Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World: Or, how to Build a Dinosaur
- Book Review,
by Rob De Salle
Amazon.com
The premise of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and the Steven Spielberg movie that it spawned (along with its sequel, The Lost World) is simple enough. Scientists extract dinosaur DNA remnants lingering in the stomachs of insects entombed in amber for millions of years, reconstitute them into complete copies of dinosaur DNA, and then "grow" dinosaurs inside the lab. It sounds intuitively plausible--if far-fetched--but could it really work? In this fascinating book, Rob DeSalle and David Lindley explain in detail how scientists might attempt this painstaking task and the challenges they would face. In the process, they provide a running tutorial on the techniques of genetic engineering and play spoilsport to the occasional sloppy science of the Crichton and Spielberg works. The result is thoroughly entertaining yet simultaneously enlightening.
From Library Journal
The best science fiction must be consistent with science fact. With the blockbuster status of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World (LJ 9/15/95), it is fair to ask, Could dinosaurs really be cloned from ancient DNA? DeSalle, an associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Lindley, an associate editor of Science News, do not have a definitive answer, but they do explore how it might possibly be done. The authors take a critical approach, questioning every premise and exposing presumptions. Copious references to events and characters in Crichton's books make familiarity with them a prerequisite. George and Roberta Poinar's Quest for Life in Amber (LJ 9/14/94) would be a better choice for anybody who hasn't read the book or seen the movie. Still, this book will benefit greatly from the tie-in to the forthcoming release of the film version of The Lost World and will be in demand at public libraries.?Gregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Science may be the first substantive word in the latest Jurassic Park spin-off's title, but this is a technology book about actually waking dinosaurs from their 65-million-year "sleep." In Michael Crichton's thriller, T. rex and its pals are reconstituted from DNA fragments drawn from blood in the bellies of mosquitoes trapped in amber. DeSalle and Lindley start their nuts-and-bolts survey of dinosaur construction with amber gathering and proceed to extracting the blood, piecing together a dinosaur genome, implanting that genome in an egg, ensuring that the hatched dinos are all female (it's too dangerous to have dinosaurs breeding unsupervised), raising hatchlings to independence, and, finally, putting mature-enough saurians into a suitable habitat. Doing any of these things is technically demanding and highly chancy. To begin with, you need amber old enough to have something contemporary to dinosaurs trapped in it, and you have to clean and polish it to see whether it contains a mosquito. Probability butts its ugly self in, too, for how likely is it that there will be blood in the mosquito and that that blood will be a dinosaur's? Answer on both scores--not bloody! So it goes with each step in the process. Meanwhile, DeSalle and Lindley relay a lot of technological and, yes, scientific knowledge as painlessly--and entertainingly--as possible. Ray Olson
From Kirkus Reviews
Physicist Lindley (The End of Physics, 1993) and DeSalle, a DNA-in-amber expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, have a fine time taking to task the tangled web Michael Crichton has spun in his Jurassic Park books and movies. Rather than producing a smug put-down, however, they provide a fine guide to the perplexed on genetic engineering and evolution. For a start, they point out that warm tropical islands off the coast of Costa Rica may have Technicolor charm but are the wrong places to look for really old amber (65 million years at least, if you want dino DNA). You're better off in New Jersey! But that's a minor detail. All of the clever gene amplification methods today would not be enough to reconstruct all you need to know to fashion your favorite brontosaurus or velociraptor from what could be recovered from a mosquito in a chunk of amber. To understand why, the authors review what we know about fossils, about dinosaurs, and about manipulating DNA. They explain how to extract DNA, map and sequence it, identify genes, and make comparisons across species. Even presuming that the DNA recovered miraculously contains a full dinosaur recipe, the next hurdle would be to puzzle out where to grow it; you need a receptive egg and egg-layer. And other problems follow: How would a dinosaur, without parents, learn to behave like a dinosaur? There is, perhaps, a little overkill here, as the authors indulge in the numbers game of how much land (and food) it would take to maintain the dinosaurs described in the books. Not that they are total skeptics: Recent headlines, after all, have demonstrated the spectacular possibilities of cloning. If, as they say, everything in life is a matter of timing, DeSalle and Lindley could hardly have brought out a book at a more propitious time. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Midwest Book Review
How would a scientist go about constructing an artificially-made dinosaur scenario as in Jurassic Park? Does dinosaur DNA come from a prehistoric animal or a bacterium? How does DNA figure into reproduction controls on artificially-created life? These and other questions are considered in a lively survey of the potentials of technology to reproduce life.
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