Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park is the thrilling novel by Michael Crichton that explores the idea of what would happen if dinosaurs were recreated through genetic engineering. John Hammond, an enthusiastic man of seventy-six, creates a theme park featuring dinosaurs. Among his employees are Henry Wu, the head genetic engineer; Ed Regis, the park publicist; Dr. Harding, the veterinarian; Robert Muldoon, the game warden whose job is to make sure the dinosaurs were under control; Dennis Nedry, the computer technician; and John Arnold the head engineer. Hammond also asks for advice from Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist; Dr. Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist; and Ian Malcolm, a mathematician that specializes in the chaos theory. Other characters are Lex and Tim Murphy, Hammond’s grandchildren. Donald Gennaro is the head of InGen’s account with a law firm. InGen is the company that provided the research necessary to create the dinosaurs.

This book is divided into sections titled with certain iterations of the dragon fractal, along with a picture. A fractal is a kind of geometric pattern.

The novel begins with an introduction that explains that, during the last part of the twentienth century, there has been a revolution in genetic engineering, and this revolution is not necsesssarily a good one. People were becoming careless with the dangerous materials with which they were working.

The First Iteration tells of two incidents in which people are attacked by a dinosaur. In both incidents, the normal people have no idea that they have encountered a dinosaur.

In the Second Iteration, the story of Jurassic Park begins when Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler are asked by Hammond to come see his park. Gennaro, Malcolm, and Nedry accompany them to the park, which turns out to be on an island near Costa Rica.

The Third Iteration is the tour of the park. The visitors, who now include Hammond’s grandchildren, go to the lab, then the control room, which is the heart of the park where the staff manages the animals. Then, the visitors go out to see the dinosaurs. They take the tour in electric cars, but the cars suddenly stop. Grant, Malcolm, Regis, and the kids are stuck. Nedry had turned off the power. He had been unsatisfied with his treatment at Jurassic Park and steals embryos to give to another company. He had to turn off the power to access the embryos, so, as well as other security measures, the electric fences are no longer working, and the animals can escape.

In the Fourth Iteration, a tyrannosaur attacks the tour cars. Regis runs away, but a juvenile tyrannosaur eventually kills him. Malcolm also tries to run away, but disappears and, later, Muldoon and Gennaro find him fatally wounded. Grant and the kids escape and make their way back to the main building but stop to sleep in a concrete shed. While Arnold, Muldoon, and Wu struggle to get power back and the animals under control, Nedry carries out his plan to leave the island and betray Jurassic Park. However, he gets lost and a dilophosaur kills and eats him.

In the Fifth Iteration, Grant and the kids continue to make their way back to the others. Things slowly come back under control, or at least that’s what they think until Arnold realizes that they have been running on auxiliary power since they got power back after Nedry turned it off. The auxiliary power runs out, and power is again lost. Arnold tries to go to the maintenance to turn the main power on, but is killed by a velociraptor. The velociraptors are free, and are perhaps the most dangerous animals on the island. The people in the control room move to a safer place. Wu, Harding, Muldoon, Sattler, Hammond, and Malcolm are now together and, for the moment, safe.

The Sixth Iteration is when things finally come under control, but not in the way everyone had hoped. Through teamwork, Grant turns the generators on and Tim turns on main power in the control room, but Wu is killed. The park would not be a success.

In the Seventh Iteration, Hammond takes a walk, but trips and falls. Procompsognathids, which are scavengers, kill Hammond knowing he is helpless. Malcolm also died from his injury before help could arrive. Help did eventually arrive, and once the survivors, Grant, Sattler, Muldoon, Gennaro, and the kids, were safely onboard helicopters, the island is bombed.

I greatly enjoyed this novel. It was fast-paced, exciting, and intense. Every chapter left me wondering what would happen next. However, this book also had some very interesting ideas about things I had never thought about before. Malcolm often makes little speeches about the chaos theory and how the park could not possibly work because of it. A point he makes several times is that Hammond is trying to accomplish the impossible, which is to control nature. These speeches were one of my favorite parts of the book.

A speech that caught my attention was the one about power. He states that most kinds of power are attainable only through discipline and sacrifice, and examples he give are earning a black belt in karate or becoming president of a company. The discipline put into gaining that power gives the achiever the responsibility to not abuse it. Then Malcolm says that scientific power is not like that. Scientists can take what other scientists have done and proceed from there. They don’t have the discipline that the president or the martial artist does. They abuse that power of the knowledge they get from others. They create and discover for money and ignore what may be best for mankind.

A question that others might have might be "How did the engineers get the DNA and how they turn DNA into dinosaurs?" Of course, the exact process that was supposedly carried out can not be completely explained because no one has actually done this before. However, they do tell you that that DNA was obtained from biting insects trapped in amber, or hardened tree sap. They also use supercomputers to decipher the DNA and plastic eggs, but the details are unclear.

A question I had about the story was about Hammond and his ignorance to failure and mistakes. Hammond is thoroughly convinced that all of the problems in his park will be solved until the very end. Even at the very end, he still thinks that he can make another park on another island. He had extra embryos hidden in California. He convinced himself that the people he employed caused the failure of the park. He blamed Wu, Muldoon, Arnold, and Regis. Hammond didn’t seem to learn from his mistake of trying to control the uncontrollable. Usually with age came the wisdom of learning from one’s mistakes. Why was he so certain that creating a park like this was possible? Was he blinded by his desire to create the park? Can desires be so strong that they stop people from seeing the difference between possible and impossible?

Jaclyn