—has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it.
The behavior of the dinosaurs had always been a minor consideration for Wu. […] You couldn’t really predict behavior, and you couldn’t really control it, except for in very crude ways. […] You couldn’t look at a DNA sequence and predict behavior. It was impossible.
And that had made Wu’s DNA work purely empirical. It was a matter of tinkering, in the way a modern workman might repair an antique grandfather clock. You were dealing with something out of the past, something constructed of ancient materials and following ancient rules […] Wu would make an adjustment and then see if the animals behaved any better. And he only tried to correct gross behavior: uncontrolled butting of the electrical fences, or rubbing the skin raw on tree trunks. Those were the behaviors that sent him back to the drawing board.
The compys didn’t look dangerous. They were about as big as chickens, and they moved […] chickens. But he knew [that…their] bites had a slow-acting poison that they used to kill crippled animals.
Crippled animals, he thought, frowning.
The first of the compys perched on the hillside, staring at him. It stayed about five feet away, beyond his reach, and just watched him. Others came down soon after, and they stood in a row. Watching. They hopped up and down and chittered and waved their little clawed hands.
“Shoo! Get out!” he said, and threw a rock.
The compys backed away, but only a foot or two. They weren’t afraid. They seemed to know he couldn’t hurt them.
Angrily, Hammond tore a branch from a tree and swiped at them with it. The compys dodged, nipped at the leaves, squeaked happily. They seemed to think he was playing a game.
